Twelve Years (Concluded)

Sam Jones won.

Earl Long was brooding, morose, tense.

After twelve years, the powerful Long machine was wrecked.

Except for a single bulb burning in a downstairs office, the lights went out in the great white Governor's mansion in Baton Rouge, the night Sam Jones defeated Earl Long in the primary run-off for Louisiana's governorship. Five uniformed officers guarded the grounds, chasing away small boys who tried to plant anti-Long signs in the shrubbery. Outside, the night was clamorous: whistles, bells, automobile horns, the music of six bands rising from a parade two blocks away. Overflow from the parade surged past the mansion, shouting insults at the Governor. Confetti drifted down from the windows along Baton Rouge's Third Street; marchers in the parade threw handfuls of aluminum sales-tax tokens in the crowd. Because Earl Long had called Sam Jones "high-hat, sweet-smelling Sam Jones," marchers wore high hats, carried mops. Baton Rouge had seen nothing like it since the Armistice. Neither had Lake Charles, where 20,000 people formed in a four-mile parade, stores closed, theatres cut their programs, thousands of tax tokens were dumped, and police roped off the business district so crowds could dance in the street to hillbilly bands.

The night of the Sam Jones victory parade, Governor Long left turbulent Baton Rouge, drove to New Orleans, where the Long machine had won. He went to the Jung Hotel, kept his room number secret. His armed bodyguard threatened to smash the camera of any photographer who tried to photograph him. After two days of seclusion, newspapermen got to him, asked for a statement. "I don't owe the newspapers a God damned thing," said Louisiana's bitter, beaten Governor.

Victory. So ended last week the rule of the political machine that Huey Long built--though not until May 14 will Sam Jones become Governor. It ended after a day of quiet balloting that gave Sam Jones 283,384 votes, Earl Long 263,443. But far bigger than the 20,000-vote margin was the anti-Long victory. In the Legislature, where there had been no opposition since 1929 ("I can buy and sell legislators," said Huey Long, "like sacks of potatoes") only 37 of 100 members were returned Longsters.

The Senate, where before the election only hearty, vigorous James Noe, onetime Long lieutenant, had fought the Long machine, would now have 23 Jones supporters and independents, and only 16 Longsters. The Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Superintendent of Education, were anti-Long. Totally destroyed in New Orleans was the Louisiana Democratic Association that Huey set up when he was getting control of the city. And out through the State's remaining 63 parishes (Louisiana equivalent of counties) the potent parish sheriffs, who bulk large in Southern rural life, were put in their place: 41 sheriffs were for Earl Long, but he carried only 14 of their parishes.

Victor. Nobody believed that the popularity or political acumen of Sam Houston Jones, 42, accounted for the victory. Five months ago Sam Jones was known only as a moderately prosperous Lake Charles attorney. He comes from that stretch of Southwest Louisiana that is more akin to Texas than to the Old South, where the French-speaking Acadian country of the bayous, live-oaks, sugar & rice plantations, shades off into oil and cattle country.

When Huey Long was practicing oratory and salesmanship on the hillbillies of his native Winn Parish, Sam Jones was going to high school in the sleepy cattle town of DeRidder, 15 miles from the Texas line. When Huey was making a name for himself as a young lawyer, handling compensation cases for hillbillies hurt in Winn Parish's new lumber mills (1915), Sam Jones was working his way through Louisiana State University. When Huey Long was baiting the Interests--especially Standard Oil--claiming draft exemption because he was a notary public, and proclaiming that only suckers would fight, plodding Sam Jones, true to his commonplace name, was drilling away in the army. (His boyhood sweetheart, pretty, vivacious Louise Gambrell, meanwhile married somebody else.)

When Huey Long--his voice getting a little more raucous, his face a little puffier, his eyes more noticeably protuberant--was Railroad Commissioner, stridently upholding the rights of the people, but somehow mixing them up with a belief that Standard Oil had cheated him of $1,050, Sam Jones was getting admitted to the bar. And when Huey Long was getting licked for Governor in 1924, and plunging into the politician's purgatory of private practice, deals, publicity hunting, Local Boy Sam Jones, 26, was wrenching himself away from DeRidder and moving to Lake Charles (population then: 13,000), where an oil boom had started.

When Huey Long was elected in 1928, Lake Charles was still booming, had financed locally a $6,500,000 port improvement fund to build up its port, and Sam Jones was stumping for Al Smith in a pro-Klan district. When Huey Long was being impeached on 19 charges, including a plot to murder a legislator, Sam Jones was working in Lake Charles as assistant district attorney. When Long was making the Legislature of Louisiana a savage parody of democratic processes, packing the courts, building the Capitol, putting in roads, trapping his opponents, calling out the troops, and boasting, "There are not many people in the United States who are smarter than I am, and none in Louisiana"--when Huey Long, with five bodyguards now, and a passionate, vituperative voice, was being hit in a Sands Point washroom, clowning and shouting in the Senate, posing in green pajamas, filibustering in a torrent of disconnected sentences, plodding Sam Jones was unexcitingly being chosen State Commander of the American Legion (and keeping the Legion out of politics). When Long launched his Share the Wealth Plan, fast-growing Lake Charles, with 20 oil fields in the region, was still growing, and Sam Jones had gone back to private practice. The smartest man in Louisiana, with all his bodyguards around him, was shot in the Capitol he had built; and Sam Jones's career had also taken a new turn: Louise Gambrell, 33, reappeared on the scene, her first husband having died, and married Sam Jones, 37.

Reason. The gigantic machine that Huey Long had built careened from scandal to scandal, as solemn John H. Overton gave way to independent, Huey-worshipping James Noe, as Noe gave way to paunchy Dick Leche, and Leche resigned for Huey's brother Earl, Sam Jones's fortunes improved: he built a $30,000 house in Lake Charles (population now: 30,000), fathered a son and a daughter. Settling-up time had come for the Long machine. A photographer from the New Orleans' States got a picture of a State University truck being used to haul building supplies to the half-built house of the wife of a Long machine-man -- and the States's fighting editor, 64-year-old Jim Crown, had libel-proof evidence of the graft that every body knew was going on. As his disclosures were followed by a Federal investigation, the record stood: more than 200 parish and Federal indictments had been returned, three men had committed suicide, five had pleaded guilty, five more had been tried and convicted. The big shots--a former Governor, the president of the University, a millionaire promoter, a district judge, a president of the State reform school for boys--were caught with the smaller fry, and still the end was nowhere in sight.

Last week plodding Sam Jones, having plodded through 400 speeches in 158 days, made few promises. Twelve years of the Long machine had left Louisiana in bad shape. Tax reformers pointed out that the bonded debt had jumped from $12,000,000 to $200,000,000, that Louisiana had the highest auto license tax in the U. S. (Sam Jones promise: a flat $3 tax), had 27 new taxes, including a general 1% sales tax that filled Louisiana pockets with brass and aluminum tokens, one of the highest gasoline taxes in the country. General was the clamor for a clean-up of the judicial system. Said Sam Jones: 1) dictatorial laws must be abolished; 2) courts must be placed above reproach; 3) Louisiana schools must be revitalized. "Louisiana has gone back into the hands of the people. . . . A new day has dawned on this State after a long night with foul things happening in the dark."

That long night had left a legacy of scandals, crime, debts, but some good things too: a network of badly needed, Long-built roads, the towering 33-story Capitol, free bridges where there had been toll bridges and ferries, free textbooks, the magnificent physical plant of the University. And one part of Huey Long's inheritance unemotional Governor-elect Sam Jones was never likely to invade: the folklore that Long inspired, the tales of his Kingfish cleverness and rascality gleefully repeated in country stores and country cabins, the vague, contradictory feeling that he somehow stood for the poor man ("Every man a king") that brought crowds out to hear him speak and put his picture in houses where there was nothing much else on the wall.

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