By the November election, the Great Depression was a disaster. The Gross National Product had fallen from $181.8 billion in 1929 to $126.6 billion in 1933:
|
1929 |
1930 |
1931 |
1932 |
1933 |
|
$181.8 |
$164.5 |
$153.0 |
$130.1 |
$126.6 |
Source: Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 21. |
||||
From 1929 to 1933, national income fell from $88 billion to $40 billion; wages and salaries from $50 billion to $29 billion.1
At least 12 million people nationwide were unemployed, and many more could find only part-time work. In Philadelphia in April 1931, 25.5 percent of the workforce were unemployed and 13.8 percent were employed only part-time. By early 1933 in Chicago, 624,000 people—40 percent of its workforce—were unemployed.2
Farm revenue declined from $14 billion in 1929 to $7 billion in 1933:
|
1929 |
1930 |
1931 |
1932 |
1933 |
|
$13,985 |
$11,432 |
$8,385 |
$6,371 |
$7,081 |
Net farm income declined from $7 billion in 1929 to $3 billion in 1933.3
Behind the statistics was human misery of a type difficult to conceive today. Now, unemployment insurance tides over someone who gets laid off. In the Depression, they were dependent on private charity. By 1933, the resources of family and friends, relief agencies and churches, were exhausted. “Starvation” and “homelessness” were not rhetorical hyperbole. Millions of people were starving and homeless—and without hope.
Orphaned by age ten, President Herbert Hoover had made his fortune as a self-made mining engineer, more comfortable with numbers than language, and his name as a relief administrator after World War I, as Commerce Department secretary during the 1920s, and as a flood relief administrator in 1927. The tragedy of Hoover’s career is that his worldview—that unregulated or only lightly regulated capitalism would spontaneously correct itself after a recession—collapsed and he just couldn’t believe it or react to it.4 Ironically, Hoover’s proposal a year before the crash in 1928—to create a $3 billion public works fund to cushion unemployment if it ever occurred—was never implemented. Even from the cold Congressional Record, one can feel Senator Cutting’s frustration with Hoover’s pigheadedness in opposing his own idea.5 Had he supported the public works or relief legislation and then administered it with the skill with which he attacked relief in Europe after World War I, how would history have regarded him? Hoover’s dour personal style complemented his dogmatic rigidity. In a speech to Congress in May 1932, Hoover had the “smile of a dying man” and spoke in a “tense monotone” that could not be heard beyond the front row.6
Roosevelt was the opposite of Hoover. His optimism, infectious smile, ease with crowds, and sympathy for the unemployed—giving the people hope—accompanied an aversion to fixed principles. Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign speeches consisted of “painfully discordant themes” and “oscillations on fiscal policy.”7 During the campaign, Roosevelt was given two different speeches on tariff policy, one reductionist and the other protectionist, so Roosevelt airily asked the two writers to go “weave the two together.”8 Roosevelt recognized relief as a federal issue, however. For that reason, Republican Senators Johnson, LaFollette, Norris, Cutting, and others deserted their party and endorsed him.
The result of Roosevelt’s studied ambiguity and varied electoral appeals was an incongruous group of supporters. A week before the election, syndicated columnist Mark Sullivan discussed Roosevelt supporters Bernard M. Baruch, Owen D. Young, John W. Davis, Huey, and Senators Burton K. Wheeler, George W. Norris, and Robert LaFollette. Davis would never agree with Huey’s plan to limit incomes. Baruch would never agree with Wheeler’s inflation proposals. Young would never agree with Norris about public ownership of utilities.
If Roosevelt displeased wealthy industrialist Young, thought Sullivan, it might not disturb anything but his lunch. But,
if Mr. Roosevelt displeases Senator Huey Long, something quite different happens. First of all, Senator Huey will “bawl out” the President. He literally will—let no one doubt that. The White House will ring with his sulphurous expletives. Senator Huey will remind Mr. Roosevelt that he, Huey, was instrumental in nominating Mr. Roosevelt, having delivered the Louisiana delegation to him. . . .
Thereafter he will go on the Senate floor, where in language that will be little short of profanity, he will again and publicly “bawl out” the President and declare that henceforth he proposes to fight every measure proposed by the President. Finally, Senator Huey will go on the stump, with his radio equipped fleet of automobiles, and do everything he can, which is a good deal, to prevent Mr. Roosevelt from being re-nominated.9
That forecast didn’t influence the election.
Roosevelt won in a landslide. Prominent Senate leaders of the Republican Party—Majority Leader Moses of New Hampshire, Majority Whip Watson of Indiana, tariff author Smoot of Utah—were defeated in their home states. The Times speculated that Huey might lead a coalition of liberal Democrats and Republicans to hold the balance of power in the Senate.10
Roosevelt invited Huey to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he was vacationing and meeting with political and industrial leaders before his inauguration. Huey spent “considerable time” with Roosevelt, joking and pressing his tax views, and talked to patronage chief Farley.
Something must have bothered Huey about Roosevelt or other Democratic leaders, however.11 On December 6, the second day of the lame-duck Senate session, Huey broke an unwritten rule (prohibiting speeches until the fourth day) to argue that the Senate should implement the mandate of the election: to scale up income and inheritance taxes, limit the working day, put farm surpluses under federal control, and inflate the currency. Quoted were several Roosevelt campaign speeches advocating these principles. The Democrats talked harmony, but this should not divert them from helping the people: The talk is to “tread easily”; to be quiet; “Don’t wake up the baby”; “nothing but harmony.” What kind of harmony? Starvation harmony? Nakedness harmony? Homeless harmony?12 Huey expected Robinson’s cooperation and, if his leadership “is in accord with the wishes of the American people, let’s keep it; but if it ain’t, then let’s throw it out.” Progressives could unite under Senator Norris, but he denied press reports that there was any factional block of senators.13
On December 8, the Times reported that Huey was absent from a Democratic Party caucus because of his feud with Robinson. Huey first and then Robinson denied it.14 Huey in the caucus had argued in favor of his tax plan, and the caucus issued a compromise statement favoring taxation in accordance with party principles.15
In the lame-duck session, the first legislation considered was independence for the Philippines. The Philippines’ production of sugar made this bill important to Huey. Several times he grabbed the Senate floor and yielded it piecemeal to other senators, thereby acting as a floor leader to effect an agreement, with the implicit threat of a filibuster hanging over everyone’s head. Huey won some concessions.16 The House-Senate conference weakened the provisions for which he had fought, but he voted for the compromise bill.17
One of Huey’s speeches was compared to a “vaudeville show which kept more of the Senators in their seats than usual during such proceedings.” Huey said he didn’t care whether President Hoover vetoed the Philippines bill. It reminded him of a poem:
When I asked to wed, go to father, she said.
And she knew that I knew that her father was dead,
And she knew that I knew what a life he had led.
And she knew that I knew what she meant when she said:
Go to father.18
Hoover did tell the Senate to “go to father.”
On January 3, Huey heard Senator Arthur Robinson (R-Indiana) defend veterans.19 On January 4, Senator Hiram Johnson discussed foreign war debts20 and Senator Borah spoke on economic conditions.21 Huey had something planned for the New Year, too.
On January 5, Carter Glass proposed a banking reform bill. Its main features were to separate commercial and investment banking, to prevent speculation, and to increase the regulatory powers of the Federal Reserve Board.22 Seventy-five years old in 1933, Glass was short, slim, and “prickly, with large scornful eyes, an aggressive brush of white hair shooting back from his forehead, and the defiant, contemptuous bearing of a man who feared nobody. His habit of talking out of the left corner of his mouth gave his face a peculiar twisted expression well adapted to his snarls and snorts. . . . He was intensely vain and intensely honest.”23 And intensely conservative. Glass could recall passing the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.24 He was still conservative in 1933, but knowledgeable, and he took a proprietary interest in banking legislation.
Glass’s bill allowed large banks to establish branches. Larger, healthy banks could therefore take over the undercapitalized small banks that Glass thought were nothing more than pawnshops. Glass knew that the branch-banking feature might be controversial and was prepared to water it down. Given the 5,096 bank failures between 1930 and 1932,25 most accepted the necessity for reform. Robinson loyally supported the bill.26
Huey had exhaustively questioned Louisiana and New York bankers about it.27 Before Glass explained his bill (Glass considered this discourteous), Huey offered an amendment on January 5 to prohibit branch banking except in municipalities where the bank was already located. Otherwise, the big banks would drive out the small ones, Huey claimed. Huey quoted a Roosevelt statement years earlier that was hostile to branch banking.28
The next full legislative day, Monday, January 9, Glass explained the bill and asserted that Roosevelt favored it. Huey asked him how he knew that. There was no satisfactory answer.
Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma and Senator Wheeler joined Huey in what became a filibuster against branch banking. It went on for days, paralyzed the Senate, and grabbed the attention of the country. On January 11, Huey advocated government insurance for bank deposits, one of the first politicians to do so.29
Glass sneered and snarled at Thomas and denied Huey’s request to have documents read by the clerk—a routine courtesy usually extended to filibusterers—to provide a short rest.30 Huey read the document slowly, pausing to ask with feigned innocence whether he was “going too fast.” Neither interruptions nor insults bothered Huey. He became more cheerful in inverse proportion to their nastiness. Huey was weary on January 12, however, and had to be rescued by Wheeler and Thomas. Glass demanded that the Senate sit in longer sessions, and this was done. But Huey, Thomas, and Wheeler continued the filibuster.31
The filibuster became the issue. Will Rogers said that ninety-five senators couldn’t outtalk Huey, they couldn’t even “get him warmed up,” and Huey was getting near the truth in his criticisms of Wall Street.32 The Times, however, was appalled at the “sickening” spectacle of the “impotent” Senate and lamented the obstruction of the bill by a man with a front of brass and leather lungs.33 Yet its reporter wrote that Huey put on a good show and, unlike other obstructionists, had “uncommon forensic ability and a definite legislative philosophy.” Long lines of spectators waited for a chance to see the Kingfish in action.34 Republicans enjoyed the spectacle of a divided Democratic Party, and this further inflamed party leaders.35
Glass was the type of politician Huey had steamrolled in Louisiana: an older, conservative man past his prime. Glass had shaped the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 to be sure, but had Glass litigated complex cases against banks, issued and sold highway bonds in a down market, supervised a state bank examiner, obtained loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and saved his state’s banks from depositor runs and failure? Huey never said this, but it must explain why he never deferred to Glass. Huey did coordinate his views with Representative Steagall, chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee in the House.
Note again Huey’s skill at drawing an issue. There were more independent bankers than Wall Street bankers. Like independent oil drillers fighting Standard Oil, they were the underdogs, but they were capitalists, leaders in their communities, and connected with other businesses. A Chicago banker whose several small banks had failed, John A. Carroll, testified in Congress against branch banking and supported Huey.36
On January 17, Glass exploited minor inaccuracies (“rhetorical rubbish”) in some of Huey’s arguments, claiming that Huey had conducted a “circus” for the galleries and was secretly doing the bidding of big bankers who disliked other provisions of his bill.37 Huey submitted a resolution to investigate Glass’s charge, so it is doubtful that it was true, and Glass never proposed to strike the branch-banking provision so that the rest of the bill could be enacted, which would have been the easiest way to test his suspicion.38 Wheeler said that had Roosevelt favored branch banking he never would have been nominated.39
Twenty-nine more conservative Senators, however, including Robinson, signed a petition asking for cloture, a vote to limit debate and stop the filibuster.40 On January 18, after negotiating off-the-record for hours, Huey and Robinson agreed to have cloture withdrawn and then a compromise branch-banking amendment voted upon. Huey playfully punched Robinson and slapped him on the back. Alleging that the outgoing Republican leaders were supporting the filibuster, however, Couzens opposed this compromise (one objection was enough to kill it) and insisted on a vote on the record. It failed by one vote. Senator George denounced southerners who voted for cloture. Robinson rebuked George. Huey defended the filibuster and George and contended that branch banking had to be opposed by the leaders of the people. Robinson interrupted to demand by whom those leaders were chosen. Huey exclaimed “by the election returns!” to thunderous applause.41 The limitation of debate was agreed to, fulfilling the terms of the agreement negotiated by Huey and Robinson. The filibuster ended.42
The next day, Huey asked to meet Roosevelt in Washington before his inauguration in March. Arriving a half-hour late, he pounded on the door and said he was going to talk turkey, to ask Roosevelt if he meant it. Emerging smiling, he said Roosevelt would be a great president. Newsmen would just have to watch his actions to see what was decided; he was too ignorant to explain things. Roosevelt favored county branch banking but not state branch banking. Complete loyalty was professed: “He don’t want to crack down on me. He told me ‘Huey, you’re going to do just as I tell you,’ and that is just what I’m a-going to do.”43
Privately, however, he said: “When I talk to him, he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ But Joe Robinson goes to see him the next day and again he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine!’ to everybody.”44 Huey did not really understand what Roosevelt said (you’re going to do just what I tell you). By the end of the month, Huey wrote Roosevelt that he figured “all the time you wanted men like me to advise you.” After Glass declined the treasury job, Huey urged supporters to ask Roosevelt to appoint Henry Steagall.45
A compromise limitation of branch banking was added to the bill. Senator Black’s motion to eliminate it was defeated, but indicated widespread hostility to it among southern, midwestern, and western progressives. Minor amendments Huey proposed failed. The most interesting was that the secretary of the treasury should remain a member of the Federal Reserve Board. Glass wanted to insulate the board from treasury influence. Huey thus tried to preserve Roosevelt’s influence over the board, evidencing a sincere belief in focusing authority and responsibility over government boards with the elected executive, even if he were not that executive. Roosevelt should have appreciated this.46
Only one article in the Times explained the controversy, rather than the conflict of Huey versus Glass.47 Banks with branches should be stronger and better run, with economies of scale in administration and increased capitalization. Opponents believed that the local banks would be destroyed, that local businesses would be denied credit or subjected to national policies irrelevant to local conditions, and that, therefore, the communities they served would suffer. The banks would become more powerful than the regulators or, if one member of the chain failed, they all might fail, requiring a huge bailout because it would be too big to allow to fail.
Branch banking was opposed by many as a reaction to modernity, for the same reasons that some at the time tried to prevent chain stores48 or, today, oppose allowing Walmart into the neighborhood. Rural progressives—Huey’s allies in this fight—opposed the establishment of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation because it propped up the interests that had caused the Depression and was socialism for big financiers. Huey was invited by his ally Wheeler to join the criticism of the corporation. Huey declined. It had helped rescue some small Louisiana banks, perhaps because he was on intimate terms with its personnel (Harvey Couch, Rudolph Hecht). Separately, he acknowledged modernity, saying good roads had killed some country banks; they couldn’t stand the competition once people could drive a little way to find another bank.49
Huey thus stood up for the local banks but conceived of a national support system. That would have had a similar effect to the one envisioned by branch banking proponents, but with more diverse ownership, more competition, more local control, and greater governmental regulatory power.
In his filibuster, not only did Huey advocate the new idea of insurance of bank deposits, tentatively at first, then forcefully, but also gave an insight into his January 1933 ideas for solving the Depression:50 crop holidays, $10 billion in public works secured by high inheritance taxes, shorter labor hours, and the soldiers’ bonus. It might soon become necessary, he said, to enact a tax on capital to secure mass purchasing power. With Huey’s support, Senators Thomas and Wheeler tried but failed to amend Glass’s bill to increase the money supply by coining silver.51
The strange thing about this spectacle is Roosevelt’s silence.52 Huey had Robinson and Glass just where he wanted them: they were supporting branch banking, something Roosevelt had opposed. An overwhelming number of small bankers and their small-business allies agreed with him. Robinson and Glass should never have taken on the fight or should have had to capitulate. One wonders whether Huey had the filibuster in mind when he started; maybe he thought that, once he read Roosevelt’s prior statements against branch banking, Glass would back down, or Roosevelt would speak up. Roosevelt refused to back him up or tell him to shut up. He did nothing to stop the filibuster or effect a compromise. Roosevelt told Huey everything was fine, fine, fine, but denounced him privately to Senator Johnson two days later.53
Hofstadter details Roosevelt’s “signal failure . . . in the realm of financial policy” as governor of New York. A state investigatory commission suggested banking reforms, citing the Bank of the United States for abuses. Roosevelt ignored it and appointed another investigative commission, with a director of the Bank of the United States among its members. This commission rejected the earlier recommendations. Shortly thereafter, the Bank of the United States failed, after which Roosevelt, “self-assured, unabashed, impenitent,” hectored the legislature to rectify abuses.54 Hofstadter’s essay is entitled “The Patrician as Opportunist.”
Huey traveled to New York after the banking controversy concluded. He planned to see reporters at 2 p.m. and then go to a show at 2:15 p.m. At 2 p.m. Huey opened his door “an inch and let out a gust of radio music” and said that an important conference delayed his plans. At 6 p.m. he met reporters. Huey was in a manic or mystic mood. If his economic ideas were adopted, golf links would replace farmland, and everyone would have time to read The Count of Monte Cristo. Newsmen asked how he got the name “Kingfish.” “He grinned . . . and walked up and down the room. ‘As the mist rises in an October field, as the cotton boll opens in the sun . . . (and so on) . . . so the name of Kingfish came.’ ”55
The Sunday Times on January 29 traced his career and described his mannerisms: he was always in action; centrifugal force impelled his body and mind; as a speaker his mind ran ahead of his words, leading to some erratic speech transitions; but he could be “as coldly logical as a corporation lawyer.” In the Senate he wandered around, sitting in any unoccupied seat, then bounded up again like a jumping jack. Huey’s jerky movements reminded the author of early motion-picture films that were always flickering. When interested, Huey would sit near a speaker and stare at him. “Nothing daunts him and no ridicule or contempt can pierce the armor of his self-esteem. His hair may stand on end, his arms wave like a windmill, his clothing may become ruffled, but behind all his explosive force is a keen and resourceful mind, which acknowledges no master.”56 Westbrook Pegler separately noted Huey’s impudence and intelligence.57 Journalists observed that, instead of the Senate hazing Huey, Huey had been hazing the Senate since he arrived.58
But Barkley argued Huey to a draw over whether the secretary of the treasury should remain on the Federal Reserve Board. Other senators debated Huey and sometimes had the last and best retort. What is extraordinary is Huey’s energy, resilience, and confidence despite a retort or adverse vote.
In January 1933, while Huey was proclaiming his banking expertise, the Union Indemnity Bond Group, tied in with his highway construction program, failed. Louisiana took the news calmly, in part because there had been so few bank failures. As the Times’s editors excoriated Huey for filibustering, its reporter wrote: “It is unanimously agreed that this record [of few bank failures] is due to the activities of Huey Long as Governor and Senator. . . . Whatever may be said about his oft-assailed dictatorship, it has operated for the good of the state in the hard years since 1929. . . . Louisiana banks were just about as heavily loaded with farm mortgages [and cotton loans] as any other banks. . . . But the immediate and sometimes drastic intervention of Huey Long brought aid whenever it appeared the day could be saved.”59
On January 25, the Glass bill was passed, but it was sent to the House of Representatives and killed. In the meantime, Huey had packed the membership of the National Rivers and Harbors Congress, an influential group lobbying for public works. Assisting him was Frank Reid, a Republican congressman from Chicago, ally of former Mayor Big Bill Thompson, and advocate for flood control.60
The year 1933 thus promised to be as triumphal as 1932, when he had confronted the Senate, made his views and himself known, helped nominate and elect a president and two senators, and was considered influential with Roosevelt. Now the subject of feature articles, he fostered the idea that he was big. When he went out to eat, he mixed his own salad dressing in restaurants. “It was quite a rite,” with the dumping of ice, and the mixing of cheeses and oil and vinegar. “Neighboring patrons regard[ed] a glimpse of the ceremony as justification for a cover charge.”61
The hallowed customs of the Senate could not be overcome so easily. Joe Robinson was not charmed or awed by Huey’s expertise in mixing salad dressings. Robinson could not deny Huey’s influence with the voters of his home state or overcome him in an open Senate debate.
Open debate or electoral defeat are not the only weapons to silence an upstart, however. We always have a wild man, one senator observed; we let him blow off steam and then tame him.62 One way to defeat a charging politician, like a charging army, is to attack his home base.
When Overton defeated Broussard in September 1932, Broussard asked the Senate to refuse Overton his seat.63 The appropriate Senate committee sent researchers to Louisiana. They talked to Allen Ellender and Harvey Peltier, Overton’s campaign managers, who admitted spending about $13,000, based on Seymour Weiss’s records. Overton had spent $400 or $500. The initial hearing was held on October 5 under Senator Connally.
Edward Rightor was Broussard’s attorney. Rightor’s propensity to pass gas caused Huey to nickname him “Whistle Britches.” Rightor conceded that he could not prove fraud, that Broussard got more votes, or that Broussard should be the nominee. The chairman of the Honest Election League, Burt W. Henry, asked the committee to infer fraud based on the use of dummy candidates and the amount of campaign money spent. They both wanted Overton to be denied his seat, however, forcing a new election.
Huey responded for Overton that the New Orleans results—where most of the dummy candidates were—had been attested to by a special arbitration committee set up between Overton and Broussard. Broussard’s representatives—headed by Rene Viosca, a law partner of J. Y. Sanders—signed its report. The arbitration committee never asked for a recount. There the matter stood in October before Roosevelt’s election, and there Huey expected it to end.64
After the election in November, nothing was done, but Huey either didn’t get the implied threat or chose to ignore it. During the filibuster over the banking bill, Connally asked to extend the deadline for his report. Startled, Huey asked why, but Connally finessed his inquiry. On January 27, 1933, days after Roosevelt’s visit to Washington, DC, the committee announced resumed hearings. “Interest [was] heightened by Senator Long’s recent activities . . . in which he has vehemently opposed the leadership of his own party.” Engaged as the committee’s counsel was Samuel T. Ansell, a former judge advocate general in the Army. In early February, the committee resumed its inquiry under Senator Howell of Nebraska, an ineffectual senator who never practiced law.65 Huey left for Louisiana to represent Overton. It is difficult to lead or filibuster in Washington when you are defending your ally in Louisiana.
Huey and Ansell clashed. On the first day, Huey said Ansell was taking so long he must need a job. Ansell retorted that Huey always had a job. Huey jibed that he could be elected, whereas Ansell could not. Ansell beat Huey by saying he had not run for office and would not do so under Huey’s circumstances. Ansell threw away his victory, however, by then asking if Huey should be referred to as “the Kingfish.” Huey acknowledged the title and the scope of his powers: he was Kingfish of the (Louisiana) lodge.
Weiss had destroyed supporting expenditure records but reconstructed them.66 Ansell charged that he was dealing with a deliberate, evil design. Huey replied so angrily that Ansell invited him to step outside. Huey said he would walk outside and whip hell out of him, and Ansell responded with a sneer: would he walk out alone or with a lot of armed guards? Huey replied that he would supply a guard for Ansell if he needed one.
Huey was then allowed to instruct Weiss to avoid naming banks that held campaign money because of a new banking crisis in Louisiana. Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York accused Rudolph Hecht, chairman of Hibernia Bank in New Orleans and director of the Regional Reconstruction Finance Authority, with arranging a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to a bonding company that owed Hibernia money. The bonding company used that money to repay a loan it had with Hibernia, and then failed.
A run on Hibernia ensued that afternoon. The bank president told Huey that night. Huey called New Orleans bankers into conference, summoned Governor Allen from Baton Rouge, and told him to bring the official seal of Louisiana. Huey’s plan was to declare a bank holiday on February 4 to stop the run while he arranged with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to infuse $20 million in cash on the following Monday. But no one could discover anything noteworthy that occurred on February 4. After a frantic search by librarians and others, a publisher phoned to say that Woodrow Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3. Huey decided that must have taken “two nights at least.” Allen made the proclamation for February 3 and 4.
The members of the conference had sworn themselves to secrecy. A Times-Picayune editor—also a bank director—had been present. The paper’s morning edition contained some details of the conference. When Huey learned this, in a towering and perhaps inebriated rage, he ordered General Fleming of the National Guard to seize its office. The paper recalled the edition, and Huey’s order was revoked.67
With the holiday declared and the Hibernia run averted on Saturday the 4th, Huey wrangled with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation all weekend, not having slept on Friday, and made radio announcements that no one would lose “so much as one slick, slivery dime.” Late Sunday afternoon, the corporation agreed to send $20 million, and Huey departed for a supper party, where he was treated as the conquering hero. Then the phone rang, and Huey was heard to say, “No, you can keep your damn fifteen million dollars. It’ll be twenty million dollars or nothing. . . . I don’t care if they did change their minds. If you send me any fifteen million or seventeen million or anything else but twenty million, I won’t take it, and we’ll all go to hell together.” Twenty million was wired to Hibernia. On Monday, Huey deposited $12,000 into Hibernia, money borrowed from his life insurance, declaring that he couldn’t think of a safer place to put his money. Days later, the state deposited several hundred thousand dollars into Hibernia.68 The Times wrote: “When speed and an idea or two are needed, the Kingfish will pop them out as rapidly as a machine gun. Even those who do not like him are willing enough to admit that his services in this crisis were extremely beneficial.”69
This crisis, very real, provided cover for Weiss to refuse to answer some of the Overton Committee’s questions, and Huey didn’t want many questions answered. Inquiries into campaign finances met a dead end because of the absence of recordkeeping, sloppy recordkeeping, or uncommunicative witnesses.70 Robert Maestri testified that he had been asked to donate to a relief fund and had done so, but, when asked if he had been requested to make a campaign contribution, Maestri said, “No; for the relief fund to be put in the expenses of the campaign.” Dr. Joseph O’Hara, who had replaced Maestri as the head of the Louisiana Democratic Association, testified that patronage workers were not forced to contribute to the campaign: they “had to pay that ten per cent voluntarily.”71
Ansell had an easy time demonstrating what Huey’s leaders conceded. They paid filing fees for “dummy” candidates who were going to drop out solely so they could appoint loyal election commissioners. The candidates lacking a sincere intent to run were committing perjury. But the Old Regulars had used dummies for decades, defeating court challenges to the practice, establishing the precedent.
Charles Suer, a part-time painter, restaurant proprietor, and exterminator, was asked why he decided to run for Congress. Suer just thought he was qualified. The highly educated Ansell moved in to humiliate the uneducated witness, asking him if he could convince others that he was qualified. Suer conceded that he “couldn’t convince anybody, because the facts are I never spoke to anybody about my being a candidate.” Ansell pretended shock: “Nobody?” That was correct, Suer replied, not even his wife. Did he announce his candidacy to the press or put up campaign posters? Again, no. Ansell bored in for the kill but asked one question too many: How did you expect to be elected? Suer paused: “That is the chance you take.”72
Inquiry into coerced payments of campaign contributions by government workers and the use of dummy candidates was a legitimate inquiry into the conduct of elections. A good chairman, however, would not have permitted the relentless, cumulative questioning of lay witnesses when the points about which they were testifying were conceded.
The committee’s inquiry, however, had little to do with the 1932 election but instead explored Huey’s entire career, a fishing expedition. Judges in civil cases try to prevent fishing expeditions—nonspecific searches for information—because they waste time, invade privacy, and distract from the relevant issues.73 The hearing lasted from February 3 to February 17 and provided a platform to all of Huey’s opponents.
Easily the most vicious and irrelevant witnesses were Huey’s brothers Julius and Earl. They testified that Huey accepted cash contributions from public utility companies in the 1928 campaign. Huey interrupted, stood up, and shouted that this was a “goddamn lie” but then apologized for his language, muttering to Overton within earshot of newsmen that he would put Earl in jail if he repeated the charge outside the hearing room (testimony in hearing is privileged).74 Bozeman testified that, when he was chairman of the Louisiana Tax Commission, Huey asked him to raise tax assessments on some opposition businesses and newspapers. Huey yelled that he was a “lying thief.”
The toll bridge plan was aired, with allegations that Overton stood to gain $200,000 if the toll bridge went through and that Huey collected $5,000 to give to Overton to assuage him when the plan was scrapped.75 One witness testified that the state overpaid cement dealers to build roads. Huey objected. “What has that got to do with the Overton seat in the United States Senate? Why not try us on whether the hens laid more eggs in June than they did in January?”76
Gamesmanship livened the inquiry. Huey showed an assistant U.S. attorney a copy of a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that a witness at a congressional hearing did not have to answer irrelevant questions. The lawyer acknowledged the ruling. Huey then told the committee that he had secured a “ruling” from the assistant U.S. attorney that the witness did not have to answer irrelevant questions. Letting Huey start a row in the opposition camp, Ansell summoned the assistant U.S. attorney, who sheepishly explained that he was only opining as a matter of general principle.
On the last day, Huey called several witnesses who testified to the absence of fraud in the election. Chief of police Reyer said it was the quietest election in the city’s history. The day afterward, Ansell said the inquiry was not half finished. The committee disclaimed Ansell’s remarks, and an early report was anticipated.77
The national press emphasized the ugly charges from the Overton hearings: Huey’s brother testifying that he was bribed, testimony that campaign contributions were extorted from state workers, that graft riddled the Highway Department, that dummy candidates could choose election commissioners, and the attempted retaliation of raising tax assessments on opponents. The papers also reported Huey’s denials, countercharges, and threats to jail perjurers, and the raucous, unruly conditions of the hearing.78 The Tribune opined that, when cornered, demagogues like Huey turn to irrelevant derelictions. It failed to see that the Senate leadership was doing this to Huey.79
Chairman Howell was worn out and did not care to return to Louisiana. Some blamed Huey’s circular, “The Kangaroo Court,” issued to protest the committee’s investigation,80 for Howell’s death in March. On the night of February 17, when the hearing concluded, Huey’s New Orleans home was set on fire.81
Almost in conjunction with the Overton hearings, Huey’s Louisiana’s opponents investigated election fraud related to the vote on seventeen constitutional amendments. Only two were controversial: to issue bonds to refinance Board of Liquidation debts and to permit New Orleans to purchase a ferry. These amendments were defeated in the rural parishes but passed in New Orleans by such big margins that Huey’s opponents suspected fraud. The district attorney, Eugene Stanley, somewhat independent of the Old Regulars and Huey, agreed to investigate and asked the court to turn over four ballot boxes to the grand jury. The court granted this request on November 23.
The following day, Attorney General Porterie asked Stanley to end the investigation to avoid imperiling the sale of the bonds, but Stanley refused. Porterie then supplanted Stanley, as permitted by law, but unwise. Porterie met with the grand jury on November 29. It took no action, which increased demands for an independent review. The Louisiana Bar Association, the New Orleans Bar Association, and the Young Men’s Business Club of New Orleans joined the Honest Election League to ask Porterie to step aside for Stanley. Porterie declined. The grand jury adjourned without counting the ballots. This outraged the judge and the bar association. It probed whether Porterie should be expelled for exerting improper influence on the grand jury.82
A third attack on Huey was led by the IRS. After Long’s Senate activities in April and May 1932, Hoover’s IRS began an inquiry into Huey’s taxes. In charge was agent Elmer Irey, who had obtained the facts used to convict Chicago mobster Al Capone for income tax evasion.
Senator Wheeler was sitting in a restaurant in Shreveport traveling to visit Roosevelt, just at the start of Stanley’s investigation. As a courtesy, he called Huey. Minutes later, two state policemen appeared and told him that Huey wanted them to drive him to New Orleans to meet. Wheeler demurred, but the policemen, grim and insistent, convinced him. They drove Wheeler to the capitol but arrived after midnight and Huey had gone to bed. They met the next morning. Told about the grand jury machinations, Huey suggested, as a pretense because of Wheeler’s presence, that the officials should be forced to brave the investigation. Huey asked Wheeler to talk to Roosevelt about the Treasury Department probe (Huey didn’t ask him to intervene in the Overton investigation, which shows that he didn’t think it would be resumed). Wheeler said nothing to Roosevelt.83 In January 1933, an article about the IRS probe appeared in a Memphis newspaper. It reported that Huey’s bank accounts were scrutinized, that he was shadowed by government agents during the Christmas holidays, his telephone was tapped, and his every movement watched.84
The psychological effect on Huey of the Overton, Stanley, and IRS investigations and the arson at his home can be guessed. When Huey returned to the Senate on February 21, he gave an address, “surpassing in violence all his previous outbursts,” denouncing Ansell. Huey accused Ansell of letting a criminal escape while he was in the Army to split a pot of gold with him, called him a dog-faced son of a wolf, a liar, a crook, a scoundrel, a Benedict Arnold, a burglar, and thief of the deepest dye. Most of Huey’s biographers report his speech only to that extent. The allegations about splitting a pot of gold seem surreal.
But “throughout his violent speech Senator Long was seconded by Senator Bennett C. Clark.” Even Senator Broussard, who denounced Huey in the Senate, said that he would “hold no brief for Gen. Ansell.”85 Why? A House committee had investigated Ansell a decade earlier. After resigning from the Army, Ansell became the attorney for Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, a draft dodger. Ansell obtained permission for Bergdoll to be released from prison so that he could locate $150,000 in gold that he said was buried in a Maryland hillside. Bergdoll then escaped to Germany. The House Committee wrote that Ansell was out of the Army and therefore “beyond the jurisdiction of court martial proceedings, but provision should be made against his future practice before any of the departments, before any court martial or in the courts of the District of Columbia, or the nation above whose safety and integrity he has placed gold.”86
Shocked at Huey’s speech, Senator Bailey asked him if he claimed the senatorial privilege from libel. Huey said he did not, but when Bailey persisted, he qualified his answer by saying Ansell could sue him in any court of competent jurisdiction, meaning Louisiana. The next day Ansell sued in Washington, DC.87 Huey asserted immunity and was upheld. But Huey had excerpted the speech in circulars, and such publications are not privileged, so Ansell amended his complaint. In a series of stories about Ansell’s lawsuit between March and May, the papers emphasized that Huey asserted immunity after he told the Senate that he wouldn’t.88 They disregarded Ansell’s misconduct.
Before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Huey recovered his cheerfulness. He flashed a million-dollar smile as he circulated among senators during the last day of the lame-duck Senate session.89 Huey got the IRS investigation killed by having his bank examiner force a bank to call a $250,000 loan of Hoover’s assistant secretary of the Navy, E. L. Jahncke of New Orleans. Huey’s friend Harvey Couch, a director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, called Huey to protest. Huey denied doing anything to call the loan: “I don’t have anything more to do with that bank examiner than the Assistant Secretary of the Navy has to do with the Treasury Department.” “Oh, is that it?” “That’s exactly it.” Embittered, Jahnke became an FBI informant. Inside the IRS, Irey was told to stop investigating so that the incoming administration could decide what to do with Huey.90
Also with the aid of Harvey Couch, Huey reached a truce with Joe Robinson. It was not revealed in the press, and the exact time of it is unknown. In March, the Overton Committee denied that it would tighten the “lax rules regarding admissibility” of evidence, but by June it revealed that testimony would be “confine[d]” to the defeat of Broussard.91 Huey’s attacks on Robin-son ended. Robinson became the majority leader. Huey applied for committee memberships and received assignments.
Huey thought he would have influence with the Roosevelt administration and let it show, sometimes in ways that did not enhance his reputation. At a Roosevelt advisor Raymond Moley dinner party, Huey crashed in, took a vicious bite out of an apple he plucked from a fruit bowl, tapped J. P. Morgan banker Norman Davis with it, and said, “I don’t like you and your goddamn banker friends.” Huey left as suddenly as he arrived. One guest was found cowering in the bathroom.92
Huey was not invited and didn’t crash a February 18 dinner hosted by the Inner Circle, a group of newspaper reporters. Roosevelt attended. The reporters lampooned the politicians and “told what they thought was on the minds of the party men.” One of the humorous songs was sung to the tune of “Fit as a Fiddle (and Ready for Love).” An excerpt:
We have a mandate we must carry out,
None of us knows what the hell it’s about, Hungry for office and thirsty for beer,
Now with Johnson, and George Norris,
Huey Long and Cactus Jack,
We can run this gosh-darned country
With a hey-nonny-nonny and a hot-cha-cha.
Hey diddle diddle, they helped us to win,
But we’ll throw ’em overboard now that we’re in.93