Within twenty-four hours of the most elaborate funeral ever held in Louisiana, attended by approximately 150,000 participants in the solemn rites of lamentation, Huey’s Praetorian Guard were up in arms against one another. Ready to yield instant obedience to their Kingfish, they were one and all determined never to render such homage to anyone of their own subordinate rank.
The climax came about three o’clock one morning, when Gerald Smith not only proclaimed himself the new head of the Share-Our-Wealth movement, but announced the ticket which he and his followers had endorsed and would back in the forthcoming January primary. None of the names Huey had been considering appeared thereon. It was headed by the names of State Senator Noe for governor and Public Service Commissioner Wade O. Martin, Sr., for United States senator.
Reverend Smith issued his pronouncement from the Roosevelt Hotel, but was incautious enough to tell such people as Ray Daniell of the New York Times, Allen Raymond of the New York Herald Tribune, and myself that the Huey Long organization would move forward with even greater strides as soon as it had rid itself of the Jews in it.
The reaction was so immediate it must have shocked even him. The first obstacle he encountered was the announcement by Earle Christenberry that no one not specifically authorized to do so by himself as copyright owner, could use either Share-Our-Wealth or Share-the-Wealth as party designations, and that he proposed to turn over the only membership rolls of that organization to Mrs. Long.
The next came when the other Long bigwigs, realizing the ominous implications of Smith’s bid for the scepter, submerged all their intramural antagonisms in order to prevail on Judge Leche, as the candidate the late Kingfish himself had tapped, to head an “official” Long organization ticket. By way of making this ticket’s status all the more authentic, it also carried the names of Earl Long as candidate for lieutenant governor, Oscar Allen as nominee to serve out Huey’s unexpired term in the Senate, and Allen Ellender as candidate for the ensuing full six-year term, for which Huey himself would have run as curtain raiser to his bid for the presidency.
In addition, Russell Long, then only seventeen years old, was enlisted as one of the speakers who would campaign on behalf of the official ticket. This was to be his initial bid for political recognition; he was put on the first team, campaigning right alongside his uncle and Judge Leche. Gerald Smith, on the other hand, was relegated to obviously subordinate rank. Realizing the hopelessness of a maverick’s lone foray against such odds, to say nothing of his inability to secure funds from the Share-Our-Wealth organization, he returned to the fold, and was assigned to address rural meetings in small country churches and the like.
By and large the platform of the authorized Long ticket was simple: from the stump and in circulars, over the radio and in newspaper advertising, the anti-Long slate was branded the “Assassination Ticket.”
Its backers were additionally handicapped by having Congressman Cleveland Dear, an Alexandria attorney and a very inept campaigner, as their candidate. His insistence that he headed a “Home Rule Ticket” which proposed to return to individual communities those rights of self-government which dictatorship had usurped, fell upon deaf ears. Even had Dear and his fellows been skilled and adroit campaigners, their prowess would have availed little against the hysterical determination of the great mass of voters to express by their ballots how deeply they disapproved of assassination—especially of the assassination of their idolized ol’ Huey.
There was actually a pathetic overtone to Cleveland Dear’s declaration that the hotel conference “was attended by about 300 of as fine men as can be found, who registered openly at the hotel desk, conducted their conversations openly in rooms and in hallways and not behind locked doors. There was hardly a meeting at that time where the possibility of bloodshed was not mentioned, but I heard no discussion of it at that hotel conference.
“Yet the governor is going around this state preaching hatred, and charging that the murder plot was hatched there. If he believes that, he should have me arrested. I challenge him to have me arrested!”