He retired from forty years of the practice of medicine at an advanced age, and moved from his home at Leonville on Bayou Teche to Opelousas. But his popularity along the bayou-side, where by that time he had delivered more than fifty-eight hundred babies, was so widespread that patients demanded he continue to treat them, so that he had to establish a small office. From this GHQ he successfully brought about the defeat of an opposition sheriff, winning a scandalously large sum of money in bets on the outcome of the election. He converted most of his winnings into currency, packed them into an ordinary water-bucket, and carrying this, he marched triumphantly around and around the Opelousas courthouse square, shouting his exultation to the four winds.
He had been among the first to cheer Mason Spencer’s closing remarks in April 1935 at a special session during which the Kingfish brought about the enactment of a bill which to all intents and purposes gave him the sole right to appoint every commissioner and other polling-booth official in every voting precinct for every election throughout Louisiana.
“I am not one of those who cries ‘Hail, Caesar!’” Spencer said in slow and measured tones, “nor have I cried ‘Jail Caesar!’ But this ugly bill disfranchises the white people of Louisiana.... I can see blood on the marble floor of this capitol, for if you ride this thing through, it will travel with the white horse of death. In the pitiful story of Esau the Bible teaches us it is possible for a man to sell his own birthright. But the gravestones on a thousand battlefields teach you that you cannot sell the birthright of another white man!”
Within five months there was blood on the marble floor of the capitol.
Transcriber’s Notes
The source document uses the word capitol both for capitol and for capital; this usage has been retained. Inconsistent spelling and grammar have not been standardised.
Changes made
Some obvious minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected silently.
The text in a dotted box underneath Figs. 10 and 11 has been transcribed from the illustration, not from the actual text.