Eminentoes/The Saga of Crazy Earl
Gold, Victor
EMINENTOES THE SAGA OF CRAZY EARL Little Davey Duke, oh yeah. . . . You know that sapsucker went and bought hisself a new nose? Oh yeah . . . Flew all the way to California to pay one o' them...
...And if, despite all, his political enemies should close in on what files he had...
...At one such meeting in Dry Prong, Julius [Long, another brother] opened with a series of vicious personal attacks on John Fournet...
...With 90 percent of the votes in, Russell's opponent held what Professors Kurtz and Peoples describe as "a seemingly insurmountable 3,000-vote lead...
...I'll take care of you...
...Try to envision it, not on the stump in the Louisiana boondocks, but on the tube...
...And if Uncle Earl was indeed anti-Semitic, then God help the Jews, because even their best political friends are their enemies...
...When Fournet's turn came, he retaliated with insinuations about the circumstances of Julius's and Earl's birth...
...Wiliam E. Dodd In two volumes: $15.95 each Available at your bookstore...
...McSween, according to Long, was nothing but "a full-fledged faker and anointed jackass . . . a hothouse plant born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and you couldn't pry it out with a crowbar . . . a yellow-bellied sapsucker, a spoiled brat . . . that little hypocrite...
...Ain't he the pretty one...
...If I'm crazy now," he told the press after he'd outfoxed the sapsuckers who wanted him committed, "I've always been crazy...
...Don't wink anything you can nod...
...Not that Kurtz and Peoples, for all their research, get the full story...
...If Jones ever became governor, Earl warned his fellow rustics, he'd "tax everything you got—your bedsprings, your bed bugs, your jackasses and your nanny goats...
...Now Earl, in addition to Liebling's tour de farce and a Paul Newman comedy, at least has a biography to call his own...
...2) the new director then asked the board to fire the superintendent at the hospital where Earl was being held, replacing him with another close friend...
...There is no gainsaying Taylor's importance...
...There is a sniff of apocrypha in that one—Earl did not go unscathed through three decades of grand jury hearings because he left witnesses, especially clerical witnesses—but the fact that Louisianians believe the story tells us something about the man's management style...
...He's a High-Hat Sam," charged Earl, "the high society kid, the high-ldckin, high-and-mighty snide Sam, the guy that pumps perfume unVictor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Crazy and smart, like his older brother Huey...
...Col...
...From Kurtz-Peoples' Earl K. Long, page 58: The Longs introduced a unique Louisiana political phenomenon...
...Brother Huey has his full shelf in the library, including novels and documentaries...
...Students of Dixie demagoguery are on notice that while the authors arein earnest, Joe Liebling was also sui generis which is to say that while Kurtz and Peoples have done their research, the artistry that brought Long to life in The Earl of Louisiana isn't easily replicated...
...which, as historian T. Harry Williams pointed out, was part of the Long family's appeal to Louisianians...
...Twenty years later, when Earl's public vagaries and private demons brought him national publicity as another Southern governor who'd rounded the bend, I was among the few prescient political observers who predicted they'd never be able to hold the man in a nut-house, because he had the perfect defense: Earl didn't let me down...
...Maybe I'm as impressionable today as I was at age eleven, but if Earl Long was indeed being paid off by the Mafia, it strikes me that three decades of prosecutors and grand juries blew their assignments...
...I told you we were holding up some of the returns from the boys in the country...
...I was an impressionable eleven at the time, a pre-pubescent populist who thought Earl Long was the best show around...
...WARTIME CLASSICS Paperbacks from Da Capo Press THE ART OF WAR by NiccolO Machiavelli Translated by Ellis Farneworth Revised and with an introduction by Neal Wood "A benchmark in the development of modern military thought...
...Earl instructed Sims to file a suit of legal separation against Blanche, thus nullifying her legal authority as a spouse to have him recommitted...
...Don't worry about a thing," Earl told the man...
...The same could have been said if anyone had tried to fit Earl Long with a team of campaign consultants, professional speechwriters, and public opinion analysts...
...I'm not going to do a thing for either one of these sons of bitches...
...For all his low crimes and misdemeanors, Crazy Earl was a fleshand-blood politician working from internal signals, however vertiginous, rather than from the strategies and tactics furnished by professional plasticizers...
...A few minutes later, a lobbyist from the other side walked in and left an even bigger wad of cash on his desk...
...Whewwww . . . and all Harold McSween did wrong was get hisself elected to Congress in Earl's home district...
...But why quibble over a few items,however questionable, in an otherwise sterling contribution to Southern political literature...
...More recently Paul Newman, striving to impersonate the inimitable, played him in the movie Blaze, based on Bourbon Street stripper Blaze Starr's book about her bizarre affair with Crazy Earl...
...Don't write anything you can phone," was Crazy Earl's way of never letting his left hand know what his right was taking...
...From Earl K Long, page 265: Earl and a Roman Catholic priest were having a friendly, casual conversation in his office...
...233 Spring Street New York, NY 10013 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 39...
...What else could a New York writer make of a Southern politician who stood up to the racists of his state in the segregationist fifties...
...Theodore Ropp $13.95 SWORDS AND PLOWSHARES A Memoir by General Maxwell D. Taylor "The general's memoirs...
...Several hours later, Sims appeared in Long's room and discovered him stark naked, yelling, "JOE SIMS, WHERE THE HELL YOU BEEN...
...Naturally, those joint appearances often degenerated into name-calling contests, and, at times, candidates lost their tempers...
...to the extent that when Earl ran for governor in 1948, he needed Russell at his side to reassure Longites that the feuding brothers had patched up their differences before Huey died...
...A group of farmers managed to restrain him from doing bodily harm to Fournet...
...The zingers he used to warm up his crowds were inspired, not the kind of Gridiron 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 Club one-liners turned out by a Hollywood jokesmith...
...Suddenly, a lobbyist walked in and dropped a wad of cash on Earl's desk...
...W hat interested Paul Newman in playing Earl Long, explained the actor, was that the man was an authentic...
...Wouldn't it be a joy, though, to COME SEE AND HEAR GOVERNOR EARL LONG, in Ville Platte or Haynesville, lighting into the candy-ass Klansman from Metairie the way he lit into Harold McSween in his last campaign, the summer of 1960...
...der his arms...
...The opinions he vented on the stump were his own, not those of a task force producing "position papers...
...No problem, as Crazy Earl once told a reporter: "I've seen to it that all records and books they could harass me with have been destroyed...
...Opposing candidates frequently spoke at joint stump meetings, giving the voters the opportunity to contrast the men...
...He has been a key actor in the great events of our time...
...Oh yeah, Dickie Nixon, oh yeah...
...There are times, too, when even the professors' research falters—as when they rely on off-the-wall FBI reports that variously charge that Earl Long was "extremely and rabidly anti-Semitic," as well as on the take from Mafia bosses Carlos Marcello and, as the authors have it, "Phil Kaistel" (the man's name was Kastel...
...He was, as he often boasted, one of "the last of the red-hot poppas," an authentic whose raw candor would be a refreshing bracer in this Supermedia era of endemic euphemism and image-conscious modulation...
...Put one of them $400 suits on Uncle Earl, it'd look like socks on a rooster...
...Don't smile anything you can wink...
...are of a superior literary quality, far surpassing the usual old soldier's tales...
...Graft, chicanery, and political lies we expected from our public servants...
...Don't phone anything you can talk face to face...
...Elting E. Morison $12.95 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT by Jefferson Davis New foreword by James M. McPherson "As a justification of secession and the resulting civil war, it is the best in existence...
...by Victor Gold Earl had had their differences was a well-known fact of Louisiana political life...
...My first recollection of Earl K. Long as a campaigner was during the wild-hair Louisiana governor's race of 1939-40, when he accused his opponent Sam Jones of smelling sweet...
...Like his brother Huey, he was sui generis, an anti-establishment redneck Danton who, as Kurtz and Peoples put it, "refused to allow social convention or personal inhibition to keep him from doing whatever he wanted...
...That Huey and 'Louisiana State University Press, 312 pp., $24.95...
...Earl said "Don't worry about a thing, I'll take care of you...
...A Da Capo Press vr...
...In no time, (1) the board convened and fired its director, replacing him with one of Earl's close friends...
...or call 800-321-0050...
...3) the new hospital superintendent then issued a statement certifying Earl as "completely rational" and discharging him from the hospital...
...The race was close...
...The old man was always like that, even when he was young...
...with the Longs, at least, we got a floor show for our cover charge...
...Or could it be that they too were on the Mafia pad...
...Washington Post $14.95 ABRAHAM LINCOLN His Speeches and Writings Edited by Roy P. Basler Preface by Carl Sandburg "This is the most comprehensive and readable one-volume collection of Lincoln's writings ever published...
...Huey, after all, gothisself assassinated at age forty-two...
...Years later, Fournet recalled the incident and remarked that "the son of a bitch would have killed me...
...We'll make up them 3,000 votes...
...From Earl K Long, pages 22122: Distrusting his regular attorney, Theo Cangelosi, Earl called a close friend, Joe Arthur Sims, a lawyer from Hammond, and told him to come to Mandeville right away...
...Badly depressed [write Kurtz and Peoples], Russell told his uncle that he was ready to concede defeat, but an irate Earl shouted, "Stop crying, you weak-kneed son of a bitch...
...Don't talk anything you can smile...
...With a lawyer that crazy, Richard Nixon could have served out his full term and retired to San Clemente with a Nobel Peace Prize...
...Dan Rather, if you think tangling with George Bush was tough . . . T iebling subtitled his book, "The la Liberal Long," an understandable misnomer given the author's cramped ideological perspective...
...Follow closely now, law-lovers: After giving Sims his orders, Long began calling in chits from friends on the hospital board...
...T he Kurtz-Peoples biography, part 1 of a Southern history series published by LSU Press, is not without flaw...
...Oh yeah . . . Flew all the way to California to pay one o' them plaster surgeons fifty thousand bucks just to pretty up his snoot...
...Paul L. Miles, USMA $12.95 MASTERS OF THE ART OF COMMAND by Martin Blumenson and James L. Stokesbury "Easily the best and perhaps most 'practical' work of its kind...
...After election, Earl named Russell his executive secretary, then later that year repaid the political debt in full by backing his nephew in the race to fill the unexpired term of U.S...
...Russell won by 10,000, with some outlying precincts in St...
...Earl was nothing if not a hands-on CEO, as when he personally engineered his release from the state hospital in Mandeville, after his wife Blanche put him there to await transfer to a mental institution...
...Louisiana's Earl K. Long on the subject of David Duke E Long said nothing of the sort, .1:, / of course, but only because he's been dead thirty years...
...Well now...
...He would have, though, if the Great Poll-taker in the Sky hadn't changed Earl's precinct in September 1960, roughly about the time David Duke was in high school, squeezing Aryan-pure blackheads and plowing through the English-translated Hitler jugend edition of Mein Kampf...
...at least, not by the elite standards of any Manhattan assemblage of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s friends...
...After listening to the harangues for several minutes, Earl, unable to tolerate the insults any longer, charged toward the platform, shouting, "I'll clean your plow...
...After the man left, Earl turned to the startled cleric and bellowed, "Who the hell do those bastards think they are, trying to bribe the Governor of Louisiana...
...David H. Donald $17.95 THE ROUGH RIDERS by Theodore Roosevelt New introduction by Elting E. Morison "An extraordinary document .. . Here a remarkable experience is set forth in lively, serviceable, masculine prose...
...But though a racial moderate and soak-the-rich populist, Earl was hardly a "liberal...
...Bernard and Plaquemines parishes giving him a nine-to-one pad against his opponent, Robert Kennon, who objected—the story isn't included in the Kurtz-Peoples book, but I remember it well—that in one precinct, where he received only fifty votes, he had over seventy-five personal friends...
...Oh yeah, and did they ever...
...Always hotheaded, Earl succumbed to his temper and sometimes tried to assault his opponents...
...not to forget the self-righteous goo-gooism inflicted on the body politic by such guardians of campaign morality as the League of Women Voters and Common Cause...
...to which a sympathetic Uncle Earl replied, with existential realism, "Well, that's politics for you—one day you got friends, the next day you don't...
...Earl in a campaign debate...
...Earl would say smarter...
...Oh yeah . . . that "Pretty Boy" Duke got him a sweet manicurist to shine up his pinkies, and a full-time barber does nothin' but spray his hair, and an Eye-talian shirtmaker who charges five hundred bucks just to pick up a needle, and a tailor from England to do his hand-stitched Klan robes that glow in the dark...
...Senator John Overton...
...H e is remembered by students of picaresque Southern politics as The Earl of Louisiana, the title of A. J. Liebling's rollicking book that covered Long's last days on the sapsucker circuit...
...Then Earl told Sims to file a formal petition for a habeas corpus petition [and] to convene a meeting of the state Hospital Board, which had formal political jurisdiction over the Mandeville institution...
...Going up against "Chep" Morrison, a new-breed urban politician, in one of his last campaigns, Earl said of his opponent, "He wears $400 suits...
...And now, for those few demagogue buffs in every community who thrive on politics as the art of the improbable, a pair of Louisiana historians, Michael L. Kurtz and Morgan D. Peoples, have collaborated on a definitive biography of the man, Earl K Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics.' The sobriquet "Uncle Earl," as Liebling readers should recall, came to Long not so much because of his habit of handing out peppermint sticks to kids as his eccentric avuncular ties to Huey's son, Russell...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
