The next step was Huey’s Share-Our-Wealth promise that this movement would recognize no racial bars of any sort, that the division of shared wealth would include black as well as white on equal terms. “Five thousand a year and a span of mules,” the poor and underprivileged of both races told one another ecstatically. “With what I’m making now and the five thousand Huey Long’s going to give us, we’ll be in high cotton for true!”
The final step would have been some sort of a second Emancipation Proclamation, issued as a campaign document to a mammoth 1936 Share-Our-Wealth convention to be held in Detroit, or possibly St. Louis. The unmistakable augury of this was Huey Long’s published apology during the summer of 1935 for having used the word nigger in the course of a national network broadcast. A “race” tabloid, referring to the word he had used as “the epithet n——r,” sent a reporter to him in his suite at the New Yorker Hotel, and published the ensuing interview under a two-column headline on its front page. In his statement Long made it plain his use of “the epithet n——r” was a slip of the tongue, and was not meant to be derogatory in a racial sense; also that he would exercise due care not to use the epithet again in either public or private speech.
It is all but impossible to convey to non-Southerners how radical a departure from the mores of Winn parish in central Louisiana was this sort of retraction. Efforts were made to use the interview as an anti-Long campaign document. Facsimiles of the front page of the Negro tabloid were printed by some of the rural weeklies, but it didn’t work. The Negro Share-Our-Wealthers throughout the land rejoiced. The whites in the organization shrugged it aside as fabricated anti-Long propaganda inspired by “the interests” or passed it off with: “As long as I get my five thousand a year, what difference does it make who else gets it too?”
It should not be overlooked that in the case of Judge Pavy, Long needed no resort to ancient libels to accomplish his longtime opponent’s defeat. The gerrymander would make it impossible for Ben Pavy to be re-elected. Long would take the stump against him, of course, in order to claim the foreordained victory as another personal triumph; but once St. Landry parish was put into the same judicial district with Acadia, Lafayette, and Vermillion parishes, even the slightest possibility of a Pavy election was precluded. Huey Long would no more have gone to needless lengths to win an already certain victory at the risk of alienating any large section of the prospective Negro presidential vote than he would have belabored a dying horse at an S.P.C.A. picnic in an effort to make the animal run.
Taking all the foregoing into account, it would seem clearly impossible to accept either the hypothesis that Carl Weiss, Jr., was the chosen instrument of a political murder cabal to whose membership he was almost wholly unknown, or the proposition that his was a nature sufficiently ruthless to take the life of a fellow being in reprisal for the loss of a long-held political office by his wife’s father.
As concerns the idea that Dr. Weiss was motivated by the “pure patriotism” ascribed to him by his wife’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, there can be little doubt that this was possible. But it is also not to be doubted that there is a basis beyond parental affection for the elder Dr. Weiss’s statement at the inquest into his son’s death that “my son was too superbly happy with his wife and child, too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a murder.”
On the other hand, no such contradiction is an integral part of the hypothesis that he made this sacrifice to shield his wife and his son from exposure to groundless odium. This would appear to be the only assumption in full accord with all the known circumstances, even though Dr. Weiss’s belief that Huey Long would exhume a long-buried slander reflecting on his loved ones was tragically erroneous.
On the basis of the situation as he saw and understood it, the only way to safeguard them was to silence Long before he could utter the libel. If the only price at which this assurance could be purchased was the forfeit of his own life, the compulsive paternal urge to protect his beloved baby son might well be strong enough to overcome every inhibition that was normally part of his character and background. He took no one into his confidence, realizing that anyone to whom he confided would inevitably thwart his plan. Thus we may picture him leaving to his family the happy memory of an afternoon of carefree affection, and departing alone to weigh in solitude one factor of the situation against another, as he understood them.
Should he thereupon have decided that “this man will never slander my son as he has slandered others in the past if I can silence him,” we can only surmise that it was with this thought in mind that he entered the marble-walled corridor where he died to make certain that some words Huey Long never intended to utter would remain unsaid.