Death of a Dictator

One morning last week the New York Herald Tribune published a cartoon by Jay ("Ding"') Darling captioned "The Fates Are Funny That Way." It pictured a wreck at a railway crossing ("36,000 Die in Auto Crashes Every Year!"); a scene in an operating room (''Prominent Senator Succumbs to Emergency Operation!"); a street accident ("Pedestrian Killed Crossing Street!"); a row of dead lying beside a table ("Poison Food Kills 469 at Old Settlers' Picnic!"); a volcano erupting ("Earthquakes, Floods, Cancer and Pestilence Kill Thousands Every Day!"). Beneath this billboard of horrors appeared a citizen, newspaper in hand, turning to his wife exclaiming: "But nothing ever seems to happen to Huey Long!"

Three days later in Baton Rouge something very serious happened to Huey Long. The seventh special session of Louisiana's Legislature was just getting down to the business of rubberstamping 39 bills devised by the Senator to tighten his one-man dictatorship over the State. On the floor there had been the customary brawling and cursing as the "Kingfish" strutted up & down the aisle giving orders to his henchmen. As the Legislature adjourned for the night, Senator Long marched out of the chamber and started down the corridor to Governor Allen's office, flanked, as always, by his bodyguards. A young man in a white suit, lurking in a corner, stepped out into the Senator's path, shoved a small revolver against his right side, pulled the trigger. There was a muffled explosion. One of the Long bodyguards grappled with the assassin. He fired again, searing the bodyguard's thumb. Then the young man in the white suit went down under a rain of submachine gun bullets.

Senator Long clapped his hand to his side, staggered down the corridor. Attracted by the crackle of gunfire, friends rushed forward, carried the wounded "Kingfish" out a rear door, put him into a car, started for Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. On the way Huey Long held his hand to his bleeding side, spoke only once: "I wonder why he did it."

Why a 29-year-old doctor named Carl Austin Weiss Jr. did it seemed fairly plain to local newshawks. Young Dr. Weiss, a Tulane Medical School graduate who practiced with his father in Baton Rouge, had married Miss Louise Yvonne Pavy. Mrs. Weiss was the daughter of Circuit Judge B. H. Pavy, a rabid anti-Longster in St. Landry Parish. One of the 39 bills up for passage by the Legislature was to gerrymander Judge Pavy's judicial district in such a way as to effect his ouster. Brooding darkly on this piece of petty politics, Carl Weiss apparently thought he was doing his father-in-law a favor by taking a potshot at Boss Long.

At the hospital the Senator was taken straight to the operating room. On examining his wound physicians found that the bullet had twice pierced his colon, made its way out through his back. On the operating table, the intestinal punctures were sewed up. Then Huey Long was put to bed and a mass vigil began: by his wife, daughter, two boys and three hastily reconciled brothers at the bedside; by his miscellaneous henchmen in the corridor outside; by a brigade of newshawks downstairs; by a truculent detachment of State troopers and bodyguards around the building who were ordered to shoot photographers on sight; and by a horde of onlookers who shuffled up & down in front of the hospital. While the Senator's political enemies buried Assassin Weiss with honor in a nearby Catholic cemetery next day, the Senator's doctors ordered five successive blood transfusions, adrenalin injections, an oxygen tent. Toward sunset, when his condition became hopeless, it was arranged that the lights would blink in the sickroom to signify the end to friends and kin on the porch below. At 4 a. m. two mornings after he was shot, Huey Long, breathing heavily, was staring wild-eyed at the canopy above him. At 4 :10 the lights in his room blinked, but he did not see them. . . .

Men look smaller when dead, but Huey Long, who developed the traditional figure of the American backwoods demagogue to its fullest stature, was not likely to shrink in the estimates of his contemporaries for some time to come. Twenty years ago but a traveling salesman, a peddler of baking powder and cotton seed oil, he married a girl who won a cake-baking contest which he staged. After seven months study of the law, he was a lawyer, wangled himself a job on Louisiana's Railway Commission, and began building up a political following. He made the Governorship in 1928. In short time an effort was made to impeach him, but in vain. He "reached" 15 Senators, enough to forestall his ousting, and from that time on no one in Louisiana could stand against him. After he had himself elected to the U. S. Senate, he refused to go to Washington until he could arrange to leave Louisiana bound and gagged in the hands of a Long-chosen Governor. At the Democratic Convention in 1932, he was not only Senator but Dictator of Louisiana and with his vital votes Franklin Roosevelt was nominated. But President Roosevelt refused to pay the political debts which Huey Long thought Candidate Roosevelt had contracted. So Huey Long, the ex-drummer, was a pariah instead of a leader in the most powerful Administration in U. S. history. All he had, besides Louisiana, was the right to clown, to get beaten in a Sands Point washroom, to filibuster and to hurl invective. Yet last week the U. S. realized that save for Franklin Roosevelt, no other public figure could by his death produce so great a change in U. S. politics.

A favorite saying of the Dictator was: "I'm a smart man. There are very few men in the United States as smart as I am, and none in Louisiana." In truth, he left no successors, only stooges. These, Governor Allen, Lieutenant Governor Noe and Col. "Abe" Shushan, the machine's moneyman, quit their leader's death bed in a panic. The best thing they could think of was to throw a cordon of police around the State House, hold troops ready in New Orleans to prevent a possible "coup d'etat." With equal melodrama, the suppressed anti-Long forces throughout the State began to serve threateningly and the Square Deal Association ominously warned the Legislature: "Heed the example of the man who has just passed away." Whether by bullets or ballots, in sight was a bitter dogfight for the dead man's big shoes. Meantime, the Dictator's death had put a vastly different complexion not only on the fortunes of Louisiana, but life in the U. S. Senate, the doings of the next Democratic Convention, even the tenor of the 1936 national political campaign.

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