These would be headed by House Bill Number One, the anti-Pavy gerrymander, and a somewhat similar measure which was designed to keep Congressman J. Y. Sanders, Jr., from returning to his home in Baton Rouge to run for a judgeship. His father, a former governor and congressman, stood at the very head of Huey Long’s bête noire list. Another measure high on Long’s “must” roster made provision for the fact that his current senatorial term would expire unless renewed in the fall of 1936 by re-election.
But in one-party Louisiana, the Democratic primary was the only actual election, even though technically it selected merely a party nominee. Its date was fixed for September by the state election law as this statute currently stood. Obviously, a campaign for a senatorial primary to be held in the fall of 1936 would play hob with Long’s plans to run against Roosevelt for the presidency that same season. Consequently, one of Huey’s thirty-one must bills amended the state election law by setting the primary’s date ahead from September to January. Thus Mr. Long could win the Democratic nomination (equivalent to election in Louisiana) for senator at the year’s outset; with that as paid-up political insurance he would be free to devote the balance of 1936 to his presidential campaign.
Another of the must bills is significant in this connection in spite of the fact that it was rooted in a strictly personal grudge, because it so strikingly exemplifies the savagery with which at an earlier stage of his career Long made Negro affiliation the prime target of political attack.
Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Southwest Louisiana Acadian, had run for governor several times, had been a legislator off and on, and would one day become a millionaire as author and high priest of a nostrum called Hadacol. He and Long had been allies as members of the Public Service Commission in the old days, but had fallen out and had been at swords’ points ever since.
Defeated by the Kingfish when he sought to retain his office, LeBlanc organized a burial-insurance society of a type immensely popular among the Negroes. Since he catered primarily to this segment of the population, he put in a Negro nominal president of the “coffin club,” as Long invariably called it. In the columns of his weekly newspaper, The American Progress, Long thereafter lost no opportunity to reproduce what purported to be one of the brochures issued by LeBlanc’s company, showing pictures of LeBlanc and the Negro officers of the company together. Ultimately, Long had a law passed banning from Louisiana that type of insurance society.
LeBlanc thereafter moved the company’s home office across the state line into Texas, and continued in business. Although no longer pillorying opponents by reason of Negro affiliation, Long included in his must bills a prohibition against publishing, printing, or broadcasting in Louisiana any advertising matter by insurance companies not authorized to do business in the state.
Occupied with these and a thousand and one other such minutiae of legislative procedure, Long remained on the main floor of the capitol that Saturday night until the House adjourned, trailing a nimbus of bodyguards as he dashed back and forth between Governor Allen’s office and the House chamber. Some of his leading supporters tried vainly to keep up with him: Dr. Vidrine, “Cousin Jessie” Nugent, Dr. Clarence Lorio, Louisiana State University president James Monroe Smith. These had little to occupy them, for all the must bills were introduced by their “official” author, Chairman Burke of the Ways and Means Committee; and under a suspension of the rules, each was immediately referred to Mr. Burke’s committee as quickly as he could say “Ways and Means” and Speaker Ellender could utter a contrapuntal “Any objections? Hearing none, so ordered!”
Thrill seekers behind the railings and in the gallery had anticipated at least some show of oratorical fireworks. Disappointed when they found the proceedings about as exciting as listening to a couple of clerks take inventory in the kitchenware stockroom of a department store, they drifted away and left the capitol for their homes, while Long and the faithful Murphy Roden retired to the Senator’s twenty-fourth-floor retreat.