Louisiana in the 1930s

ROBERT B. HEILMAN: Huey Long was killed in 1935. There's no reason why you should remember it; I wrote an essay on it because I was present. [My wife Ruth] and I, on what was practically our honeymoon, arrived at Baton Rouge on Labor Day in 1935. [The city of Baton Rouge is the State Capital of Louisiana and the home of Louisiana State Univesity. -ed] The next Sunday, we went to a meeting of the legislature because the United States Senator Huey Long was going to be there.

And we were sitting in the balcony, which is at the rear of the lesser chamber, and we saw Huey Long in action on the floor. United States Senator Huey Long was sitting in one of the head chairs of the Lower House of the Louisiana legislature. After about forty-five minutes, he left; he was walking down the aisle underneath us with henchmen going after him in droves.

Senator Huey Long

And then we heard something that sounded like firecrackers. People started running back in and ducking behind desks. What we were doing was attending the death of Huey Long–well, he died two and a half days later. That was quite an introduction for a couple of Northerners to Louisiana! We thought, "So that's how they settle problems here!"

The head of the department at that time came to my apartment several days later. He said, "Heilman, I don't know if the university is going to open next week.” I thought he meant that a formal period of mourning might con­tinue. But no–what he meant was that the whole state might fall apart. I thought, "Good God!" But the university did open.

LEWIS P. SIMPSON: Huey, he had actually got control of everything, even of the university. He had the National Guard here in Baton Rouge and so on. He had made the National Guard into his own groom, so to speak, as he already had the state police and the state legislature. He left the governorship to become a United States Senator, but in fact he kept both jobs and solidified his power in Louisiana even though he had gone to Washington.

He had aspi­rations to become president, and there were reports that Franklin Roosevelt was rather afraid of Huey Long. But I don't know how true that was, consid­ering Roosevelt had some cognizance of the fact that he [Long] would have some problems trying to establish himself as a national force as well as a hav­ing a stake in the South.

That was the context when Voegelin arrived. By the time he got here, what is referred to as "the Scandals" had already broken open. By 1939, a number of members of the Long regime were in prison, including the president of Louisiana State University. He had been engaged in various fraudulent activ­ities.

He was sentenced to the state penitentiary at Angola, which is still bad enough, but in those days was probably one of the worst penitentiaries in the country! They still wore prison stripes, traditional prison garb. There is a picture in Life magazine, oh, from about 1943: "Ronald Smith, former president of LSU, standing in a cane field with a machete cutting cane.” Anyway, he died there not long afterward. It was a strange time in Louisiana. A great deal of it was used in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men.