By Evan Cornog
‘Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas — stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows. That, I suppose, is why for twenty-five years I underrated Huey Pierce Long.”
Thus begins A.J. Liebling’s profile of Huey Long’s brother, Earl, which ran in The New Yorker in 1960 and was published as a book the following year. The lead demonstrates authorial self-confidence at the highest level — here is a master, secure that whither he goes, his reader will follow. It also establishes an important point — things are more complicated with the Longs than they first appear to be (and that’s pretty complicated).
At the book’s start, Earl Long is the sitting governor of Louisiana and is planning to run for reelection, in spite of a provision of the state constitution barring a governor from succeeding himself. Earl’s idea was simple: he would win the Democratic primary, at that time tantamount to election, and then resign. That way he would be succeeding not himself but his short-term successor. As Liebling observes, “Even Huey had not thought of that one.” Earl’s goal was a remarkable one not only in view of the constitutional obstacle but because a few months before Liebling started reporting, the governor had “gone off his rocker” and been committed by his wife and family to a mental hospital in Texas. Long had managed to engineer his release, return to Louisiana, and resume his office, and then “he had departed on a long tour of recuperation at out-of-state Western racetracks.”
In the rich and diverse cultures of Louisiana, Liebling found a setting perfect for his talents, and in Earl Long he found a character profoundly sympathetic. Liebling likes his characters fat and sassy, and Earl’s oversized personality and intemperate appetites struck a chord in his biographer. Liebling affectionately records the governor’s appearing with other politicians on the campaign trail, trading wisecracks with the crowd, cooling himself in the hot Louisiana evening with a handkerchief dipped in iced Coca-Cola, and “monopolizing attention like an old vaudeville star cast in a play with a gang of Method actors.” Yet the political situation Liebling found in the state, which at first seemed the stuff of broad comedy, turned out to have the makings of a modern tragedy. The result, published as The Earl of Louisiana, is a masterwork of nonfiction writing.
Liebling generates fresh ideas, elegant turns of phrase, startling but apposite references, and sheer linguistic pleasure at a rate matched by no other journalist. An oilman is described as having “the kind of head Norman peasants carve on wooden stoppers for Calvados bottles.” He mentions how, following President Eisenhower’s heart attack, statements by physicians had become as newsworthy “as the award of an honorary degree to the publisher of the paper.” Nearly every page holds something one wishes to read aloud to a friend.
It is also, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a tremendously moving tribute to the city of New Orleans, which Liebling discovers to lie outside the normal cultural boundaries of the United States, existing “within the orbit of the Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic.” Here’s his description of this process of cultural migration: “The Mediterraneans who settled the shores of the interrupted sea scurried across the gap between the Azores and Puerto Rico like a woman crossing a drafty hall in a sheer nightgown to get to a warm bed with a man in it.”
Liebling is an omnipresent narrator, and reading The Earl of Louisiana is like having a superb meal with the most entertaining of dinner partners. Characters are delineated with vivid economy. A leader in the local Democratic organization is depicted “squatting on a kitchen chair, like a great, wise, sun-freckled toad.” Earl’s late brother Huey is introduced this way: “A chubby man, he had ginger hair and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. It was an uneasy color combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt.” In Earl Long’s speeches, the governor’s thoughts “chased one another on and off the stage like characters in a Shakespearean battle scene, full of alarums and sorties.”
There are digressions aplenty in the book, but they just make for a more enjoyable experience, especially since Liebling’s asides have a way of turning out to be more than pleasant detours. A host of seemingly tangential subjects — boxing, food, horseracing, resemblances between Louisiana politics and factional struggles in Lebanon — appear first as asides, then grow into themes, knitting together a sometimes unruly narrative, one in which the protagonist, the governor, does not appear in person until a third of the way into the book. The opera buffa story of Earl Long, which is where the story starts, begins to fade as the hero’s progress is impeded (Long is prevented from pursuing his electoral scheme by the Democratic state committee), and then a more sinister story line takes over when the race for governor develops into a full-fledged white-supremacy campaign.
The opening sections of the book give little hint of the more serious issues that lie ahead. Liebling embraces both the grit and the shine of New Orleans, singing the praises of its food (in particular of “busters” — “fat soft-shell crabs shorn of their limbs, which are to the buster-fancier as trifling as a mustache on the plat du jour must seem to a cannibal”).
The city of New Orleans, in fact, emerges as one of the leading characters, and its gin mills and strip clubs are rendered with affectionate care. The election, however, is for governor of the entire state, and north of the city the Catholic, Mediterranean flavor gives over to the more familiar Anglophone, Protestant South of northern Louisiana, where Liebling and a companion decide to head, having been in the Big Easy for so long, he explains, “we were beginning to pick up rumors that we ourselves had started.”
It is a transition that Liebling conveys through a culinary observation. Stopping for a meal beyond the civilizing reach of New Orleans, they encounter a fry shack with “the shrimps stiff with inedible batter, the coffee desperate.” Not yet a day out of New Orleans, Liebling is pining. “A PoBoy at Mumfrey’s in New Orleans is a portable banquet,” he rhapsodizes. “In the South proper, it is a crippling blow to the intestine.”
This culinary shift as one travels north is symptomatic of a larger change, and Liebling describes the middle of Louisiana as the place “where the culture of one great thalassic littoral impinges on the other.” It was the achievement of the Longs, both Huey and Earl, to recast the state’s politics, winning the votes of poor voters of varied backgrounds and from all over the state, rather than choosing one side or the other of the thalassic divide. And, by the southern standards of the time, Earl Long seemed to Liebling so temperate on racial matters that he describes him as “the only effective Civil Rights man in the South.” The style of civil rights the Longs espoused, however, was hardly a paradise for African Americans. One example given is Huey Long’s approach to getting jobs in state hospitals for African American nurses — he pretended to be outraged to discover that white nurses were taking care of black patients, saying such work was an affront to white womanhood. “It was the most racist talk you ever heard,” an informant tells Liebling, “but the result was he got the white nurses out and the colored nurses in.”
At times, the treatment of the race issue in the book seems strained and anachronistic, like the use of “colored” in the previous sentence. After all, Earl Long could be described as “the only effective Civil Rights man in the South” only by someone whose frame of reference was limited to white politicians. And there are scenes that can put today’s reader on edge. At about the midpoint of the book, Liebling describes a dinner at the governor’s mansion with Earl and a group of cronies. During the dinner a black waitress named Laura is called upon to perform an imitation of her prizefighter husband, which she does at some length.
“‘Show us how your husband does when he gets tagged,’ the Governor ordered, and Laura fell forward, her arms hanging over the invisible ropes, her head outside the ring, her eyes bulged and senseless.
“The feudal faces were red with mirth. I applauded as hard as I could. Laura stood up and curtsied.” Liebling’s complicity in this scene is tempered by his frank recognition, in the use of the word feudal, of its true character. His depiction pays tribute both to the skill of Laura’s enactment of her minstrel-show part and the larger context in which it must be understood. Four decades later, we may not like watching it, but we can’t deny that the scene is revealing.
This same sort of prestidigitation is achieved in the book’s treatment of its larger subject, the political use of race and racial fear in Louisiana politics at the dawn of the 1960s. Once Earl was sidelined from the gubernatorial race, the principal contenders for the Democratic nomination were deLesseps S. “Chep” Morrison, the New Orleans mayor; Jimmie Davis, a singer and former governor of the state who had a big hit years earlier with “You Are My Sunshine, My Only Sunshine”; and Willie Rainach, the most outspoken segregationist in the state legislature. There were also two Longites running, and Earl was on the ballot for lieutenant governor. In the first round of the primary, Morrison came in first and Davis second, and these two faced each other in the runoff. But third place had gone to Rainach, and the support of his backers was seen as the key to victory. Morrison won the bulk of the black vote in the first round, and that left him open to charges from the racists that he was “soft” on segregation. So Davis (who had avoided the race issue in the first primary) quickly recast himself as a champion of segregation to line up support from Rainach. Eventually Earl Long himself announced he would vote for Davis (having apparently decided that having some influence with the likely winner was better than trying to make peace with a man he had offended by calling “Dellasoups”).
The runoff election was a nasty, race-baiting affair, and Liebling describes it with unconcealed contempt. He recounts such “issues” as the accusation that Davis had once danced with Lena Horne at an event in California (as the Rainach forces, “the extreme faction of the bug-eyed,” charged in the first primary), or the charge that Morrison had made an integrationist remark at the dedication of a swimming pool for blacks in 1948 (he hadn’t). The climax of Liebling’s exploration of the mind-set of racism is an interview with a New Orleans surgeon who confidently explains how the Fourteenth Amendment was the “bastard child” of Thaddeus Stevens and his “mulatto mistress.” At the outset of the interview, he describes a couple of the surgeon’s remarks as amuse-gueules, but as their conversation proceeds Liebling fades into the background. Knowing when to keep still, Liebling allows this “bleached in the bone” racist to expose his own vileness unmolested.
Today, of course, Liebling is best remembered as a press critic, and throughout the book he remains attentive to the misdeeds of the press, and in particular to those of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which opposed the Longs. Liebling notes how newspaper photos of Earl “were usually taken without warning while he was scratching his pants, or when a reporter acting as the photographer’s picador had provoked him into a scream of rage.” He accuses The Times-Picayune of being willing to bring race relations in Louisiana down to the level of Mississippi “so long as The Times-Picayune could say it had elected a governor.” (While many of the problems Liebling found in Louisiana persist, The Times-Picayune is a different newspaper, as is pointed out elsewhere in this issue.)
On election night, Liebling moves around New Orleans following the returns, and it is at a bar run by an old prizefighter that he learns that Davis has finally overcome Morrison’s initial lead from the early-reporting New Orleans precincts and is moving toward victory based on his strength in the northern part of the state. Liebling’s disgust grows deeper when Davis, once in office, moves to reward his racist supporters by backing a measure to throw illegitimate children off the welfare rolls in the state, a move that threatens those children with starvation. (British citizens sent donations to ease the suffering.) Liebling’s account notes that the “net saving to the state of Louisiana” from this move would be $1.3 million, “a handsome return for starving 22,000 children to death.” His final sentence is a postscript noting that the racists have “taken over the streets of New Orleans,” with the state government cheering them on.
Liebling has marched a long way from his opening, with its cheery likening of southern politicians to sweet corn. In Earl Long Liebling found a kindred spirit — stout, fond of food and horseracing, quotably frank, and unwilling to adapt to the pieties of Ike’s America. But Liebling was too good a reporter to miss the tragedy that lurked behind the farce that first drew him to Louisiana, and he takes the reader down that road of discovery at a time when coverage of the racial disparities of the South, and of the nation, was still highly intermittent in the mainstream American press.
Today, with the Hellenistic city that Liebling loved deeply wounded, the book seems like a chunk of literary amber, preserving lost New Orleans for future generations, as Lawrence Durrell preserved Egyptian Alexandria and James Joyce preserved his Dublin. Hold it up to the light, and see what it reveals.
Evan Cornog, the associate dean for planning at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, is CJR ’s publisher.
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