After watching several of the recent swamp themed reality programs filmed in Louisiana which cover such topics as oil drilling, alligator catching and duck hunting, I couldn't help but feel that the Bayou State was being somewhat short-changed by the image being presented to a global audience. The ratings would indicate and that there is an interest in the region and if that is the case, I reckon it may interest some to learn of another story that happened there between the wars.
I remember being taken with my Fourth Grade class to the Capitol building in Baton Rouge to see the bullet-pocked green marble walls where an important man had been gunned down in cold blood a mere thirty-two years before. I was already familiar with the political tool of assassination from TV coverage of the murder of President Kennedy when I was in Grade One. Our class was also taught the significance of the Louisiana flag depicting a mother pelican wounding her breast to feed her three chicks with her own blood.
The quality and accessibility of my first six years of public schooling in Denham Springs and Baton Rouge, Louisiana were made available to me by the efforts of a Louisiana native son and by his mother who home-schooled her children in her farm kitchen in Winnfield, Louisiana. Education never ceases to be our own responsibility but I deem it only proper to say thanks and to acknowledge folks who cleared some of the paths I have been blessed to walk on in my own quest.
The man was Huey P. Long and the woman was his mother, Caledonia Long. She tutored her nine children until her husband and some other neighbours could raise enough money to hire a teacher for their community. Huey finished grade eleven and just as he did, it was made mandatory to complete twelve years in order to receive a diploma. Huey started a petition against this and was expelled without a diploma.
He did many different jobs and studied for awhile in Oklahoma to be a preacher. He found this not to be his calling very shortly and went to law school and completed three years in one. At this juncture, the young married man's money gave out and he approached the Supreme Court of Louisiana and asked to be examined forthwith. His challenge was accepted and he became a full fledged lawyer at the age of 21.
As chairman of the Public Service Commission in 1922, Long won a lawsuit against the Cumberland Telephone & Telegraph Co. for unfair rate increases, resulting in cash refunds of $440,000 to 80,000 overcharged customers. Long successfully argued the case on appeal before the United States Supreme Court (Cumberland Tel & Tel Co. v. Louisiana Public Service Commission, 260 U. S. 212), prompting Chief Justice William Howard Taft to describe Long as one of the best legal minds he had ever encountered. Awhile later, he took on Standard Oil.
Less than forty years before my family moved to Louisiana, there were only about 300 miles of paved roads and only three major bridges. Mr. Long, in the roles of Governor for four years and later as a Senator for three years, transformed this into 2,446 miles of cement roads, 1,308 miles of asphalt roads, double the miles of gravel roads and built over forty bridges. He provided free textbooks which caused a 20% rise in enrolment. Free night schools were set up that taught 100,000 formally illiterate adults to read. He built the new Capitol Building where he was later murdered, as well as hospitals and the LSU School of Medicine.
These things are only a smattering of the accomplishments of a man who's dying words were, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.”
He intended to run for President and had a plan for limiting the amount of money that any one individual may own. History shows us the truth of the old saying concerning power, absolute power and their proportional relationship with corruption. Plainly, how could it harm a man to be 'limited' to a fortune many times more than he could ever spend in thousands of lifetimes of utter luxury, while those around him starved? You may perhaps be interested to learn how and why he did these things. There are many books about that subject and of the several I have read, I must recommend to you Huey's autobiography, Every Man A King.
After reading the following excerpt from a Senate speech you might be inclined, as I was, to trust the veracity of this man's telling of his own story. Whether you choose an autobiography or a biography to learn about Long, the facts and figures of his life's work stand open for all to see. Here then, is the excerpt:
“Mr. President, I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. I have not even had a high school education. But the things that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to colour what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected. I know the hearts of the People because I have not coloured my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiana and another way here in the Senate."
"I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education. Nonetheless my voice will be the same as it has been. Patronage will not change it. Fear will not change it. Persecution will not change it. It cannot be changed while people suffer. The only way it can be changed is to make the lives of these people decent and respectable. No one will ever hear political opposition out of me when that is done."
-Huey Long, U. S. Senate floor speech, March 5, 1935, six months before being shot.
At the end of Every Man A King, there is a reprint of an open letter. It was printed by the newspaper, American Progress, circa 1935. That publication was started by Huey P. Long when he became Governor in 1928 as Louisiana Progress and re-named when he became a Senator. The letter is addressed to the gangster, Al Capone. It strongly criticizes the relationship between J. P. Morgan and associates, the federal government and what they have been allowed to get away with. Unlike Al Capone who was in prison for tax evasion. It goes as far as to claim that Morgan's company does the same thing but with federal approval. The catalyst for the letter was an assault on Huey P. Long at Long Island, New York. While there is no authorship claimed, I think Chief Justices Taft and Monroe would have worn knowing smiles if and when they ever chanced to read it. That is, if they weren't too busy hunting ducks, wrestling alligators or playing the accordion. I will include it here to conclude this essay about a real Louisiana Man.
American Progress Bulletin No. 1
J. P. MORGAN & COMPANY POINTS WAY FOR CAPONE’S RELEASE
Can receive original gold medal and fund collected for “unknown hero” at Collier’s office owned by Morgan & Company.
AN OPEN LETTER
Alphonse Capone,
United States Penitentiary,
Atlanta, Georgia.
Dear Sir: —
"The newspapers report efforts to secure your release from the penitentiary. A way is open for you to do it. Somebody (it makes no difference how many) made an assault on United States Senator Huey P. Long and then made a clear get away, while he was attending the Charity Benefit at Long Island on Saturday, August 26th.
Glorious worship has been printed for several days for whoever was guilty of this crime. No one has yet found the criminals to get any version from them, but, just the same, certain newspapers and magazines have given various “what might have been” reasons for the assault, and while each “reason or excuse” contradicts all the other “reasons and excuses,” none the less these papers declare that the assault should be highly extolled and commended.
Now the House of Morgan editors, particularly one Owen P. White, of Collier’s Weekly, owned by Morgan & Co., are receiving contributions to give to the unknown criminals, or to put it their way, “only one criminal, but a very strong man capable of doing the job alone.
The fact that Collier’s magazine is owned by Morgan & Co. was admitted by Mr. Thomas W. Lamont, a Morgan partner in answer to questions propounded by Senator Huey P. Long before a U. S. Senate Committee.
The New York Evening Post, owned by the House of Morgan but later turned into the name of one on its preferred list, says: “Money and messages rolled in to Mr. White at his office at Collier’s Magazine.”
This Morgan editor, Owen P. White, has announced that large sums are coming in cash currency so that the Morgan firm can swell it to immense proportions, thus concealing that they are really just putting up the money. (You know, Al, while they’ve got you in the penitentiary for not reporting all your income tax, J. P. Morgan and all his partners paid none at all and the government ordered them “not investigated because anything they returned was O. K.)
So now, here is your chance: You haven’t yet been charged with having anything to do with trying to beat up or kill any U. S. Senators, particularly one of those who advocates a limitation on big fortunes. Furthermore, you have been in a small fry business. Morgan and our other international bankers swindled the people out of more money on Kreuger & Toll and Insull stocks, on Argentine, German and Brazilian flotations and caused more starvation, suicides and murders than a million such men as you could do in a hundred years.
But, now comes your chance if you can rise to it: Wire at once to Collier’s Weekly, the Evening Post, or any other magazine or newspaper in with the House of Morgan and other big fortune holders (and that gets most of them), wire them at once that you had Senator Huey P. Long beat up at the Charity Benefit on Long Island and that the only reason he wasn’t killed was because he managed to get away too soon for the men to finish the job. Immediately they will send you the contribution and this Morgan gold medal. That puts you in their class. Then you are not expected to pay any income tax and the government will owe you back whatever money you did pay.
Wire them that you will complete the job on Senator Long if he goes too far again. And, to make it sure, wire them also that you have your eyes on the other U. S. Senators who voted for the “Long Plan” to put some limit on the big fortunes and to spread some of the wealth among all the people in America. Let it be known that from the sign left on the forehead of a U. S. Senator, (who escaped before he could be worse handled) is a mere warning of “events that are casting their shadows before.” Those Senators who have persisted in voting to place taxes on the big man at the top, so as to relieve and help the little man at the bottom, should be announced as your special luminaries for future notice and attention, with Senator Long as the fair sample.
If you send this wire and qualify for the credit of this attack then, overnight, you become the hero to America that Morgan’s magazines are now looking for; you get the big “contribution” being taken up by Morgan’s editors, or at least the swag Morgan’s outfit has to give for “the work.” Becoming thus honoured and aligned with Morgan & Co. the government has to release you from jail and pay you back whatever you paid on income taxes. Instead of being classed with small fry criminals, you will stand with the crew that has starved and killed by the millions, not just a few now and then; you will rank with the extortioners who filched the last penny of the labourers, widows, and orphans for the worthless paper floated by the swollen fortune element. We advise that you make connections early. Otherwise someone else may claim this honour if you delay."
-Sources: http://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/louisiana_anthology/texts/long/long--every_man_a_king.html -accessed August 18, 2019
-Broadsides and Ephemera Collection of the Duke University Library Digital Collection Item ID # bdsla60736.
-http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/broadsides_bdsla60736/ (jpg)
-http://www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/louisiana_anthology/texts/long/long--every_man_a_king.html (text)
fin