Win the Race or Die Trying: Uncle Earl's Last Hurrah

By Jack B. McGuire

Earl Kemp Long (1895–1960) was the political heir to his brother Huey in Louisiana politics. A country boy who never lost his common touch, he ran for office in every state election between 1933 and 1959. He was the best campaigning politician Louisiana ever produced. In his final term as governor, he suffered a breakdown on live television while addressing members of the legislature. He was kidnapped and committed to mental institutions in Texas and Louisiana. That he engineered his own release gives proof that he was in charge of his faculties.

Abandoned by his family and his allies, Long was written off politically. But in 1960, he had other ideas. He was plotting his comeback. In poor health, smoking and drinking, he decided to challenge the incumbent in Louisiana's Eighth Congressional District, Harold McSween. Doctors warned him that the race could cost him his life. But politics was his life, and he vowed to win the election or die trying. He did both.

This book tells the story of the last year of Long's life and the campaign that he waged and won by sheer force of will. He won the election (and a sizable bet he placed on it), but he was dead in just over a week. Win the Race or Die Trying captures the essence of Earl Long by chronicling the desperate, death-defying campaign he waged to redefine his legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jul 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496807649

Jack B. McGuire

Jack B. McGuire served as special assistant to the mayor of New Orleans, press secretary to the mayor, and director of public relations from 1964 to 1970 as well as a councilman-at-large for the city of Mandeville from 1984 to 2000. For over forty years, he has been an officer of Union Savings and Loan Association. He is author of Win the Race or Die Trying: Uncle Earl's Last Hurrah and coauthor (with Walter Greaves Cowan) of Louisiana Governors, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

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INTRODUCTION

If they ever tell you that Ol’ Earl Long is dead, Louisiana folklore went, you just ask them to call a governor’s race. If Earl don’t git up and run, he’s dead sure enough.¹

Earl Kemp Long, younger brother of the Kingfish, Huey P. Long, was a candidate for governor or lieutenant governor in every state election but one between 1932 and 1959. In campaigns for governor in 1940, 1948, and 1956, he crisscrossed the state, making hundreds of stump speeches as he appealed to and campaigned among people at crossroads and creek forks who had never seen a governor before. On June 26, 1939, serving as lieutenant governor, he took the oath of office as governor for the first time in a brief governor’s mansion ceremony following the resignation of Governor Richard W. Leche. Exactly twenty years later, on June 26, 1959, he was released from confinement at the state mental hospital at Mandeville. In his long political career he succeeded to the governorship once, won it twice, lost it once, won the lieutenant governorship once, lost it three times, and was congressman-elect when he died. He put it best when he said, I’ve had ups and downs all my life, just more ups than downs.²

He was probably the most approachable governor Louisiana has ever had. In his final term, from 1956 to 1960, he disdained attending many ceremonial functions, sending Lieutenant Governor Lether Frazar instead, but he loved to stop at rural cafes, gas stations, and feed stores to talk with farmers in a language they understood. His shopping trips for bargains were legendary, and if there was a limit on a purchase at a supermarket, he would go through the checkouts several times and have his state police driver do the same. He loved to haggle, and while many purchases, particularly those in quantity, sounded strange, he bought things for the farm and gifts for friends and poor people. A dozen straw hats would go in the trunk of his limousine, and he would put one on and then give it to an old-timer at the next stop, frequently signing the hatband for the recipient, who was delighted to brag that Uncle Earl had given him his own hat. He took enormous pleasure from giving things to people and would sit on the back seat of his car shelling peas and putting them in small sacks to give away. Dupre Litton, his executive counsel, wrote that Long spent most weekends at his beloved Pea Patch Farm, and upon returning on Sunday night his car was often loaded with vegetables, corn meal, buttermilk, and pork. This was a major portion of the Mansion menu. He hunted wild hogs and said that when he did, Uncle Earl always brings home the bacon.³

Al Mechana, one of the state troopers who drove Long, said that they sometimes had chickens and pigs in the Cadillac limousine and on occasions had more animals at the end of the day than they started with. He’d get a hamper full of chickens and there’d be feathers flying out of the trunk like we’d just come out of Mexico, Mechana recalled. He’d give somebody a chicken and they’d give him a little pig. Into the trunk the pig would go. By the time we got to Winnfield, we looked like Ringling Brothers.⁴

At heart, he was a country boy from over in Winn Parish who knew how to talk to the common people, and he knew how to look when he talked. Iris Kelso, the dean of Louisiana political columnists for many years, said he was irascible, unpredictable, earthy, and brilliant in his deliberately rural ways.⁵

He asked listeners at his stump speeches to vote for a man who looks like you, thinks like you, talks like you, works like you, acts like you, and smells like you on Saturday night. In his final campaign, he told stump audiences, I’ve always tried to stay with the people that made me. I could have gone with the big shots, sold out the poor people and the schoolchildren and the old agers, and the papers and the fat cats would all be saying that Earl Long’s a great man, that Uncle Earl’s a statesman. But I’m not a high hat and never have been. I’m a country boy from over here in Winn Parish, a farmer like you, and I like my Pea Patch more than anything else. Vote for one of you, not a big shot who wears fancy clothes and talks ten dollar words.⁶

I’m just an old ordinary gazebo, he said. As for a socially elite men’s club in New Orleans, I don’t belong to the Boston Club. You could look at me and tell that. There’s two reasons—they don’t want me and I don’t want them. He said, I don’t know how to get in Antoine’s, a legendary New Orleans restaurant, or get out. I was led in there once in my life and led out. With the menu in French, he said, They didn’t have a thing on the bill of fare that I could read. Commme-ca-ca-silvouplait, poly pea pot in the bag, and it cost about eighteen dollars. I could go to the cafeteria and eat for six bits or ninety cents.⁷

He told candidates on his ticket, Don’t write anything you can phone. Don’t phone anything you can talk face-to-face. Don’t talk anything you can smile. Don’t smile anything you can wink. And don’t wink anything you can nod. He also warned, Don’t ever take too big a campaign contribution. I did once and the sonofagun was in my outer office every day for four years.⁸

Until television caught up with, and regrettably surpassed, his style of fire-and-brimstone politics, he put on a marvelous show every four years, bringing the sound and fury of Longite politics to every nook and cranny of the state’s sixty-four parishes. It was as much fun as when the circus came to town.

There you would find him, in any of a score of backwoods parishes in the heat of an election campaign, Thomas Martin wrote in Dynasty: The Longs of Louisiana. The steaming Louisiana sun would heat up and Earl would get hot with it. Hands jammed into his hip pockets, coat off, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the galluses showing, he would roar his message with a gravel-tinged voice that took on a tremulous falsetto when he became excited.⁹

Audiences roared at his assaults on political enemies, some good-humored, others daggers to hearts. He doesn’t have enough sense to get out of the rain was how he characterized one opponent. He’s in every skin game, and he’s bald-headed too, was his description of another. No question but that man is a confirmed alcoholic. He’s a wife-beater. He’s been shooting at his wife, and he has diabetes, he said of another. One opponent was the biggest shyster that God ever let live, others were smooth as a peeled onion and so bad he couldn’t get elected dog catcher. He chuckled that a legislator was too big a liar. You know, sometimes you want a reasonable liar that can make it stick.¹⁰

Marshall Frady wrote in his book Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey that their supporters loved Earl but they feared Huey. He said that

Earl was a somewhat more antic and skirling spirit, an obstreperous jaybird of a man even well into middle age, one watery eye usually squinting feistily and waggishly, attired in black mohair suits with flowered ties, with the sober swankiness of a funeral parlor director or prosperous Baptist parson. Sitting, though, he would cross his legs to disclose drooping white cotton socks. He was disposed to a cuisine consisting of Vienna sausages, salted watermelon, and buttermilk. Whenever he was out on his campaign circuits, it was his habit, while perched restlessly up on the platform among the other candidates on a hotly flaring afternoon, to produce from his suit pockets an inexhaustible succession of handkerchiefs, like a magician endlessly flourishing forth scarves, each of which he would sop in generous splashes of Coca-Cola and then swipe bracingly over his flushed face. After that, with an air of abstract earnestness, he would absorb himself in grabbing at the flies mumbling about him.

He was, on the whole, an open-hearted and affable soul, finally innocent of Huey’s capacity for a mongoose-eyed ferocity. . . . In his constant peregrinations by limousine over the map of Louisiana, he would repeatedly pause along the roads to purchase such random commodities as post-hole diggers, hams, pitchforks, forty-four cases of cantaloupes once and seven hundred dollars’ worth of cowboy boots, occasional livestock like goats and chickens, cases of 7-Up and Dr. Pepper, fifteen pounds of okra—he once suspended a press conference at the mansion over two hours while he lingered beside some highway haggling over guinea hens.¹¹

Frady said that his mornings as Governor usually commenced with an exhaustive meditation on racing sheets arrayed over a conference table, after which he would place his bets by phone, later dispatching a state trooper over to his bookies to collect if he had fared handsomely. That out of the way, he would then studiously consult the supermarket ads in that day’s paper.¹²

The cantaloupes and cowboy boots Frady wrote about were purchased on a celebrated western trip as gifts for allies after talking his way out of one mental hospital and firing his way out of another by dismissing the people responsible for his confinement. One legislator said that Long sent him a crate of Texas cantaloupes collect and the freight charge alone was more than what the cost would have been at his local market. As for his election bets, rather than two-dollar ones he bet hundreds on some races, keeping a fund of cash in a safe in his mansion bedroom. One story went that a Baton Rouge bookie whom he bet with on credit always had to pay the winnings when a state trooper showed up to collect them, but Long never sent money to cover the bets he lost. When Uncle Earl got deeply in the hole, the bookie pestered him for his money. Annoyed, Long said the bookie was operating an illegal gambling operation and he sent State Police to raid it.¹³

He had a lot of fun lambasting the big daily newspapers, calling the Times-Picayune the Times Pick-On-You and the Alexandria Daily Town Talk the Alexandria Blabber. He saw the value of pouring it on them in rural areas — and he did. You can tell a man by the enemies he has made, he shouted. The Times-Picayune is one of my biggest enemies and I don’t propose to lose it by any act of mine. He told one stump audience, The only way Uncle Earl can tell the people what’s going on is with this big mouth of mine. You can’t believe what you read in the newspapers. They don’t tell the truth. But how are you going to fight people who buy paper by the boxcar and ink by the tank car? You need to come out and hear the truth.¹⁴

In a 1948 cover story, Time magazine described him as shifty-eyed and wrote that

he has none of Huey’s wild, magnetic appeal. At 53 he is a soft, dumpy man with a mushy voice, a flaccid handshake, a venomous temper, and the general bearing of a small-town pool hall operator. But he has the Long Look and a shrewd insight into the mind of Louisiana’s tobacco-chewing common man. He calls himself Old Earl, gets up as early as 5:30 in the morning to let visitors wander into the governor’s mansion. He appoints colonels with a lavish hand and presents lesser fry with penknives, after first extracting a penny so a friendship won’t be cut. He enjoys the feel of clean white suits, but he never allows his interest in the finer things to interfere with a certain honest vulgarity. On the day he was elected governor, he asked friends to his house, spread out a copy of the anti-Long New Orleans Item, and spent the afternoon spitting on it.¹⁵

Long was not only happy to let visitors into the mansion to show them around, he often invited supporters with whom he kept up correspondence to spend the night. He wrote one Cloutierville couple that you have always been considered among my very best friends and said, Mrs. Long and I will be very happy to have you visit us at the Mansion at any time convenient to you. We have plenty of room and would be happy to have you spend the night so we can see and talk with you in the near future.¹⁶

Uncle Earl said that the deadliest politics in the world is no politics at all. Mighty few politicians ever seemed to learn that. They all want to corkscrew, sidestep, and do fancy footwork. When a man never opens his mouth except to say what he means; when he never breaks a promise; when he keeps in touch with his people and doesn’t let the hangers-on and sucker-ups surround him so the people can’t get to him, that man has ninety-nine percent of the professional politicians licked from the jump, because they can’t figure out anything as simple as that. He said I’ve got one language—the truth!¹⁷

Earl Long did not simply pose as a friend and champion of the common man and a benefactor of the little people of Louisiana. He was motivated by a genuine desire to improve the lot of the state’s poor people.

My opponents fought the old age pension, he sneered. Now they tell you they can give you a better old age pension themselves. They fought our hospital program. Now they say they can run the hospitals better. They opposed the good roads program, and now they claim the ability to build good roads, better than those who made them possible. A minimum pay scale for teachers was obtained over their opposition, yet they now pose as the teachers’ friend. Several months before he left office, Long was asked in an interview what he considered his greatest achievements. He named the old age pension first, then school hot lunches and good roads.¹⁸

In stump speeches, he loved to recall his own school days, when children of poor families would go behind the schoolhouse to eat an old cold biscuit and old cold greens. Those biscuits were so hard you could knock a mule out with one. He was proud, he would say, to have provided a good hot meal and cold, sweet milk for kids whose school lunch was the only full balanced meal of the day they received.¹⁹

Long equalized the pay for schoolteachers, ending the longtime practice of paying white teachers more than black teachers with the same seniority. With the exception of a bond issue to pay a World War II veterans’ bonus, he did not increase the state debt; he proposed a $140 million bond issue for roads and bridges as a constitutional amendment in 1950, but it failed. Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville, planned as a custodial facility, was changed to a treatment venue by Long after state hospitals director Jesse Bankston recommended that it be a state-of-the-art institution.²⁰

While there were noteworthy good government aspects to many things he did, Long was a master of the art of spoils politics. Those who are with us in the first primary will get the jobs, contracts, and favors, and those who come aboard in the runoff will get just what they deserve—good government, he chortled. When a green reporter saw the governor in the capitol building and asked how many people worked there, he said about half of them. A rookie legislator told the governor how thrilled he was to be representing his people and said, Governor, I’m going to be with you when you’re right, and I’ll have to be against you when you’re wrong. Long snarled, "Understand this, boy, I don’t need you when I’m right. Asked what to tell a delegation that said they had not gotten a road he had promised, he answered, Tell ’em I lied. The Louisiana legislature, he said in a moment of anger, is the best bunch of lawmakers money can buy. Asked if he bought them, he said, Hell no, I don’t buy them. Huey bought them, but I just rent them, it’s cheaper that way."²¹ As for Attorney General Jack P. F. Gremillion, he laughed, If you ever want to hide anything from Gremillion, put it in a law book.²²

Diehard anti-Longs viewed the Long administrations as periodic doses of evil visited upon the state, yet the survival of their faction was largely dependent on the excesses of their opponents and the extent to which they adopted the Long programs as their own. If indeed the Long versus anti-Long fights were contests of Good versus Evil, then in Earl’s three major elections, for governor in 1940, 1948, and 1956, the final score was Evil 2, Good, 1.

1.

THE LONGS: A POLITICAL FAMILY

Earl Kemp Long loved to tell crowds in stump speeches that he grew up poor but had no regrets about that because it made him understand those who had few advantages and made him want to provide benefits and a better life for them. In his famous speech by the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville, Huey Long said that generations had cried bitter tears there, waiting for the roads and bridges, schools and hospitals that they had been promised but had never come. Huey asked his listeners to give him the opportunity to dry those tears, and once he had the power to do so, he pulled Louisiana out of the mud and into the modern age. His younger brother, Earl, built on that legacy during a long and storied political career

In his monumental biography of Huey Long, Dr. T. Harry Williams wrote that Huey created a myth that the Longs were abjectly poor and lacked education, culture and opportunity. It was accepted not only by his own generation but also by later ones as well, and finally by history. Writings about the Longs almost universally depict them as representing the very lowest strata of Southern white society, the poor white or hillbilly type, crude, coarse and comic. So plausible did Long make the myth that only a few have challenged it. The most violent dissenters are the feminine members of the Long family, Huey’s sisters, who survived him and have to live with his legend.¹

Huey P. Long Sr., known as Old Hu, provided well for his family, at least by the standards of Winn Parish. He bought a tract of several hundred acres with a large log house in 1886; the cabin was replaced by another house, and in 1907 he built a colonial-revival house with two stories, ten rooms, and a balcony. He had four sons and five daughters; one daughter, Helen, died in infancy. The sons were Huey P. Long Jr., the Kingfish, who dropped the diminutive from his name; Julius T. Long; Earl K. Long; and George S. Long. The surviving daughters were Charlotte, Clara, Lucille, and Olive.

Their father prospered during the lumber boom in the hill country of north central Louisiana. The town of Winnfield grew, and Old Hu profited by selling property he had acquired for home sites. Few Winn Parish families owned more land than the Longs, nor did any family live any better or more proudly. Old Hu and his wife were proud that they had a big house, that they set a good table, and that they were financially independent. They were even prouder that they were people who had genuine intellectual pretensions, who read books and magazines, and who talked about things they read. There was no public library in Winnfield, and while books were not common in many households, the Longs boasted shelves of the classics and subscribed to magazines. They were, Dr. Williams said, among the literary elite.²

While Huey and Earl both played the rube when it suited them, they were not the uneducated boys they led people to believe. Old Hu was insistent that every one of his children got some kind of college education and helped each on the way as much as he could, Williams wrote. Julius attended Louisiana Polytechnic Institution at Ruston and Tulane University. George received a dental degree from an institution in Quincy, Illinois. Huey spent brief interludes at the University of Oklahoma and Tulane. Earl, who came of college age when his father had more money than when Julius and Huey were young, went to Polytechnic, Louisiana State University [in Baton Rouge] and Loyola University in New Orleans. All the girls took the two-year teacher training course at the state normal school at Natchitoches, and all taught in secondary or grade schools for varying periods. One, Olive, eventually received a master’s degree from Columbia University and became a member of the faculty of the normal school now known as Northwestern State University.³

Because they owned land and had a relatively large home, the Longs stood high in Winn Parish. That was a relative term, however. In a richer, plantation parish, the Longs would have been on a lower, middle-class rung; in Winn, they were on a top rung because farmers in Winn, with its thin soil, had a rougher time than those in most other parishes. Winn was poor—pathetically, almost sensationally poor—but they did not accept their lot as something ordained by higher economic law or by people higher on the economic scale; they did not see it as something to be endured without complaint.⁴

Voters in Winn Parish did not support secession during the Civil War and instructed their delegate to the state convention to oppose leaving the Union; he was one of 17 dissenting votes out of 130, and he refused to sign the Ordinance of Secession. In the 1890s, the Populist Party appealed to the sense of class identity of farmers in the South and Midwest with its radical remedy for the ills of the time—a program of national governmental control over the economy. The farmers in Winn embraced its ideology and became its strongest supporters in the state.⁵

The Long children grew up with a keen understanding of their roots in the backwater area known for poverty and dissent. They became a remarkable family that produced governors, US representatives, and US senators, and they divided Louisiana for decades into two political camps—the Longs and the anti-Longs.

The oldest of the Long children, Julius Tison Long, was born in 1879. He practiced law and in 1912 was elected the district attorney for the Fifth Judicial District of Winn and Jackson Parishes. He served for eight years. Rather than stand for reelection in 1920, Julius ran for state district court judge against the incumbent Casimir Moss, a former political ally, and lost in a heated campaign.

Julius moved to Shreveport in 1921 and continued to practice law until his death in 1965. Thomas Martin said that Julius would write scathing articles denouncing his brother as a thief and a liar. One, published in Real America in September 1933, was titled What I Know About My Brother, Senator Huey P. Long. Julius supported Huey in his first race for a seat on the Railroad Commission in 1918 and backed him in both campaigns for governor.

Julius was the early organizer, the money raiser, the political horse trader and detail man without whom no political organization flourishes. When Huey did not support Earl for governor or lieutenant governor in 1932 and a defiant Earl ran for the latter office against Huey’s candidate, Julius and most of the family rallied behind Earl. Julius and Earl both testified against Huey at a US Senate subcommittee hearing into election fraud in Louisiana after Huey’s candidate, John H. Overton, unseated US Senator Edwin Broussard. Julius described how Huey received big rolls of cash from utility lobbyists. He called Huey a drunkard surrounded by a gang of gunmen and said that he should be forced out of public life.⁶

In 1934, Huey and Earl made up, and Earl supported Huey’s candidate, Lieutenant Governor John B. Fournet, for a seat on the Louisiana Supreme Court. Julius supported Fournet’s opponent, and they almost came to blows when Earl taunted him at a political meeting. In later years, Julius and Earl were not close. When Earl was sworn in as governor in 1948, he had Judge Casimir Moss, the man who had thwarted Julius’s judicial ambitions, administer the oath of office. The enmity lingered a decade later. Julius had nothing public to say about Earl Long’s breakdown while the latter was serving as governor in 1959, which was brought on in part by the stress Earl experienced fighting segregationist voter purges that swept the state in the wake of President Dwight Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to integrate Little Rock High School. Julius supported the segregationist ally of Leander Perez, Willie Rainach, for governor in the primary election that year and eventual winner Jimmie Davis in the runoff against New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Morrison.⁷

George Shannon Long, known as Shan or Doc, was regarded as the handsomest of the Long men. He practiced dentistry in Oklahoma City and served in the Oklahoma state legislature, but he eventually returned to Louisiana. He was elected to Louisiana’s Eighth District seat in the US House of Representatives in 1952 and served until his death in 1958.

Charlotte Arabella Long Davis, born November 11, 1876, was the oldest of the clan. In addition to teaching school in Winn Parish, she was a tutor for many children. She married Robert W. Davis, a lumberman, and after his death she was president of Davis Bros. Lumber Company in Ansley in neighboring Jackson Parish. Active in civic and charitable work in Ruston, she sang in the First Baptist Church choir and was a member of the Colonial Dames, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the National Society of the Sons and Daughters of Pilgrims. She died on May 15, 1961.⁸

When Lucille Long Hunt died in Ruston on February 28, 1985, at age eighty-five, she was the last survivor of the Long children. Born on January 31, 1898, she taught school in Shreveport and was widowed by Stewart Smoker Hunt, a prominent lumberman. Her son, John S. Hunt II, was an attorney and served on the Louisiana Public Service Commission from 1964 until 1972.⁹

Olive Ray Long Cooper lived the longest of the Long siblings, passing on at the age of ninety-five on January 8, 1982, in Natchitoches. Born in Winnfield on April 17, 1886, she earned a degree in art. She married Edward Cooper and they moved to Natchitoches so she could head the Art Department at what is now Northwestern State University. Her own work was exhibited in a number of galleries. Active in civic affairs, she founded the Natchitoches Art League and the St. Denis Spring Arts Festival and was a charter member of the Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches.¹⁰

Clara Long Knott joined her sister Lucille Long Hunt in campaigning for Earl in the 1960 race for Louisiana’s Eighth District seat in the US House of Representatives. Born October 5, 1888, she taught in public schools for ten years and in 1914 married William M. Knott of Many, a cashier at Sabine State Bank and Trust. Knott became president of the bank in 1916 and served in that capacity until his death in 1952. Clara prevailed on Earl in 1956 during his final term as governor to make old Fort Jesup a state park.

Fort Jesup was founded by Zachary Taylor in 1822 as an outpost to protect US interests against Mexico. The fort was located within ten miles of Many and had been under the care of locals until Clara convinced her brother to make it a state park. In 1961, Fort Jesup was designated a National Historic Landmark. Clara was president of the Children of the American Revolution and Louisiana vice regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution as well as a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and the Daughters of Pilgrims. She died on January 27, 1973, and is buried in the Fort Jesup Cemetery.¹¹

Charlotte and Clara were proud to be accepted into membership in patriotic organizations based on colonial and revolutionary ancestry, presumably through Longs who were in the Baltimore area before the Revolution. The Maryland Longs were people of substance. Old Hu’s father, John Long, was born in Ohio, but John Long’s father James was an Episcopalian minister and physician from Baltimore. James Long devoted himself to the ministry, and a preaching call took him to Springfield, Ohio, and then, in 1841, to Smith County, Mississippi, from which three of his sons (including Hu) went to Louisiana.¹² Charlotte did the extensive genealogical research required on application for membership and shared her files of church, legal, and census records and the family tree with T. Harry Williams for his biography of Huey.¹³

Huey and Earl would not have been caught dead bragging about colonial ancestors and revolutionary patriots. Nor did they tap into Confederate traditions in their politics. Winn Parish had two hundred slave owners and one thousand slaves in 1860, but most of the white farmers operated small patches. They also saw the Civil War through the traditional southern agrarian lens of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Many Winn Parish farmers dodged conscription into the Confederate army while hoping for a Union victory. John Long did not serve; his two brothers were in the Confederate army for a limited time.¹⁴ Earl never referred to the Civil War. Huey spoke of Confederate legend in mocking terms during a speech in the US Senate. Williams wrote that Huey had boasted of his ancestors who had been Southern patriots. They got to be patriots, he said, because the sheriff arrested them and forced them into Confederate service. Huey and Earl had other ancestors who fought for the Union. Huey also said that he had relatives who wanted to fight on both sides.¹⁵

Earl never conjured up memories of Pickett’s Charge or the burning of Atlanta, and he made no claims of his ancestry other than that they were poor but that his parents had raised him right and worked him hard. He spent hours under a hot sun picking cotton, Earl claimed, and there were days when he was so exhausted that he had to put a watermelon in his bag to make the weight for the day’s picking.

Earl Kemp Long was born in Winnfield on August 26, 1895, the eighth of nine children. He and Huey were very close during childhood, and he was the only family member to remain close to Huey during adulthood.

Earl dropped out of school to take to the road as a traveling salesman. When Huey ran for railroad commissioner in 1918, Earl covered the district for him, nailing up posters and nailing down votes. Huey won. When he ran for governor in 1924, Earl worked for his brother’s strong third-place finish, which laid the groundwork for Huey’s successful 1928 campaign. As a reward for his work on Huey’s behalf, he was named state inheritance tax collector for Orleans Parish.¹⁶

Earl did not receive a college degree, but he took law courses at Loyola University of the South in New Orleans and passed a special bar examination. If it wasn’t for the Catholics I wouldn’t be a lawyer, he said. I went to Loyola University. I’m a Baptist but the Catholic Fathers there gave me a free scholarship. He wore a Loyola ring and would hold his hand up and point to it on the stump, telling audiences to be tolerant as he was. He told one rally that he was sixty percent Baptist and forty percent Catholic, which was the makeup of the state then. His gravelly voice was the result of a childhood accident, when he mistook a jar of lye water for plain water and swallowed from it. In later years, when his throat was sore after stump speeches, he liked to sip from a jar of pure honey.¹⁷

He also had a stump story about how he got up at five o’clock Sunday mornings to get the surrey ready to take his Baptist grandparents to church. He would come back, rest and feed the horses, and then he would take his Catholic grandparents to Mass. Riding back from a political meeting, his driver said, Governor, I didn’t know you had Catholic grandparents. Laughing, he said, Hell, boy, we didn’t even have a surrey.¹⁸

Palmer R. Long of Shreveport, one of Huey’s three children, said that his uncle liked to have a good time and made the campaign caravans of sound trucks and cars a lot of fun. I was around on the campaign trail with him lots of times, Palmer said. It was hilarious. You know, giving away, hell, you name it, at his speeches. Finally he was giving away everything from watermelons to kids, just anything to get a vote, I mean anything. Palmer said that Earl was not as smart as Huey, but country folks identified with him. See, Daddy had to more or less act the country boy, he explained. Earl was the country boy. That was what the difference was. He was country through and through. Wasn’t nothing but.¹⁹

David Bell was a cousin of Long’s; his grandmother, Delia Tison, and Earl’s mother, Caledonia Long, were sisters. He was forty-seven when Long died and said he was with Earl for thirty-two years, working in campaigns, driving him, and holding state appointments. He was director of Veterans Affairs in 1959, when Earl fired him after public reports that he had been extravagant with expense accounts, but they stayed together