Huey Long may not have expected to be taken quite so literally when he told the Roosevelt hierarchs they could take their patronage “slap-dab to hell” as far as he was concerned. But when he saw that he was indeed given no voice in any Louisiana federal appointment, he initiated an entire series of special sessions of the state legislature which subserviently enacted a succession of so-called “dictatorship laws.” Under these statutes he took the control of every parochial and municipal position in every city, village, and parish out of the hands of the local authorities, and vested the appointive power in himself.
He did this by creating new state boards, composed of officials of his own selection, without whose certification no local public employee could receive or hold any post on the public payroll. A board of teacher certification was thus set up and without its—which is to say, Huey Long’s—approval, no teacher, janitor, school-bus driver, or principal could be employed by any local parish or city school board. No municipal police officer or deputy sheriff throughout the state, no deputy clerk or stenographer in any courthouse, no city or parish sanitary inspector, and so on down the entire line of public payroll places, could continue in his or her position unless specifically okayed by Senator Long. In those pre-civil-service days the appointive state, parish, and city employees in Louisiana outnumbered the federal patronage places within the state by hundreds to one, even during the New Deal’s era of production controls and “recovery.”
Hence, for each federal patronage job he had nominally lost to his opponents he gained hundreds—literally—of local appointments which were thenceforth at his disposal. When this was pointed out in the anti-Long press and he was asked for comment, he chuckled and said: “I’m always ready to give anybody a biscuit for a barrel of flour.”
In sum, he had brought practically all local public employees, including those who staffed Mayor Walmsley’s city administration in New Orleans, under the Long banner by the summer of 1935. Only a scant handful of “dictatorship laws” yet remained to be enacted, and these were already being drafted to his specifications. The moment Congress adjourned, when he would be released from Washington and could return to Louisiana, they would be rushed to enactment.
Meanwhile he readied his parting shot against the White House. The incident on which he based the grotesque charge that President Roosevelt abetted, or at the very least knew of and acquiesced in, an assassination plot was a supposedly sub rosa political caucus held at the Hotel De Soto in New Orleans on Sunday, July 21, 1935. The gathering had been convened presumably without letting any outsider (i.e., “nonplotter”) know it was to be held. Its ostensible objective was the selection of an anti-Long gubernatorial candidate whom all anti-Long factions would agree to support against any nominee the Senator might hand-pick for endorsement.
However, with what still appears to be a positive genius for fumbling, the anti-Long leadership guarded with such butter-fingered zeal the secret of whether, where, or when they were to meet that even before they assembled, Long aides had ample time to install the microphone of a dictograph in the room where the anti-Long General Staff was to confer. The device functioned very fuzzily. Its recording (which it was hoped to duplicate and replay from sound trucks throughout the ensuing campaign) was only spottily intelligible. But a couple of court reporters had also been equipped with earphones at a listening post, and their stenographic transcript, though incomplete, afforded some excerpts which Senator Long inflated into what he presented as a full-scale murder plot.
His fulmination was delivered before a crowded gallery, as usual. This popularity annoyed many of his senior colleagues, none more so than Vice-President Garner, whom John L. Lewis was soon to stigmatize as “that labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man.” More than once, as the galleries emptied with a rush the moment Long finished, Mr. Garner would call to the departing auditors, saying: “Yes, you can go now! The show’s over!”
In this instance, as on many previous occasions, there was no advance hint of the fireworks to come. The fuse was a debate over the Frazier-Lemke bill, and Senator Long contented himself at the outset with charging that the administration was conducting “government by blackmail.” In making this statement he was referring to NIRA, which had succeeded NRA, the latter having been declared unconstitutional some three months earlier. This had nothing to do with the Frazier-Lemke bill, but it gave Mr. Long an opportunity to charge that no contracts for PWA work were being financed unless the contractor agreed to abide by all the provisions of the NRA code which the Supreme Court had invalidated.
That led to the statement that “we in Louisiana have never stood for [such] blackmail from anybody,” which in turn led to a section of his arraignment the Congressional Record headed:
“THE PLAN OF ROBBERY, MURDER,
BLACKMAIL, OR THEFT”