Mourners, Heirs, Foes

All that was mortal of Huey Pierce Long was buried last week in a copper-lined vault sunk in the front lawn of the State Capitol at Baton Rouge. From the 33-floor tower of the Capitol which the murdered Dictator had built as a $5,000,000 monument to himself and which now served as his headstone, reporters saw that the vast funeral crowd had choked the roads for miles around. Below, ringed by 100,000 spectators, of whom some 200 fainted during the long wait before the services began, lay a great bright field of floral tributes: little bunches of daisies from up-country folk, every one of whom Huey Long had promised to make a king; a blanket of red & white roses from his colleagues in the U. S. Senate, whom he had harassed so long; orchids and lilies of the valley from the Louisiana Legislature, which had done its boss's bidding even after death.

Also present in a body were Huey Long's many and various political heirs. Observers were given a prime opportunity to study them collectively, appraise them individually, speculate on their destinies and the destiny of the Long tradition in State and Nation.

There was the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, the Dictator's unofficial chaplain and national organizer of his Share-Our-Wealth Clubs. This onetime pastor of a rich Shreveport Christian Church congregation surpassed himself in a 15-minute eulogy over his dead chief's bier. It began: "Greater love hath no man. . . . The lives of great men do not end with the grave. They just begin. This place marks not the resting place of Huey P. Long, it marks only the burial ground for his body. His spirit shall never rest as long as hungry bodies cry for food, as long as lean human frames stand naked, as long as homeless wretches haunt this land of plenty." It ended: ''His unlimited talents invariably aroused the jealousies of those inferiors who posed as his equals. He was the Stradivarius, whose notes rose in competition with jealous drums, envious tomtoms. His was the unfinished symphony."

Notwithstanding this valedictory, Dr. Smith was not credited with much influence among his lay colleagues in the Long machine, aside from making a few conversions among them to teetotalism.

There was Governor Oscar Kelly Allen, who with tears coursing down his cheeks, gave out the first official statement on the Dictator's death: "It . . . marks the passing of the greatest hero in the fight for the common rights of all the people of America.'' "The Kingfish" had no truer friend than Oscar Allen. Twelve years Long's senior, he had grown up with him in Winn Parish. Waxing wealthy in oil and merchandise, he had staked Long to his political start in 1918 when Long ran for a place on the Louisiana Railroad Commission. As Governor, Oscar Allen had been utterly subservient to Long, taken his cursings with a smile, contented himself with being what he called "The Little Fish." In mortal fear for his own life, Oscar Allen last week had only one thought: to get his daughter quietly married (see p. 55) and to retire from public life as soon as possible.

Col. Abraham Lazard Shushan was also the Senator's true-blue friend. It was he who rushed from the death bed with the first news of his chief's passing: "Huey's dead. It's terrible!" But Colonel Shushan, drygoods merchant, president of the New Orleans Levee Board and builder of one of the biggest, most expensive ($4,000,000) and most useless airports in the world for his personal glorification, was not destined to figure largely in the Long inheritance. Like Oscar Allen, his chief service to the Kingfish was as a yes-man.

Another overpublicized nonentity in the Long entourage was Alice Lee Grosjean Terrel Tharpe, whose pretty eyes flowed freely outside the Dictator's hospital room door while he fought for life. At 18 she started as Long's private secretary. He made her Secretary of State, later State Supervisor of Public Accounts, handling millions, her records immune to audit. Her power with the Kingfish arose from a personal relationship. No sooner was he dead than more potent lieutenants began planning to oust her in favor of Long's brother Earl.

Insiders, Outsiders. In London, where the death of the Dictator shouldered the Ethiopian crisis aside, the sensational Star stormed that Huey Long "left no successor, no system, no ideas for development, but only a passion for guns." Louisiana observers regarded this as an extravagance. Beyond and above the Allen type of Longster was a predatory but polished political system whose chief danger lay in the fact that its boss had left not too few but too many successors. They fell into two classes: Insiders, functioning as behind-the-scenes manipulators of the tightest, most profitable political dominion the nation has ever known; and Outsiders, the vote-getting political front of the Long machine which rarely lost a ballot battle in Louisiana since the Kingfish took over in 1928. Last week, after a solemn meeting in Governor Allen's office in which they shook his hand, loyally pledged him their fealty for the time being, these were the men who began measuring each other and themselves for the Kingfish's shoes:

No. 1 Insider was Seymour Weiss, one-time barbershop manager who now runs New Orleans' biggest hotel and the Dock Board, a plump, baldish, suave, natty Jew credited with handling the Long money bags so adroitly that, while he himself is under Federal indictment for income tax evasion, a four-year Treasury search has yet to turn up any charge against the Kingfish, whose fortune last week was variously estimated from $0 to $5,000,000.

No. 2 Insider was Robert Maestri, Louisiana Conservation Commissioner. Between him and the Kingfish existed complete understanding and a private joke. When Long was elected Governor in 1928 a New Orleans publisher collected a fund to buy him a set of table silver. Mr. Maestri's check, however, was righteously returned because nice people looked askance at the source of his family's fortune. Thereupon Mr. Maestri purchased a $2,500 emerald & diamond scarf pin for the Governor which the Governor wore and laughed about all over the State.

No. 1 Outsider is Public Service Commissioner Wade O. Martin of St. Martinville. It seemed likely that a sizeable slice of the dead Kingfish's power would fall his way. A fiery, gun-toting Creole from Southern Louisiana, Martin is the best vote-getter the Long cabal ever produced. The first transfusion pumped into the dying Dictator's veins came from the sporty blood of Lieutenant Governor James A. Noe. This gay and friendly politician of 38 has a good field record as an A. E. F. infantryman, is a stumpster second only to Commissioner Martin.

No. 3 Outside Man of the Long machine is Speaker Allen J. Ellender of the State House of Representatives. A bilingual Bayou character, he and Martin have equally burning ambitions to be Governor, may precipitate the internal split which would start the Long machine's dissolution.

Opposition. "Without Long, not for long," was the way Southern politicians viewed the Louisiana Administration last week. A strong qualification to that sentiment came from local observers who noted the lack of harmony or homogeneity among the anti-Longsters. They, too, had their funeral-mass meeting when they buried their man, Assassin-Doctor Carl Austin Weiss Jr., at Baton Rouge three days before the Kingfish's interment, talked of erecting a national memorial to him at Washington.

Most militant force is the Square Deal Association which claims 70,000 members, started a vague, abortive uprising on the airport outside Baton Rouge last winter. President is a onetime Standard Oil fore man named Fred O'Rourke. Most formidable officer is probably the steering committee chairman, Oscar Whilden, a New Orleans horse & mule dealer with a rich background of Latin American revolutionary experience.

Outside New Orleans, Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley is viewed with suspicion because of his previous affiliation with Long. Nor is Colonel John Patrick Sullivan, another big old-line Democrat, persona grata beyond his urban district, because of his horse track, gambling and brewing connections. Most potent unit the Opposition could put into the field against the Long faction in the January Democratic primaries is that of the five united, New Deal, anti-Long Congressmen from Louisiana, led by scrappy Jared Young Sanders Jr. of Baton Rouge. Last July they met in an obscure New Orleans hotel for three days to study strategy for the January primaries. Last week this quiet conclave made lurid national news.

Headline-hunting Harry Brundidge of the St. Louis Star-Times discovered that Herbert Christenberry, brother of Long's Washington secretary and small-bore lawyer whom the Kingfish made an Assistant District Attorney at New Orleans, was telling a tall tale about hiding a dictaphone in the conference room. According to him, the records repeated a reference to a "Dr. Wise," and one voice said: "I will draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long." Month after the meeting, jittery Senator Long had caused little excitement in the U. S. Senate when he produced the dictaphone evidence as part of a plot to murder him. With Reporter Brundidge as its broadcaster, the tale secured a better audience. "Dr. Wise," it seemed, was none other than Dr. Weiss, and Congressman Sanders' Democrats had chosen him to do away with Senator Long.*

All this was of considerable embarrassment to District Attorney John Fred Odom of East Baton Rouge. It was up to him to investigate both the murder of Long and the execution of Dr. Weiss by Long's guards. Unfortunately District Attorney Odom is an anti-Long man, for Baton Rouge is an anti-Long town which did not mourn much for the Dictator's passing last week. What was more, Mr. Odom was among those present at the New Orleans meeting under discussion.

Mr. Odom dismissed the Christenberry charges with "a derisive laugh." In all candor, however, he added: "It is possible that someone said something about shooting Long. Wherever two or three people gathered together that thought was expressed--on street corners, in hotel lobbies and in barrooms."

Vacancy. Outside of his own clique of back-scratchers in Louisiana, Huey Long had few friends in public life. On the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, his numerous enemies gave the Kingfish a charitable verbal sendoff. Spokesmen like General Johnson, Father Coughlin, James A. Farley and the New York Times chorused, in effect: "I didn't like anything about him, but I'm sorry he was assassinated."

The polite obituaries over, speculations as to just how big a hole the late Senator had left in the nation's political life were in order. His death had certainly put an end to any radical independent Democratic threat to split the party in 1936.** His Louisiana followers had enough to keep them busy at home. Governor Floyd Olson of Minnesota is going to test his radicalism by opposing Senator Thomas D. Schall for his seat. Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, whose abuse of President Roosevelt and the New Deal has been second only to that of the Kingfish, has Long's mannerisms but not Long's mind.

*In an impassioned radio address last week Share-Our-Wealth Preacher Smith aired his own suspicions as to who was responsible for the Kingfish's murder, laid the blame on New Orleans newspaper publishers and Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo of Mississippi, whom he darkly accused of journeying to New Orleans week before with $25,000 in his pocket. In his best form, "The Man" Bilbo snapped back: "The Reverend ... is a contemptible, dirty, vicious, pusillanimous, with-malice-aforethought, damnable, self-made liar!"

**Issued this week by the Harrisburg, Pa. Telegraph and Telegraph Press was a book which was to have been Candidate Long's big campaign publication. My First Days in the White House. Modeled after Upton Sinclair's I, Governor of California, but wittier, the book presents an imaginative narrative beginning with Huey Long's election to the Presidency, concludes with his setting up his Cabinet, among whom were: Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt; Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover; Secretary of State, William F. Borah; Secretary of War, Smedley D. Butler; Secretary of the Treasury, James Couzens; Attorney General, Frank Murphy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.