He spent some time then chatting informally with rural well-wishers, while waiting for Murphy Roden, who had driven the Cadillac with License Plate Number 1 from Washington to New Orleans and was to call for its owner that afternoon in Baton Rouge. The Senator was due to make one of his fiery radio broadcasts over a state-wide hookup that night at eight in the Roosevelt Hotel. After a late lunch at the Heidelberg Hotel coffee shop he read the first installment of a biographical sketch of his career which had just appeared on the newsstands that day in the Saturday Evening Post. Then at length, with a group of friends and a cadre of bodyguards to see him off, he left for New Orleans. The bystanders urged him in parting to “pour it on ’em, Kingfish ... give ’em hell, Huey, you’re just the boy that can do it!” The party reached the Roosevelt barely five minutes before he was scheduled to begin broadcasting.
He spoke that night for a little more than three hours, interrupting the early portion of his program from time to time to say, as was his custom on such occasions:
“This is Senator Huey P. Long talking, and since the lying newspapers won’t tell you these things, I’ll get the boys to play a little music for the next five minutes or so, and while they’re doing that you go call some friends and neighbors on the telephone and let them know I’m on the air, and if they really want the truth they can turn on their radios and tune in.”
One of the major proposals he made public that night was a project for enabling unusually gifted high-school students to continue their education through college at virtually no cost to themselves or their parents. Education for the underprivileged—e.g., the free-schoolbook law—had been one of the most potent elements in the grand strategy of his drive for popular support when he first entered public life. It highlighted the last public address of his career as well.
“One thousand boys and girls,” he pledged, “will be given a practically free college education at L.S.U. next year. We’ll select the ones that make the best grades and send them through college, a thousand of them for a starter. I already asked Dr. Smith [Louisiana State University president] whether he could do it beginning this fall, if we came up with a hundred thousand dollars extra for the University appropriation, and he said, well, he might be able to do it, anyway he would try. So I asked him could he do it if we gave him an extra two hundred thousand dollars, and he said yes indeed he sure could. So I told him we would give him three hundred thousand dollars just to make sure he had enough.”
Of course he attacked the Roosevelt administration at the national level and for its intrusion via patronage into the local arena of Louisiana politics; and equally of course he “poured it on” Mayor Walmsley, Congressman Sandlin, “the whole old plunderbund that you’ve done got rid of once and that Roosevelt is trying to saddle back onto you.”
At intervals the musicians would play “Every Man a King,” and Senator Long, who claimed authorship of the lyrics but could not carry a tune, would recite one chorus to the band’s accompaniment; and once he recited a chorus of “Sweetheart of L.S.U.,” for which he had also written the lyrics to music composed by Castro Carrazo, the state university’s bandmaster.
At the end of his three-hour stint he was driven to his home in posh Audubon Boulevard and spent the night there with his family. But he was up and away early enough the next morning—Friday—to eat breakfast in the Roosevelt Hotel coffee shop, talking with an uninterrupted succession of callers while he was at the table, and again in his twelfth-floor suite, access to which could be gained only if one were passed by a succession of bodyguards. Technically, these were officers of the State Bureau of Investigation and Identification, which had come into being during Long’s term as governor.
The bill creating it was introduced by an anti-Long member as a nonpolitical measure, at a time when Louisiana had no state constabulary. The jurisdiction of each sheriff and his deputies was restricted to his county. What the backers of the new measure sought was the creation of a force which, working in conjunction with the F.B.I., would have state-wide jurisdiction.
Instead of opposing this, on the ground that it was inspired by political opponents, Long espoused it enthusiastically, and then turned it into a personal elite guard whose powers were broader than those of any mere local peace officer. Certain particularly trustworthy members of the group were assigned to duty as his bodyguards.