Quote of the Day (Gov. Earl Long, on a Crazy Man vs. a ‘Kept’ One)

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, but you will never get to know the truth by reading the Alexandria Town Talk. You all read in that paper that I am crazy. Ohyeah. Do I look any crazier than I ever did? I been accused of saying the fella that owns that paper is a kept man. Maybe he ain't, but I'd like to be kep' as good as he is. He married a rich woman. That's about the best way I know to save yourself about ninety-eight years' hard work.”—Louisiana Governor Earl Long (1895-1960), quoted in A.J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (1961)

For the current state of elections, I blame mostly the ad men and political consultants for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. These professionals didn’t have much to work with—a corrupt paranoid with an avid interest in policy, and a likable former matinee idol with no interest in policy—and sold them to the American people like bars of soap. Their advice, followed eagerly by their clients, was simple: Stick to the script. Stay on message.

Hearing this, Earl Long (1895-1960), as I think you can tell from the above quote, would have snorted in astonishment. Script? What script?  Message—isn’t that something from Western Union?

Several years ago, in Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid, Time Magazine writer Joe Klein recalled Bobby Kennedy’s extraordinary impromptu address, amid the frenetic 1968 primary season, on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, to a group of anguished and angry African-American voters in Indiana. Kennedy spoke of his own brother’s murder, then mentioned his “favorite poet,” Aeschylus, quoting powerful lines about how “pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until ... in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'" 

It was an electrifying moment in American political theater, a pause amid searing tragedy—created at least partly because a candidate was blissfully ignorant of his listeners’ psychographics: “The audience hasn't been sliced and diced by his pollsters, their prejudices and policy priorities cross-tabbed, their favorite words discovered by carefully targeted focus groups,” writes Klein.

“Uncle Earl” Long embodied a long-past moment of political theater, too, but in a comic vein: Aristophanes to Kennedy’s Aeschylus. What he shared with the fated Presidential candidate was an improvised performance. It was spoken, and then some.

“It is difficult to report a speech by Uncle Earl chronologically, listing the thoughts in order of appearance,” wrote The New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling. “They chased one another on and off the stage like characters in a Shakespearean battle scene, full of alarums and sorties.”

Liebling’s politics were distinctly liberal, and certainly Long’s comparatively moderate civil-rights policies (no attempt to break Jim Crow laws, but an expansion of employment and suffrage opportunities for African-Americans) appealed to him. But even if that were not the case, one suspects that his overriding affection for those on the raffish side of life would have led him to hold a grudging affection for this politician.

This was, after all, not only the brother of “The Kingfish,” Huey Long, but a man whose outrageous fling with stripper Blaze Starr inspired the 1989 movie Blaze.

(Incidentally, if you really want an idea of what Earl Long’s life and last campaign were like, you’ll stick with Liebling rather than this movie. Liebling’s profile makes you feel what it was like in that last campaign—one so hot that at one memorable moment, Long holds a bottle of Coca-Cola up to his head to cool off. Director Ron Shelton seems far less interested in telling Long’s story than Blaze’s, and he was certainly besotted in the making of the film with female star Lolita Davidovich, whom he eventually married.)

The chapter from which the “Quote of the Day” was taken appeared in a book edited by Mordecai Richler, The Best of Modern Humor. It’s easy to see why Liebling’s account made it into this 1983 anthology. To be sure, Liebling wrote some clever asides about the politician.

But most of the chapter rolls along on the rhythms of Long’s voice, a style virtually nonexistent among today’s blow-dried, soundbite-hounded, risk-averse politicos. It’s at once colorful, earthy, raw, and even in your face, as when Long confronts a Democratic heckler and gives it to him with both barrels: “I knew your daddy, Camille Gravel, and he was a fine man. But you trying to make yourself a big man, and you nothing but a little puissant."
 

In my home Congressional district, we just went through a primary in which the two candidates bombarded each other for weeks with screaming mail order ads, high-decibel, sneering TV commercials, and nonstop robocalls—all the way to 15 minutes before the polls closed, and all to highlight virtually nonexistent differences between two veteran Democratic liberal congressmen. By the time it was over, I was thoroughly disgusted by the shameful spectacle.

I’m not saying I would have wanted to live in Long’s time, mind you, but the political combat would have been less disembodied, more hand to hand—and infinitely more entertaining.

Oh, one more thing about Long: After an incoherent speech against a bitter enemy, an unremitting racist, in the state legislature, Earl Long's wife, perhaps out of retaliation for his affair with Blaze Starr, committed her husband to a mental institution.  In turn, he managed to check himself out and run in his last political campaign. 

After all this time, it's hard to know the psychological disorder to which Earl Long was indebted. Whatever it was, however, he was still more sane than virtually the entire slate of GOP Presidential candidates this past year.

(Photo of Earl Long, undated, in his office at the state capitol.)

This Day in Southern History (Huey Long Assassinated)

September 8, 1935—A 42-year-old U.S. senator, the linchpin of a political dynasty, whom detractors called ruthless and admirers hailed as progressive, was in the midst of challenging an incumbent President from his own party when he was assassinated, setting off endless controversies about his legacy as well as conspiracy theories surrounding his death. 

No, I’m not talking about Robert F. Kennedy of New York, but Huey Long of Louisiana. 

The circumstances of their lives and deaths, you can tell from the first paragraph of this post, were similar in many ways. But in the years since his death, Kennedy has enjoyed much better press than “the Kingfish.” 

It’s been more than 40 years since RFK was murdered in a Los Angeles hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, but the wound of what might have been still stings. Forty years after his death, however, Long did not evoke similarly weepy nostalgia, but instead, in that Watergate era of fears of corrupt, all-controlling executives, a sense of relief that the nation was spared the dictatorial style he honed in Louisiana, first as governor, later as Senator. 

It won’t do to dismiss or forget Long that easily. Five years ago, Americans discovered, to their astonishment, that deep divides still exist along racial and class lines in his state. Yet those fissures would undoubtedly have been a thousand times worse without the grand infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads, etc.—and services he put in place. 

Contemporaries never made the mistake of ignoring Long. RFK has been lionized on disc (Black 47’s “Bobby Kennedy”) and the big screen (Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby”), but he has not become fodder for novelists in the same manner that Long did. 

From 1934 to 1946, a half-dozen novelists took a crack at rendering The Kingfish’s life and death in fiction, according to Keith Perry’s critical study, The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel. 

Ironically, the most famous, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, All the King’s Men, was the one most loosely based on his life. There were others by Hamilton Basso, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here), and Adria Locke Langley's A Lion is in the Streets (later, like All the King’s Men, adapted for film, this time starring James Cagney as the Long stand-in). 

Sixty years after the shooting, Joe Klein (writing as “Anonymous”) used All the King’s Men as a kind of template for his own novelistic study in ambivalence about a compromised Southern progressive, Primary Colors. 

Why so much literary interest in Long? For all the overtones of Greek tragedy evoked by the death of Bobby Kennedy, his life didn’t pose in stark terms, the way Long’s did, the elemental questions posed by the political process, such as whether the end justifies the means. 

Take a look at the roll call of governors from roughly the 1870s to the Roaring Twenties, when Long came to power. A dispiritingly high percentage of these came from the “Bourbon” set of politicians in the governor’s seat, conservatives intent on spending as little as possible on basic services for the state. 

Long broke that pattern, and nearly five decades after his death, many ordinary people who allowed themselves to be filmed for Ken Burns’ documentary on Long spoke highly of how the governor-senator positively affected their lives. 

Long’s take-no-prisoners style in assuring passage of his programs, however, along with certain aspects of his populist stances (e.g., “Share the Wealth” clubs that advocated redistribution of the incomes of the most affluent), led many to wonder if a homegrown version of Fascism was appearing in the U.S. 

None other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who had received crucial support from Long at the 1932 Democratic Convention—privately believed that the politician was one of the two most dangerous men in America. (The other “dangerous man” was General Douglas MacArthur.) 

The fiery opposition to his positions and his leadership style (Long had to fend off an impeachment move while governor), it somehow seems appropriate, ended in equally vociferous reactions to his death. 

For years, the accepted version of Long’s death was that it came at the hands of Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a judge being gerrymandered out of office by a set of bills that the Louisiana legislature was then passing. Weiss encountered Long in the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, and to the horror of eyewitnesses a hail of bullets was exchanged. Dr. Weiss was gunned down immediately by Long’s bodyguards, while Long died from his wounds two days later. 

Yet, surprisingly enough, as outlined in Robert Travis Scott’s article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on the 75th anniversary of the shooting, the most fundamental forensic evidence from the case—e.g., the bullet, the gun—did not receive what we would think of as standard identification and preservation. 

To the annoyance of Long’s band of admirers today, then, questions impossible to dismiss have lingered as to whether a) Long died directly from the crossfire of his own bodyguards rather than from the bullet Weiss was able to fire, or b) whether Weiss merely got into fisticuffs with Long, and that his guards, to cover up their overreaction, arranged the evidence to point in the direction of Weiss rather than themselves. 

A quarter century to the day of the assassination, Huey’s only slightly less colorful brother Earl Long was buried, after 18 months in which he a) took up with stripper Blaze Starr, b) his wife committed him to a mental institution, c) he checked out of said institution and ran for Congress, d) he won the race, and e) he died after a second fatal heart attack while in the hospital.

Quotes of the Day (Edwin Edwards and Peter Cammarano, Demonstrating Touching Confidence in The Electorate)

“The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”—Former Louisiana Governor (and current jailbird) Edwin Edwards, handicapping to reporters his chances of winning a 1983 election against GOP opponent Dave Treen, quoted by Jeremy Alford, “The Cajun Express,” The Independent Weekly (Lafayette, La.), September 28, 2008

“Right now, the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down. Nothing can change that now. I could be, uh, indicted, and I’m still gonna win 85 to 95 percent of those populations.”—Just-resigned Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III (the guy in the accompanying photo, doing the perp walk), discussing his prospects for winning a runoff election for his office last year, quoted in United States of America v. Peter Cammarano III and Michael Schaffer

Mr. Cammarano, you just have been, uh, indicted. Your unique political science theory is about to be put to the test in ways you couldn’t imagine in 2008.

Unlike ex-Gov. Edwards—who displayed such a raffish charm that his bid for a pardon by George W. Bush was supported by politicians in both parties, even old rival Dave Treen—Cammarano has displayed only monstrous hypocrisy. He campaigned as a reformer, if you can believe that—bringing to mind the adage by columnist James J. Kilpatrick that reform consists of throwing your rascals out and putting my rascals in.

Moreover, Cammarano served as state legal director of Sen. Bob Menendez’s campaign a few years ago. I’d love to hear about the kind of advice he served up then.

Edwards and Cammarano epitomize the two different styles of corruption perpetrated by politicians on the good citizens of Louisiana and New Jersey.

New Jersey politicians are as much fun as a highway full of oil refineries on fire. If they squeezed silver dollars even a smidgen harder than they do right now, the poor coins would scream for relief. They meet the people they shake down in the kind of diners that Tony Soprano and his wrecking crew used to frequent on the HBO series.

Moreover, it’s all part of what Acting U.S. Attorney called, referring to the environment in which Cammarano operated, “an ethics-free zone”—i.e., the entire Garden State. The culture of corruption permeates every level of state government and law, even traffic court—where, because of our gazillion municipalities’ need to make money, it can easily cost a citizen more than $400 to cop a plea to wipe out points on a license for a moving violation that could otherwise leave you paying a surcharge for several years on your car insurance.

(In the 44-person indictment just handed down by the Feds, even rabbis ended up indicted, for God’s sake. I’m still suffering from cognitive dissonance, as I try to square the concept of representatives of the religion of The Law—you know, Moses and the 10 Commandments—breaking all sorts of them. Will someone explain to me how they got involved in this sorry mess?)

All of this wouldn’t be so hard to take if our politicians were entertaining. But the only thing funny about our public officials are the Quasimodo-like humps they’ve grown in carting out ill-gotten booty. The booty they stole, especially aggravating in a bum economy, from us.

Louisiana, taking its cue from the New Orleans motto, “Let the good times roll,” has by far the more cheerfully colorful crew of crooks. I think that if I’m going to be had, I’d rather be done by them.

Governor Earl Long, Edwards’ predecessor, is a case in point. Younger brother of Huey Long, committed to a state mental hospital by his wife after coming out for black voting rights, ol’ Earl managed to check himself out of the institution and run for Congress, all the while flaunting his relationship with stripper Blaze Starr. (You might remember the Paul Newman movie about this, Blaze.)

Here’s one of the things I like best about the fellow A.J. Liebling called “The Earl of Louisiana.” In the 1950s, he decided to backtrack from a position he’d taken, upsetting some of his most loyal supporters. An anxious aide asked how to finesse voters displeased that he’d gone back on his pledge.

Long’s response—paradoxically breathtaking in its brazen honesty—is one that I wish my state’s small-time double-talkers would try once in a blue moon: “Just look them in the eye, and tell them I lied!”