Colonel Campbell B. Hodges was a professional soldier from Louisiana and then commandant of the Military Academy of West Point. After the impeachment collapsed in 1929, members of the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors suggested to Huey that Hodges be selected as president of the university. The current president, Thomas Atkinson, was incapacitated from a heart attack. LSU was established as a military academy, known as the “Old War Skule,” had a large ROTC program, and graduated many who chose military careers. Hodges was asked to take the job in 1926 before Atkinson was appointed, but his Army commitments prevented his acceptance.
The Hodgeses were old-line aristocrats and conservative. Hodges’s brother was the campaign manager for Riley J. Wilson in the 1928 gubernatorial election and joined the Constitutional League in June 1929. Undoubtedly for these reasons, Huey stated that the new president should be a civilian and vetoed Hodges.
Huey’s intervention to veto Hodges was his first significant involvement with LSU. When Huey became governor, LSU was a class C institution— third rate—but it obtained an A rating from the Association of American Universities in November 1928, without Huey’s help.1 There were 1,600 to 1,800 students at the time, with 168 faculty members, and an annual budget of about $800,000. Compared to other American universities, it ranked eighty-eighth in size. In the “psychological retrogression” after the Civil War, the attitude of Louisianans and southerners toward many of their colleges was “resigned”:2 they knew their educational institutions were second-or third-rate and, worse, accepted it.
The campus was located just south of Baton Rouge, a new campus to which the university moved in 1925, after Governor Parker arranged for it to acquire an old plantation, and after he had obtained consistent severance tax revenue for it. New buildings were constructed. Student enrollment as well as the hiring of faculty members increased. In 1924, Huey had criticized Governor Parker’s plan to expand LSU, claiming that “our kind” don’t need to learn fancy ways to farm. This attack backfired at the time and was not repeated then or during the campaign of 1928. Huey was preoccupied with his legislative program in 1928, with his impeachment defense, post-impeachment recovery, and the campaign against Ransdell in 1929 and 1930, so he gave scant attention to LSU. But Huey did have the band play “Streets of New York” in 1928 in Shreveport before the LSU-Arkansas game: it was a dig at the Klan and support for Al Smith in a bastion of anti-Catholic sentiment.3
After winning election as president of the student government at the LSU Law School, Kemble K. Kennedy led a delegation of fifty students to Huey’s office to protest the Law School’s dean, Robert Lee Tullis, in December 1929. Kennedy had been a law client of Huey4 and was a political supporter in Union Parish and LSU. Kennedy claimed that Tullis was ineffective. Huey tried to have Tullis removed, but criticism made him back down.5
In June 1930, a satirical student newspaper, the Whangdoodle, was published, but instead of the lame lampoons of the past, it was now filled with accusations of embezzlement, dirty stories, and juicy gossip about faculty members. The university’s business manager was embezzling funds; the wife of a faculty member was having an affair while her husband taught in the classroom; an English professor was a drug addict who slept with prostitutes “of the fifty-seven variety.”6
The convalescing Atkinson hired a detective to discover the perpetrators. Kennedy’s fraternity was identified as the producer, with Kennedy the editor. Atkinson expelled him. The local district attorney in Baton Rouge had Kennedy arrested for criminal libel. The faculty member accused of being a dope addict—John Uhler—was one of the four complaining parties, and the business manager denied embezzlement. While the legislature was still in session, Huey asked Atkinson to allow Kennedy to graduate, but after Atkinson showed him the Whangdoodle, Huey retracted his request. In November 1930, Kennedy was convicted and sentenced to one year in jail. Petitions seeking a reprieve were given to Huey, who complained that Kennedy was being singled out and that everyone who was in on the scurrilous publication—they were all “mean as the dickens”—should serve thirty to sixty days in jail to learn their lesson. After a week, Kennedy got a reprieve from Huey, citing a recent broken arm he suffered in an automobile accident that required medical care.7
Huey visited the university in November, unannounced. He asked for President Atkinson, but the secretary told him Atkinson was at home, ill. Huey then asked for the business manager. The secretary ran to a separate building to try to retrieve him, but he was out at the old campus, on an errand. Huey was carrying a gold-headed cane that day and pounded it on the table, demanding that she obtain someone for him to talk to.
In tears now, she brought to him the dean of men, Fred C. Frey. When Frey arrived, Huey said he didn’t want to talk to a “damn kid.” Frey said he was two years older than Huey. Huey laughed and the two men went to Atkinson’s office. At Atkinson’s desk, Huey sat down, leaned back, put his feet on it, and asked Frey how he would look as president of the university. Frey thought he had a list of people to fire, most of them old-timers. Frey was friendly and diplomatic.
Huey asked Frey to summon the band director, Pops Gilbeau, so he could fire him. Frey demurred, warning of difficulties with accreditation authorities if Huey interfered, and noting Gilbeau’s popularity. Frey suggested that Huey consult with the commandant of cadets, Major Troy H. Middleton, who also urged noninterference with personnel decisions. Huey directed Middleton to expand the band from 28 to 125 pieces. A few days later, Middleton found a new band director, A. W. Wickboldt. Gilbeau had two jobs and kept the other one.
Middleton sensibly asked if President Atkinson had been informed, but Huey said “To Hell with him. You and I are going to have us a real band.” Middleton sensibly informed Atkinson, who said to go along up to 75 pieces. Huey followed up. When Middleton reported the 75-piece restriction, Huey blew up, shouting “he has nothing to do with it,” ordered him to expand to 125 pieces, and hung up.8
Atkinson resigned on November 17, 1930.9 Earlier in August 1930, Huey had appointed the last members needed to control the Board of Supervisors. Huey investigated potential replacements for Atkinson. Board member George Everett suggested James Monroe Smith. A graduate of LSU, Smith had a background as a country schoolteacher and dean of Southwestern Louisiana Institute, a small state college. Smith had earned a PhD in educational administration from Columbia University. O. K. Allen and Harley Bozeman interviewed him and then recommended him. Huey interviewed him and introduced him to the board, and he was hired.10 Legend has it that Smith appeared unimpressive. Huey gave him cash and said, “God damn you, go out and buy a new suit. At least try to look like a president.”
After Huey’s death, Smith disgraced himself by forging and illegally speculating with LSU bonds and was convicted and jailed. While Huey was alive, however, he was an imaginative and skilled administrator and popular with students.11 The deplorable absence of budgets was remedied. Student aid changed overnight. Huey believed that every child ought to have a chance to attend college.12
Smith got as much money as possible to improve education at the university but accepted Huey’s direction, as necessary. Huey was savage in supervising Smith, sometimes for Smith’s own protection. Smith’s wife, for example, let her husband’s new position go to her head. She obtained an exotic moon display in New Orleans that cast a romantic glow over her garden during elegant parties13—until Huey told her to get rid of it. Mrs. Smith sponsored a riding club with expensive, thoroughbred horses. At one riding event, an LSU coed was injured. On the campaign trail at the time, Huey only had time to send a telegram: “sell THem plugs.” Upset at its peremptory tone, Smith showed the telegram to George Everett. “Why show it to me,” Everett exclaimed. “He fires me every other day. But I know what you’re going to do—sell them plugs.”14
Familiar with football, Huey attended a practice. Watching the kicker practicing extra points, Huey asked to try it. The ball only dribbled off his foot. Again, Huey issued a mighty kick and failed once more, telling the boy, “I guess I’m a little off today.” When the team gathered around, Huey asked if they were going to defeat their rival Tulane at the next week’s game. The boys were optimistic but mentioned a star halfback who played for Tulane. Huey suggested they pirate that player for the game by offering his father a state job. With embarrassment, they schooled him on anti-pirating rules. Nor did Huey understand that a coin flip determined who would receive the first kickoff. He thought it was their turn to receive because Tulane got the first kickoff last year. Huey understood one thing, however: “I don’t fool around with losers.”15
LSU had not been a loser, but its record was mediocre: 6–2–1 in 1928; 6–3 in 1929. Most of the wins were against small schools. In both years, Russ Cohen coached the team. Cohen had played college football at Vanderbilt and had been an assistant coach at Alabama. Tulane was a big rival and had trounced LSU in 1929, 21 to 0. When Huey watched the team practice, LSU had a 6–3 record but was expected to lose big to Tulane in its next game.
What Huey saw in Cohen he did not like. Former players said that Cohen made them nervous, could not inspire them, and issued strange edicts, such as a prohibition on smiling. Smiling meant, he thought, that they did not want to win. But the mediocre record was also due to the inability to recruit top talent. Without waiting for the Tulane game, Huey fired Cohen. Cohen, his assistants, and the sportswriters covering the team were all infuriated.
At the game, Huey arrived with a huge LSU badge. Ignoring the governor’s box seat on the Tulane side of the field, he went to the LSU locker room, ran out on the field with the LSU players, and stayed on the LSU bench or roamed the sidelines. At halftime, he blew off a scheduled appointment with Paramount News to have his picture taken, saying, “I’m running my team,” returning to the locker room. At the end of the third quarter, Huey left the LSU bench and crossed the field resignedly to the governor’s box because LSU was losing 12–7, earning a chorus of boos from the Tulane fans. LSU in the fourth quarter drove down the field and narrowly missed scoring when time ran out. This so-called moral victory thrilled LSU fans and emboldened the reporters in the jubilation after the game: “Are you going to fire that man after a game like that?” one reporter asked, grabbing Huey’s suit lapels. The emotion overtook Huey, who thundered above the din that Cohen would stay and be given the resources to recruit more talent. LSU shortly hired an athletic director and additional assistant coaches. Recruiting star high-school players became routine.16
Although Huey began with the band and took charge of the football team, he had studied the entire school. Enrollment had doubled despite the Depression, but the school lacked the money for equipment and buildings. A law authorized construction of a medical school, but it was never built. Many qualified premed students could not get admitted to the only medical school in the state, Tulane.
Huey decided that LSU needed to be expanded and the medical school built. But there was no money to build the medical school. Huey told LSU personnel to “dare a bit”: develop the plans, let the “people see what we propose, and we will find a way to do it.”17 One anti-Long leader said Huey developed the idea for the medical school years earlier,18 which seems unlikely, but his plans must have been preceded by detailed study.
A month later, in December, Huey announced that LSU was going to build a new medical school. No one knew where Huey would get the money to fund the expansion, however. Even if the legislature were in session, Huey would have had difficulty persuading it to appropriate money for LSU.19
On January 3, 1931, the mysteries were revealed. In describing construction of the new capitol building, Huey declared that more land was required for it, and he authorized the purchase of real estate from LSU’s old campus. The first purchase for $350,000 was used to construct the medical school. Shortly after this surprise, the LSU Board of Supervisors and the governing board of Charity Hospital in New Orleans met in a joint session at Huey’s suite at the Roosevelt Hotel. They agreed to create a medical school and named Dr. Arthur Vidrine, the superintendent of Charity, as dean.
Conservatives thought Huey created the LSU medical school to spite Tulane for its failure to grant him an honorary degree, but Williams debunks this. In February 1931, however, Huey received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Loyola University in New Orleans.20 Either George Wallace or Huey had conceived of an idea to compile the eight prior constitutions of Louisiana with extracts of the decided cases under the various provisions, permitting a historical comparison of the decided cases that would be useful to lawyers. In March 1930, it was printed and praised. It listed Huey as compiler. At that time, he said he had worked on it in spare moments while he was governor. In his autobiography, he claimed credit for undertaking “the work of combining [the cases] in substantive order” but admitted that the “credit for the compilation was due as much or more to those working under [his] direction.”21
Loyola relied on this work to award him a doctor of laws degree, but the citation emphasized his political accomplishments more than the compilation. The Catholic university wanted to record its appreciation to the man who had given free textbooks to Catholic children.22 After the award, he signed some pronouncements as “Huey P. Long, LL.D., Governor and Senator-Elect.”
A Times-Picayune editor called Huey to complain about the effect of the new school on Tulane. Huey’s response: “Raise all the hell you want to, print what you want to. But we’re going to have that medical school and every qualified poor boy can go.” A doctor who talked to Huey was “utterly astonished by his knowledge of medical history and what was needed to make a good medical school.” Critics charged that it was theft for one state agency to make purchases from another. Afraid to sign the paperwork, agency official Jess Nugent asked Huey to sign it first. Huey demanded the documents and with a flourish signed his approval.23
From then on, Huey turned the accusation on its head. Naming himself the “official thief” for LSU, he made additional purchases of land, probably amounting to $9 million over time. LSU built a music and dramatic arts building, a French chateau for the Romance languages department, a fine arts building, dormitories for girls, a gymnasium, an enlarged football stadium, and a student center, the Huey P. Long Field House. By the end of 1935, LSU had constructed sixty-two new buildings out of the ninety-six planned in the early 1920s; in 1934–35, ten new buildings were constructed or extensively remodeled.24 Huey planned the LSU buildings in detail.25
Appropriations from the state budget increased as well so that, by 1935, LSU had the “finest and largest physical plant in the South.” The student body more than doubled to 4,300 by 1935, plus another 900 in the medical school. Another 1,000 students were added in 1935 on a work-for-tuition plan. On a newly purchased 664-acre tract near the campus, the students would grow, can, and market farm products. If his organization stayed in power another four years, Huey said, enrollment would increase to 15,000.26 Tuition was low. Over half the students were on the state payroll. By 1937, LSU ranked twentieth in size among universities and eleventh among state universities. There were 7,000 students and 400 professors.27
To save money, dormitories were installed in the space under the football stadium stands. The stadium was expanded several times, along with the dormitories to house the growing enrollment. They were Spartan but occupied until the late 1980s.28
When Huey was inspecting construction of the women’s dormitories, he saw the workers about to pour concrete for the sidewalks. Stop and wait a year, Huey said, and see where the students walk, and then pour the sidewalks on the paths that they naturally created. “The gently winding sidewalks of LSU still survive as a testimony to his lively and creative mind.”29
Commandant Middleton and board member Everett showed Huey the design for a pool that would cost $75,000. Huey said he knew more about pools and sketched one that cost $500,000. During construction, he inspected it and asked if it was the biggest in the country. When told that the Naval Academy’s pool was slightly longer, he turned to the foreman and told him to put ten more feet on the pool.
The quality of the faculty improved. Growing to 245 members (excluding the medical faculty of 149 members) from 168 when Huey was elected governor, many were recruited from northern schools with impressive reputations. One of Smith’s best decisions was to promote Charles Pipkin as dean of the Graduate School, who “blew like a bracing current of arctic air into a campus which for decades had gone its languid way.”30 First-class writers and scholars such as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert B. Heilman were recruited. Brooks was hired in 1932, Warren in 1934, and Heilman in 1935. Recruited along with Heilman, from Harvard, was Thomas A. Kirby, from Johns Hopkins, and Nate Caffee, from the University of Virginia. Heilman wrote several essays about Huey’s influence upon LSU.
LSU was advancing—“the Huey Long way of doing things”—while other universities were retrenching. “Warren had already published a biography and was publishing poems and essays; Brooks was writing essays. Likewise, people in other departments were writing. In some way the university had acquired members who wrote spontaneously, autonomously.”31
The results “were a first-rate music school, a superior fine arts department, a flock of good appointments in various departments, and at least four new journals ( . . . in history, sociology, and political science), of which the outstanding one was the Southern Review. . . . The Review grew famous; the English department picked up luster from it and attracted some very good graduate students; and through it the university . . . gained respect in quarters that had hardly known of it before.” The influx of talent created among the faculty many contrasts in aims, attitudes, and sensibilities, but they were “energizing differences” during “extraordinary times.”32
Harold McSween agreed with Heilman and added:
LSU’s graduate school under Charles W. Pipkin, late a professor of political science at the University of Illinois and a Rhodes Scholar, had begun an ambitious doctoral regimen. . . . LSU . . . seemed a model in proliferating courses of study within a boundless curriculum. . . . The university operated a sugar school that attracted students from throughout the Caribbean. It engaged in agricultural research related to all the state’s crops. It had begun initiatives in petroleum geology and engineering, aeronautical engineering (in addition to existing staple engineering curricula), speech, music, voice, theater, dance, and other fine arts. Its music department produced grand opera accompanied by its own symphony orchestra under directors of international acclaim. . . . [I]t was attracting outstanding young academicians in law, political science, sociology, economics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, botany, biology, classical and modern languages (including medieval literature), philosophy, psychology, education, history, English.33
In addition to the Southern Review, Brooks and Warren coauthored Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943), which became popular textbooks used in many universities across the country. They fostered a revolution in education.34 (Warren’s masterwork of fiction, All the King’s Men, was published in 1946, after he had left LSU.) The Southern Historical Association was started in 1934 and began publishing the Journal of Southern History.35 The LSU Press was established in 1935.
While the growth of the number of students, faculty, buildings, and budget can all be quantified, the unquantifiable psychological impact on students and faculty was also “tremendous,” said Troy Middleton, and how could it not be, with the plethora of new buildings, faculty members, and students? Huey always mentioned LSU as one of the top universities in the country, along with Harvard, Yale, or Johns Hopkins, setting the standard for the university to live up to.
In 1964, Warren discussed Huey’s impact on students: “Among the students there sometimes appeared, too, that awkward boy from the depth of the ‘Cajun’ country or from some scrabble-farm in North Louisiana, with burning ambition and frightening energy and a thirst for learning; and his presence there . . . was due to Huey, and to Huey alone. . . . For the ‘better element’ had done next to nothing in fifty years to get the boy out of the grim despair of his ignorance.”36
The psychological impact extended beyond the school and the students. The Southern Review, for example, “won some honor among a laity of whom such reading might not be expected. Once a Baton Rouge printer showed [Heilman] with pride his own seven bound volumes of the Review. His sense of it as a regional achievement of national repute was surely not unique.”37
The Southern Review—“one of the best literary magazines anywhere”— usually contained three or four academic discussions of contemporary issues, followed by fiction, criticism, poetry, and book reviews. The index of the Southern Review “would be a roll call of the best Southern writers of the century.” New criticism by Kenneth Burke, Theodore Spenser, R. P. Blackmur, Delmore Schwartz, and L. C. Knights all “achieved their reputations” largely through the Review. While those with established reputations such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Aldous Huxley were published there, the early works of Mary McCarthy, Nelson Algren, Peter Taylor, W. H. Auden, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell were published early in their careers or before they were known.38
Some have written that Huey’s intense devotion to LSU allowed him to live out a college life as governor that he was denied when he was of college age. Others believed that he was laying the groundwork for future electoral success. Huey often talked to students about politics. Some believed that his football antics were motivated by the desire to get news coverage in the sports pages.
More probable is that after passage of his public improvement programs—the roads, bridges, new capitol, and airport—he was ready with some new ideas. These new ideas show personal growth. The candidate who criticized the idea of a college teaching fancy ways to farm became the foremost proponent of the university that taught fancy ways to farm and a lot of other fancy things, too.
While the medical school was being built, the press treated Huey favorably over the last months of 1930 and the early months of 1931.39 On February 12, 1931, the assistant secretary of the Navy hosted Huey on the battleship USS Wyoming. No pajamas this time, just a blue suit.40
Favorable press was also generated—nationwide—from an unlikely source. Potlikker is the broth in the pot left over after cooking greens and salt pork. Usually eaten as soup with corn pone (meal mixed with salt and water baked into a hard patty), it is healthy but an acquired taste. It was a staple food for poor whites and African Americans. No one knows why Huey discussed it. Emphasizing it as a healthful food and cheap and providing further ethical proof of his kinship with rural voters, Huey described a stylish way of eating potlikker—dunking the cornpone instead of crumbling it into the soup broth—and food editor Julian Harris of the Atlanta Constitution saw some comedic potential. In a mock serious tone, Harris exclaimed that crumbling, rather than dunking, was the only way to eat it, and accused Huey of crumbling in private.
Huey matched his tone and defended his position—denying that he crumbled in private, for example, saying he had only demonstrated it to show faults in the technique—and the controversy took off. On the Amos ’n Andy radio show, Andy crumbled but Amos liked it either way; the St. Regis Hotel in New York added it to their menu; a Paris newspaper commented; Governor William H. (Alfalfa Bill) Murray of Oklahoma advocated crumbling for humans and dunking for dogs; Baptist governor Doyle E. Carleton of Florida recommended dunking on scriptural grounds, preferably “an absolute and complete submerging”; etiquette writer Emily Post refused to take a stand; and New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, seeking to burnish his credentials as a southerner (he vacationed in Warm Springs, Georgia, and said he was an adopted Georgian), wrote that the controversy should be referred to the Platform Committee of the Democratic National Convention.
At various intervals thereafter, Huey would refer to potlikker or serve it, at one point—with what must have been malicious glee—at a dinner with bankers. The publicity lasted for about three weeks, and Huey became friendly with food editor Harris, telling him the controversy was the only fun he had had since becoming governor.41 Decades later, John Edge wrote his graduate thesis on this potlikker-cornpone debate.42
In March, Huey dedicated the Baton Rouge Airport and officiated at the air races.43 On March 26, he convinced the Cleveland Indians to continue spring training in New Orleans instead of going to the West Coast, getting stock in the club in the process. Huey knew the club officials and players because they often stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel. The stories claimed that once Huey joined the team in Detroit because they were suffering a losing streak, after which they won twelve of their next thirteen games.44 The papers even gave Huey a fluffy story when he played the “Jew’s harp” for mansion visitors.”45
In the shadow of the favorable press, the medical school was built with astonishing speed. Architects issued their plans in January, contracts were signed in March, construction began in April, and, in October, classes began. Dean Vidrine had recruited an impressive faculty, and the first class included 109 students, but that number doubled the next year and increased every year afterward. By 1935, over 900 students were enrolled. Enrollment at Tulane increased, too, corroborating Huey’s belief that there was a need for two schools and that the South needed more doctors.
In comparison to the medical school or the quality of the faculty, the size of the LSU band was unimportant. But Williams perceptively notes that “a consummate politician would instinctively begin with something impressive, something that was also simple—something that anyone with eyes to see or ears to hear could understand.”46 Huey’s actions—the band, the football team, and the medical school—were begun in November or December 1930, required advance study, and were rolled out after his smashing triumphs in the senatorial election and legislature. It was a coordinated approach designed to develop public support, give everyone in Louisiana a chance at a college education, and generate major improvements in public health. Exhibited at parades and football games, the big band symbolized to the average man that LSU was now a big-time university.
Critics state that Huey politicized LSU.47 The new medical school was built in New Orleans. The Charity Hospital, with seventeen hundred beds available, provided the patients and the beds. Charity granted privileges to the doctors who practiced there, those from the new LSU School and from Tulane. Tulane doctors were allocated five hundred of Charity’s beds, and the LSU administrators pledged not to disadvantage them. When Huey controlled the Board of Charity Hospital, however, he had control over the privileges of all doctors, including those at Tulane.
One of the best surgeons at Tulane, Dr. Alton Ochsner, famous throughout the South, wrote a letter to a friend stating that Huey was politicizing the hospital. Vidrine pilfered the letter from Ochsner’s coat and gave it to Huey, who then ordered Charity to revoke Ochsner’s privileges. No historian excuses this act. Criticized by others as being pro-Long, Williams said it revealed “something . . . sinister,” a concept of Huey’s that any program or institution he sponsored was personal to him. Through a psychological alchemy, an attack on Huey was an attack on his program and produced a self-defense response to remove the offender from any position Huey controlled.
Huey’s retribution fed the myth that he created the LSU medical school to spite Tulane and created another myth that he banned all Tulane professors from Charity. Openly anti-Long doctors faced delays and interference, the type of hassle that civil service is designed to prevent but often doesn’t. One intelligent Tulane professor asked Huey to write his request for privileges. In his letter on behalf of the professor, Huey noted that anything he did was construed as political. While politics could never be entirely absent from his mind, Huey concluded that political power had built Charity into a great hospital.48
Robert Mann comprehensively analyzed Huey’s influence over Louisiana’s higher education personnel. Figuring most prominently are Huey’s selection of Smith, band leaders, and football coaches of LSU, and the ban on Ochsner. Huey also fired the president of Louisiana State Normal College, Victor L. Roy, and one faculty member, on recommendation of his sister, Olive, who taught there (Kingfish U, 39), and this was criticized during his impeachment; and he fired the replacement president (third cousin W. W. Tison) years later when he failed to reinstate the rebellious son of a political supporter (165). The reinstated student, William Dodd, later became lieutenant governor of Louisiana. Huey intervened in 1933 with LSU’s law school to grant Kemble Kennedy a special degree not signed by the dean of the law school and contrary to the wishes of the faculty, something discovered in 1934, and he caused Dean Tullis’s removal, all of which contributed to the law school being put on probation by the American Bar Association (223, 231) and censured by the American Association of Law Schools (244) in 1935. Huey tried but failed to fire President Edwin L. Stephens from Southwestern Industrial Institute at Lafayette (now the University of Louisiana (42)). Smith finessed Huey’s early effort to fire more faculty and staff at LSU (97). Huey ousted the prior head of the Surgery Department at the LSU medical school in favor of the more qualified Urban Maes and recruited an outstanding tropical disease specialist (133).49
The ban against Dr. Ochsner failed. He was granted privileges at Charity two years after his ban when the accreditation authorities put their foot down. The reinstatement plus the recruitment of the outstanding surgeon, Maes, secured the medical school’s accreditation. It received an A ranking.
There is the conundrum in a nutshell. Huey’s opponents—in LSU, in the Charity Hospital, and elsewhere in the state—did not share his vision of Louisiana preeminent in education. Without Huey, the entire university would have remained small and second-rate, and every administration making a change is going to make mistakes, reward friends, and punish foes. Based on the condition of LSU, whoever controlled it before deserved to have it taken over and improved. Should opponents of these worthy goals have been permitted to retain their positions of influence to defeat or impede these goals? Should Huey have been able to remove qualified surgeons from a hospital because they criticized him? The answer is no.
Criticism because of the identity of the decision-maker is more problematic than criticism of decisions themselves, however. The ban on Ochsner would have been terrible if it had been made by Vidrine without Huey’s input. The recruitment of Maes was not terrible simply because it was engineered by Huey. The appointment of Smith was within the ambit of Huey’s duties as governor.
Williams’s favorite anecdote about Huey and LSU, the one with which he started his chapter 18, had Huey describing Frederick the Great’s decision to attack the city of Vienna. Meeting objections from his nitwit ministers, “Old Fred” said his soldiers would take Vienna and his professors at Heidelberg would explain why. Closing, Huey said LSU had cost him $15 million, and his professors there would explain “why I do like I do.”50 Huey’s belief that LSU belonged to him, if not sinister, was wrong: LSU, the Charity Hospital, indeed, every position in the state government, were public trusts.
The Frederick the Great story was a harmless manifestation of his erroneous belief, and the instances of interference with LSU were few, however. Fred Frey, “Mr. LSU,” had experience with many LSU presidents and many Louisiana governors. There was less interference under Huey than under his anti-Long successors, he said.
Frey described a nationwide meeting of deans of colleges, hosted by LSU. At the last minute, Frey asked Huey if he would speak to the group. The legislature was in session so Huey could only spare twenty minutes, but he gave an extemporaneous speech advocating a college education for every qualified person that left the assembled deans spellbound and wishing they had a similar governor.51
The question of academic freedom is a twin concern of interference. But all kinds of questions of institutions, ideas, and philosophies took place at LSU. Observers believed there was more academic freedom at LSU than anywhere else in the country. Huey opposed loyalty oaths for colleges, saying radicals in colleges wouldn’t do any harm and wishing the country had a few million radicals.52 Huey said he allowed anti-Long faculty members to remain at LSU to maintain a diversity of opinion. An anonymous faculty survey reported no political interference.53
Heilman notes there was a faint “derivative air of quid-pro-quoism” emanating from some campus functionaries tied in with Huey’s administration, but on “the other hand, there were campus characters who hated Huey and all his works and methods and successors.” There were liberals, conservatives, communists, and Marxists.54 Professor White quotes a minority opinion that: “I’ll bet there wasn’t dictatorship mentioned in sociology, government, anything.”55 Warren’s lecture on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was packed because of the means-and-ends parallels with Huey. His class paid close attention to it. Huey’s daughter, Rose, sat in the back row and earned As.56
In 1931, Professor Uhler of Whangdoodle fame wrote a novel, Cane Juice. Father Gassler, an anti-Long Catholic priest in Baton Rouge, denounced it as slimy animalism and filth in early October 1931. President Smith suspended Uhler. The Executive Committee of the Board of Regents dismissed him. Huey was on this committee, but it is unclear whether he attended the meeting. All university functionaries and legislators criticized the novel; none supported Uhler; none wanted to be seen as endorsing his description that Cajun boys and girls “made love” in “dark corners.”57
Uhler wrote about these facts to his lawyer in early November without mentioning Huey. Later in November, however, Uhler reported that Huey had called one Mr. Heller and said that, if the archbishop made a gesture, the matter would be dropped. This doesn’t establish that Huey had a hand in his termination; it was probably an effort to diffuse and rectify the situation after it came to his attention. Late in November and thereafter, however, Uhler said Huey ordered him fired to curry favor with Catholic voters right before the January 1932 elections.
In other contexts, Huey relished using his opponents against each other, and he might very well have enjoyed using his opponent Father Gassler against Kemble Kennedy’s nemesis Uhler. The hesitation in judging this with finality results from Uhler’s reliance on a political motive during the 1932 election that was never in doubt, although two of Huey’s secondary candidates had French Catholic opponents; the natural desire for his defenders or groups like the ACLU, which backed Uhler, to select Huey as a big target to gain maximum publicity and engage someone who could reverse the decision; and the position of Thomas W. Cutrer, who had plenty of criticism of Huey, that it could not be shown that Huey ordered the suspension or termination. Russell Long denied that Huey had anything to do with it.58 Assuming nevertheless that Huey caused the suspension or termination, he did so because of Father Gassler’s denunciation, reflecting more conservative times. This was something any administrator sensitive to retaining public support would have done. While all administrators and politicians denounced the novel, academicians nationwide supported Uhler, and no public outcry took place. Uhler was reinstated in April 1932, after the January 1932 elections.59
Misplaced priorities are another criticism. Professor White points out that, in 1931, $14,345 were allocated for LSU’s band while $837 were allocated to its law school and $493 to its graduate school.60 No law school could run on $837, and no graduate school could exist on $493. Perhaps the law school and graduate schools only needed a small state subsidy, with tuition payments covering most costs.
By promoting the band and the football team, Huey developed fans of the school throughout the state, assuring its support. In 2014, Forbes magazine pointed out that even an exorbitant salary spent to recruit a great football coach was a sound investment. A good football team would improve the entire university, including its academic reputation.61
Two authors reported that the LSU pool was installed without drains.62 Huey had engaged architects for the state capitol, the airport, the governor’s mansion, and other structures, all of which were acclaimed. The missing drains cannot fairly be attributed to him.
Huey loved LSU and its students and was sincerely committed to their advancement. Professor Williams must have enjoyed interviewing former band members, football players, and coaches of the LSU football team. The stories he collected have a certain humorous pathos.
Huey often attended band practice and was popular with its members. Listening quietly at first, he would suggest changes of tempo or tone, and then wind up directing. Huey’s favorite songs included “Harvest Moon,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and “That Lonesome Road.” The band was expanded to 250 pieces, the largest marching band in the nation.63 Its uniforms of purple and gold were designed with Huey’s approval into a flamboyant pattern. Huey once asked to hear a saxophone solo, but the band member who played that instrument was too nervous to perform. A clarinet player was secretly induced to play instead. Unaware of the deception, Huey characteristically pronounced the solo the best he had ever heard.64
In 1935, Castro Carazo from the Roosevelt Hotel was made bandleader. He and Huey composed two songs still played today: “Touchdown for LSU” and “Darling of LSU.” The drum majors were equipped with huge shakos, and tall students were recruited for the job; the height combination was freakishly impressive. Huey sometimes conducted the band and led it at parades and football games, marching at the head between the drum majors. Once during Mardi Gras, he led the band in a parade and a policeman signaled him to stop. Raising his baton, Huey shouted, “Stand back! This is the Kingfish!”65
Huey recruited football players. One high-school star was brought to the governor’s mansion and there said he was considering Centenary College instead of LSU. With disdain, Huey said Centenary only had one old teacher there who taught the Bible. Huey knew “a hell of a lot more about the Bible than he does” and assured the boy that, if he attended LSU, he would teach him the Bible. The boy chose LSU.
Huey would help injured players at halftime, wrapping bandages or holding ice packs. Three injured team members were invited to the mansion to recuperate, where he fed them steaks, turnip greens, cornbread, and pineapple upside-down cake. Once they had finished one steak, he would put another on their plate. They learned to eat slowly. One fullback gained fifty pounds and, when he returned to a game, collapsed after five plays.
The players who stayed in the mansion were sometimes woken up at 2 a.m. by Huey to talk football or give advice. Huey told one player, “For every crime there’s a loophole if you know which book to grab. You’re looking at a man who knows which book to grab.”66
Huey prescribed a Winn Parish Epsom salt remedy for a player who had a boil between his legs. Drinking it induced nausea. The vomiting player was exiled from the LSU huddle, confusing the opposite team and some observers, who thought Huey had invented the new formation of the lonesome end.
Sometimes Huey set up chairs in the mansion ballroom and ran between them to demonstrate plays he designed. At halftime in a game against Arkansas, Huey gave the pep talk while Coach Cohen stood there speechless and at other times walked on the field to tell Cohen what plays to call. Once, when Cohen told his players how he would signal them the plays to run, Huey said, “And when I grab the coach around the neck, it means a forward pass.” Huey called so many passes that Cohen got a stiff neck. At another game, when LSU was losing at halftime, he promised every player a job on the Highway Commission if they won (and they did).67 Before another game, Huey told the team that it had to win, so he wanted no drinking: “not even two or three.”68
If these stories induce a kind of wonderment at a grown man and governor bandaging college football players at halftime and giving them pep talks and leading a band, nevertheless his unrestrained authenticity also induces a grudging admiration. He didn’t hold back. He did what he wanted to do. He followed his instincts.
A large gong was assembled at the university. When it rang, the students were to assemble so that Huey could announce and discuss the latest developments or plans for the university. It rang often as the changes and the construction accelerated. Note the huge amount of time and energy Huey spent communicating with the students and administration. He carried them along with him.
When LSU students came to his hotel room one year with a copy of the yearbook (the Gumbo) dedicated to him, he sat on his bed and cried. Professor White wrote that “deep down he loved his university and its student body.
. . . [H]e looked upon the students at LSU as his own.”69 Heilman wrote that the “remarkable influx” of talent “had its ultimate roots in the imaginativeness evident in [Huey’s] very complex makeup.”
“It was an imaginativeness which could grasp ends beyond profit and power,” one that “gave him visions of excellence in LSU, an excellence beyond band and football fame.”70 Harold McSween wrote from a perspective of decades that, “while it would challenge any scholar . . . to allocate academic credit between Huey, who fostered the university environment, and the scholars who actually did the work,” nevertheless, “In retrospect, [the] burgeoning LSU of the depression years seems one of [the] strong man’s signal achievements.”71
About seven years after Huey’s death, his opponents were in power, and James Monroe Smith was in disgrace. Fred Frey was asked to become president, but when he bridled at interference from the new “reform” governor, the offer was withdrawn, and someone else was selected.
The Southern Review was terminated (revived only in 1964), notwithstanding that the June 10, 1940, issue of Time magazine hailed it as the best journal in the English language and at the center of America’s efforts to maintain precious traditions of art, scholarship, and culture. LSU’s Board of Supervisors declined to renew sponsorship of the Journal of Southern History and the National Mathematics Magazine. Robert Penn Warren left for Minnesota because LSU would not match its salary offer that would have required a $200 raise.72 Later Warren transferred to Yale and became the first poet laureate of the United States. Heilman left for the University of Washington. Cleanth Brooks left for Yale. The pool Huey designed is now a lawn.
Heilman denies that the anti-Longs burst the bubble on the energy and accomplishments of LSU. Professor Williams arrived in 1942.73 But no leader in Louisiana thereafter spoke of LSU in the same sentence as Yale and Harvard. The band and the football team remain among the best in the nation. Later Louisiana leaders missed the whole point. Huey’s showmanship was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Cleanth Brooks, Heilman, and others opposed the presidential choice of Huey’s opponents, the reformers who won election in Louisiana in 1940. Heilman commemorated their visit to a member of the board to lobby for their choice. Not only were they overruled, with the board member insisting that “he had the best interests of the university at heart,” but
he took a tack that was devastating in effect, though I am unsure whether he just fell into it, made honest use of a good thing, or took a deadpan demonic revenge for our bothering him. Having found that we professed literature, he took on the air of a kindly benefactor. . . . Then he revealed to us a manuscript or privately printed pamphlet, the poetry of his wife, and introduced us to the maker herself. . . . On the scene I limped in clichés while Cleanth managed benign words, in which the chilly critical spirit was somewhat muffled in the folds of courtesy.
One observer said the new appointment was fortunate, however. If he had not been appointed to head LSU, he would have been sent to Europe and set back the World War II effort of the Allies by two years. The appointee who presided over the budget cuts and loss of faculty talent? Colonel Campbell B. Hodges.74