Russell Long

A Life in Politics

Michael S. Martin

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626741119
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Russell Long (1918-2003) occupies a unique niche in twentieth-century United States history. Born into Louisiana's most influential political family, and son of perhaps the most famous Louisianan of all time, Long extended the political power generated by other members of his family and attained heights of power unknown to his predecessors, including his father, Huey.

The Long family and its followers pervaded Louisiana politics from the late 1920s through the 1980s. Being a Long--especially a son of Huey Long--preordained Russell for a political life. His father's assassination set the wheels in motion for his eventual political career. In 1948, Russell followed his father and his mother to a seat in the United States Senate. In due course, he rose to the politically eminent positions of majority whip and chair of the Senate Finance Committee.

Russell Long: A Life in Politics examines Long's public life and places it within the context of twentieth-century Louisiana, southern, and national politics. In Louisiana, Long's politics arose out of the Longite/ Anti-Longite period of history. Yet he transcended many of those two groups' factional squabbles. In the national realm, Long's politics exhibited a working philosophy that straddled the boundaries between New Deal liberalism and southern conservatism. By the time of his retirement in early 1987, he had witnessed the demise of one political paradigm--the New Deal liberal consensus--and the creation of one dominated by a new style of conservatism.

CHAPTER ONE

Learning the Ropes in the Long Family, 1918–1948

RUSSELL LONG was born in the booming oil town of Shreveport, in the far northwestern corner of Louisiana, on November 3, 1918. His mother, Rose McConnell Long, named him Huey Pierce Long III for his father, who, at the time of the boy’s birth, was busy campaigning for a seat on the Louisiana Railroad Commission. Huey changed his son’s name to Russell Biliu when he arrived at the hospital.¹

No one knows for certain why Huey changed the name, although a couple of anecdotal accounts have been handed down through the years. One has Huey, who had been named after his own father, telling Rose, “I hated being little Huey all my life. It’s better for the boy to have his own name so if things go bad for me, he can have his own name to make it on.” Another acknowledges Huey’s certainty that he would be a divisive figure once he won political office, and his concern that his son sharing his name would cause more harm than good. “When a man is in politics, he almost always winds up being repudiated,” he supposedly said.²

Both of those stories point to the fact that even before he won a single elected position, Huey had understood that the career he planned for himself might create personal or political problems for his child. Huey’s prescience played out over the next seventeen years, as he parlayed the seat he won on the Railroad Commission into the governorship, followed by a place in the U.S. Senate and plans for a presidential run. Along the course of his meteoric rise, Huey became simultaneously the most reviled and the most beloved politician in Louisiana’s history. The name Huey Long became synonymous with graft, corruption, scandal, patronage, nepotism—even, according to some observers, dictatorship and fascism. Conversely, Long ended up revered as the first Louisiana politician to provide for the needs of the vast, unrepresented masses of his state. Had the benefits Huey provided been delivered without the objectionable tactics he used, Russell Long might have found his own life much easier, both inside and outside the political arena. As it was, however, even the name change could not shelter Russell from the storm his father had brewed.

Over the course of his first thirty years, Russell Long watched his father win offices at all levels of government, garner an immense amount of personal political power, and create a dominant political machine. Following his father’s death in 1935, Russell dedicated himself to completing his education, and then serving in World War II, before setting up a law practice in Baton Rouge. At the same time, he benefited from the political guidance of his Uncle Earl, who prodded Russell to campaign for Long machine candidates and to run for office himself. By the time Russell won his first office—to the U.S. Senate in 1948—he had become a seasoned political veteran, trained by two masters, his father the Kingfish and his Uncle Earl.

The Long Family

Rose and Huey, along with Russell’s older sister, Rose Lolita, had moved to Shreveport less than a month before Russell’s birth. They came from Winnfield, Huey’s north-central Louisiana hometown. The move to Shreveport had been made for practical purposes: the city’s burgeoning oil industry promised new clients for Huey’s law practice, and as north Louisiana’s major urban area, it provided Huey with a broader political platform, an important consideration for a young man who aspired to much higher offices than the Railroad Commission.³

Huey had been born on August 30, 1893, into the moderately prosperous family of Huey Pierce Long, known as Hugh, and Caledonia Tison Long. The Long family lived among the piney woods of Winn Parish, one of the poorest and most isolated areas of north-central Louisiana and a seedbed of political discontent. Huey was the seventh of nine remarkable children. Even in his youth, Huey clearly stood above the others. As a precocious youngster, his curiosity and intelligence foreshadowed the future heights he would attain, but his personality also displayed faults that would emerge time and again in his life. He lacked attention, focus, and patience. In school or at home, he had little self-control and refused to accept discipline from others. He wanted to be the center of attention at all times, and he tended to be argumentative and restless.

Huey’s inattentiveness and arrogance led to poor showings in school, and he left Winnfield High School in 1910 without a diploma. In July of that year, at age sixteen, he took a job as a traveling salesman for Cottolene, a cooking oil company. The job suited him well and allowed him to use his greatest assets, salesmanship and communications skill, without too much physical labor. It also, inadvertently, led to his courting Rose McConnell. The two first met when Huey served as a judge for a cake-baking contest Rose had entered in Shreveport. This initial meeting led to a turbulent, two-and-a-half-year courtship, culminating in their marriage in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 12, 1913. By then, Huey was a regional sales manager for the Faultless Starch Company.

When Faultless’s business faltered, Huey lost his job, and he and Rose moved back to Winnfield. The young salesman hawked patent medicines for a while, but he eventually sought the help of his older brother, Julius, who fronted tuition for Tulane University’s Law School. In May 1915, after only one year of classes, Huey passed a special oral examination to become a member of the Louisiana bar. He and Rose returned to Winnfield, where he entered into partnership with Julius, who was Winn Parish’s district attorney and needed a young partner to help carry his caseload. Less than two months later, their partnership dissolved. Lacking experience and clients—and confronted with dim financial prospects—Huey took part-time jobs as a newspaper reporter and, yet again, as a traveling salesman.

By early 1916, Huey had earned enough through sales and writing to focus most of his energies on his latent law practice. After the move to Shreveport, Huey also began plotting his political career. As a lawyer, he specialized in cases of on-the-job injury compensation, a fertile field given the inherent dangers of the local lumber and oil industries. Huey also began representing small, independent oil companies that most often paid him in stock. World War I created great demand for these local companies’ crude, but when the war ended, the demand for local oil dwindled, and the big three oil companies—Standard, Texas, and Gulf—ceased purchasing and transporting the smaller concerns’ product. The big three’s actions ignited an uproar among many of the Shreveport companies, who turned to their lawyer, Huey Long. Deciding that taking on the biggest of the big might create the greatest publicity, Long trained his sights on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Huey had economic motives for doing so—he stood to gain a significant amount of wealth, either in cash or stocks, from the companies he represented—but he also understood that attacking Standard, even if he lost the battle, would lead to future political benefits. Such cases provided an initial footing for Huey’s claims of protecting the commoners and downtrodden in the face of external threats from faceless big businesses and their owners, a populistic rhetoric he would use to great effect after entering politics.

Russell Long spent his early childhood in Shreveport. The family—Huey, Rose, Rose Lolita, Russell, and later, youngest son Palmer—lived initially in a respectable yet modest neighborhood, but following a settlement in a 1923 case that earned Huey a $40,000 fee, the Longs moved into a larger home in Shreveport’s most upscale neighborhood. When he reached school age, Russell attended Creswell Elementary School.⁴

Huey Long and Louisiana Politics

As in other southern states, the Democratic Party dominated Louisiana politics in the early twentieth century, so that a victory in the Democratic primary was the equivalent of winning the general election. It had been consolidating power since the end of Reconstruction, but its stranglehold on the Bayou State’s politics had been solidified following passage of the Constitution of 1898, which disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites through literacy tests and a poll tax and effectively killed the Republican Party. True political power, however, rested in the hands of an even smaller element within the party itself. For most of the first two-and-a-half decades of the twentieth century, New Orleans’s “Old Regular” political organization controlled statewide politics with an ability to deliver up to 20 percent of the state’s total vote, a direct oversight of a large number of legislative seats, and a powerful control of the Democratic Central Committee. When working in alliance with the state’s planter-merchant elite, the Old Regulars could usually deliver pluralities from at least two of Louisiana’s three traditional geo-cultural-political domains, which were the largely Protestant north, the largely Catholic south, and the urban area of New Orleans. A minor reform wing did exist within the Democratic Party, but it usually could not summon enough electoral strength to overcome the Old Regular-planter-merchant alliance. Even in the rare instances when the reformers did manage to win state office, usually as a result of infighting within the dominant alliance, the so-called reformers did very little to change how, and for whom, Louisiana’s government functioned. Both sides, it seemed, agreed that the state government should perform within very limited confines: taxes should be low or nonexistent, individual parishes should be responsible for internal improvements, and the people should take care of themselves.

Huey Long, conversely, saw providing benefits to the people of Louisiana as a necessary state responsibility. He also saw his seat on the Railroad Commission (renamed the Public Service Commission in 1921) as a springboard to higher office. On August 30, 1923, his thirtieth birthday, Huey Long announced his candidacy in the following year’s Louisiana gubernatorial election. By then, he had served not only on the Public Service Commission but also as its chair, and he had begun to reshape the board into an active political body that appeared to champion the common folk of Louisiana in the face of entrenched and enormously powerful outside entities like Standard Oil and Bell Telephone. Although he lacked a political organization that could rival the Old Regulars’, had very little money for advertising and travel expenses, and received no endorsements from established politicians, Huey threw himself into the campaign with abandon, while focusing on two resonant issues for Louisiana voters: roads and education. He took the offensive and attacked his two major opponents: Lieutenant Governor Hewitt Bouanchaud, the chosen successor of sitting governor John Parker, and Angola State Penitentiary general manager Henry L. Fuqua, the Old Regular candidate. Long’s chief message was the populist-inspired clarion call that Louisiana’s poor and hardworking people had been ignored and repressed by the state’s powers that be, especially Parker, Bouanchaud, and Fuqua, whom Long claimed pandered only to moneyed interests. Such appeals to class resentment swayed a surprisingly large number of voters, and Long might have stood a better chance if class issues had been the only ones up for debate. But the key question in the 1924 election turned out to be the resurgent Ku Klux Klan and its role in Louisiana. Long’s wavering stance on the Klan proved his undoing—he did not seem sufficiently anti-Klan to appease south Louisiana Catholics nor sufficiently pro-Klan to satisfy Klan strongholds in the north. Long finished third in the first round of the Democratic primary, although he performed stronger in rural parishes than either of his opponents. He refused to endorse either of the candidates in the runoff election, which Fuqua won.

Over the next four years, Long prepared for the 1928 governor’s race. On August 3, 1927, Huey stood before a throng of supporters in Alexandria and officially announced his candidacy for governor. He faced two major opponents for the 1928 Democratic nomination: Riley J. Wilson, who received much of the support of Louisiana’s upper classes, and Oramel H. Simpson, who had been lieutenant governor under Fuqua and had succeeded to the governor’s office when Fuqua died in 1926. Wilson and Simpson campaigned on traditional pledges of efficiency and conservatism, but Long promised improvements to the state’s highways, schools, and medical services; free textbooks for schoolchildren; financial support for farmers and laborers; and a state government free of greed and corruption. Long shrewdly chose for his running mate Paul Cyr, a native of south Louisiana. As he had during the 1924 campaign, Huey alleged that wealthy interests and behind-the-scenes political powers controlled his opposition.

Huey sat in his Shreveport home with his wife Rose, their ten-year-old daughter Rose Lolita, and their two sons, nine-year-old Russell and six-year-old Palmer Reid, as the results of the Democratic primary rolled in on January 17, 1928. The returns came as no surprise to Huey, and they confirmed the worst fears of his opponents. Long received 126,842 votes, Wilson 81,747, and Simpson 80,326. Wilson eventually conceded the Democratic nomination.

Following his inauguration on May 21, 1928, Huey set about the business of gaining control of the state legislature. He personally chose members of all committees, where almost all legislation originated, and dispensed patronage freely to create or firm up loyalties. By controlling the lawmakers, he was able to fulfill many of the promises he had made during his campaigns. Over the course of the 1928 session, Long received the lawmakers’ endorsements of free school textbooks, bond issues for highway and bridge construction, and small increases in funding for state educational and medical institutions. To pay for the new expenditures, the legislature increased severance taxes and issued bonds. Despite the opposition of a group of legislators that called itself the Dynamite Squad, Long also managed to place control of major state agencies, and their patronage, within his own hands.

Huey’s family, meanwhile, briefly considered moving into Louisiana’s antiquated Governor’s Mansion, a dilapidated, termite-infested house, but thinking better, returned to Shreveport following Huey’s inauguration. Huey moved into a suite at Baton Rouge’s Heidelberg Hotel, from which he ordered, without proper legislative authorization, the demolition of the old mansion and the construction of a new one. Only after the new mansion was finished in 1930 did Rose, Russell, and the rest of the Long family join Huey in Baton Rouge. They lived there for the next two years.⁵

While the new mansion was being built, Huey Long called a special session of the legislature in March 1929 to place a tax on refined petroleum. The proposed tax represented a new source of revenue for the perpetually poor state, but Long also intended it to be a direct jab at his old nemesis, Standard Oil. Long drew his line in the sand when he publicly declared that any member of the legislature who voted against his proposal had been paid off by John Rockefeller. The tax plan failed to pass. At this point Long, miscalculating the recalcitrance of his opposition, made a major blunder: He called for a second special session, to meet later in March, and he reiterated that those who opposed the tax dwelled deep in the pockets of Rockefeller and his Standard Oil. As earlier, the tax plan failed, and this time Huey’s opponents seized the opportunity to begin impeachment proceedings against the governor. The Dynamite Squad passed nineteen impeachment charges on March 26. By April 26, the House had approved eight articles of impeachment, with charges ranging from bribery and attempted bribery of government officials to intimidation of the press and misappropriation of state funds. Sensing that, although the proceedings presented a serious challenge to his ambitions, defeating them would only solidify his dominance of Louisiana’s government, Long rallied for the fight. With the help of his younger brother, Earl, the governor cajoled, bribed, and threatened Louisiana senators and managed to secure the promise of fifteen that they would not vote for his conviction, no matter what evidence was presented, because the articles of impeachment had been approved after the special session’s scheduled end date. On May 16, 1929, only two days after the impeachment trial had begun, Senator Phillip Gilbert presented a petition signed by the fifteen senators. Their signatures on the document that would be known as the Round Robin insured that the two-thirds vote needed to remove Huey would never materialize. His opposition capitulated.

Following the attempt to remove him from office, Governor Long determined to secure his political dominance of Louisiana through nepotism, patronage, and legislative action. Then, on July 16, 1930, following defeat in the legislature of a measure that would have allowed the issuing of bonds for more paved roads, Huey announced that he would run for the U.S. Senate. He declared that the race would be a referendum on the bond issue and, more generally, on his overall political leadership of the state. And if he won, he promised that he would not take office until a suitable successor—Long and his lieutenant governor, Paul Cyr, had become bitter enemies—was chosen by the people of Louisiana. The 1930 Sena...