Governor Huey Long: Kidnapper
Impeachment can do terrible things to a person, even if they don’t get removed from office.
Huey Long had learned some fundamental life lessons from the Louisiana legislature’s attempt to remove him during his first year as governor in 1929.
He had learned that persuasion wasn’t something that worked on politicians – so from now on he would force them to do what he wanted.
He had learned that opponents weren’t to be tolerated or compromised with – from now on in Louisiana, you were either with Huey, or you were going to be destroyed by Huey.
He had learned that the state government’s apparatus was there to be used for his own personal and political aims. If he didn’t do it, someone else would. So from now on, Huey’s hand was going to stay on Louisiana’s governmental steering wheel.
***
One of the projects near and dear to the governor’s heart was building a big new state capitol building. Not only would it have the benefit of demolishing the old one, where his impeachment trial had played out, but it would be a far more impressive and lasting monument to his reign than miles of state roads. He was even able to cite a story where the famous author Mark Twain, passing by Baton Rouge years before, “took an instant dislike to the Gothic-and-gingerbread edifice. He imagined that the turreted eyesore came from reading too much Sir Walter Scott.”
A reporter asked him what he would do with the old capitol building once the new one was built. “Turn it over to some collector of antiques,” he said. The legislature was not in favor of the idea, and neither was Huey’s brother Earl. The governor’s brother called the idea “a monument for someone’s vanity,” and told state legislators that Huey was secretly opposed to it. The first round of votes on the new capitol failed.
There must have been quite a lot of sibling rivalry in the Long house growing up.
***
Having learned hard lessons from his impeachment, Huey started slashing funding from opponents of the capitol plan. He cut his disloyal lieutenant governor’s budget by $6,400 and his attorney general’s by nearly $30,000. He vetoed funding for the Public Service Commission, which essentially stopped their operations. Walking through Union Station shortly after, Huey ran into L.F. Sherer, a member of the unfunded Commission, who held out his hat, closed his eyes, and pretended to be a beggar.
Huey flipped a dime into Sherer’s hat without missing a step. That was all the funding the Public Service Commission would get from the governor until they got on board with his plans.
The only thing working against him was time. His enemies could simply wait him out, since he was constitutionally prohibited from succeeding himself as governor.
So Huey Long, expert political multitasker, decided to run for the United States Senate.
***
Huey no longer made any pretense of accommodation, and he had no trouble breaking earlier promises he had made to get elected and stay in office. He “had pledged during his inauguration to serve without ambition for ever again holding another public office.” He had also said he had no interest in serving in “the national legislative halls at Washington.”
So now Huey announced he was using the Senate run as a “referendum” on his road projects and new capitol building. He claimed that if the people of Louisiana supported his national-level race, it would be proof to the state legislature that they also approved of his agenda at home.
This sort of argument was exactly the kind a populist would make: a vote for me automatically means support for any and all of my policies. Theodore Roosevelt in his time used the same logic, and politicians since have translated electoral victories into total support for their policy agendas, whatever they were and whatever they might become.
It’s a rather thin argument.
To contend with the issue that if he won he would still have about a year left to go as governor, Huey said he would just leave the Senate seat unoccupied until he was done with his term. He cited the precedent of other governors elected to the Senate like David Hill, Robert LaFollette, and Hiram Johnson, who “waited until their gubernatorial terms expired before taking their seats in the Senate.” At the heart of these rationales was Huey’s commitment to not have his rival, Lieutenant Governor Paul Cyr, serve as governor for even a minute.
“I won’t [run for the Senate] if I have to let that good friend of mine, the Lieutenant Governor, get the office,” Huey said. “I love him too much to impose the duties of governor on him.”
Huey was quite the compassionate humanitarian.
And Huey, being Huey, said that leaving the Senate seat empty would be no different than leaving it in the hands of the incumbent, Joseph Ransdell, who had held the seat since 1912 and had been in Congress since 1899.
The campaign for Senate became “as amusing as it was depressing,” and soon descended into “one of the nastiest that Louisiana had seen.” Huey was well-financed and popular. He drew large crowds everywhere he went, asking his listeners if they even knew the name of his opponent. He promised that when he was in Washington, “you’ll always know the name of your U.S. Senator.”
Compared to the ancient and slow-witted Ransdell, Huey appeared as he always had—as a man who would get things done for his people.
Always a master campaigner, Huey delivered one of his best speeches in Shreveport: “If you believe that Louisiana is to be ruled by the people, that the poor man is as good as the rich man, that the people have the right to pass on issues themselves, if you believe that this is a state where every man is a king but no man wears a crown, then I want you to vote for Huey Long for the United States Senate.”
According to a reporter at the scene, Huey gave this performance while dead drunk.
At a rally for Huey in New Orleans, which was definitely unfriendly territory, Huey’s state police “slugged it out” with New Orleans police officers. A state police sergeant got arrested, and “Huey vowed to march on the city jail” to free him.
The people may have been on his side, but the establishment of Louisiana—career politicians and business interests—were definitely not. This Senate race wasn’t going to be a slam dunk for Huey. In addition to the setbacks he already faced, he had an even bigger problem.
But he had an idea in mind that would take care of it once and for all.
***
Six days before the election, armed agents from the Louisiana Bureau of Criminal Identification (widely acknowledged to be the governor’s personal police force), took two men into custody in the middle of the night at the Shreveport Gardner Hotel.
One of the BCI officers was Huey’s brother-in-law; another was his cousin. The two men arrested were Sam Irby, the uncle of Huey’s secretary and purported mistress, Alice Grosjean, and James Terrell, Alice’s ex-husband. Both men knew a great deal about Huey’s political and private affairs due to the plush state jobs the governor had given them, plus their connection with Alice, and could have let slip quite a lot of information that would have damaged Huey’s senatorial chances.
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The day before the arrests, state Attorney General Percy Saint, no fan of Huey’s, had started a corruption investigation into the state highway commission. Highway building was famous for corruption, graft, and kickbacks. The governor’s extensive road building projects, which built thousands of miles of roads in Louisiana, made for lucrative backroom deals and lining of pockets.
When confronted with evidence of corruption in the state’s road building program, Huey dismissed it. “We got the roads in Louisiana, haven’t we? In some states they only have the graft.”
Huey Long, master of the “things could always be worse” argument.
But this line of reasoning wasn’t going to help him in a tight Senate primary. One of the key witnesses about to be called by the vengeful attorney general was Sam Irby, who had worked for the Highway Commission before Huey made him business manager of the newspaper he had founded, the Louisiana Progress. Irby and Terrell were hiding out in Shreveport to keep away from state subpoenas.
Rumors about where the men actually were got wilder and wilder. Some said they were being held at Angola penitentiary, others that their bodies were sunk in a remote swamp. Huey had made a radio speech claiming that the men were safe in the Jefferson Parish jail.
Sam Irby’s lawyer filed a habeas corpus motion, and Federal agents were called in to investigate. A U.S. marshal subpoenaed Huey to appear in a New Orleans federal court. He showed up but claimed to have no knowledge of where the men were.
Now it was a kidnapping.
***
The situation was a swampy mess of politics, dirty laundry, and corruption. After the two men had been taken, Huey and his advisors met to decide what to do with them. Huey’s brother Earl offered up the suggestion that they should “take the son of a bitch—Irby—and kill him.” Huey said that he didn’t want to be a U.S. Senator if it meant he had to murder someone. Nice to know there was a line he would not cross.
Instead he sent some loyal supporters to put the two men on a boat, along with the BCI agents who had “arrested” them, and take them to Grand Isle and keep them there until after the election. Sam Irby was a known drunk and was kept quiet with a steady stream of liquor.
Two days before the election, Huey did a radio broadcast from his hotel room at the Roosevelt, where he introduced Sam Irby to the audience on the air. Irby denied being kidnapped, claiming he and Terrell had been on a fishing trip to Grand Isle, which was technically not a lie.
After the interview, Huey’s men sped away with Irby, pursued by city police and Federal agents, but they were able to evade them.
When the election was over two days later, Irby changed his story, claiming that he and Terrell had indeed been kidnapped and taken to Grand Isle, where they were tied to a tree and left to the mercy of the mosquitos.
But by then the election was over, and the press and the public didn’t have much interest in the truth.
On Tuesday, September 9, 1930, Governor Huey Long won the Democratic primary. There were plenty of electoral shenanigans reported – stuffing ballot boxes, more votes tallied in a parish than they had citizens, a precinct where “they had trees [registered to vote] down there,” and parish voting rolls that listed Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Charlie Chaplin, “none of whom was ever known to have set foot there.”
After the election, Huey “began signing his name ‘Huey P. Long, Governor and Senator-Elect.’”
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