After Long

While Huey Pierce Long was being buried at Baton Rouge last week the Press found time to take stock of painful inadvertencies caused by his assassination:

P: Judge, funnybook, had almost finished its entire October issue to be called the "Every Man a King Number,'' the cover depicting a street scene with men & women walking about in ermine robes and crowns.

P: Life's October issue was already on the presses and beyond recall, honeycombed with unpleasant references to the late Senator, including the announcement that he had led all candidates in a "Public Nuisance" poll.

P:Vanity Fair managed to stop its presses in time to delete a picture of Huey Long in a golfing pose, on a page entitled "You Can't Judge By Appearances."

P: Doubleday, Doran was about to put plates on the press for Sinclair Lewis' forthcoming book, It Can't Happen Here, in which Huey Long was involved in a supposed U. S. dictatorship in 1936. The publishers reached Author Lewis in England, arranged changes by cable.

P: Associated Press was full of apologies because its purported picture of Mrs. Carl A. Weiss Jr., widow of Long's assassin, was really a picture of Miss Helen Bell of New Orleans.

P: Most distressing was the case of the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Like other clients of the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, it had received, a few days before the shooting, the cartoon by J. N. ("Ding") Darling, with the legend: "But nothing ever seems to happen to Huey Long" and depicting death and disaster for practically everyone else (TIME. Sept. 16). Instead of printing the cartoon on schedule, the Spokesman-Review held it over, ran it, by mistake, on the same front page that carried the news of something very serious happening to Huey Long. Before the paper could pull it out of late editions, many a shocked reader got the idea that the cartoon had been drawn to accompany the report of the assassination.

P: Lucky, as usual, was the Saturday Evening Post, with a series of articles about Huey Long already appearing (Prelude to a Heterocrat: The Evolution of Huey Long, by Hermann B. Deutsch). Observers recalled how the Satevepost, which goes to press five weeks in advance of publication, had an article on the Harding Administration the week that President died in San Francisco.

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