Each first came to prominence a century ago, yet when we think of Babe Ruth and Huey Long through the telescope of time, parallels between the two men appear pronounced. They looked somewhat alike, as each man had a stocky frame and a square face. Both lived large. Similar superlatives (and, in some cases, epithets) were used in describing them. Plus, they were contemporaries.
So the question becomes – did they ever meet?
Internet searches of “Huey Long and Babe Ruth” turned up a link to the 2006 book written by Richard D. White, Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long. Referring to voter fraud in the September 9, 1930 election for U.S. Senator, White writes, “In one St. Bernard Parish precinct, the official record indicated that voters marched to the polls in alphabetical order. In others, the rolls included the names of Clara Bow, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Charlie Chaplin.”
Grand Opera House of the South in Crowley, present day. Photo by Sue Lincoln
Search responses also linked to the Grand Opera House of the South, located in Crowley. Suggested as an interesting stop for historically-inclined tourists, the page says that in its heyday, “notables such as Enrico Caruso, Babe Ruth, Clark Gable, Huey Long and Madame de Vilchez-Bizzet of the Paris Opera were just a few of the famous to grace the Grand’s ‘mammoth’ stage.”
Babe Ruth in Shreveport, 1921. Photo courtesy thisdayinbaseball.com
Alas, further research showed that the two men never stood on the Opera House stage at the same time. Babe Ruth’s lone appearance there was in March 1921, when he and the New York Yankees swung through Louisiana as part of spring training. They played a game in Lake Charles against the St. Louis Cardinals, who trained then in Orange, Texas. And the Yankees played an exhibition game on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, against the pride of Acadia Parish, the Crowley Millers. In the game with the popular local minor league club – according to a newspaper report – Ruth threw no strikeouts, gave up no bases on balls, and hit no homers. Still, the Yankees beat the Millers 14-4, and that evening Ruth took the stage at Crowley’s Grand Opera House of the South, to doff his cap to his admirers there in Louisiana’s “Rice Capital.”
Huey Long frequently stood on the same stage, making it a regular rally stop when he campaigned for any office. When the Babe came through in 1921, Huey was already a state commissioner, having been elected to the Louisiana Railroad Commission in 1918. (The panel was officially renamed the Louisiana Public Service Commission in 1921.) Long next ran for office – Louisiana governor – in 1924. He lost that race, but ran again in 1928 and won. Long then ran for U.S. senator in 1930.
No meeting in Crowley.
Searchin’, Searchin’ for the Babe Huey
Continued searching for links between the two men at first seemed like apophenia, but then devolved into a modified version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
There’s an urban-legendary list of claimed coincidences between two assassinated U.S. Presidents John F Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. First published in 1964, subsequent investigations have proved some of the listed items to be based on misinformation, while others have proved to be just coincidences. The endurance of the list (it made the rounds of re-posting and sharing on Facebook just this past year) even has a psychological term. It’s called the phenomenon of apophenia, which is defined as the “tendency to perceive order in random configurations.”
Here are some of the near coincidences between Ruth and Long.
Babe Ruth retired from baseball in 1935. Huey Long was assassinated in 1935.
Huey Long was one of nine siblings. Babe Ruth was the oldest of eight children (though only he and his sister survived to adulthood.)
Huey Long funeral, left. Babe Ruth funeral, right.
Long died September 10, 1935, after being shot in the state capitol two days prior. His body lay in state at the capitol he built, and over 200,000 people traveled to Baton Rouge to pay their respects and attend Long’s Sept. 12 funeral.
Ruth died August 16, 1948. His body lay in repose in Yankee Stadium – also known as the “House that Ruth Built”, with his funeral two days later at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. In all, over 100,000 people lined up and paid their respects to the Babe.
Both men were known to drink – no big deal, except their heydays in the public eye also coincided with Prohibition, which was the law of the land from 1920 to 1933. And Huey Long was a Baptist, a denomination that frowned on drinking, period. Babe Ruth was a Catholic.
As for the “Six Degrees” game, in a 1994 magazine interview, actor Kevin Bacon said he “had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them.” That statement was combined with “six degrees of separation,’ which states “all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other,” giving birth to the ”Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” parlor game. The game has become a standard in popular culture, now designated “Bacon’s Law” or with current verbal shorthand referring to someone’s “Bacon number.” For example, Tom Cruise’s Bacon number is one, due to both appearing in “A Few Good Men.” John Goodman’s Bacon number is also one, as he appeared with Bacon in the movie “Death Sentence” in 2007.
John Goodman holds the ultimate “Babe Huey number,” in a way. The actor, who lives in New Orleans, has portrayed both men. In 1992, he starred in “The Babe,” and in 1995, he played Huey Long in “Kingfish.”
John Goodman as “The Babe” (left) and as “Kingfish” (right). Photos courtesy imdb.com
The question is, though, what IS that Babe Huey number? Is it zero? Or perhaps it is the square root of negative one? Irrational, I know.
Perhaps I needed to find a person or topic that connected the two men? I enlisted the assistance of the Bayou Brief’s founder and publisher, Lamar White, Jr. He’s been researching and writing a new biography of Huey Long, and so has access to voluminous documents and photographs. Maybe he’d found a mention of a time or place the two men had met?
Nope.
But he did find a photo of Babe Ruth in front of the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, posed in front of a car, foot resting on the running board. Standing next to him is Seymour Weiss, manager and ultimately owner of the Roosevelt Hotel.
Weiss was Huey Long’s golf partner and confidant, and had been his friend and ardent political supporter since they met during Long’s 1928 campaign for governor of Louisiana. Huey Long made the Roosevelt Hotel his campaign headquarters, and made Weiss the treasurer of both the state Democratic Association and Huey Long’s “Deduct Box” political fund. Long also made him vice president of the Win or Lose oil Corporation.
Weiss was also – at one point – a part owner of New Orleans Pelicans baseball, which was a Southern Association, Double A ball club in continuous operation from 1901-1959. It was affiliated with the Cleveland Indians from 1930-1939.
Weiss’s ownership interest helps explain this photo.
Huey Long in Cleveland uniform, shaking hands with Alva Bradley in 1935. Photo courtesy: Sporting News photo archive
None of this, however, gives us a definite connection location or time for Babe Ruth and Huey Long, since info on a date for the Roosevelt Hotel picture of Ruth and Weiss only says “circa 1920s.” Yet the vehicle in the photo appears to be a very late1920s or early 1930s model.
Still, the Roosevelt Hotel has promise for a potential meeting location, and Seymour Weiss holds a solid Babe Huey number of one.
What about other hotels, especially in New York?
Huey Long’s regular hotel had been the Waldorf-Astoria, but he changed it to the New Yorker Hotel in early 1935, partly because the second establishment offered the then-U.S. Senator his suite for free. It was “comped” – provided complimentarily. Both of those hotels are located in mid-town Manhattan, with the New Yorker located less than a block from Penn Station.
Babe Ruth, on the other hand, spent his bachelor days with the Yankees ensconced in the Ansonia Hotel, which is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
No chance meeting in the hotel lobby, dining room, or even on the street.
Golf seems to have been a common denominator for the two men, and perhaps they played a round of golf together sometime, somewhere. Ruth took up the game in 1915, and was awful at first, trying to use his homerun slugging power to batter the itty-bitty ball into submission. One news account of his early efforts opined, “With broken clubs and lost balls taken into account, golf is a pretty expensive pastime for Babe Ruth.”
He improved, but his inability to reliably give the gentle taps needed to sink consistent putts frustrated him. During one raido interview, when the Babe was talking about how much he enjoyed golf, his wife Claire interjected, “Then why have I often heard you come off the golf course saying, ‘Baseball really is a great game’?”
Considering how closely reporters and photographers followed every move of both Huey Long and Babe Ruth, though, it would have undoubtedly made the news if they’d played golf together. A Golf.com article by Kevin Cook refers to Ruth as “the man who pioneered celebrity golf,” and quotes Doug Vogel, a member of the Society for Baseball Research who’d spent a decade researching Ruth’s golf game as saying, “Whenever the Babe teed it up, the papers covered it.
A picture of the pair together might not have pleased Huey Long overmuch. Babe Ruth was 6’2”, and would have been a half-head taller than Huey Long, who was 5’10”.
The Meeting that Never Was (But Should Have Been)
What if Huey had not been assassinated? What if he HAD become U.S. President?
What if the Babe had not succumbed to metastasizing naso-pharyngeal cancer? Recently, articles have speculated on how he would have fared as a baseball team manager.
Why don’t we speculate then, on what Huey Long and Babe Ruth might have discussed if they met and had drinks and a meal together?
I asked Dr. Emily Toth, the now retired Robert Penn Warren Professor of English and Women’s Studies at LSU, and the author of 12 books – including biographies of Kate Chopin and Grace Metalious – for her best guess.
She said she had posed a similar question, (i.e., “what do men talk about?”) once to the late Dr. Philip Young, considered to be the first serious Ernest Hemingway scholar.
“He told me what two men usually talk about when no women are around to overhear them is one thing only: ‘gash’. Toth then added, “However, I think the topics of most men’s conversations with other men can be viewed as some form of ‘whose is bigger’.”
I also asked my publisher, Lamar White, Jr., for his ideas. He thought for a few moments, and then said, “Even though Prohibition was in effect through most of the years when they might have met, I’m sure they would have been drinking, and would, no doubt, talk about their favorite drinks – giving Huey the opportunity to brag about the Ramos gin fizz.”
Gov. Huey Long leading the LSU marching band, circa 1931. Photo courtesy louisianadigitallibrary.org
“Also, I bet they would have talked about LSU. Huey would have certainly bragged about how he raised the university to class-A standards, how he helped build up the ‘Golden Band from Tigerland,’ and how he helped create ‘the best football team the state’s and Huey’s money could buy,’ as Forrest Davis (the author of the 1935 book Huey Long: A Biography) put it.”
Whose is bigger, indeed.
What do I think they might have discussed? If the meeting happened in 1934, they would have had a drink or two or three, and their conversation might have roamed the world, from the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression here in the U.S., to the rising powers of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung in Europe and in Asia. They might have discussed the ends of notorious gangsters John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde.
I would expect they’d commiserate about the omnipresence of those reporters and photographers people presently refer to as “the media” or the “paparazzi.”
I doubt they would have discussed that year’s bestselling books: Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, or P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins. In view of Dr. Toth’s earlier comments, though, they might have had a few things to say about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
I hope they would have talked about Huey Long’s plans to to run for president, and the benefits of his “Share Our Wealth” platform. I expect that Ruth, having felt the childhood effects of poverty himself, would offer his help – much as he did with visits and charitable donations to hospitalized sick kids and to orphanages.
Mostly, I would hope that they could talk about common interests and values, praise each other’s successes and virtues, and become each other’s true and abiding friend.
Each of them – and perhaps all of us – would have been the richer for that.
Alexandria Mayor John K. “Tilly” Snyder asked a New Orleans private investigator to help remove his boot at a press conference after being arrested for drunk driving. Snyder claimed that his arthritic foot was why he could not walk in a straight line during a field sobriety test. Two weeks after this press conference, Snyder was involuntarily committed for psychiatric care. Credit: Leandro Huebner, The Town Talk archives, Jan. 22, 1986.
Updated on June 1, 2022: I recently sat down with Michelle Southern, host of the podcast “Only in Louisiana,” to discuss the Great Catfish Massacre of 1985. Listen here or on your preferred podcast platform.
When an editor for Wikipedia decided to permanently remove the entry for former Alexandria Mayor John K. “Tilly” Snyder late last month, he affixed a note explaining that the page was “presumptively deleted” because one of its authors, Billy Hathorn, had been banned seven years prior for repeatedly violating the online encyclopedia’s terms of standards. In fairness to the editor, it is understandable why someone who had likely never heard of Snyder would presume the story about his life was fabricated or plagiarized. Without question, Snyder certainly meets Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion; a person must have achieved a level of public “notoriety” to qualify, and Tilly Snyder was nothing if not notorious.
While the now-deleted entry contained passages that merited attention, the truth is that, if anything, Snyder’s Wikipedia page was actually underwritten.
In 1986, during Snyder’s final year as mayor, his attorney, Eugene Cicardo, told the Washington Post, “Oh yeah, (Snyder)’s flamboyant. He likes to think he’s Earl Long.” It was a characterization shared by then-Chief of Police Glenn Beard, a man Snyder twice tried and failed to fire. “I think he thinks he is Earl Long reincarnated,” he told the Post. (Snyder once brazenly appropriated one of the Police Department’s cars from Chief Beard and had used it as his personal vehicle).
There are many reasons why Tilly Snyder easily ranks as one of the most eccentric, controversial, and polarizing politicians in Louisiana history. His legacy is also one of the most complicated. ”History is going to prove how we did,” he said in an exit interview with the Town Talk during his final days as mayor. “I’d rather leave it up to history. I think history will vindicate what we’ve done.”
Like Huey P. Long’s brother Earl, he had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital during his final year in office. He was erratic, mercurial, and often conspiratorial, if not outright paranoid. In 1984, he went “missing” from City Hall for more than a month. He once called an African American City Councilman a “chimpanzee,” sparking national outrage and calls for his resignation.
Louisiana Public Broadcasting featured a report in 1984 about how Alexandria Mayor John K. Snyder decided to suddenly stop showing up for work. Credit: Louisiana Digital Media Archives. Watch the segment here.
Yet Tilly Snyder, whose nickname (a spin on the game Tiddly-Winks) had followed him since childhood, was also the first mayor in Alexandria to promote African Americans into key leadership positions. During his final election for mayor, he won more than 88% of the vote in the city’s twelve majority African American precincts, and when he passed away in 1993, the councilman he had once called a “chimpanzee,” Columbus Goodman, told the Town Talk that he had never had a “cross word” with Snyder personally and called his death “a loss for the community.”
Today, Alexandria is led by Jeffrey Hall, the first African American mayor in the city’s history. 45 years ago, Hall began his career as an accounting clerk hired by Tilly Snyder. City Council President Joe Fuller, who is also African American, first launched his political career after serving as Snyder’s Director of Community Development. This is not to suggest that either of the two men “owe” Snyder a debt, only that as with many chapters of his biography, the story is filled with contradictions and controversies, most of which you wouldn’t have found on Wikipedia.
The Kingcatfish:
Alexandria was once the second-most populated city in Louisiana; it had been home to William Tecumseh Sherman; it was burned to the ground by the Union during the Civil War. It’s the birthplace of the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps and the childhood home of the legendary blues musician Little Walter. It was where Omar Bradley and George Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower trained nearly half a million troops in preparation for World War II.
And yet often the only thing that people from other corners of Louisiana know about the city is a decision made by Mayor John K. Snyder. The true, full story is even wilder than the one now repeated as a comical piece of Louisiana trivia.
Tilly Snyder believed he knew the engine that would transform Central Louisiana’s economy and soon become one of the most profitable industries in the state. He had been so confident that he made a significant investment in a start-up company in Ouachita Parish, and in the spring of 1985, he announced his ambitious plan to raise revenue for the city of Alexandria: Catfish farming.
At a press conference in April, Mayor Snyder claimed he had lured in investors willing to spend millions of dollars on building a massive catfish farm operation at the city’s industrial park. If Alexandria agreed to become a partner, it would take a share of all of the future profits. The sky was the limit.
He recognized that his plan may have sounded too good to be true, so he knew it’d be important to educate the public on the catfish farming business. And what better way to do that than to provide citizens with a free and convenient opportunity to gain first-hand, practical experience in catching catfish?
At the time, the John Knox, Sr. Natatorium, the city’s public swimming pool, which had been abandoned only a year prior due to a botched painting job, required around $50,000 worth of repair work, and it had always been challenging to line up the political support for a public pool. He had an elegant solution: Some friends of his from Wisner, Louisiana had offered to provide the city with 1,000 pounds of catfish. Instead of paying to repair the Knox Natatorium, Alexandria could become a national leader in the development of the catfish farming business by turning the pool into a pond.
Editorial cartoon. Courtesy: The Town Talk archives.
The mayor envisioned a program that first allowed local schoolchildren to fish the pond for free, but eventually, he believed the city-owned operation could become yet another profitable component of its nascent Department of Catfish Farming. Because the old natatorium was located in proximity to the Alexandria Zoo, he suggested providing the zoo with the revenue.
As Snyder had predicted, the City Council, with the exception of Councilman Goodman, hadn’t raised any objections, and on Wednesday, April 3rd, 1985, Alexandria fire trucks began pumping the old pool full of well water. They were done before noon on Friday.
The City of Alexandria officially entered into the catfish farming business on Wednesday, June 19th. Children 13 and under were allowed to fish at the pond, as long as they brought their own bait and tackle and were accompanied by an adult, who were suggested to donate 50 cents toward a fund established to benefit the zoo. Snyder’s friends came through with the promise of 1,000 pounds of free catfish, and he’d even managed to convince two local banks to contribute $500 each toward the program.
Employees of the Alexandria Public Works Department remove the remnants of its catfish pond. Credit: The Town Talk archives.
Even if you haven’t already heard the story of the mayor who decided to turn the city swimming pool into a catfish pond, it probably seems self-evident this was a comically absurd idea that was guaranteed to fail, and to be clear, there were plenty of people living in Alexandria in 1985 who pointed out the obvious, including, most notably, the city’s beloved Zoo Director, the late Les Whitt, and its championship swimming coach, Wally Fall.
Snyder’s Director of Public Works, Tony D’Angelo, had been insistent the renovations to fix the pool, as is, would cost at least $50,000. Fall believed these projections were exponentially inflated, arguing that it’d require a fraction of that amount, $5,000, to ensure the pool was operational and safe.
“The pumps are in excellent condition,” Fall, who is white, presciently stated to the Town Talk in early April. “That’s a beautiful place there. It really could be nice. The truth is, the mayor and the city just don’t want to fool with a pool that will be used mostly by blacks.”
Whitt had privately expressed his own concerns about the efficacy of the pool’s pumping system, knowing the distinct possibility it could become a sadistic slaughterhouse for the bottom-dwellers. He had first attempted to convince Snyder not to stock the pond with 1,000 pounds of catfish because of concerns about the level of oxygen in the water; Snyder dismissed those concerns.
On the morning the pond had been prepared to finally become stocked, Snyder located two additional large fans; however, they didn’t have blade covers.
When KALB, the local NBC affiliate, showed up to record a segment on the new city catfish pond, Whitt found himself attempting to block the camera during an interview from recording what was occurring directly behind him: Every time a new bucket of fish was dumped into the pond, “It looked like we were chumming for sharks,” Whitt recalled later.
Only two days after the 1,000 pounds had been stocked, the pool’s supply had been nearly cut in half, literally.
It was the Great Catfish Massacre of 1985.
The city exited the catfish farming business less than a week after it launched. For the three dozen or so catfish that somehow survived the Great Catfish Massacre of 1985, they were rewarded with a new residence in Bayou Hynson.
And the clean-up and repair project Wally Fall claimed he could do for $5,000 and D’Amico said would’ve been $50,000 (or ten times as much) would now cost $500,000 to fix. The city, instead, decided to fill in the old swimming pool-turned-catfish pond.
Editorial cartoon. Courtesy: The Town Talk archives,
Tilly Snyder would never recover from the debacle, which resulted in him and his city becoming the punchline of jokes told all across the nation. The city’s white establishment class had been particularly embarrassed by the story, and to a certain extent, it became a way in which his political opponents attempted to discount each and every decision he’d ever made.
To some, the Great Catfish Massacre of 1985 wasn’t Snyder’s biggest mistake. Instead, they pointed to his decision, during his first term, to annex the majority African American neighborhoods known as Samtown and Woodside and a pocket of homes located near Horseshoe Drive. For Snyder, the annexations were based on social and economic fairness; Alexandria had been rapidly expanding to include suburban, predominately white residential neighborhoods, while snubbing parts of the city that needed infrastructure investment the most.
The Resilience of the Bottom-feeder:
John K. Snyder, 1969. Courtesy: The Town Talk archives
John Kenneth Snyder was born on August 29th, 1922 at Baptist Hospital (now Rapides Regional Medical Center) on the banks of the Red River in Alexandria, Louisiana. One week after his 38th birthday, Snyder’s political hero, former Gov. Earl K. Long, a man whose legacy and antics would later animate much of his approach to campaigning and governing, passed away at the same hospital. Snyder was raised in Pineville but educated at Alexandria’s Bolton High School. Later in life, he’d return to Pineville. During his second of two nonconsecutive terms in office, Snyder had spent most of his time actually living in Pineville, despite the Alexandria City Charter’s requirement that the mayor reside within the city limits.
After graduating from Bolton High School, Snyder joined the U.S. Army, serving as an aviation cadet for two years during World War II and earning an education with the Army’s V-5 program. He later attended classes at the University of Georgia, and perhaps most tellingly, Hollywood’s Palmer Institute, where he learned rhetoric and creative writing. Prior to a brief stint as a deputy director of Louisiana’s Office of Economic Opportunity, he had served as a consultant for Sargent Shriver and as an aide to Congressman Gillis Long.
In 1969, when he was 47 years old, he sought political office for the first time, running for Alexandria mayor against Ed Karst, a New Orleans-born lawyer who had moved to town only two years before. Against a field of two other Democrats, Karst narrowly finished ahead of Snyder, forcing a runoff for the party nomination. When Karst edged out Snyder again, Gov. John McKeithen canceled the general election; no member of another party had qualified.
Snyder’s campaign, though, had been unusually ugly, particularly on the radio station KSYL, and following his loss, he was charged with and indicted on fourteen counts of defamation by a parish grand jury. The case was ultimately thrown out by the Louisiana state Supreme Court, which ruled the District Attorney should have recused himself. Several prominent businessmen were among those named, including Joe D. Smith, the publisher of The Town Talk, and Harry B. Silver, the owner of the department store Weiss and Goldring and currently, at the age of 97, a member of the Alexandria City Council and the oldest elected official in the state of Louisiana.
Almost immediately after his defeat, Snyder challenged incumbent Congressman Speedy O. Long for the 1970 Democratic primary. He lost again. But he was not deterred. The next year, he challenged incumbent Rapides Parish Sheriff Marshall Cappel in the primary. And again, he lost.
In 1972, John K. Snyder caught a break. Mayor Karst decided to defect to the Republican Party, the modern version of which was still in its infancy in Louisiana. Karst hired Kent Courtney, a far-right segregationist and provocateur from New Orleans, as his executive assistant. The two decisions effectively ended Karst’s political prospects, and ultimately, he decided not to seek reelection in 1973.
When Tilly Snyder launched his fourth campaign in as many years, he squared off against former state Rep. Buzzy Graham, the hand-selected candidate of House Speaker Bubba Henry and the so-called “Young Turks.” This time, though, Snyder finally prevailed, and like clockwork, he was once again indicted for defamation. And again, another case named State v. Snyder made its way up, down, and then back up to the Louisiana state Supreme Court, which eventually sided with Snyder and provided a robust explanation of the “actual malice” requirement necessary to find defamation against public figures aligned with the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“You don’t have to run against Tilly to fear him— just to have him talk about you is enough,” the legendary Louisiana political writer John Maginnis wrote in The Last Hayride. “Tilly’s an attacker from the Uncle Earl school— he delights in picking apart the personal foibles of his political enemies. Earl Long is the past master of personal attacks in public. Yet Earl laced his stinging barbs with brilliant humor (often turned against himself) and the rich imagery of his peapatch vernacular. By his folksy delivery and populist fervor, Tilly is in ways a throwback to the Earl Long-style campaigner, but absent any subtleties, wisdom or humor.
“Tilly throws all his energy into the attack. When Snyder, trying to pay a compliment, introduces Edwin Edwards at a testimonial this night as someone ‘who’s been called just about everything you can call someone,’ Edwards corrects him. ‘You haven’t heard or can’t imagine the worst thing you can be called until you get into a race with Tilly Snyder.’,” Maginnis recalled in the book.
Maginnis was a brilliant writer, a collector of confidential sources and their secrets, but by the time he got around to writing about Tilly Snyder, the man had already been spiraling downward and was at the end of his career. During his first term, however, while he may have been loathed, for good reason, by his political nemeses, Snyder managed to accomplish a great deal of his agenda, using his own power under the soon-to-be-extinct commission form of government to chip away at the institutional control of the exclusively white business establishment.
When he decided to annex Samtown and Woodside, people believed that it was merely a short-term, cynical ploy to ensure he politically benefitted by increasing the number of African American voters. But at the time, the city was preparing to transition away from a commission form of government to a council-mayor form. He wasn’t shoring up his political base. In fact, he lost his bid for reelection in 1977. Instead, he was helping to guarantee more equitable representation on the City Council.
Tilly Snyder returns to City Hall and attends a City Council meeting during his final year in office. Credit: The Town Talk archives.
By the time he returned as mayor in 1982, he was combative, vindictive, and erratic. Only a year after winning the race for mayor, Snyder decided to run for state Senate against incumbent Ned Randolph. His entrance into a field that already included former state Sen. Cecil Blair and Woodworth businessman Joe McPherson seemed, to many, as nothing more than a cynical political ploy. He didn’t seem as interested in the state Senate as much as he was in disrupting the race for the state Senate.
Snyder finished in fourth in a campaign that would otherwise be forgotten except for the fact that he handed out records featuring a local musician’s version of Snyder’s campaign theme song, appropriately titled “John’s Song.”
From the collection of Lamar White, Jr.
Incidentally, Snyder had used the same gimmick in his failed bid for Rapides Parish Sheriff, offering a $250 reward for musicians who could provide the best version of his theme song.
Courtesy: The Town Talk archives
Snyder may have finished in last place in 1983, but he proved to be disruptive, undercutting Randolph’s support in Alexandria. Snyder’s 12.8% share of the vote would have been enough to prevent Randolph from a runoff election against McPherson. McPherson would prevail and eventually become one of the state’s most powerful legislators (His Wikipedia page has also been removed). And in a twist of fate, Ned Randolph would take City Hall from Snyder (who did not seek reelection) and hold onto the office for five consecutive terms until his retirement in 2006. Randolph, who passed away in 2016, was beloved by the city he led; in his final act as mayor, his successor, Jacques Roy, renamed the city’s riverfront center after Randolph.
Today in Alexandria, there are no public buildings or lasting tributes to Tilly Snyder.
After all, the “business community” loathed him, including the publisher of the local newspaper.
And while he certainly provided ample material for local reporters, Tilly Snyder had a legitimate point to be made about the Town Talk, which was owned and published by Joe D. Smith, a childhood friend of Snyder’s whose claims of defamation had been struck down twice by the state Supreme Court.
The outsized role of the Town Talk- the city’s official “paper of record”- also complicates the retelling of his story: There are allegations that he removed the door of a private bathroom at City Hall because he was convinced Commissioner Jack Rosenthal had been spying on him, and there’s a great story about Snyder being seen rummaging through a trash container while mumbling about Russians controlling the price of diamonds and city police officers driving drunk, for example. In many cases, the Town Talk is the one and only source that documented some of the most outrageous and bizarre details.
That said, it’s unlikely history ever ultimately “vindicates” Tilly Snyder, because, despite the advances made during his first term, John Maginnis is right: He’s no Uncle Earl. At the very least though, he deserves to be listed on Wikipedia, immortalized as the mastermind of the Great Catfish Massacre of 1985.
Meron Yohannes at a rally in support of Planned Parenthood in New Orleans, La., Feb. 10, 2017. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard.
When Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dodd v. Jackson Women’s Health first leaked, a contentious blame game flared up online among some members of the political left. The debate, it seemed, was over which Democratic politician or influential liberal was most responsible for landing us in this moment of doom.
It was Barack Obama’s fault, some argued, for not prioritizing the codification of abortion rights during the few short months at the beginning of his first term when Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in both chambers of Congress. Or maybe it was the actress Susan Sarandon, who discouraged progressives from voting for the Democratic nominee in 2016 because a Trump presidency, she suggested, would “bring the revolution immediately.” Most absurdly were those faulting Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer whose life was spent advancing women’s rights, for not resigning her seat on the Supreme Court when a Democrat held the White House. This unproductive conversation keeps us distracted from the work to be done and lets the folks who are really at fault off the hook.
As those of us in Louisiana already know, the extremist evangelical right has been organizing for decades to get to the moment where they can overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize abortion. But abortion was not always their signature issue. “One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion,” explains Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor (and Episcopal priest) who has spent his entire career studying and writing about the history of American religion. “In fact it wasn’t until 1979— a full six years after Roe— that evangelical leaders… seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying cry [against Democrats]. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.” In other words, anti-abortion advocacy became a subsidiary of the Lost Cause.
We know from numerous national polls that a large majority of Americans want the rights enshrined in Roe to stay in place. It’s not even close. A new CBS/YouGov poll shows that 67% oppose a law criminalizing abortion, and 64% want to keep Roe as is. Poll after poll after poll shows by about a two-to-one margin, Americans say Roe v. Wade should be upheld rather than overturned.
If the left has not been organizing as effectively, as cleverly, or as obsessively, there is no choice but to do so now. As a Louisiana organizer who has worked in Democratic Party politics for 15 years, people often reach out to ask what they can or should be doing. Those requests have escalated in the last two weeks, so I’m writing to offer some options of how people can get engaged in this precarious moment.
Protestors in The Handmaid’s Tale costumes on the anniversary of the Women’s March on Jan. 20, 2018 in New Orleans, La. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard
WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO HERE IN LOUISIANA?
Already, marches and protests have been held across the state. While those kinds of actions are not sustainable in the long term, nor do they address the big structural changes we need to make, this is certainly a moment for the majority to be visible and vocal. If you have the opportunity to attend a big public event in defense of Roe, this is a time when it would make strategic sense to show up.
I’ll just add my relentless pitch for organizing here: If you’re attending a march or a rally without registering voters or collecting names and contact information for future follow-up with sympathetic allies, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Those efforts will be more successful if you can coordinate with and feed that information back to groups that are already set up to do advocacy work on the issue at hand.
More urgently, bills are being debated in the Louisiana legislature this session that deserve attention. As the Alito draft leaked, many conservatives in elected office took that as a green light to move full speed ahead with their extremist anti-abortion agenda. Groups that have been tirelessly organizing on reproductive rights and reproductive justice in our state for years could use support in their efforts now. Below I’ve hyperlinked to five prominent ones that you can plug into right away and get involved at a local level.
Even as we work to block the worst bills being proposed in today’s Louisiana legislature, we already have some of the most oppressive abortion laws in the country. In addition to existing laws restricting abortion in our state, there are further Draconian “trigger laws” that will go into effect the minute Roe is overturned, completely eliminating the rights of Louisianans to make decisions with their family and their doctor on whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. At that point, according to a recent Guttmacher Institute report, Louisiana would literally be the farthest state away from access to safe, legal abortions. It would require a Louisianian to make at least a 1300-mile round trip for an appointment, assuming a) the clinic wasn’t too overburdened to accept them, and b) the patient could afford the journey, as well as time off work and away from family.
Spoiler alert: Yes, many of these awful bills were introduced by Louisiana Democrats, and signed into law by Democratic governors – even a Democratic woman governor. If that last point seems counterintuitive, it just so happens that there are no “pro-choice” women at this moment, Republican or Democrat, in our state senate. In fact “pro-choice” women represent less than 10% of the entire Louisiana legislature, in a state in which women comprise the majority of the population, and in which only 22% of the residents believe abortion should be banned with no exceptions. Few Louisiana politicians are eager to broach the subject on the campaign trail due to outmoded perceptions of demographics, sporadic polling, and historical voting patterns.
However, a new poll from LSU’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs suggests a potential shift in that strategic thinking. Bayou Brief publisher Lamar White provides the upshot in his piece for The Daily Beast: “Most notably, since LSU last conducted the polling on the issue six years ago, Republican attitudes have remained relatively the same, while support for abortion rights among Democrats has increased dramatically.”
So at a time when abortion rights are imperiled at a federal level and Republicans control the agenda in our state legislature, with enough votes to override the governor’s veto, is there any reason for left-leaning Louisiana voters to support anti-abortion Democratic candidates in future elections? There are national Democrats who refer to themselves as “pro-life” yet vote firmly pro-Roe. I’m not suggesting litmus tests, but defending all the rights enshrined by Roe is not too much to ask from candidates representing the only party that still works to protect our democracy.
As we know, with few exceptions, most politicians who refer to themselves as “pro-life” are, in fact, pro-forced birth. They do not support families making the best decisions for themselves in concert with their doctors. They do not support mothers as they carry a child. They do not support parents of newborns. They do not support children after they are born. They do not support systems that would allow for healthy, thriving, whole families, and afford the promise of America to all, from birth to end of life.
Disturbingly, the Alito draft reveals that this is not just about restricting abortion rights. Instead, it opens the door for far-right lawmakers and judges to strip away many of the hard-fought rights Americans have won over the last several decades. So let me offer another reframe: Instead of saying those advocating for abortion rights are “pro-choice,” let’s call them “pro-freedom,” because that’s what this fight is about. This is a battle against the larger national and global assault on individual freedom, personal privacy, human rights, and democracy.
So after we have fought the good fight in Baton Rouge for the legislative session’s remaining weeks, when sine die hits Monday, June 6, 2022, how should Louisianians organize to stop the hellish domino effect of the Alito draft decision?
Audra Rouse (left) and Leslie Holder (right) at the Women’s March in New Orleans, Jan. 21, 2017. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard
WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO NEXT?
At the risk of infuriating some of our Democratic candidates running for office in the 2022 midterms, no polling or punditry suggests Louisiana has a shot at flipping the partisan makeup of our federal delegation. Congressional seats have been gerrymandered to protect incumbents, and our senate race is rated by every reliable prognosticator as Solid Republican, with Shreveport’s own Charlie Cook’s Political Report assigning us a Partisan Voting Index of R+12. Should we be doing something to change that long-term? Of course we should. Should we always have a Democrat running in every race? Absolutely.
Like a football game, you always suit up and take the field. Wild things happen in elections; we should always be poised to make a move when the opportunity presents itself. And the data collected from every election is instructive. We must vote in every election. We must always support good Democratic candidates. That’s one piece of the puzzle to building a bench and establishing infrastructure, which is significant since we’re only a year out from our gubernatorial and state legislative elections.
That said, we have several significant elections happening in Louisiana in 2022. We have two Public Service Commission seats up this year that are critical to our energy and climate goals. There are multiple school board seats on the ballot, and this is a space where we’ve seen a sharp increase in ultra-conservative, Q-conspiracist, anti-history, book-banning candidates. So these are key races to engage in for the sake of our children. There are also parishes voting this year on chiefs of police and judges, all of which arguably are opportunities to further criminal justice reform and protect rights potentially threatened by the Alito draft.
The outcomes of each of these local elections will impact thousands of lives, immediately and daily. If folks are working or volunteering for good candidates in these races, don’t stop that crucial work. And for God’s sake, everybody, understand how much your vote for these positions impacts your community. At the very least, vote!
However, if abortion rights are your primary concern – or access to contraception or protections for women who have miscarriages or family planning of any kind or LGBTQ+ rights or protections for interracial marriages or privacy rights or civil rights – then the whole ballgame in the 2022 midterms is not in just maintaining Democratic control of the U.S. House, but in expanding the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.
At this point, it might be helpful to do a quick explainer on what’s happening in Washington, D.C. for folks who may not live and breathe politics. Leigh McGowen, professionally known as “Politics Girl,” created a simple, digestible (and slightly NSFW) three-minute video that explains this more thoroughly. But here’s the short version: The Democratic-controlled House is passing bills that the Democratic president is ready to sign, if only they could get through the U.S. Senate.
It’s true, Democrats currently have a razor-thin majority in the evenly-split Senate, owing to Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. And that’s important. This simple fact has kept Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s lump of coal in America’s stocking, from being Majority Leader. McConnell took pride in being known as the “Grim Reaper” when Republicans controlled the Senate, because most of the bills Speaker Nancy Pelosi could get passed through the House never saw their way to the floor of the upper chamber. He just left them to die in the legislative graveyard that was his office.
Supporters of Planned Parenthood at a rally in New Orleans, La. on Feb. 10, 2017. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard.
With Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York now Majority Leader (thanks to victories in the Georgia senate runoffs on Jan. 5th, 2021), some of the gridlock that previously existed has been broken up. (And since the January 6th Capitol Insurrection denied Democrats a chance to fully celebrate those remarkable wins, we should forever pat ourselves on the back for everything we did to elect Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.) Among the many pieces of legislation that have advanced to the president for signing are the covid relief package, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and aid to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, due to support from Congressional allies, Joe Biden, the man who fairly won “the most secure election in American history,” has steadily repaired our relationships with our foreign allies, rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, reunited migrant families, filled positions in the State Department and other agencies that had atrophied under Trump, and rebuilt a stronger NATO than we’ve seen in decades.
However, due to cumbersome Senate rules— and two senators you hear about all the time, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema— Democrats have struggled with passing some of the bigger items on President Biden’s agenda. If we want the opportunity to appoint more justices like Ketanji Brown Jackson and continue Biden’s work of ensuring a more diverse judiciary ( including appointing more Black women to federal judgeships than any other president), Democrats need to keep the Senate. In order to pass some of the big agenda items currently being blocked by every Republican, plus Manchin and Sinema, we need to elect at least two more Democratic senators. If we want to codify Roe, we need to elect more “pro-choice,” pro-freedom, pro-privacy rights Democrats to the Senate. If we want to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or the Freedom to Vote Act or the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or the Build Back Better “human infrastructure” plan, if we want to amend the filibuster rules and potentially expand the Supreme Court to break it out of its current anti-democratic iteration, we need to dilute the power of Manchin and Sinema’s votes.
The writers Michael Tisserand (left) and Alex Rawls (right) on the anniversary of the Women’s March on Jan. 20, 2018 in New Orleans, La. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard
WHERE SHOULD WE FOCUS?
As an abortion rights supporter in Louisiana, I consider working to expand the Democratic majority in the senate to be the best use of my time and money in 2022. Speaker Pelosi is working on the congressional races, and she’s a pretty badass strategist, as well as a world-class fundraiser. Since the current concern is the Supreme Court, and that’s the purview of the senate, I would make the argument to focus there.
There are four well-liked, solid Democratic senators we must re-elect: Mark Kelly in Arizona, Rev. Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire. Looking at the Cook Partisan Voting Index again, these are states that just barely lean red or are considered toss-ups.
Arizona – R+3 – Tossup
Georgia – R+3 – Tossup
Nevada – Even – Tossup
New Hampshire – Even – Lean D
Additionally, demographics and circumstances give us some pick-up opportunities: Val Demmings running against incumbent Marco Rubio in Florida, Cheri Beasly running for an open seat in North Carolina, Tim Ryan running for an open seat in Ohio, John Fetterman for an open seat in Pennsylvania, and a Democratic nominee to be selected on August 9th to run against Ron Johnson in Wisconsin.
Florida – R+3 – Lean R
North Carolina – R+3 – Lean R
Ohio – R+6 – Likely R
Pennsylvania – R+2 – Tossup
Wisconsin – R+2 – Tossup
I’ve hyper-linked either to the websites of the candidates or the state party where the primary has yet to take place. Signing up to volunteer, supporting them through donations, or amplifying their messages on social media are all ways that you can help. I’ll continue to give more detailed information on how to help these campaigns in this document, which will be updated as the year progresses.
It’s always difficult from a distance to know which campaigns are worth our investment. We don’t get to see the candidates up close and personal. We don’t know if they’ve built an effective campaign infrastructure, if they’ve got the capacity for sufficient fundraising, if they’ve made the right community connections, or if they’ve got the right message to speak to the voters of their state. But at the very least, if we start with the demographic and polling data, we know that we’re contributing our time and resources to winnable races.
I recommend looking over these candidates and finding one or two that speak to you, for whatever reason: you like the reverend or the astronaut, you have family in Ohio, you went to college in North Carolina. Just pick a candidate or a state, and pitch in as much as you can. If you don’t mesh with the first campaign, try a different one. Find the right fit for you.
Every one of these races is going to be a fight, so every bit of extra help for every single vote will matter. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you missed the story in The Washington Post by LSU professor and political historian Robert Mann about a recent judicial race in Baton Rouge: “My wife and I nearly didn’t vote. Then our guy won — by two votes.”
Women’s rights advocates on the anniversary of the Women’s March on Jan. 20, 2018 in New Orleans, La. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard
WHEN DO WE FINALLY WIN?
If you feel like you belong to what one former Republican politico dubbed “the exhausted majority,” I empathize. We’re going through serial crises: pandemic, insurrection, war, inflation, the linked threats of white supremacy, theocratic extremism, and authoritarianism… and just as the Louisiana legislature closes up shop, hurricane season starts in a region increasingly impacted by climate change. Some of the tactics of the right are specifically built to exhaust us. It doesn’t help that during the Trump years, we became semi-addicted to “doom-scrolling” on social media.
We should take some inspiration from the way Ukrainians are standing up for their country and their right to exist. If they can weather 2022 with such courage, surely we can too. Or consider the words of Alexey Navalny, the illegally-imprisoned opposition leader to Russian President Vladimir Putin: “I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up.”
Yes, we made this heroic effort in 2020. Now we have to do more. We need our country to be motivated enough by what we’ve seen from radical Republicans, not just in the Alito draft, but in their promotion of white nationalist and Q-Anon conspiracy theories, and in the hundreds of voter restriction bills that are being introduced and passed across the states. While there is still time, while we still have the right, we must, once again, turn out our voters in numbers too big to ignore.
Let’s revisit polling one more time. While polling suggests that the abortion issue may motivate pro-freedom and women voters to turn out in the 2022 midterms, other polls make clear that conservative voters and men and white women have been committed to voting this year-long before the Alito draft was leaked. The numbers tell the story that we cannot take anything for granted.
As Avoyelles Parish community leader Liz Leger put it when I asked her about the Supreme Court leak during an interview for the Louisiana Lefty podcast, “We get five minutes to cry, and the rest of our lifetimes we have to organize.” It’s a theory to which I subscribe. It was the driving force behind my career in politics, and now I’ve built a podcast around it. I believe we create our own hope through organizing.
And surely, by now, we know that some things are worth fighting for.
Bookmark this document so you can you check for updated actions to take in 2022
If you still need help finding your place in the fight, email me at lynda@bayoubrief.com
Michelle Erenberg, executive director of Lift Louisiana (left), Lynda Woolard, the author (center), and Ellie Schilling, attorney and prominent reproductive health care advocate (right) at a crawfish boil in support of Lift Louisiana in New Orleans, La. on March 10, 2018. Photo credit: Lynda Woolard
On Sept. 6, 1948, a little over two weeks after Harry Bernard Silver, a 26-year-old lawyer from East Orange, N.J., exchanged vows with 20-year-old Marilyn Weiss Levy of Alexandria, La., the ravishing eldest daughter of Louis and Miriam Levy, owners of the city’s iconic department store, Weiss & Goldring, the newlyweds made their national radio debut on the ABC hit show “Bride and Groom.”
A precursor to “reality TV,” the show, which aired daily and would later be adapted for television, randomly selected a prospective bride and groom from its studio audience–no divorcees or Catholics allowed (on account of the requirement that couples marry only inside of a church)—and threw them a 15-minute-long shotgun wedding, officiated by one of 30 clergymen on standby and conducted during the broadcast but not on air. The married couple was then whisked back to the studio and showered with an assortment of gifts, courtesy, of course, of the show’s sponsors.
The Silvers, however, were not there to reenact their wedding, reportedly one of the most elegant and impressive ceremonies ever held in Alexandria, a spectacle that even Hollywood would have struggled to reproduce. They were in California on their honeymoon. “For traveling, the bride chose a cocoa-colored silk shantung, with which she wore a small felt hat of brown with matching accessories and a purple orchid corsage,” The Town Talk gushed to its readers. No word on the groom’s traveling attire, but one can safely assume that he was also sufficiently well-appointed. 15 days into a union that would span nearly 74 years, Harry and Marilyn Silver were in a studio in Los Angeles, already dispensing marital advice.
When Harry Silver announced his resignation from the Alexandria City Council on Feb. 10, 2021, three weeks after his 99th birthday, he was, indisputably, the oldest elected official in the United States (and there’s a good chance he was also the oldest in the world). Yet he was not even the senior-most official on the Alexandria City Council; that title still belongs to his 77-year-old former colleague Chuck Fowler. That’s because Silver didn’t get his start in politics until the age of 83, when he was appointed to replace District Four Councilman Rick Ranson. There’s a good chance he would have continued to serve, had the COVID pandemic not continued to linger and placed him at a unique risk. Indeed, he had been trying his best to negotiate around the constraints of COVID, which, in his case, were exacerbated by a mean-spirited and petty council president whose refusal to provide reasonable accommodations resulted in a lawsuit Silver easily won.
Harry B. Silver at Weiss & Goldring in 2017. Courtesy: Cenla Focus.
“Having just celebrated my 99th birthday, I had time to reflect on my life, our City, and the place I should hold in it,” Silver wrote in a letter announcing his resignation. “While there is hope that the pandemic will soon recede and a more normal life can resume, such will not occur overnight. With the recent elections having been conducted and concluded, the will of the electorate has been heard and I feel now is a good time to hand the mantle of leadership for District 4 over to another from a younger generation.”
The 99-year-old claimed he would spend his waning years focusing “more on service to my family,” a departure from what he used to say whenever asked about his future plans. “I’ll be 100 when my term on the council ends. Maybe I’ll run for mayor.”
From his very first days on the City Council, Silver created controversy; his appointment, it was said, came with the unwritten agreement—or maybe just the implied stipulation—that he would not seek a full term; he was expected to be nothing more than a temporary seat-warmer. Regardless, nothing legally prevented him from campaigning on his own in 2006, and that’s exactly what he did, running as a Republican (a switch he made to express his disappointment with former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards but would not last long) and beating his Democratic opponent 56%-44%. Four years later, as a Democrat, Silver won a second term, 77%-23%. In 2014, against two challengers, Silver once again coasted to re-election, winning more than 58% of the vote, and in his last election in 2018, he ran without opposition.
What, exactly, qualified Silver as “CenLa’s most celebrated civic champion”? Among other things, he was named Cenla Focus’s “Cenla-ian of the Year,” twice. First in 2012, at the age of 90, and again, five years later, at 95. (My late paternal grandmother Joanne Lyles White won in 2006, and my late paternal grandfather Paul D. White won ten years later, in 2016). Silver’s community service did not begin with the City Council. He served as President of. the local Jewish Temple, Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim, from 1957-1960, a term that included the temple’s centennial in 1959 and its relocation, following the loss of the “Second Temple” to fire in 1956, to its current building, a stunning Mid-Century Modern structure designed by Max Heinberg of Barron, Heinberg, and Brocato. He led a number of downtown development agencies and authorities, once held a minority ownership interest in the Hotel Bentley, and served a term as Chairman of Rapides Regional Medical Center, among many other accomplishments.
In news reports and official correspondence and records, he was always Mr. Silver, but to almost everyone who worked with him or spent time at his store, Weiss & Goldring, myself included, he was always “Harry.” His politics was, more than anything else, one of eternal, unwavering, even stubborn hope. In his century on this earth, he’d experienced failures and losses; even at the end of his life, he still confronted anti-Semitic bigotry and hatred. And yet, he had an abiding faith in the future that was infectious and inspiring and ecumenically minded.
Like so many people who were born and raised in Alexandria, I knew Harry Silver for my entire life, but I got to know him professionally when I was in my mid-20s and working as an assistant to former Mayor Jacques Roy. One of my responsibilities was to introduce Alexandria to prospective consultants—architects, engineers, developers, analysts, visiting dignitaries, among others. For many of our guests, the highlight was a visit to Weiss & Goldring, where Harry would hold court around a conference table in a room adjacent and open to the shop. The experience always left an impression on people. Practically all of them, at some point, even if they never ended up working in Alexandria, would call and ask me, “How is Harry?”
Of all of those I introduced, one stands out in particular, Fred Schwartz, an internationally-acclaimed New York architect who responded to one of our proposals for a streetscape project, initially by mistake, believing the work, given its scale and ambition, was in Alexandria, Virginia. As much as I liked to think that Schwartz, who died of cancer in 2014, stuck around because of my powers of persuasion, the truth is that he loved Harry Silver. Their connection was instant, and it was profound; Fred told me that Harry reminded him of his father. Harry continuously tried to sell Fred a proper suit or a beautiful new tie or a luscious pair of socks, with very little success, and he constantly teased him for dressing like “a slob,” which Fred always took in good humor. He may have not sold Fred on a new wardrobe, but he did something even more impressive: He sold him on his dream for Alexandria.
“I came to Central Louisiana over Three-Fourths of a Century ago in service to our nation and met the love of my life,” Silver wrote in February 2021. “Together we raised a family, continued and modernized the family business, and did all we could to be of service to the people of the area. Whether you or your parents, grandparents or great grandparents agreed with me or not over the years, I hope everyone agrees that I acted only as I felt was best for our mutual home.”
Harry Silver died on Friday, April 8, 2022. He was 100 years old.
Housed in a sleek new building just over the levee near downtown Baton Rouge is a scale model of the lower Mississippi River Delta. Researchers use it to study how sediment moves through the river. State officials, environmental groups, and lawmakers use it to advocate for coastal restoration projects. As land along Louisiana’s coastline continues to disappear at faster and faster rates, the model could help shape the future of the region and provide valuable lessons for coastal communities across the world.
It’s no secret that Louisiana’s coast is changing and many of the state’s coastal wetlands are subsiding, the technical term for sinking. It’s not a mystery why it’s happening, either.
“Because the Mississippi River floods each year and wants to change its course, we built levees on either side of its banks,” said Bren Haase, executive director of Louisiana’s Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority (CPRA). “Those levees have had real benefits to the United States and the State of Louisiana in terms of navigation and flood control, but they’ve also had real negative impacts to our coastal communities, leaving them much more vulnerable to things like saltwater intrusion, subsidence, sea level rises and storm surges.”
This also isn’t exactly new information.
An 1897 National Geographic article, “The Delta of the Mississippi River,” warned of the “effect of withholding by the levees from the great areas of the delta of the annual contributions of sedimentary matters,” saying it would lead to “subsidence of the Gulf delta lands below the level of the sea and their gradual abandonment due to this cause.”
The article went on to say that while the “development of the delta country” would lead to land subsidence, the economic benefit “far outweighs the disadvantages to future generations.” The benefits would be “so remarkable,” the article asserted, that “the people of the whole United States can well afford, when the time comes, to build a protective levee against the Gulf waters.” Almost 125 years after that article was published, its predictions of the environmental impacts of overdevelopment have come to fruition, but federal funding for coastal restoration projects may be lacking.
The land is also sinking faster than recent estimates said it would. A 2017 study by Tulane University geologists found that the average subsidence rate along the Louisiana coast is around nine millimeters a year, or more than one-third of an inch. That’s much higher than the rate averaged between one and six millimeters per year found in previous studies.
In some spots, the subsidence rate is as high as 12 millimeters per year, or nearly a half-inch. “We’ve been losing coastal land at the rate of a football field every 90 minutes,” Haase said.
While most Louisianans likely know about at least some of the problems facing the state’s coastal wetlands (almost everyone has heard the “football field” analogy), few know about the Lower Mississippi River Physical Model, a 10,000 square foot model housed at the LSU Center for River Studies on the Baton Rouge Water Campus near the banks of the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge.
Lower Mississippi River Physical Model (Photo courtesy of Judith Sylvester)
Constructed of 216 high-density foam panels that match the exact topography of the region and using 20 high-definition projectors to create a dazzling visual display, the model brings the river and coast to life. It’s essentially a replica of the lower Mississippi River Delta, down to the last bayou, levee, and channel. Using real-time data collected from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers river gages that measure water levels on the real Mississippi River, researchers pump water filled with lightweight plastic particles that simulate sediment into the model to run simulations and look into the future of the state.
“When we put those particles in our model river, they move down the model river the way sand moves down the Mississippi River,” said Clint Willson, director of the LSU Center for River Studies. “One hour on the model is about one year on the river. So that means every 65 seconds on the model is five days in the real world.”
Willson said researchers use the model to look into the river’s future. “The objective is to study the way sand moves down the river within a year, and then two years, five years, 10 years, 25 years, and 50 years.”
That 50-year mark is important because of Louisiana’s “coastal master plan.” Every five years the state produces a science and engineering-based plan to prioritize coastal restoration projects based on their ability to build land, maintain land, or reduce the risk of flooding. “They do that with the idea that over 50 years, they can decide which projects are the most effective,” Willson said.
To help determine which projects are a higher priority as they’re crafting the coastal master plan, state lawmakers and officials from the CPRA often visit the LSU Center for River Studies, where they can get a larger perspective of coastal Louisiana. “We’ll bring people here first, talk about the big picture, talk about the river, the coast, talk about the projects that are happening. And then they’ll go out into the field and go to a specific project site,” said Willson.
That perspective can be an invaluable tool, especially for out-of-state visitors. “The really cool thing about the model when you see it is that coastal Louisiana is really hard to get to. It’s really hard to take someone from Iowa and show them the coast,” said Amy Wold, director of communication at The Water Institute of the Gulf, an independent non-profit applied research organization that works to help solve complex environmental challenges. “You can take them to this place and they have these fantastic animations that really give them an idea of what’s going on. It gives a big picture, which was impossible to do before this.”
Wold said taking people who aren’t from the region through the facility and showing them the river model helps drive the point home and illustrates that what happens in coastal Louisiana affects the rest of the country. “People think of it as Louisiana problems,” Wold said. “These are nationwide impacts from the challenges we’re facing here. You knock out the oil and gas in coastal Louisiana, you’re going to see gas prices rise. You want your shipping to continue, we’ve got to keep this dredged. And to keep it dredged also means keeping it surrounded by wetlands. Those are connected. So it’s giving people an idea that losing wetlands isn’t just sad for us, it’s sad for all of us. We’re all in this together.”
The river model isn’t just a useful visual or educational tool for state officials or nonprofits. U.S. Congressman Garret Graves, who represents Louisiana’s 6th District, which spans 13 parishes across Southeast Louisiana (including the capital city of Baton Rouge), brings officials from Washington DC and Louisiana. Recently, he brought the deputy ambassador to the European Union to the Water Campus. Rep. Graves said the model helps him translate the science behind coastal challenges.
“We can explain to people that this is why we’re asking you to invest millions of dollars or billions of dollars,” Rep. Graves said. “Here’s what we’re doing. This is why I can tell you it’s a good investment. Because this model shows that these engineering principles verify it. And let me show you this project, and we throw it up on the screen, let me show you this project that we did four years ago, and what it looked like before, what it looked like after and what it looks like now.”
Rep. Graves compared bringing visitors to the river model to flying over the region and getting a bird’s-eye view. “One of the most powerful ways to communicate the challenges of the coast to people is in a helicopter. You can show people pictures but when you’re able to get up in the air and show them, it’s really powerful. We’ve been effectively able to simulate that.”
Clint Willson, director of the LSU Center for River Studies (Photo by Drew Hawkins)
And you don’t have to be an environmentalist to care about Louisiana’s wetlands. Even from an economic standpoint, saving the coast is a solid investment. Rep. Graves, a Republican congressman from the Deep South, agrees. And he said that the problems facing the state are happening around the country and around the world.
“If you start looking at restoring the coast as a sector, it’s one of the largest economic sectors in the state,” Rep. Graves said. “What’s happening in coastal Louisiana related to our sustainability, and the subsidence, and the sea rise, and the erosion, and just everything we have going on, it’s maybe a $70 billion problem. But it’s a multi-trillion dollar problem around the world. Because of our unique geography, and geology, we’re experiencing it before others.”
Coastal communities like those in south Louisiana are essentially on the frontlines of climate change, facing subsidence on the coasts, pollution in the air (the region is home to the infamous “Cancer Alley”), and catastrophic storms like Hurricanes Katrina and Ida. According to the EPA, the effects of climate change have been measured and observed in shoreline communities “for decades.”
What’s more, just last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released an updated technical report highlighting the risks from sea-level rise caused by climate change. The report said that the seas will rise by up to a foot nationally by 2050, which would have devastating effects on communities living along the coast.
As researchers, environmental groups, and policymakers work to find solutions to the climate crisis, some of the strategies used in Louisiana to combat the sinking coast may be useful in other places. And many of those strategies and coastal restoration projects came about as a result of simulations run by the Lower Mississippi River Physical Model in the LSU Center for River Studies. A little-known building a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River has the potential to help people living in coastal communities across the globe.
The decennial redistricting session is finished, although there’s no guarantee Louisiana’s lawmakers won’t need a do-over, or two, or three, or more, somewhere down the line. While waiting for them to finish, I reflected on the many times I’d done this before.
Near the end of every Louisiana legislative session, there are hours of downtime for the majority of members. That’s when those favored few not relegated to the ranks of “hurry up and wait” disappear from view, purportedly engaged in the business of finding compromise that will allow both chambers to finally agree on exactly the same details and wording of bills that have been generally agreed upon previously. Those kinds of political negotiations and deals have now been immortalized in a song from Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton.
Sung by the actor playing Aaron Burr, it goes like this:
“No one really knows how the game is played, The art of the trade, how the sausage gets made. We just assume that it happens, But no one else is in the room where it happens.
No one else was in the room where it happened, The room where it happened, The room where it happened. No one else was in the room where it happened, The room where it happened. The room where it happened.
No one really knows how the parties get to “Yes,” The pieces that are sacrificed in every game of chess. We just assume that it happens, But no else is in the room where it happens.”
As we have seen through the past two+ years, since compromise is no longer a welcome concept within Louisiana’s legislature, none of us need to be “in the room where it happens,” because it doesn’t really happen at all.
However, that particular song from Hamilton, coupled with the session’s (mostly) concurrent timing with the Winter Olympics, got me thinking this sad excuse for fair and democratic reapportionment actually deserves some awards.
These are not the Tonys. Instead…
First up, we have the Totally Off-Key Award. It goes to both House and Senate, based on the following:
State senators filed 23 bills in total: 17 were authored Democrats, including 14 by African-Americans. The other six bills were authored by Republicans. Only five bills made it out of the Senate and Governmental Affairs committee. Two of those were by the Senate President, two by the committee chairperson, and the last by a member of that committee. All those authors are white. All are Republicans.
House members filed 24 bills: 17 by Black Democrats, seven by white Republicans. The House and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced seven of those bills, with four in total making it through a House vote and advancing to, and through, the Senate. The three bills that languished all involved redistricting the state Supreme Court. One, by a white Republican (more on that later) got a semi-hearing on the House floor, before being forcibly tabled. The other two Supreme Court district mapping bills, both drafted by a now retired former state district court judge who just happens to be Black and a Democrat, weren’t given the courtesy of a committee hearing and vote until the final few days of the session. Then the bills just hung out on the House calendar – without being called – until sine die ended it all.
Sen. Sharon Hewitt and Sen. Cleo Fields. Screen shot by Sue Lincoln
The Bayou Brief would next like to acknowledge the Best Performance Justifying Non-Performance., which goes to Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee chairperson Sharon Hewitt (R-Slidell).
On February 4, she cast the deciding votes to defer congressional district mapping bills authored by Black Democrats – bills that would have added a second majority-minority district, as the Census indicated was appropriate – saying, “It’s not just about maps and numbers. It’s about people.”
She then went on to present her congressional redistricting bill, SB 5, which was the one ultimately passed by the entire legislature, and which basically keeps the status quo: five white majority Republican districts, and one (Black, Democratic) majority-minority district. Here’s her justification:
“I believe that SB 5, as we have drawn it, does comply with the Voting Rights Act… It provides a majority-minority district, Congressional District 2, in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas, that has consistently provided minority voters in that district the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
In addition, I do not believe, and there is too much uncertainty to convince us otherwise, that a second majority-minority district can be drawn in Louisiana, that is sufficiently compact and would perform as a minority district without greatly diminishing the opportunity to elect a candidate of choice that is currently afforded the voters in Congressional District 2. By taking voters out of a district that is 56% Black today, and creating two under-performing districts, as proposed in several other bills, we would jeopardize the current majority-minority district. And this legislature would be remiss in our obligations to comply with the Voting Rights Act.”
Our Tone Deaf Award for Biting the Hand that Feeds You goes to Rep. C. Travis Johnson (D-Vidalia). On Thursday, February 10, he voted for Speaker Clay Schexnayder’s House redistricting bill, which maintains the status quo of 29 majority-minority districts. In so doing, Johnson, the first vice president of the Louisiana Democratic Party, clashed with his party and fellow members of the Black Caucus.
A closed-door come-to-Jesus-meeting, held on Valentine’s Day, didn’t earn Johnson any candy or flowers. As reported by The Advocate’s Blake Paterson, Johnson was defiant, allegedly telling his colleagues “he wouldn’t tolerate their disrespecting him for his voting record. Johnson then said he could outraise anyone else in the room in campaign cash as a candidate if a second majority-Black congressional district were created.”
House Speaker Clay Schexnayder. Screen shot by Sue Lincoln
Next, we present the Not Too Sharp Award, to House Speaker Clay Schexnayder (R-Gonzales). Even after presiding over four previous legislative sessions, the auto mechanic and former race car driver still has trouble counting how many laps left to go.
When a member asked what number of votes would be needed to table a bill, the Speaker quickly replied,”It’s 53.”
The House Clerk, off-mic, turned and corrected him.
“Majority present,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Another member asked if the motion to table could be debated.
The Speaker abruptly answered, “It is a non-debatable motion,” then quickly called for the vote to table the bill.
“52 yeas, 43 nays, and the motion fails to pass.,” Schexnayder announced, necessitating another sotto voce correction from the House Clerk. “The motion to table passes. My apologies on that.”
Rep. Barry Ivey. Screen shot by Sue Lincoln
Before we go further with the Tone Deaf Awards, we’d like to truly honor one House member for his courage and determination. Rep. Barry Ivey (R-Central) casting off his red cape and called out the bull.
For those of you who missed the action, which took place on the House floor Wednesday, February 16, Rep. Ivey presented his committee-approved bill (HB 22) to realign the electoral districts for Louisiana’s Supreme Court, adding a second majority-minority district. (Census figures showed three were appropriate, rather than just the single one that has been in place for the past 25 years.)
“You may be asking, ‘Why, oh why, Barry, would you bring this?’ I felt that it was necessary to do this. I try to operate out of conviction and principles, despite knowing that this is not that type of body. It’s a whole lot more about self-preservation and about D and R politics than about anything else. And I believe that’s what’s kept our state back from doing other things, from working together and actually solving problems that affect the people we serve.
“At the very core of our form of government is representation. And when people are not allowed, by virtue of action or inaction in this body, to be fairly represented, I believe we fail to embrace what our Founding Fathers designed in this form of government,” Ivey said. “Today it might be convenient, when your party’s in power. And we may make excuses of why it’s okay to do it like this: why it’s okay, because we have the upper hand. But the tables can turn.”
That’s when the bull turned on him, as Rep. Mark Wright (R-Covington) rose and made a motion to table the bill.
(Yes, this is when the Speaker earned his award, as a majority – 52 of the member present –voted to kill Ivey’s bill.)
That’s when Ivey, speaking on personal privilege, transformed into a magnificent matador.
“This institution historically loves to put off till tomorrow what we can do today. We play the politics, we play the games…We all say it’s not about race. We’ve grown, we’ve matured, we’ve evolved, right? We’re enlightened. And what to we do? We repeat ourselves, because we don’t learn from history. We prioritize politics and a word that I can’t speak on this microphone. It’s a bunch of B.S.
“It’s okay, though. We’ll just continue to ‘get by’ here in Louisiana, because we’re too stupid to work together. That’s okay, though. Our state is dead last. We’ve had kids from all over the state come and tell us they have no hope. This institution has extinguished the hope of our children. Shame on us…Our children are leaving our state and we’re okay with that, ‘cause we do nothing about that. When groups of people in our state do not vote because they feel that their vote does not count, they’re right. Their vote doesn’t count.
Rep. Barry Ivey. Screen shot by Sue Lincoln.
“And what are we saying? We’re saying we haven’t evolved at all. And that’s okay. We’ll continue to be dead last. We lie to ourselves. We pretend. We play the games that it’s about the people, but it’s not. Look at every bill passed in this last year. What you’ll find is that if it wasn’t backed by deep-pocket special interests, it didn’t have much of a shot. And that’s okay. We’re Louisiana. We’re too busy focusing on the politics. We’re too busy focusing on all the things that don’t matter. And what’s the price that we pay? Our children’s future.
“But we’re content with that. Because it’s about me. It’s about my district. It’s about keeping the status quo that is the most failed status quo in the nation…This is how we do things. We squash debate. We don’t debate issues. We have everything pre-planned, organized. We’ve got the political machines operating full throttle all the time…But how many of us can say we did the best we can?
“I’ve told people this institution is the laziest group of people I’ve ever worked with. Because it’s true. Because we’ve got problems everywhere and we don’t want to solve them. Collectively, we expect that someone else is taking care of that, and so we don’t make any effort. There’s problems everywhere and we just assume that someone else is working on it. And what happens when you try? (raises his hand) Look what happens.
“When I come up here, it ain’t about grandstanding. It ain’t about getting re-elected. It’s not about me. It’s about trying to do the best I can to serve the people of this state – to help create a brighter future, a brighter tomorrow for our kids. That’s it. That’s the only reason I’m here.”
Rep. Ivey earned a full round of applause from the Black caucus for his statement.
And for his courage and determination – even though it was tilting at windmills – the Bayou Brief names Don Quixote de la Ivey – Rep. Barry Ivey – this session’s winner of The Impossible Dream Award.
No titlting Don Quixotes allowed. Photo courtesy MediaCommons.
Not everyone appreciated Ivey’s speech. Rep. Lance Harris (R-Alexandria) came up to the lectern right after Ivey finished, earning our last Tone Deaf Award. For this session. We call it the Tap Dance Out of This Award.
Rep. Lance Harris. Screen shot by Sue Lincoln
“Members, I just wanna come up here and say something real quick. You know, Barry started his comments saying, ‘This is the process,’ and it is. I’m not happy with the way my district was redistricted, or a lot of things. But it is the process. And I want to remind Mr. Ivey that when he came up here and threw the whole body under the bus, only 50, you know, 49, you know, 51 people voted to table the bill. That means that half of y’all did not.”
So saith the chairman of the House Education Committee.
“So think about that. It is the process. But I will tell you, this is a lesson we all need to learn about these kinda things when we go to the floor. Life does not give you what you want. It gives you what you deserve.”
It’s been nearly two years since I wrote to y’all, telling you I was done with observing and writing about the bullying that had become so constant at the state Capitol, but when the redistricting session began, I thought I’d pop in and have a look. After all, there have been several years now of concerted efforts to promote awareness and fairness in the process of redrawing the representational maps and I had hopes that might have led to lawmakers “enlightening up.”
Just over four years ago, a day-long conference – the Louisiana Redistricting Summit – was held at the Lod Cook Alumni Center at LSU. Hosted by the university’s Reilly Center and the non-profit group Fair Districts Louisiana (founded in 2017), the event was convened to bring together good government advocacy groups, politicians, the media and Louisiana’s citizenry to shine spotlights of both attention and scrutiny toward the reapportionment process which would be required after the 2020 census.
I was there, as many others in attendance voiced concerns about perceptions of “the foxes guarding the henhouse.” You see, Louisiana’s legislators draw all the various district lines: for congressional representation, for BESE representation, for the Public Service Commission, for the state Supreme Court, and – most worrisome – for their own districts. Suggestions were made to advocate for creating a separate and independent Redistricting Commission, with members from government watchdog groups, the public at large, and the legislature. In subsequent legislative sessions, bills were filed to try and make that a reality, but each was killed in committee.
In the past six months, there have been the “Redistricting Road Shows” – town hall type meetings conducted in Louisiana’s larger cities. The public comments received at these events generally echoed the opinions expressed by respondents to the redistricting poll done as a joint venture of the Louisiana ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Fair Districts Louisiana, and Louisiana Progress. That survey of 525 voters, conducted January 10th and 11th this year, asked the proportional and racially diverse samples of men and women, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents across the voting age spectrum what they knew and thought about redistricting. (Note: 56% of those polled said they had voted for Donald Trump’s reelection in 2020.)
More than half of all asked (53%) didn’t even know the once-a-decade reapportionment session was due to begin. Eighty percent of those surveyed felt it was important for the new maps to keep whole towns, cities, or parishes together in a single district, while 58% thought drawing districts to making incumbents’ re-election easier was unimportant. Instead, 78% thought making districts more competitive across party lines should be a priority.
Add to all this the fact that the 2020 Census results for Louisiana show that minority populations have increased, while white populations have declined. This means fairness would require drawing more districts with a majority of minority voters, while cutting back on the numbers of districts where white voters dominate.
And while Louisiana no longer has to seek pre-clearance for its proposed maps from the U.S. Department of Justice, due to the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, some present legal actions regarding redistricting maps drawn in other states should be serving as current caution signs for Louisiana’s lawmakers.
For example, North Carolina’s Supreme Court has rejected that state’s Republican-drawn congressional and General Assembly maps because they “deprive voters of substantially equal voting power on the basis of partisan affiliation.” Ohio’s Supremes said their state’s GOP-designed congressional maps violate an Ohio constitutional amendment that prohibits gerrymandering. In Alabama, a panel of federal judges sent lawmakers back to the drawing board, saying the legislatively designed and governor-approved mapsd violate the Voting Rights Act requirements by packing blacks in one district when population figures show two were warranted. Then on Monday, February 7, the U.S. Supreme Court put a stay on the do-over order.
Now that we’re one week into the reapportionment session, how’s all that working out?
We haven’t heard our lawmakers speaking out for status retention, or making any loud and proud public statements about the need to protect re-election chances for incumbents. (They may very well be saying those things to each other, in the Ellender Room in the capitol sub-basement.) I suspect quite strongly the lack of “save my seat” statements has less to do with the concerns of current state senators and state representatives for public perception, and much more to do with the realities of term limits. “Terming out” has led to turnover of as much as 43% of the total House members, and 41% of the senators in any of the quadrennial elections, since the restriction to three consecutive terms in one chamber or the other was enacted in 1995. For example, in 2007, 45 of the 105 House members and 15 of 39 senators were ineligible to run for re-election. In the most recent statewide elections of 2019, it was 16 of 39 senators, and 31 of the 105 representatives that were barred for running to save their seats.
In addition to the turnover of terming out, there has also been a surge in general churn, as noted by a rising number of special elections. A legislative special election is required if a lawmaker leaves his or her office (resigns, or dies, or is convicted of a felony) with more than 6 months left in the term. Over the past decade, 37 such special elections have been required, with the majority of those occurring in the past 5 years.
So no. Those charged with redrawing election district maps aren’t first-and-foremost prepping for personal longevity at a particular desk in one of the Capitol chambers.
They ARE, however, attempting to gerrymander.
Original use of the term “gerrymander.” Pic courtesy Wikimedia Commons
For those curious about that term, it is a verb, defined as “manipulating the boundaries of an electoral district with the intent of favoring one party, group or socioeconomic class.” Also, “it is always considered a corruption of the democratic process.”
The word was coined in the early 19th century, from the name of Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts + salamander. It was reflective of the supposed similarity between a salamander and the shape of a new voting district on a map drawn when Gerry was in office (1812), as the creation of that district was felt to favor his party.
Louisiana’s district map designers appear to be using both of the two main tactics of gerrymandering: “packing” and “cracking.”
While “packing” is generally described as “concentrating the opposing party’s voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts,” it’s how we’ve gotten much-needed majority-minority districts in the past.(See our 2nd Congressional District on the current map, as an example.) Now Louisiana’s increases in minority populations mean the state should have two majority minority congressional districts, instead of the present one. Yet the Republican majorities in both the state House and state Senate do not thus far seem inclined to use any crayons other than the red ones when they draw the new congressional outlines.
Louisiana’s current (since 2011) U.S. Congressional Districts. Map courtesy Fair Districts Louisiana.
Senator Sharon Hewitt (R-Slidell), chairing the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee charged with vetting the new map proposals before a floor vote, has gone so far as to question whether a new majority-minority congressional district would “perform,” helping to underscore the GOP’s symbiotic relationship with white supremacy.
House Speaker Clay Schexnayder. Screenshot by Sue Lincoln.
There’s also the bill redrawing House district lines, filed by (Republican) House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, appears to try and erase at least one voting block that, for the past decade, has been colored blue.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Sam Jenkins issued a statement last Thursday, pointing out the problems with those proposed electoral maps: “We want maps that fairly represent Louisiana, protecting communities of interest and avoiding gerrymandering. The census data shows that there should be an increase in minority representation at every level. The congressional maps that do not provide for a second majority-minority district are contrary to that census data.”
In addition, the caucus statement notes “The Speaker’s state House map cracks apart the minority population in District 23, currently represented by Kenny Cox, depriving African-Americans in that area of an opportunity for representation. Unlike the Speaker’s map, the Democrats’ state House maps account for the population loss in Northwest Louisiana without reducing minority representation.”
That brings up the other primary gerrymandering technique: “cracking,” which is defined as “diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters across many districts.”
It is what prompts people to say (and believe), “My vote doesn’t count.”
By drawing district boundaries to contain even a slim majority of the party in power’s voters, it ensures ballots cast by members of the other party (or no party) will have no effect on the final outcome. It is what Wayne Dawkins, a journalism professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and historian for the National Association of Black Journalists, describes as “politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.” Redistricting then becomes an exercise in guaranteeing political party power and dominance, rather than a method of ensuring representative government.
THAT is exceedingly problematic, for it is an utter violation of the oath of office each legislator utters. Their oath says, “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution and laws of the United States and the constitution and laws of this state and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me, according to the best of my ability and understanding, so help me God.”
Could you point me to which section of the United States Constitution refers to political parties? What part of Louisiana’s Constitution of 1974 (or any of its predecessors), or of its voter-approved constitutional amendments makes any authorization for or mention of political parties.
Political parties are unconstitutional.
Drawing voting district lines in accordance with party loyalty and to preserve party political power is absolutely unconstitutional.
May I offer you the words of stand-up comic Chris Titus to ponder?
“It’s not US and THEM the people. It’s WE the people,” he says. “Stay WE. Don’t let THEY distract you with the THEM.”
For the past two months, I’ve been completing work on a book about the assassination of Huey P. Long, expanding on the trilogy I published here on the Bayou Brief last year. The following is an excerpt from the book, Fishing for Kings: The Last Hurrah of Huey P. Long.
If you are interested in reading a version with (rather extensive) footnotes, feel free to contact me personally by emailing lamar at bayoubrief dot com.
I am particularly thankful to LSU’s Bob Mann, author of Legacy to Power: Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, for generously sharing his personal insight about Sen. Long’s life and career and providing me with several primary source documents that were absolutely indispensable to my research. Thank you as well to all of you who support our work here on the Bayou Brief and those who have supported my work personally on Patreon.
In politics, you must help your friends, or you won’t have any.”
Russell Billiu Long, the only senator in American history preceded in office by both of his parents, surprised many people when he announced at the beginning of 1985 that he would not seek another term in office. Even though he’d been in office since 1948, working alongside eight different presidents and during a time of transformational change, from the nation’s spectacular rise as a global superpower during the post-WWII boom to the violence and the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the tumult of Vietnam and Watergate, and the ascendance of the Reagan Revolution, Long was still just 66 years old and enormously popular with his constituents back in Louisiana, many of whom were urging him to return and run for his dad’s old job in Baton Rouge.
The state’s current governor, the flamboyant Cajun populist Edwin W. Edwards, after returning to office for a third term, had been indicted by a federal grand jury on public corruption charges and was now facing trial and the possibility of jail time. Long would consider the idea—the job was almost certainly his if he wanted it—but there was no rush. That election was nearly two years away, and Russell Long knew that two years was an eternity in politics. But a few months after announcing his planned retirement from the Senate, Russell Long did something else even more surprising, something very few people in his position would ever do.
On the morning of Thursday, July 25, 1985, Dorothy “Dot” Turnipseed Svendson, Long’s secretary, awaited the arrival of a Long Island orthopedic surgeon in the 25th-floor lobby of the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a glittering tower of steel and glass built atop the Villard Houses, a complex of lavish 19th-century residences commissioned by media mogul and railroad magnate Henry Villard and designed in the style of Renaissance-era Roman palazzos.
The appointment had been deliberately kept off of the senator’s public schedule. It would only be confirmed weeks later in a brief statement to the press that disclosed almost nothing about the purpose of the meeting or the discussion that took place. The doctor appeared promptly at 7:30 a.m., right on time, and Dot Svendson ushered him into an elevator and up to Long’s suite on the 49th floor.
“Senator,” Dot said as she opened the door, “allow me to introduce Dr. Carl Weiss, Jr.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Long said. “Please call me Russell. I’ve been interested in meeting you for quite some time.” His voice strained with a slight stammer, which he’d had since childhood. It was barely perceptible in person, but over the phone, it sometimes made him sound nervous or disinterested.
“Thank you for agreeing to this,” replied Weiss. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me.”
Long led him into the suite’s spacious and well-appointed living room, decorated like one of Louis XIV’s salons in Versailles. A white-linen table had been rolled in and set up next to a bank of windows, offering a bird’s eye view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral next door and a marvelous panorama of Manhattan, all the way to the Hudson River. The hotel, which opened its doors only four years before, exuded extravagance, marketing itself as “the most magnificent hotel to open in New York in a century.”
Developer Harry Helmsley put his wife Leona in charge of running the day-to-day operations. She later garnered national press attention for her tyrannical management style and her mistreatment of the hotel staff, earning her the moniker “Queen of Mean” and ultimately a stint in federal prison for tax evasion. “We don’t pay taxes,” she said, notoriously. “Only the little people pay taxes.”
Before sitting down for breakfast, the senator introduced his wife Carolyn, who had popped in to say hello before excusing herself to allow the two men to speak privately. They exchanged some brief small talk.
Weiss told them he’d lived most of his life in New York, even though both sides of his family were from Louisiana. “But when I was a pilot in the Air Force,” he said, “they sent me to Barksdale in Shreveport, though I ended up staying in a house in Plain Dealing.”
“I’m from Yanceyville, North Carolina, a little town much like Plain Dealing,” Carolyn told him.
“A lot like Plain Dealing,” Russell chuckled.
A waiter, an Indian man, neatly outfitted in a trim black suit, who had been sent up to serve the senator and his guest breakfast, asked if they preferred coffee or tea.
“Tea would be fine,” said Carl.
“Coffee,” Russell said. “Decaffeinated.”
It had been 50 years since Carl Weiss’s father, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Sr., shot Russell Long’s father, the inimitable and electrifying Huey P. Long, Jr., inside of the Louisiana State Capitol, a skyscraper towering over Baton Rouge that had been a monument to Huey even before he was buried beneath its front lawn.
“Neither of us had the power to shape the events that happened on Sept. 8, 1935, although each of us, in his own way, paid a price for something he was powerless to control,” Long wrote in a statement issued on Sept. 6, 1985, acknowledging his meeting with Carl Weiss, Jr.
Russell B. Long (left) served as Executive Counsel for his Uncle Earl (right), Huey Long’s younger brother Earl K. Long, in 1948.
Russell won his first election to the Senate a day before his 30th birthday, two months after narrowly defeating Shreveport judge and future Louisiana Gov. Robert F. Kennon in the 1948 Democratic primary contest to fill the remaining two years of the unexpired term left vacant with the death of Sen. John H. Overton. At the time, Russell had been serving as Executive Counsel to his Uncle Earl, Huey’s father’s irascible and wily little brother, who had just roared back to political life and reclaimed the governor’s office, defeating his old rival, Sam Houston Jones, in a landslide.
Russell had been on the job for just two days when Overton died but was immediately considered the presumed frontrunner. However, the race between him and Bob Kennon, an anti-Long judge from Minden who finished in third in the governor’s race earlier that year, was far closer than most had anticipated. Russell learned from his mistakes, realizing that his political future would depend on his ability to carve out his own identity, distinct from the Kingfish and Uncle Earl.
In his six subsequent reelection campaigns, he would never again face a serious challenge, building a record as a pragmatic deal-maker—“the Master of Compromise,” he was often called— and amassing greater seniority and accumulating more power in Congress than any other Louisianian in history.
“President-elect Jimmy Carter used to say that he was sent to Washington to run the country [only to discover once he got there that] Russell Long was already running it,” Sen. J. Bennett Johnston told the packed pews of Baton Rouge’s First United Methodist at Long’s funeral in 2003.
Among the nearly 2,000 people who have won election to a full six-year term in the United States Senate, when he finally stepped down in January of 1987, Russell Long—whose tenure spanned 38 years, 13,881 days, to be precise— had served longer than anyone other than John Stennis of Mississippi, Carl Hayden of Arizona, and Richard B. Russell of Georgia. The Georgian Dixiecrat often said that Russell Long was the “second-smartest senator” he’d ever known. The smartest, he claimed, was Russell’s father.
By contrast, Huey Long’s time in office—three years, seven months, and 15 days— is among the 25 briefest, 1,323 days in total, ranking, in terms of brevity, directly ahead of Barack Obama, who spent 1,413 days in the Senate before ascending to the White House.
As the actual day drew nearer—two days, really, Sept. 8, 1985, the 50th anniversary of the shooting, and Sept. 10, 1935, the 50th anniversary of Huey’s death—Russell would be obligated to attend an ever-increasing number of symposia, television interviews, and commemorations. On the afternoon of the 8th, which coincidentally also fell on a Sunday that year, he would be at the scene of the crime, regaling a group of around 150 friends and supporters for more than an hour with some of his favorite stories about his late father and briefly mentioning his contention that Carl Weiss had not acted entirely alone.
“Everyone has an opinion, I suppose, about my father’s assassination,” he said, standing in front of three massive panels featuring photographs and memorabilia from his father’s political career. “I don’t believe it was the act of a single individual. In my view, there were likely other people involved in one respect or another.”
That night, inside of the chambers of the Louisiana House of Representatives, beginning at almost the same exact time the shooting erupted 50 years prior, an invitation-only audience of dignitaries, state and local officials, and historians watched the first-ever screening of the PBS documentary Huey Long by 32-year-old filmmaker Ken Burns. The hour-and-a-half-long documentary, narrated by renowned historian David McCollough, is generally favorable to the Kingfish, though it includes interviews with a number of Huey’s critics, including two of the state’s most virulent anti-Long opinion leaders, former state Rep. Cecil Morgan, the leader of a group of legislators behind Long’s impeachment in 1929 known as the “Dynamite Squad” and who would later spend most of his career as general counsel for Standard Oil, as well as Betty Werlein Carter, an acclaimed writer and publisher who, along with her late husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman Hodding Carter II, owned the Hammond Daily Courier. Werlein Carter was also a member of one of New Orleans’s most prominent families; her paternal grandfather, Philip P. Werlein, founded the iconic store Werlein’s for Music, a Crescent City institution for more than 150 years, and her mother was the legendary suffragette Elizabeth Thomas Werlein, who is widely credited for ensuring the preservation of the French Quarter.
Both Morgan and Werlein Carter offered their own remarkably candid assessments of the general sentiment shared among Long’s opponents at the time of his assassination, which, in some respects, bolsters Russell Long’s belief that Carl Weiss had been part of a larger conspiracy.
“I can’t remember any Saturday night that I went anywhere that we didn’t talk about killing Huey Long,” confessed Werlein Carter. “It was the normal conversation. I suppose that the very strong pro-Long people weren’t talking that way, but the antis certainly. It doesn’t mean you meant to do it. It just meant that you wished that there was some way to rid the state of this incubus.”
Cecil Morgan corroborated her account.
“Every time there was a gathering— I don’t care who the people were that I associated with— every time there was a gathering of two or three people somebody would say, ‘That son of a bitch ought to be shot,’” Morgan recalled. “Somebody would say it in every gathering. And the tension was so extremely high and the feeling was so strong that there was hardly any other conversation throughout the state.”
Russell Long, who was also interviewed in Burns’s film, did not stick around for its premiere. Some suggested that he was “not pleased with some of the more negative aspects” of the documentary, though it is just as likely that his absence was the result of a scheduling conflict. He was heading back to Capitol Hill and preparing an extended speech he would deliver from the Senate floor on Tuesday, which included at least one surprise. He would introduce a motion to enter into the congressional record an important historical document that had previously been nearly impossible to find: A 72–page transcript of the 1935 East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner’s Inquest into the deaths of 42-year-old Sen. Huey Long and his 29-year-old alleged assassin.
Despite the way the inquest was subsequently characterized by Huey’s opponents and by conspiracists sympathetic to Weiss, the written record, Russell knew, was clear: According to the sworn testimony of no fewer than seven eyewitnesses, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Sr. intentionally shot Huey Long, at near point-blank range, and in response and within a matter of mere seconds, Huey’s bodyguards killed Weiss.
Carl Austin Weiss, Jr. never knew the man who had left him with his name. He was only three months old on the night of Sept. 8, 1935. At 50, he looked distinguished, almost aristocratic, with his mop of dark blonde hair and a perennial tan. He spoke French before he learned English and was built like someone who played a lot of golf and flew his own airplane, which he did.
Russell wanted to know where he’d gone to school—College of the Holy Cross as an undergrad, Columbia for medical school— and why he decided to become a doctor, and Carl told him about how he and his mother had moved to Paris shortly after his father’s death but were eventually forced to return to the states only days before Hitler’s army marched down the Champs-Elysées. As for why he became a doctor, he was probably genetically predisposed, he said, or perhaps the better word was “destined,” for a career in medicine. After all, both his father and his grandfather, Carl Adam Weiss, were physicians.
“I suppose you and I also share a destiny,” Long said. “Both of us lost our fathers because of what occurred on that night 50 years ago, an experience which has had a profound effect on my life and I imagine also on yours.”
It had, of course, Weiss acknowledged, though perhaps not as profound of an effect as it would have, had his mother not gone to great lengths to protect her only child against the ugly truth about his father’s death, which he first discovered at the age of ten while thumbing through the pages of Life magazine. He’d always been curious about his father’s life, but it was only in the past few years that he’d taken an active interest in learning about the circumstances of his death, a subject he’d previously been content to leave to his relatives in Louisiana.
“We would have met sooner, I think, had it not been for some interference by certain members of my family,” Russell admitted. Five years before, Weiss had asked an associate of Russell’s third cousin, Congressman Gillis Long, to relay his request for a meeting, but Gillis unilaterally vetoed the idea without ever mentioning it to Russell. “It would serve no purpose,” Gillis declared.
In fact, he was grateful for the opportunity to meet Carl Weiss, Jr. and had always wondered how life turned out for him. He knew that Carl’s mother Yvonne had believed, quite understandably, that her son could never have a “normal” childhood or an opportunity to make a name for himself if they remained in Louisiana, and he’d heard years before that Carl was a surgeon on Long Island. He was sincerely glad that he’d not only been able to get a world-class education, he’d also managed to build a thriving medical practice. This was what Russell had hoped he would learn about the son of his father’s murderer, and although he knew he didn’t have the answers that Weiss wanted to hear, he empathized with the mission he was on: Carl Weiss, Jr. simply wanted to know more about his dad.
“I’m happy it worked that we could meet here in New York, as opposed to you having to travel to Washington. The accommodations here are much nicer,” Russell said.
Carl also appreciated the convenience; his home in Garden City was 45 minutes from Penn Station on the Long Island Rail Road, which meant he would be able to still get a full afternoon in at his medical clinic.
“I wish to tell you first that I harbor no personal animus toward your father, nor do I have any strong feelings, one way or another, about the events of that night,” Carl said. “Not only because there’s now 50 years of separation, but also because of my own physical separation, as someone who grew up and who still lives and works in New York.” He’d rehearsed his words on the ride into the city.
It wasn’t entirely true. Carl did have strong feelings about the shooting that left his father dead and Huey Long mortally wounded. Of course, it’s also true that despite how unfailingly kind Russell was known to be, he also had strong feelings.
Huey P. Long missed the birth of his eldest son. On Nov. 3, 1918, even though he had already effectively won his first-ever election, narrowly defeating incumbent Burke Bridges for a seat on the Louisiana Railroad Commission in October’s Democratic runoff, Huey was out on the campaign trail. The general election was on the 5th, and while Huey’s race was uncontested, there were others that remained competitive, including a proposed Constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. (The amendment failed in Louisiana, but fortunately, less than two years later, that was rendered moot when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, which Louisiana didn’t get around to doing until 1970).
Only seven years after his father’s death, when registering for the draft, Russell Billiu Long, known as a kid by the nickname “Bucky,” discovered the legal name on his birth certificate was actually Huey Pierce Long, III.
“Mr. Huey P. Long, Jr. and Mrs. Rose McConnell Long are the parents of a 10-pound boy, Huey P. Long III, who arrived in the home of his maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. P. M. McConnell, of Madison Avenue,” the Shreveport Times reported two weeks later. “The paternal grandparent, H.P. Long of Winnfield, welcomes him as his first grandson.”
From her parent’s home in Shreveport, his mother Rose had wrongly assumed her husband would have approved of the name. He didn’t, but neither of them ever got around to officially correcting the mistake.
“I was Huey P. Long, Jr., and I hated being ‘Little Huey’ all my life,” Huey told Rose. “I’m not going to wish that off on a son.”
Huey had eight siblings, including two older brothers, but he was the only one of them constantly living in and diminished under “Hue” Long’s shadow.
This wasn’t the only reason he objected, however. He hadn’t even been sworn into office yet, but already, Huey was thinking about the legacy he would leave behind.
“When a man is in politics, he almost always ends up being repudiated,” Huey said. “It’s better for the boy to have his own name, as if things go badly for me, he can have his own name to make it on.”
Rose knew this about her husband from the very beginning. When they first met, Huey liked to busy himself by writing letters to U.S. senators, seemingly for any reason he could think of, regardless of how trivial or mundane. “I want to let them know I’m here,” he told Rose. “I’m going to be there some day myself.”
Twenty-five years after his death, Rose reflected back on her late husband’s preternatural sense of his own destiny, how he’d mapped out his entire career when he was still a teenager. “It almost gave you the cold chills to hear him tell about it,” she said. “He was measuring it all.”
There’s a particular irony to all of this. From 1927, the year Huey launched his second campaign for governor, until 1937, two years after his death, nearly 1,300 baby boys in Louisiana were named “Huey,” almost all of whom were “Huey P.’s,” comprising slightly more than 52% of all of the Baby Hueys born in the entire country. It went from being the 179th most popular boy’s name in the state to, at one point, the 14th most popular. In response, Huey Long kept a supply of enamel tin mugs engraved with the name “Huey P.,” with enough space to add in a surname, which he would send, along with a personal letter, as an expression of gratitude to the boy’s parents.
“Nothing hurt me more than to change my name to what it had been all my life,” Russell confessed years later. “But if I had not, people would have assumed I was trying to capitalize on my father’s name.”
Russell was 13 when his father finally stepped down as governor and joined the U.S. Senate, taking the seat he’d won nearly 14 months before. Huey’s move to Washington meant that his family would need to move as well, leaving the newly-built Governor’s Mansion and settling in a two-story Mediterranean-style home on Audubon Place Boulevard in New Orleans. Russell, however, was allowed to stay in Baton Rouge for a few more months so he could finish out the school year at University High, initially occupying his father’s suite of rooms at Roy Heidelberg’s hotel before moving into the family home of LSU President James Monroe Smith, whose son Jimmy was one of Russell’s classmates. When the school year wrapped up, he gave his first-ever interview, confessing that he missed his father more than his mother or his siblings down in New Orleans.
“I would rather hear him speak than do almost anything else I know,” he said. Afterward, as he walked the reporter to his car, Russell reminded him of what he’d said at the beginning of their conversation. “When I get big and run for office, I want you to remember the promise you made to vote for me,” he said.
Russell Long’s childhood ended a few minutes after 10 p.m. on the night of Sept. 8, 1935, when the phone pierced through the silence at the Long family home in New Orleans and the panicked voice on the other end of the line, his Uncle Gil McConnell, the superintendent of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge, told his 16-year-old nephew that his father had been hurt. “Bucky, your father has been shot. He’s in the hospital, and I believe it would be well for you and your mother and brother and sister to come here. I hope it’s going to be all right, but it’s not good,” McConnell said.
Russell padded down the hallway to his mother’s bedroom and blurted out the bad news as quickly as he could, knowing that any hesitation, any stutter, and he was likely to unravel.
If only for a fraction of a second, he saw the fear and panic in his mother’s face, and then he watched her transform, snapping herself into command and calling out for her other two children, 18-year-old Dolly and 13-year-old Palmer. “Don’t get excited,” she cautioned them, “but Daddy has been shot. We all need to pack right now to go up to Baton Rouge. Bring enough for a few days.”
The phone rang again. This time, it was Jimmy Noe, the acting lieutenant governor, calling from the hospital. “Rose, I’m right next to Huey. The doctor doesn’t think it’s serious, so y’all just be careful and safe on the drive up.”
Shortly before 11 p.m., the Longs piled into Huey’s brand-new, 1935 DeSoto Airflow SG Business Coupe, the same car he’d posed beside in a series of photographs taken earlier in the year in D.C. 16-year-old Russell, commandeered the driver’s seat, cranked up the engine, backed out of the driveway of their home on Audubon Place Boulevard, and bolted for Baton Rouge.
A few miles outside of New Orleans, as they approached the newly-constructed but still unopened Bonnet Carré Spillway, he called out for his younger brother.
“Palmer, you see that wooden barrier up there? I need your help moving it to the side,” he said. “It’ll shave 20 minutes off of the drive.” The two boys cleared the way, and they were back in business, barrelling down the empty road at 90 miles per hour and arriving at the hospital a few minutes after midnight, with just enough time to witness the tail end of Huey’s surgery.
In the hours that followed, as he came to the crushing realization that his father wasn’t going to make it, Russell thought about the man who shot him and about that man’s family and his infant son. He thought about all of the people who had attended that man’s funeral— more than 2,000, they said, including two former governors and a sitting U.S. congressman— and the countless times he’d heard his dad worry about people who said they wanted him dead. He wondered about what the world would be like without Huey Long in it, and he worried for himself.
He also thought about the book he’d just finished, which he’d left on his nightstand in New Orleans. He was sure it contained passages that now seemed much more relevant than they had only a day before.
“As a matter of great, good fortune to me that I had been reading some books by an author of the name Lloyd C. Douglas at that time. One of them was a book from which a popular movie was made, Magnificent Obsession. Another was a book named Forgive Us Our Trespasses, andthe writing I felt like had made a tremendous impact on me,” Russell once recalled. “The latter book, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, as the Good Lord would have it, was something I was able to read before my father’s death, and that convinced me that when people do unkind things toward you, they don’t do it because they have something in for you or because they hate you. They do it either because they’re misguided or because they want something for themselves, perhaps something that they wrongly want for themselves. But that you ought to feel sorry for them because they’re misguided, rather than hate people because they do those kind of things. You ought to try to help them rather than hurt them. That philosophy, I guess, prevented me from being an embittered person, taught me to feel kindly toward people, on the theory that they didn’t know any better.”
By the time Russell reached his forties, his resemblance to Huey was so striking, so astonishingly similar, it was impossible to deny his paternity. Yet, in terms of personality, those closest to the Longs generally agreed that his son Palmer Reid, the youngest of Huey’s three children, was most like his father. “Palmer was my boy,” Huey’s longtime bodyguard Theophile Landry recalled years later. “Russell was more on the reserved side. Palmer was a typical Huey Long in his ways. Brains, Russell had that part of the family, but personality, Palmer had it. Palmer would sell himself to you right now.”
Whereas Huey Long earned the opprobrium of the Washington establishment and the majority of his colleagues in the Senate for his crass and frequently outlandish disregard for the rules of decorum and his unapologetically personal attacks against members who opposed his legislative agenda, it is likely that his son Russell collected and cultivated more lasting, personal friendships in the Senate than anyone in its history.
“The whole thing puzzles the hell out of me,” political scientist Norman J. Ornstein remarked when asked about the “personal dynamics” of Russell Long’s command over the Senate Finance Committee. “It amazes me because he obviously has some kind of personal charisma. Even [liberal environmentalists] like Gaylord Nelson and Abe Ribicoff love Russell Long. You won’t see any revolution coming out of the Finance Committee. He has some personal power over them.”
But however confusing it may have been for Ornstein, there wasn’t any great mystery about Russell Long’s interpersonal relationship skills.
LSU political communications professor Bob Mann, who worked as Russell Long’s press secretary during his final term and later wrote the authorized biography, Legacy to Power: Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, notes that at the beginning of Long’s career, he deliberately reached out to many of his father’s fiercest political adversaries, both in Congress and back home in Louisiana, not necessarily because he hoped to befriend them or charm them into changing their minds but, at the very least, to make it impossible for them to hate him the way they hated his father.
Huey was a flamethrower, a disrupter, and an iconoclast; Russell was a dealmaker, a pragmatist, and an institutionalist. To be sure, Russell was not always well-served by his cautious if not conservative approach. Critics accused him of being too cozy with big business and corporate interests, and his intellectually dishonest embrace of the rhetoric of “state’s rights” in the nascency of the civil rights movement wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. But when one considers the totality of his career, particularly his introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit and his work on Medicare and Social Security, Russell Long’s legacy is, in many respects, an extension of his father’s animating cause. At their core, both men believed in building a government that serves those most in need and an economy that invests its wealth to lift people out of poverty and into positions of opportunity.
Russell Long had, in fact, made it on his own name, as his father hoped he would, but he also became the most effective champion of his father’s legacy.
Among the numerous occasions throughout his life in which he came to his father’s defense, one, in particular, stands out, a 1947 essay he titled, appropriately enough, “In Defense of My Father.” The essay— written in response to Hamilton Basso’s feature-length article, “The Huey Long Legacy,” in the Dec. 9, 1946 edition of Life magazine— is raw, full-throated, and unfiltered. It’s especially remarkable because in a family known for their bombastic and unapologetically loud-mouthed personalities, to the public, the taciturn and mild-mannered Russell always seemed to be more like his mother’s side of the family than his father’s.
“I venture the assertion that no man of our time has been more abused, vilified, and misrepresented by the American press to its reading public than my father, Huey P. Long,” Russell begins. “Most commonly, he has been accused of being a ruthless dictator who would have destroyed our system of democratic government as well with the charge as a noisy low-grade rabble-rouser. A mass of fictional novels pictures him as possessed of an obsessive lust for sexual indecencies. All glory in the fact that at law there is no right of suit by defendants or relatives of a deceased person who has been libeled. It now appears that Life magazine is desirous of creating the new American legend in which Huey Long is to play the role of Satan to the epic of American democracy.”
Hamilton Basso, a well-regarded New Orleans-born writer, best known for his work, over the course of more than 20 years, as a contributing writer for the New Yorker, was not exactly a disinterested third-party on the subject of Huey Long’s representations in American fiction.He was also the author of two books featuring a character inspired by Huey Long, the first of which, His Sun in Capricorn, was published in 1943 and is mentioned repeatedly throughout his article for Life.
Given that the criticism against Huey Long never relented, even after his death, it may seem somewhat strange that it was Basso’s piece in Life that earned Russell’s ire. No doubt, this is partly because of Life’s popularity and prominence at the time, but it’s also because of Basso’s central thesis. “Basso’s article was the most comprehensive and widely read of several to declare that, despite the fact of his 1935 assassination, the Kingfish, by way of fiction—and much to his eldest son’s continued offense—was still fair game for public vilification,” explains Keith Perry in his book The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel.
That said, Russell Long also uses the opportunity to address other critics, taking direct aim at how his father had been consistently portrayed by the Louisiana press. “Except for the brief one year period [after] Huey Long was elected governor, during which only a few papers supported him, his opposition included every daily newspaper in the state,” Russell writes, somewhat misleadingly, as he fails to note that his father had been consistently supported by at least one daily, the Lake Charles American Press. “They twisted his every statement, his every act. The fact that they could not defeat him was attributable only to the fact that he was able to convince the majority of the people that the attack was due to his program of taxing the vested interests for the benefit of the State and its masses. To the outside, the Louisiana press explained its failure to defeat him on the theory that the majority of the people of Louisiana were a mass of stupid illiterates in the hands of a rabble-rouser.”
While newspaper editors and publishers would undoubtedly disagree with Russell’s characterization, it would be a mistake to dismiss his opinion as categorically false or irreparably biased. One need not be Huey P. Long’s son to pick up on the smug and condescending tone and the clear contempt that many in the Louisiana press had not only for Long but also for Long’s voters. Russell’s argument may be an oversimplification, but the arguments employed against his father were frequently overstated and often reckless. It’s easy to miss, but at one point in Ken Burns’s documentary, there is a passing reference to an editorial by Hodding Carter II, written before the shooting at the State Capitol, that is nothing short of an outright endorsement of assassinating Huey P. Long.
There is one other aspect of “In Defense of My Father” worth mentioning. Although he does not refer to it by name, Russell directly refutes the basic premise of Harnett T. Kane’s 1941 book Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928-1940. Kane, who began covering Long in 1931 as a cub reporter for TheNew OrleansItem, achieved national recognition and acclaim for his book and, coincidentally, drew the interest of the country’s most well-known “Citizen Kane,” filmmaker Orson Welles, who, at one point, had optioned the book with the hope of directing and starring in a movie about the life of Huey P. Long. The problem with Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride can be found without ever opening the book: Huey Long died in 1935; Kane’s subtitle suggests he was still in charge, five years later.
The reason for extending his reign beyond the grave, as disingenuous as it may be, is to hold him accountable and responsible for the crimes and the corruption of his political successors and the men who claimed the mantle of his movement, specifically those implicated in the saga known as the Louisiana Scandals of 1939-40 and, among those, principally, the state’s new governor, a former state appeals court judge from New Orleans named Dick Leche, who was convicted of mail fraud for a scheme involving the acquisition of trucks by the state highway department. Leche, who was later granted a full presidential pardon from Harry Truman, is also remembered for once remarking, “When I took the oath of office, I didn’t take any vow of poverty.”
However unsavory or unethical as one may find Huey Long’s methods (even Russell would later acknowledge there were several things his father did with which he disagreed or believed to be wrong), aside from when, as a Public Service Commissioner, he was fined one dollar for defaming the state’s governor, a judgment that would never hold up today, he was never found to have done anything illegal. Federal investigators spent years trying to connect him with criminal wrongdoing but came up empty. Decades after his death, the FBI released a trove of records, including a 306-page dossier outlining these investigations and ultimately concluding that there was no evidence Long had violated any federal statutes.
With respect to Louisiana state law, as many others have aptly pointed out, why would he break the law when he could simply change it?
To be sure, Huey was aware that some of his top political lieutenants weren’t nearly as savvy or as careful as he had been. “If those fellows ever try to use the powers I’ve given them without me to hold them down,” he once said, presciently, “they’ll all land in the penitentiary.”
“The scandals broke four years after Huey Long’s death,” Russell writes. “Every story of an indictment had as much about the fact that the unfortunate man was a friend of the late Huey Long as the facts of the indictment. The term ‘Huey’s heirs’ was used by the press [so frequently] it seemed to be one word. Yet, never was it shown that any alleged irregularity could even be traced back to a time when Huey Long was living. By this standard, everyone having known a man who committed an unlawful act would also be partially to blame.”
Russell had flown to New York the day before so that he could deliver the keynote speech at the annual shareholders’ meeting of Union Pacific Railroad. He told Weiss that he’d been struck by the fact that Elbridge T. “Ebby” Gerry, Sr., a prominent American banker, served as both a director and chairman of the executive board for Union Pacific.
Russell explained that the name “Elbridge” came from Gerry’s great-great-grandfather, one of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Elbridge Gerry was a Massachusetts politician, a former governor and then, briefly, the Vice President under James Madison.
“But he’s probably best known for introducing the political redistricting practice known as ‘gerrymandering,’” Long said. “When he was governor, he signed a law redrawing the lines of the state senate districts, and people thought one of the districts resembled the shape of a salamander. Hence the expression ‘gerrymander.’”
The didactic history lesson was Long’s clever way of steering the conversation to the reason for their meeting. Fifty years after the shooting at the Louisiana State Capitol, there was at least one aspect of the story that remained a mystery. It’s why, to some, Carl Austin Weiss, Sr. ranks as the “unlikeliest” of all American political assassins, and it’s the central reason members of his family and a parade of amateur detectives, conspiracists, and more than a handful of tabloid journalists and opportunistic politicians contend that Weiss was wrongfully blamed for the assassination.
The most commonly accepted explanation of Carl Weiss, Sr.’s motive is that he was likely angered by Huey Long’s efforts to push through a bill designed to gerrymander his father-in-law, Judge Benjamin “Henry” Pavy, out of office. Some also believe Weiss may have been further triggered after hearing a rumor that Huey intended on resurrecting a smear campaign against the judge that falsely alleged the Pavy family— and by extension, the newest member of the family, Carl Weiss, Jr.— had mixed-raced ancestry, which in 1935 Louisiana was just about the most incendiary claim one could make against a white person.
“Based on everything I know about my father’s background and his experiences, there is nothing that suggests he would be a likely political radical,” Carl told Russell. It was a line he’d frequently repeat during the next 38 years of his life, the line he told the press when asked about what he had discussed with Sen. Long.
But Russell knew there was more to Carl Weiss, Sr. than his son had been told or would ever be willing to admit, and he also knew that there were aspects to the story of the events that unfolded on a night in Baton Rouge 50 years ago that simply couldn’t be known.
When recounting their meeting later that day in July of 1985, using his dictaphone to record his impressions of the senator and the details of their discussion that stood out to him, Carl Weiss, Jr. spoke about how deeply moved he was by Russell Long’s uncommon decency. “He was an active listener and a pleasant conversationalist,” Carl noted. “Russell repeatedly expressed the notion of Christian forgiveness…. [and] quoted a preacher whom he enjoys who insists that his listeners shake hands and declare love for their fellow man, a feeling which he does seem to emit.”
Russell Billiu Long, who, even as a teenager, had the wisdom to recognize that his father’s assassin did not know the real Huey Long, only the version imagined by his father’s worst enemies, and who possessed the compassion to forgive that man and the grace to break bread with the man’s son, was a practitioner of extraordinary mercy.
Part Two of our limited series on The Dashing Despoiler
As stated in one of the federal civil lawsuits, “Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros is a charming, handsome, and successful serial sexual predator from France who was a graduate student and employee at LSU.” His success over more than three years of continued sexual harassment, sexual assaults, and rapes of young women in south Louisiana was enabled – individually and institutionally.
I think that this state has so much potential, and I just think that the people you can meet here are just so welcoming and so warm.”
A Culture of Non-Compliance
LSU has been lax in adhering to the requirements of Title IX, and in enforcing its provisions.
Title IX is the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational institution that receives federal funds, and it has been the law of the land since 1972. That’s two years before Louisiana changed the designation of women as legal “chattel” (property) of their husbands, fathers, sons, or whoever was their nearest male relative when the state adopted its present constitution in 1974.
The discrimination banned under Title IX includes more than just inequity in the number of athletics programs open to females. It also includes bans on sexual harassment and sexual violence and requires schools to “respond promptly and effectively” to complaints.
Sadly, LSU has – as delineated in its own commissioned reports – has thus far failed to effectively and consistently comply. The Husch Blackwell Report is the most recently released and self-reported documentation of the university’s systemic inattentiveness to the magnitude of the problem. This report, issued March 3, 2021, notes there had been at least five reviews (including three from external consultants) regarding LSU’s Title IX issues over the preceding five years. And still, as the report unequivocally states, “There was a lack of effective leadership at the University with respect to Title IX.”
LSU’s Board of Supervisors retained the Kansas City, Missouri-headquartered law firm in November 2020, in response to a series of USA Today investigative articles, most particularly the one headlined “LSU mishandled sexual misconduct complaints against students, including top athletes.” While the firm’s inquiries focused most heavily on purported problems within student athletics – football in particular – they also encountered more than a few sexual misconduct incidents within entirely academic programs. The report noted that, overall, the university harbored “a culture that does not promote reporting incidents of sexual misconduct.”
A Myriad of Contributing Factors
As delineated in the Husch Blackwell Report, the university’s Title IX Coordinator was overworked, required to wear too many hats. She was responsible for Title IX compliance (and investigating all complaints on NON-compliance) for the flagship in Baton Rouge, along with all the other LSU System campuses – in Alexandria, Eunice, Shreveport, along with the medical schools in Shreveport and New Orleans. She was also the system-wide coordinator for Clery Act compliance (campus safety), and for the Baton Rouge campus’ ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance. That means – at a minimum – monitoring safety and accessibility for approximately 50,000 students across nine campuses, investigating complaints of violations and filing reports on those investigations with campus, system, state, and federal agencies.
Many complaints were kept within the students’ own departments of colleges, or – if they reached the Title IX Office – were handed off to Student Advocacy and Accountability, under the auspices of the university’s Office of the Dean of Students. SAA is officially tasked with “promoting academic integrity and appropriate standards of conduct” for students within the university. Think allegations of cheating on exams, plagiarizing a research paper, drunk and disorderly in the dorm, or streaking across the parade ground. Problematic, certainly, but nowhere near the magnitude of violation – or felony – of rape. It’s like having small claims court try a murder case.
Cases that actually got reported to LSU campus police rarely, if ever, were forwarded to the university’s Title IX Office, due to LSUPD policy (based on a flawed interpretation of state privacy law) which prohibited sharing information regarding reports of sexual violence of assault without a waiver signed by the victim. The Husch Blackwell Report notes that, on the contrary, while public disclosure of victim information is prohibited, sharing reports of crimes involving sexual offenses with the Title IX Coordinator is mandatory reporting.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Title IX guidance explains why this is necessary.
“The Title IX coordinator must have knowledge of all Title IX reports and complaints at the school” in order to evaluate whether there are “circumstances that suggest there is an increased risk of the alleged perpetrator committing additional acts of sexual violence or other violence (e.g., whether there have been other sexual violence complaints about the same alleged perpetrator, whether the alleged perpetrator has a history of arrests or records from a prior school indicating a history of violence, whether the alleged perpetrator threatened further sexual violence or other violence against the student or others.)”
The fallout from the USA Today articles and Husch Blackwell’s report confirming the veracity of those news items have damaged and even potentially ended the careers of athletes, coaches, and administrators. It has generated outrage in women around the state, including alumni, professors, and legislators, and has prompted student protest marches and legislative public hearings. It has also led to several lawsuits, as well as prompted federal investigations of the university’s policies and procedures.
None of this, however, has mended the damaged lives of the women victimized by all these predatory men.
For many of those preyed upon by Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros, the harm was facilitated and exacerbated by a woman who had been part of the feminism faculty.
Dr. Adelaide Russo
Selling Out the Sisterhood
Adelaide Russo, Ph.D. – “Addie” to her friends and fellow academicians – used to say her greatest goal was to head the French Studies Department at LSU. That was nearly twenty years ago, when she was teaching Women’s and Gender Studies courses in addition to classes in French literature. I know. I was a student in one of her classes on Women Surrealists, and I heard her make that statement more than once.
Dr. Russo was the daughter of another Dr. Russo – John – a pediatrician, and Matilda, a nurse. Born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Addie attended MacDuffie School, a selective private college preparatory school in Granby, Massachusetts. She told several of her fellow female professors at LSU that she’d been teased and bullied there, because of her Italian surname. This led one of Addie’s peers I spoke with to wonder aloud why – if she was making a career in French Studies – she did not legally change her last name to the identifiably French spelling, as “Rousseau.” But I digress…
Russo became a Vixen in her undergraduate college years. That’s the mascot of Sweet Briar College, a private women’s college near Lynchburg, Virginia, where she earned her bachelor’s degree. Following that, she went on to Columbia University, her father’s alma mater, for Master’s and then her doctorate.
Those who had had more extended dealings with her than I offered the following observations and critiques, which – in retrospect – might be seen as predictive of Dr. Adelaide Russo’s actions and inactions in dealing with Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros and complaints she received about his behavior.
Addie was described as tending to “gush,” in different ways, depending on whether she was dealing with women or talking about men. With women, she tended to try and dominate. She would hijack discussions in meetings, and use passive voice – “it is known” – to try and give her commentary more weight than it deserved. She would hum when her statements lagged, in order to retain the floor. And certain of the other professors – at least some within the Women’s and Gender Studies affiliated faculty – made a concerted effort to squelch her when she would go on a tear, in order to move the meeting along and keep it on topic.
She was known to focus on and defer to men. One professor remembered Russo going on “ad infinitum, ad nauseum” about her interactions with French philosopher Paul Ricoeur while she was a student at Columbia. Other of her former peers mentioned that she always seemed to find a way to speak of her connections to male Frenchmen and male French scholars.
That matches with my observations when taking her course on Women Surrealists. Her lectures were all about the male surrealists. When women of the movement were mentioned, she framed them almost exclusives as mere “muses” to the men. We the students were the ones who researched the women, writing our papers about them with little direct guidance from Dr. Russo.
Some of her peers saw her as a social climber, reflecting back on Addie being very proud that she hung out with the “best families” in the Baton Rouge area, specifically mentioning her dinners and visits with the Parlange family, owners of a St; Francisville plantation. Others mentioned how, prior to being named LSU’s head of French Studies, Adelaide Russo dressed in modish French fashion, and wore her hair in the latest chic style. These comments were followed by the observation that after achieving her goal of chairing French Studies, “Addie went downhill,” with heavy alcohol consumption mentioned as either a cause or a symptom.
How does all this connect with Addie’s role in the Edouard d’Esplaungue d’Arros saga?
d’Espalungue d’Arros coat of arms
When Edouard, the son of a French baron and his wife, a noted legal expert who teaches at the Sorbonne, was arrested for rape in Rapides Parish, Dr. Russo contravened LSU’s removing him as a French instructor by hiring him as her research assistant, as well as asking him to keep grading and writing comments on papers and tests from students in the classes he had been teaching. She allowed him to continue participating in the weekly French table and to continue hosting French cinema night. She also provided him with the keys to her house, so he could ‘run errands” for her.
And, regarding TV and newspaper reports on his rape arrest, she informed the French Department grad students and faculty that “Edouard is innocent,” urging them to be supportive of him and respect his privacy. And she warned them not to discuss the rape allegation further, as such would violate FERPA, the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. (Not true. FERPA protects the privacy of student records, which is not the same as a public news report of a criminal arrest.)
Two grad students instead informed her they’d been sexually harassed by d’Espalungue and seen him coming on to undergrads. Addie Russo dismissed their complaints as “misinterpreting” Edouard’s comments and actions, which – she said – should be received as “compliments.” When they, along with a full professor in the French Department, took their concerns to Russo’s superior – the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences – and Addie was asked about d’Espalungue’s continuing leadership of activities within the French Department, she denied he was “leading anything.” She repeated these denials when questioned again about renewed complaints more than two months later.
While Russo aided Edouard in setting up and launching the American Journal of French Studies – complete with his using the alias of “Ed Darras” – over subsequent months (which ended up being a catalog of potential prey for d’Espalungue), she became overtly hostile toward the grad students who had complained about him. Between that and Edouard taking advantage of Russo’s protection to snark at and otherwise verbally harass them in front of others, both of the grad students dropped out.
After d’Espalungue’s rape of an undergrad in September 2020 prompted a new investigation Russo sent an email to faculty and graduate students in the French Department. The October 5, 2020, directive told them to report any Title IX complaints to her and she would decide whether they should be forwarded. She wrote, “All instances covered by these regulations must be reported to the Department Chair, and I will instruct you to contact the Dean’s Office and the Title IX office if you have reason to lodge a complaint.” (emphasis mine)
LSU student protest march, held in October 2021, after news of federal lawsuit filing regarding serial sexual assaults.
Is French Studies the department described by this paragraph in the Husch Blackwell report?
“For example, we met with a group of former and current students and employees in one academic department who reported that their department chair instructed all members of the department to communicate concerns or reports to the chair “and to no one else,” implemented a “gag order” in mandating that once reported to the chair, the matter could not be discussed with anyone else, and retaliated against individuals who questioned or disregarded this mandate.”
You decide.
What we do know is that Adelaide Russo has been removed as chair of LSU’s Department of French Studies, and at last report was in France.
And Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros has now been a fugitive from American justice for more than a year, while he promotes himself in France as a “digital financial analyst,” claiming to be devoue et integre. (Translation: “dedicated and absolutely honest.”)
He came on to her gently, complimenting the high school senior on both her French fluency and her accent. The handsome Frenchman then persuaded her to join him for more conversation and a beverage in the hotel bar. That’s where her group’s chaperone found them, and hustled her away – but not before the 18-year-old girl and the man ten years her senior had exchanged contact information.
Association Louisianaise des Clubs Francaise des Ecoles Secondaires convention at LSU Lod Cook Center, March 2018. Photo courtesy ALCFES Facebook page.
To a man with his proclivities, the March 2018 convention of high school French clubs, held at LSU, where Eduoard d’Espalungue d’Arros was a graduate student in French Studies, was like having a delectable buffet of choices delivered to his door. The debonair Frenchman, son of a Baron, orbited around and through various breakout sessions at the event and ultimately made his selection. He approached his target – we’ll call her NC – after she finished speaking with a well-known professor from U-L Lafayette, the university she planned to attend in the fall.
She was flattered when d’Espalungue contacted her later, and they began dating. It wasn’t long afterward that they became intimate.
The demands of NC’s freshman semester at ULL, coupled with Edouard’s studies and teaching schedule at LSU, limited their time together that fall. So when she invited him to a weekend retreat for ULL Catholic students, being held at a woodland conference center in Rapides Parish, he accepted. Because it was a faith-based event, they agreed not to divulge their relationship status to others in attendance.
One of the other retreat attendees – a 21-year-old ULL senior we’ll call BT – was charmed by the tall man’s soft French accent, and made a concerted effort to pay attention to the LSU grad student so he wouldn’t feel left out. The second night of the retreat, September 30, 2018, he followed BT when she left the bonfire, caught up to her and steered her toward a bench by the dock. She quickly found all her attempts at conversation cut short by his insistent kissing. She got up to leave, but he grabbed her, wrestling her to the ground on her back. He got on top of her, pulled down his athletic shorts and her leggings, and pinned her arms, and raped her. He left her lying there, on the ground.
She ultimately made her way back to the retreat center’s main hall, and curled into a fetal position, weeping. The priest in charge of the gathering was summoned, as were sheriff’s deputies. Despite one deputy’s efforts to dissuade her from doing so, BT insisted on filing a complaint and submitting herself to a rape exam. D’Espalungue was arrested and charged with sexual battery, then released within 24 hours upon posting a $25,000 bond. Four days later, following a more thorough investigation by law enforcement, he was re-arrested – this time charged with forcible rape. Once again, bond was quickly posted – $75,000 more – and upon surrendering his passport to the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Department, d’Espalungue returned to LSU in Baton Rouge.
ULL’s administration notified LSU authorities, and the attack and the arrest of the French grad student and Student Government Association senator made the news – TV and print – in Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge. LSU’s administration told the head of the French Department, Dr. Adelaide Russo, that d’Espalungue’s contact with students should be curtailed. He was removed from his duties as a graduate teaching assistant. (LSU employed him as an instructor of freshman French classes.) Thereafter, Russo met individually with the rest of the department’s grad students, instructors, and professors, informing each of them that d’Espalungue was innocent.
LD and SN, grad students within the department, disputed their department chair’s contention of the man’s guiltlessness. Each of the women told Dr. Russo they had been sexually harassed by the Frenchman, and they’d witnessed him hitting on other students. Clearly irritated, the department chair dismissed those complaints, going so far as to tell LD she should consider the man’s verbal comments “a compliment.”
Russo managed to keep d’Espalungue on the LSU payroll, by hiring him as her personal research assistant. She also allowed him to continue leading student activities within the department, including the weekly French table and French movie night. This kept him in regular contact with undergraduates. This both alarmed and outraged grad students LD and SN, so they, along with VT, a professor within the French department, reported their concerns and the situation to other LSU officials. Just over a month after d’Espalungue’s arrest for the rape of ULL student BT, the associate dean of the Humanities College met with Russo and d’Espalungue – on November 7, 2018. Both of them assured Associate Dean Jason Hicks that the Frenchman was only “taking classes, helping Dr. Russo with activities – research, projects.” He was “not leading anything.”
After the meeting, d’Espalungue sent an email inviting undergrads and grad students to the next evening’s French movie night.
Professor VT messaged Hicks’ boss Dean Troy Blanchard that same day, right after receiving d’Espalungue’s email. VT said, “As long as Edouard is allowed to be a senator, VP of the grad student association, and coordinator of (and attendee at!!) French table and cinema club, the students are not being protected. If the point of removing his teaching assistantship was to protect undergraduates, then he should also be prevented from attending any undergrad events or interacting with that student population.”
No administrative action was taken at that time. More complaints and warnings were filed with additional LSU officials.
Associate Dean Hicks met with Russo again on January 24, 2019. Again she denied her research assistant had any duties that put him in contact with other students.
On January 31, 2019, Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros raped TT, a freshman who had been one of his French 1001 students the previous semester, before he was suspended from teaching.
American Journal of French Studies tabling at Highland Road Park in Baton Rouge. d;Espalungue on left; Dr. Adelaide Russo in striped shirt next to him. Photo courtesy AJFS Facebook page.
In March 2019, with the assistance of department chair Dr. Russo, d’Espalungue launched the American Journal of French Studies. The promotional material for the publication claimed it was being published by the LSU College of Humanities and Social Studies, and it solicited essays, poetry, and short stories from high school and college students, to be submitted to “Ed Darras” – one of several aliases d’Espalungue began using following the publicity over his rape arrest the previous fall.
He also solicited assistance from undergrads in reviewing the submissions to the journal. IB, a freshman who had been in one of his fall classes, was one of the volunteers. On April 2, 2019, he texted her, urgently requesting they meet. When they did, he began groping her. She broke away, and headed back to her dorm room. He followed her, grabbing and kissing her as she tried to go in her door. She was finally able to get inside, and lock herself in.
Subsequently, he bombarded her with text messages, including threats to oust her from the journal staff if she did not comply with his sexual demands.
The first awards program for the American Journal of French Studies was held at LSU on April 25, 2019. d’Espalungue was heard repeatedly remarking about his romantic and sexual interest in one of the high school essayists in attendance. Within less than a month he’d seduced her.
In late August 2019, at the start of the fall semester, d’Espalungue – as the American Journal of French Studies director and editor-in-chief “Ed Darras” – was welcomed to three high school campuses in Lafayette, speaking to French students about the cachet of having their writings published in the journal. Oh, and then there are cash prizes given out at the awards ceremony held in April at LSU. All you have to do is submit your essay, poem, or short story – written in French, of course – accompanied by your name, email address, and phone number.
At the end of of the 2019 fall semester, in December, graduate student LD, psychologically and emotionally exhausted up with being “complimented” by d’Espalungue’s verbal sexual harassment, gave up her full-time status as a doctoral student in French literature.
Then, at the start of 2020, came COVID.
LSU’s main campus in Baton Rouge shut down March 23, 2020, and the rest of the semester’s classes were conducted entirely on-line. d’Espalungue earned his master’s degree that May, and remained enrolled as a graduate student, now working toward his Ph.D.
In-person classes on campus resumed August 24, 2020.
On September 6, 2020, less than two weeks into the new semester, d’Espalungue raped another undergrad. We’ll call her KC.
They had met not long before, when she got a flat tire on her bicycle and he stopped to offer her help. He ended up giving her his phone number, and she later texted him her thanks for his assistance. Subsequently they spoke by phone a few times, and, over the Labor Day weekend, met on Sunday for a picnic. During their al fresco date, he began touching her leg and asking her about her sexual preferences. She then said she was going home, and he offered to drive her. He drove her to his place instead of hers, and he raped her.
She went to a medical facility and had an exam and rape kit done. And when school reopened after Labor Day, she reported the rape to LSU’s Title IX office.
The Title IX Office punted the complaint to the university’s Student Advocacy and Accountability Center, ostensibly because the rape occurred off campus. Yet it should also be noted that this was right after USA Today launched its series of investigative articles regarding on-campus rape complaints against former LSU running back Derrius Guice.
While LSU’s Student Advocacy and Accountability Center investigated KC’s complaint, the LSU Title IX office was dealing with other complaints against d’Espalungue. On November 6, 2020, IB, who had been groped, inappropriately texted, and threatened by the man during the spring of 2019, filed an official complaint. By November 16, 2020, four other undergrad students had added their own complaints to the Title IX investigation against d’Espalungue.
On November 9, 2020, the Student Advocacy and Accountability Center issued a ruling suspending d’Espalungue from November 9, 2020 through December 31, 2021, for “sexual misconduct, endangerment, and disorderly conduct.” d’Espalungue appealed the decision.
A hearing on the matter, conducted via Zoom, took place on November 20, 2020. During that hearing, KC was questioned and cross-examined by her rapist. The decision to suspend d’Espalungue was, however, upheld, and on December 11, 2020, his appeal to LSU’s Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences was denied.
On December 14, 2020 – one year ago today – Edouard d’Espalungue d’Arros flew home to France, purportedly to spend the holidays with his parents and siblings. He has not returned, and remains a fugitive from justice,
How was this sexual predator and serial rapist able to continue preying on Louisiana’s young women – impacting the lives of at least a dozen high school and college students during his time here?
He had lots of help – intended and unintended.
We’ll examine that aiding and abetting in the next part of this series.
