Louisiana's 'Peckerwood Caligula':
SHANNON, DAVID
Louisiana's 'Peckerwood Caligula' The Earl of Louisiana. By A. J. Liebling. Simon and Schuster. 252 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by David Shannon Department of history, University of Wisconsin; author,...
...Now the second quotation...
...He explains the complexities of Louisiana politics, divided between city and country, French and Anglo-Saxon, Negro and white, Catholic and Baptist, cosmopolitan and insular...
...Obviously, he was a man after Liebling's heart, but an odd one to be paired with John Quincy Adams...
...Liebling would argue, I suppose, that Long had to come out for Davis to save his political skin...
...I suspect the attraction was more complicated...
...At a tumultuous session of the legislature, 01' Earl was either insane or undiplomatically candid, or both, and was packed off against his will to a Texas mental hospital...
...Also, if Long had not died before he took his seat in Congress—after his defeat in the State election he won the primary for the House of Representatives—"Earl would have been a great addition to Congress, where nobody of his stature has sat since John Quincy Adams and John Morrissey...
...Despite the Governor's fairness to Negroes and his opposition to White Citizens' Council types, whom he called "grass-eaters," he ended up in the run-off gubernatorial primary supporting the racist candidate, the present Governor Jimmie H. Davis, more famous as the composer of "You Are My Sunshine...
...Let's look at the first quotation...
...He is hardly, it would seem, a figure worthy of any serious veneration...
...Liebling had become interested in Long because of the Governor's recent unusual activities, unusual even by the crazy political standards of Louisiana...
...A. J. Liebling left New York to get his story in July 1959 thinking that Long was "a Peckerwood Caligula...
...Liebling is not taken in by the pre-Civil War magnolia myth of Southern gentility, and he does a good job of showing how the myth affects politics a century later...
...their common flair for good anecdotes and colorful language and their common interest in horse racing must have had something to do with Liebling's appreciation of Long...
...For whatever reasons, Liebling believes that Long "was the only effective civil rights man in the South...
...Long emerges from this volume not only the best of a bad lot, with which I agree, but a positive hero...
...Liebling says he liked Earl because he thought him to be the sanest, fairest, most liberal and most effective politician in the State on racial matters, and because he championed the poor of the State, both black and white, against a coalition of urban goo-goos and privilegeseeking, tax-ducking, powerful corporations...
...author, "The Socialist Party of America" This BOOK is such fun one is sorry to finish the last page...
...The reader is as interested in Liebling and how he got his material as in Long and the other colorful characters...
...He then returned to his plan to win the Democratic primary without leaving office, resign after his election but before the end of his current term and thereby circumvent the letter of the State Constitution, which forbids a governor to succeed himself...
...If the reader doesn't get bogged down in these occasional mires of filiopietism, he can admire many of Liebling's comments on Louisiana history and politics...
...Morrissey, in case you've been puzzled, was an Irishman who became heavyweight champion in 1858, and acquired a controlling interest in the Saratoga race track in 1863...
...But 01' Earl took the city slicker from the New Yorker, in which much of this book's material first appeared, just as he has taken thousands of Louisiana rednecks...
...Although it is perhaps twice as long as necessary, its many asides and disgressions are as interesting, and sometimes as hilarious, as the treatment of the main subject...
...The main subject is former Governor Earl Long of Louisiana, Huey's brother, and his unsuccessful effort to succeed himself as the State's chief executive in 1959 and 1960...
...He was elected to the House in 1866 and 1868...
...But even so, to support a candidate whose only real issue was segregation was strange for an effective civil rights man, let alone the only one in all of the South...
...But for all its painless lessons in politics, past and present, the book is primarily entertainment, and exceptionally good entertainment...
...I like the theory that Huey Long's success was Populism 40 years late, the more spectacular because it had been suppressed for so long...
...He bribed his way out, landed in a Louisiana institution of the same sort, got out again and promptly fired the officers of the Louisiana hospital...
...And he shows clearly that states' rightism is as much a mask for buccaneering oil companies as for the White Citizens' Councils, and how the two are related...
...Liebling's comments on food, his tight prose, his excellent quotes and anecdotes, and his amazing range of analogies—from contemporary politics in Lebanon, Algeria and Kuwait to Greek mythology, boxing and craps—combine with his more pertinent observations to make this book a delightful corrective to the stereotyped Northern "liberal" interpretation of Deep South politics...
...This sweeping statement makes many great figures seem to be of less stature than Earl Long, among them Clarence Cannon, Fiorella La Guardia, Maury Maverick and Sam Rayburn, to name some who sat only in the House...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 27
