When Labor Day began a most popular season
Some of us with long memories can recall a time when political campaigns did not go on all year long and when Labor Day was the semi-official day for them to begin. In those days people looked forward to the opening of campaign season as much, or maybe more, than to the first football game of the fall.
In fact, until relatively recent times, many of us thought the two seasons were not that different. As late as 1987, an LSU professor explained to a USA Today reporter that “politics plays the role in Louisiana that TV wrestling does in the rest of the nation. It is fixed. It is flamboyant. It is surreal. It is our spectator sport.”
In those days before social media began to besiege us, candidates traveled to big cities and backwater towns to make stump speeches that had to be as entertaining as they were persuasive. Jimmy Davis, for example, entertained his way into the governor’s mansion with his singing, but he was also a good storyteller, and that was important for anyone who wanted to gather and keep a crowd.
One my favorite Davis stories has to do with his visit to an old friend in North Carolina. The county fair was in full swing and a lying contest was part of the festivities. The person who told the biggest lie would win a Hereford bull.
Somebody recognized Davis in the crowd and the contest organizers graciously told the governor that he could participate even though he wasn’t a resident of the county. Davis accepted the invitation and began by saying, “This is kind of tough for me. I’ve never been to something like this. In fact, down in Louisiana where I come from, people don’t tell lies.”
As he told the story, that was as far as he got, “The judge immediately jumped up to proclaim, ‘Governor Davis, you just won the bull.’” Huey Long was a master storyteller who did not worry about embroidering facts. The North Louisiana Baptist told one of his most famous tales in Catholic St. Martinville. He said that even though he was a Baptist, every Sunday morning he would hitch up their horse and drive his Catholic grandparents to Mass before driving his parents to Protestant services.
One of his associates remarked as they were leaving, “I didn’t know you had Catholic grandparents.”
“Don’t be a doggoned fool,” Long replied. “We didn’t even have a horse.”
In a slightly different take on the same theme, it’s said that Englishspeaking candidates from north Louisiana regularly made contributions to Vermilion Parish’s inimitable Dudley LeBlanc so that Dudley would speak well of them during his Frenchlanguage radio program that was broadcast across south Louisiana.
Dudley took the money but as often as not, with a smile in his voice that sounded like he was giving compliments, he would vilify the north Louisiana scoundrel who didn’t understand a word of what LeBlanc was saying.
And, dare we say it, sometimes there was cheating.
When voting machines first came into wide use, Earl Long claimed that, with a proper mechanic, he could make a machine whistle “Home Sweet Home.” Before machines, ballot boxes were routinely “stuffed” with votes for one candidate or another.
In the 1930 election Huey Long was slightly embarrassed—but only slightly—when he received 3,979 votes in St. Bernard Parish even though there were only 2,510 registered voters there.
Judge Leander Perez, who ruled in Plaquemines Parish for decades, had a simple explanation when he received more votes than there were people in a certain precinct. “Oh, don’t worry about them,” he said. “Those are just absentees.”
Maybe the old attitudes are summed up in a story told by Huey’s son Senator Russell Long.
According to that tale, a politician and one of his friends were out in a graveyard late one night “researching” names to be added to the voting lists. The spooky cemetery made the friend nervous and he wanted to get out of there even though all of the headstones had not been properly checked.
The politician refused to leave. Waving his arm toward the dozen or so graves in front of him, he told the anxious friend, “Wait a minute. These people have just as much right to vote as any of the others.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
