As for the gerrymander, it never really took effect, though it automatically became law twenty days after the legislature adjourned. To be sure, it did provide for an additional judge in a newly enlarged judicial district, he to be chosen some fourteen months later at the time of the Congressional election of November 1936.
But a new legislature, meeting in May 1936, adopted another statute, superseding this law and reshuffling Louisiana’s judicial districts once more to add a new one—the twenty-seventh—consisting of St. Landry parish alone. This act, a constitutional amendment, would not become operative until ratified by popular vote at the November elections. That obviously made it impossible to elect a judge at the same time, so the new bill provided that within thirty days after its ratification, the governor should appoint a judge for the new district, his term not to end until that of the judges elected in 1936 should have run its course. In other words, the appointee would serve for six years.
Needless to say, the appointee was not Benjamin Pavy.
Another facet of the Long paradox is presented by the saint-or-sinner image which his contemporaries and their successors yet seek to preserve. Until the Kingfish’s name has lost all popular significance, debates will be waged over the issue of whether the man was an uninhibited genius, or merely a conscienceless opportunist endowed with exceptional mental agility. On this point the testimony of one of the three brothers Huey so heartily disliked might well shed some light.
Some days after the fallen leader’s funeral, and while the legislature was still in session, a number of the Long satraps were gathered in Governor Allen’s office, lamenting the confusion into which a virtually leaderless assembly (in the sense of having too many leaders) had fallen.
The leitmotiv of the parley held that things weren’t like that in the good old days when the Kingfish was around to issue orders and see to it that they were carried out. The conversation finally veered to what a remarkable thing it was for a little bit of an old town like Winnfield to have produced a superman like ol’ Huey, especially when you realized it had never given to the world anyone else of comparable stature.
Earl Long, himself one of the thus disprized other products of Winnfield, listened in morose silence for a time to these observations. Finally he got up, moved to the door, paused, and said:
“You folks are right, of course. Huey was the only smart one from Winnfield. No manner of doubt about it.” He scratched his chin meditatively and then added: “But I’m still here!”
On the other hand, those who casually dismiss Long as a conscienceless political gangster overlook the number of respects in which he was far, far ahead of his time. It is only since the mid-century’s turn, for example, that clamor has become general to provide special advanced training for school children with well-above-normal mentality. Long proposed a program of this sort for Louisiana State University in his last broadcast, delivered two nights before he was shot. One of his last rational statements, expressed only moments before he lapsed into the drugged stupor from which he never really returned to consciousness, was a lament that he would be unable to carry out this project.
He enormously increased Louisiana’s public debt with what proved to be a remarkably sound system of funding dedicated revenues into bonds, in order to give the state a highway network geared to the impending expansion of motorized traffic. In the 1960s the federal government followed the same line by laying out and constructing a vast system of interstate super-highways.