Historic Louisiana

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Right: Huey Long with his son, Russell.
Russell Long, along with Earl Long, Speedy
Long, and Gillis Long, were the heirs to the
Huey Long mystique. Russell Long served as
a U.S. senator from Louisiana from his
election at age thirty in 1948 until the
middle of President Ronald Reagan’s
administration in 1985.
COURTESY OF THE NEW ORLEANS PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Below: An early political cartoon by John
Chase, characteristically combining
Louisiana’s ethnic history with satire of its
current political figures at the time.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, TULANE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
76
went to Washington. There, Long joined the
progressive forces led by Senators Burton
Wheeler and Bob Lafollette. But back in
Louisiana, Long was crafting not progressive
legislation, but tyranny. In 1934 he sent two
thousand state troopers into New Orleans to
overawe the mayoral election. He prevented a
duly elected member of the legislature from
taking his seat, and employed a subservient
state supreme court to defend the outrage.
Long gradually became more and more
authoritarian as the need for his personal
attention spread to an ever-wider stage.
There was no longer time for the democratic
process. Long’s agenda in Washington and
Louisiana needed his personal attention;
caveats of due process were merely tricks of the
upper classes to prevent enactment of Long
programs. When Long wanted something
done, he did it. Duly elected officials were mere
figureheads. Long sat in the chair of the
speaker of the house and presided over the
state legislature. In one four-day special
legislative session presided over by Long, bills
were enacted centralizing in the governor’s
hands all the police and prosecutorial power of
the state. In two special sessions in 1935, he
stripped the City of New Orleans of its powers
to tax and to make appointments, centralizing
everything in the office of the governor. The
bills went through the legislature with no
speeches and no opposition because none was
brooked. It was tyranny out and out. By 1935,
Long had accomplished a revolution.
Representative government was now a sham.
One party ran the state and one man ran the
party. By 1935, Long had so suppressed the
legislature that no one even bothered to speak
for or against his bills. The bills were
introduced, read, and passed. The Louisiana
Supreme Court was in his pocket. Without
examining Long’s motives, his stated programs
should be applauded. But it is clear that as his
power grew, the quality of the programs he
championed cheapened. His program came
more and more to be anything that made his
power more arbitrary.
But on September 8, 1935, it all came to an
end. At 9:20 p.m. that evening, Dr. Carl Weiss
approached Long in the capitol corridor
outside of the governor’s office and got off one
shot with a .32-caliber automatic pistol. Long
stumbled wounded, then ran to a stairwell.
His bodyguards shot Weiss repeatedly. Though
Long underwent surgery, his doctor missed
closing a severed artery to the kidney. By the
next day, when the omission was noticed,
Long was too weak to be operated on again.
He died on Tuesday, September 10, 1935.
Long’s opposition to President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt had forced the president to
cut federal relief efforts to a trickle. With Long’s
removal from the stage, the federal spigot
opened wide and numerous new projects began
moving along, everything from building the
new football stadium in City Park to rebuilding
Tchoupitoulas Avenue. The Long henchmen led
by Governor Richard Leche cooperated fully in
return for control of the patronage in new
projects. As Long himself had predicted, his
hand-picked stooges could not keep the
operation running smoothly. The Federal
Government launched an investigation in 1938
that led to the arrest and eventual conviction of
the governor and many others in 1939.
Another reform faction led by Governor
Sam Jones took office in 1940. Among the
many scandals that were not corrected from the
1930s was the lease of much of the state’s oil
and gas lands to the Texaco Corporation in
return for a hidden percentage to the Win or