Last of the Red-Hot Poppas

Into Louisiana's house of representatives one day last week stormed a bulky, rumpled man, his collar tabs curling up over the lapels of his loose-hanging suit, his paunch bulging over his low belt line, his Western-style straw hat in hand. Governor Earl Kemp Long strode straight to the rostrum. "Double-cross!" he bellowed, in his gravel baritone. "I had 69 votes!" The bill before the house was one of the governor's favorites, and it had just gone down to defeat. Even as Earl bellowed, his floor leaders took their cue; member after member rushed to the speaker's desk to proclaim his vote miscounted.

"The governor," wearily explained one onlooking lawmaker, "is at it again." Indeed he was. At the end of an hour of labyrinthine maneuvering on the floor, Earl Long got the bill (to increase taxes on pari-mutuel betting) propped up for reconsideration.

Tax & Spend. Since he began his second full term less than two months ago, there has been scarcely a day when 60-year-old Earl Long hasn't been at it. He has vilified the mildest of opponents, ruthlessly axed holdover appointees from other administrations, defied legislative rules and traditions by roaming the floors of both houses at will. Long's goals, as many a despondent Louisianian sees them: 1) a tax-and-spend policy to dwarf the fondest dreams of the late Brother Huey, even at the risk of bankrupting the state, and 2) a campaign to tighten Earl's grip on the governmental reins until no hand but his guides the state of Louisiana.

To get things going his way, Long backed a program to:

P: Boost teacher salaries, build more roads, increase old-age benefits, extend already liberal state services.

P: Soak business (in violation of campaign pledges of no new taxes) by jumping state levies on natural gas by 250%, on sulphur (Louisiana is the nation's second-biggest sulphur producer) by 200%, on timber by 100%. When industry spokes men warn that such taxes will stifle Louisiana's economy, Earl challenges them to go some place else if they don't like it.

P: Soak the city of New Orleans, which Earl regards as hostile, by upping taxes on pari-mutuel betting by 30% and slashing the city's share of that revenue. New Orleans has the only flat-racing track in the state.

P: Remove voting machines from most precincts and allow party workers to go inside the voting booths to "help" baffled voters.

P: Shift control of the remaining voting machines from Secretary of State Wade O. Martin Jr. (who drew Long's wrath by remaining neutral in the gubernatorial campaign) to a Long-appointed board.

P: Call a convention to overhaul the state's cumbersome constitution, a move that Long's critics (while admitting the need for constitutional revision) see as Earl's gambit to change the constitution so that he can succeed himself.

Last week the sound and fury of his performance reached a new crescendo. On Sunday night he scheduled a 30-minute speech before both houses of the legislature, wound up delivering a 2-hr. 16-min., arm-waving, name-calling harangue. He fumed about influence-peddling under the Capitol roof and roundly lashed such former allies as his ex-law partner, Clem Sehrt of New Orleans, and Leander H. Perez, the powerful political boss and district attorney of Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. Said Earl of Perez (who once played a key role in saving Huey from impeachment): "He would like to be dictator and custodian of all human rights, races and creeds."

Two days later Long invaded a meeting of the house ways and means committee, pre-empted the committee chairman's seat, from that vantage point snatched for the microphone while his bitter antagonist, Secretary of State Martin, was talking. "No you don't, governor!" cried Martin angrily, grabbing the mike back. "You're not going to do that to me." Bawled Long, as they grappled: "You're just proving you're not fit to be insurance commissioner." "Oh, no," Martin howled back. "You're proving you should never have been governor." A few minutes later Long tangled again with Leander Perez. When Perez offered to meet him "man to man," Long snorted: "I ain't got no medals for runnin', you know."

"Damnedest Farce." Even in the Land of Long, accustomed to taking its politics raw, Earl's antics have turned faces red. Representative Peter Murtes of New Orleans described one legislative fracas as "the damnedest farce I have ever seen," suggested that if the members were to continue to ignore their own rules "every time Earl Long doesn't like the way things are going," they should "go home and let him vote for all of us."

Yet, with it all, there is a distinct dissimilarity between the performances of Earl and Huey as governors of Louisiana: what Huey wanted, Huey got; what Earl wants has begun to evade him with increasing frequency. Fortunately for Louisiana, Earl's predecessor, Governor Robert F. Kennon, led a successful campaign to amend the constitution so that a two-thirds legislative majority is now needed for all tax boosts, hence most of Earl's paralyzing tax increases seem doomed to defeat. But that does not mean that Earl will give up. When, after the hard-won reconsideration, his pari-mutuel tax bill was beaten by one vote, Earl took another tack: he let it be known that he was thinking of letting a Northern syndicate into Louisiana to run competition to New Orleans' Fair Grounds race track.

A little wearily, Earl Long admitted one day last week that "during the campaign I said I still had the snap in my garters. Now some of it has snapped out." But lest anyone think that means he isn't going to be around for a long time to come, he grinned and added: "I'm the last of the red-hot poppas in Louisiana politics, just like Sophie Tucker is the last of the red-hot mommas."

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