Long concluded his address to the Senate with the assertion that he had exposed this presumably hush-hush meeting “to the United States Senate and, I hope, to the country ... and I wish to announce further they have sent additional inspectors and various other bureaucrats down in the State....
“The State of Louisiana has no fear whatever of any kind of tactics thus agreed upon and thus imposed. The State of Louisiana will remain a state. When you hear from the election returns in the coming January ... Louisiana will not have a government imposed on it that represents murder, blackmail, oppression or destitution.”
The Senate then resumed the business of the day. But most of the correspondents in the press gallery had left and the talk was all of Huey Long’s excoriation of the New Deal, of his promise that “if it is in a Presidential primary, they will hear from the people of the United States,” and of his declaration that rumors of the New Deal leaders plotting to have him murdered were now “fully verified.”
Note: Most of the purely local references, repetitions, adversions to extraneous matters, and the like have been omitted from the foregoing condensation of Senator Long’s last speech before the Senate. Those who may wish to read the full text of his address will find it in the Congressional Record for August 9, 1935, pages 12780 through 12791. The section headed “The Plan of Robbery, Murder, Blackmail, or Theft” begins on page 12786, second column.
4 —— August 30 to September 2
“Behold, my desire is that mine adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown to me.”
——JOB
Congress did not adjourn its 1935 session until seventeen days after Senator Long had delivered his blast about “the plan of robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” at the Roosevelt administration in general and at its head in particular. This was, as he clearly stated in his reference to presidential primaries, the opening move in launching his 1936 candidacy for president; the next step would be publication and distribution of My First Days in the White House.
He devoted himself to revision of this manuscript during the fortnight in which Congress remained in session, and marveled at the difficulties he encountered. Like many another magnetic orator, he was no writer, and in spite of the ghosts who had helped bring it into being, My First Days in the White House eloquently testifies to that fact. None the less, had he lived, the book would have won him adherents by the million. In all its naïve oversimplification, it was still a triumph of classical composition beside the helter-skelter phraseology of his senatorial and stump-speaking oratory. But the latter, like his many other public utterances, his early political circulars, and even the jumbled prose of his first book: Every Man a King, had been accepted almost as gospel by Longolators who jeered at literate anti-Long editorials as propaganda dictated and paid for by the Money Barons.