Learning from Impeachment of Huey Long

By Woody Jenkins • Editor, Central City News — April 16, 1990, was a day to remember!  The Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge retired from active service when the “new” Louisiana State Capitol opened in 1935.  The Old State Capitol then became a museum. 

The event on April 16, 1990, was to kick off the renovation of the Old State Capitol. There was a special touch that day.  The Louisiana House was called into session  in the House chamber of the Old State Capitol, and the Louisiana Senate was called to order in old Senate chamber.

It was the first and only time the legislature has met in the Old State Capitol since 1935.  There was much pageantry that day and some official business.  Gov. Buddy Roemer gave his State of the Union address to a joint session in the House chamber.

Many distinguished guests were recognized.  I attended as a member of the Louisiana House. My daughters Margaret joined me.  Of all the guests, I was especially happy to see my old friend, Dean Cecil Morgan, the dean of the Tulane Law School, because I knew being in that chamber would bring back special memories to him.

Back in 1972, I was elected to serve as a delegate to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention.  We drafted a new Louisiana Constitution, which was approved by the voters in 1974.  Dean Morgan was an advisor to the Constitution Convention, and I worked with him on the Declaration of Rights.

Dean Morgan grew up in East Feliciana Parish, went to law school, and started in practice in Shreveport.  Soon afterwards, he became an assistant district attorney and had some experience prosecuting. In 1928, the same year Huey Long was elected governor, Cecil Morgan was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives. After several years in the House, he was elected district judge for Caddo Parish.  A few years later, then-Judge Cecil Morgan became general counsel of the Standard Oil Company.  In 1963, he was named Dean of the Tulane Law School in New Orleans.  By the time of the Constitutional Convention, Dear Morgan was something of a legend in Louisiana.  He had served the people of the state in many different capacities, always with honesty, courage, and great distinction.

In the proceedings at the Old State Capitol on April 16, 1990, he was honored as the only person still alive who had served as a member of the Louisiana Legislature at the Old State Capitol.

Dean Morgan was celebrated that day for his longevity and for another, more important, reason.  It was Dean Morgan who as a young former prosecutor was chosen by the House to lead the impeachment of Huey Long!

By 1990, it had been 17 years since Dean Morgan and I worked together at CC/73, and we had only seen each other a couple of times. But seeing each other after the ceremonies was a joyous time!  We gave each other a big hug and began to reminisce.  I hardly noticed but the crowd began thinning out.  My daughter came by and said, “I have a ride, Daddy. Stay and enjoy yourself!”

So there we sat, just the two of us in that historic chamber.  

Dean Morgan reminded of something I had forgotten. His family, the Morgans, had owned the land where the Old State Capitol was built! 

It was in this chamber that on January 26, 1861, the Secession Convention voted for Louisiana to secede from the Union.  And, of course, it was in this chamber that on April 6, 1929, the Louisiana House of Representatives voted to impeach Huey Long.

Dean Morgan was 90 and I wondered if I might ever have a chance to speak with him again. Perhaps he felt that too. In any case, we spent four hours in the House chamber after everyone else had gone home.  By the time we were through, I felt steeped in Louisiana history..

Between the two of us, we had been in Louisiana politics from the mid-1920’s to 1990.

My first question was, “Dean Morgan, why is politics so corrupt in Louisiana?”

He said, “I was born around the turn of the century, and I’ve known every governor who served from 1900 to present, except one. That was Gov. Luther Hall (1912-1916). I knew the governors from the early 1900’s because they were still alive and active when I was a young man around the Old State Capitol as early as 1920. I met the former governors there or in Shreveport.”

“You have to realize that Louisiana wasn’t always corrupt.  In this century, it all began with Huey 

Long.  From 1900 to 1928, state government was very small.  There was nothing to steal.”

“Louisiana’s governors were mostly business owners from North Louisiana.  A governor would be elected, serve one term, and then go home, no wealthier than when he arrived in Baton Rouge.”

Then Dean Morgan asked me a question.  He said, “Tell me this: How many state office buildings are there in Baton Rouge today?”

I said, “Dean, the state started leasing private buildings to use as state offices, and they have them all over Baton Rouge.  Today, there are more than 350 state office buildings in this city alone.” 

“Well,” the dean said, “Did you know that when I arrived to serve as a new state representative here in 1928 how many state office buildings there were in Baton Rouge?” “No sir, I don’t!”

“There was only one!” he said. “That office building was the Old State Capitol. Every state worker in Baton Rouge worked out of this building, even Highway Department employees. Our government was very small and frugal.”

“But then in 1928, Huey Long was elected and everything changed.  He was a true dictator in the mold of someone like Mussolini. We think of the State Police as very professional today, but he started a forerunner of the State Police which were really his storm troopers.  They were used to intimidate, beat, and even kill people.”

“Let me ask you a question,” Dean Morgan said.  “Do you knowwhy we had to impeach Huey Long?”  I said I had read T. Harry Williams book and remembered there were charges of corruption.  Dean Morgan said, “T. Harry was a big fan of Huey Long.  That book is not reliable.  

It whitewashes Huey’s image.”

“The most important charge against Huey Long was solicitation of murder. He ordered one of his bodyguards, Harry A. “Battling” Bozeman to murder the leader of the opposition in the Louisiana House of Representatives, Rep. Jared Y. Sanders, Jr., the son of a former governor.  Bozeman signed an affidavit.”

I later found a copy of that affidavit.  It read as follows:

“Huey P. Long sent for me to come to the Governor’s Mansion about five or six weeks ago. The governor said to me: ‘Battling Bozeman, I am the Kaiser of this state. When I crack my whip, whoever dares to disobey my orders, I’ll fire em. They won’t last as long with me as a snowball will in Hell.’ ‘Shut that door over there,’ he says. ‘Come down here and sit down by me.’ The Governor had been drinking. I smelled it on his breath. He says: ‘Battling Bozeman, I am going to call an extra session of the Legislature,’ and he says, ‘This J. Y. Sanders Jr. is going to disapprove of all my measures, and I want to do away with this —.’ I says: ‘Governor, what do you mean?’ He says: ‘I mean for you to kill the — —, leave him in the ditch where nobody will know how or when he got there. I’m governor of this state and if you were to be found out I would give you a full pardon and many gold dollars.’”

Dean Morgan said, “You have to realize these were hard times. Living today, you cannot imagine how difficult people had it. Huey Long fed off people’s hardships, and he turned the people against one another.  He used envy and hate.  Everyone became a Long or anti-Long.  If you thought you could remain neutral, you soon learned otherwise.”

I asked, “When you say the corruption all started with Huey Long, what do you mean?”

Dean Morgan said, “Government was small here, but suddenly the oil boom came.  People were driving cars.  They needed gasoline and all the petroleum products.  Long realized that he could tax the big oil companies and rake in a fortune. The people wouldn’t feel it, although it did affect them.”

“Suddenly Huey Long had vast sums of money under his control. He took half of it and put it into roads, textbooks, and free lunches. People felt like they were getting something.  But Huey Long and his friends were getting the other half!”

“They learned they could make millions by getting leases and royalties payments. They didn’t have to steal funds. They could do it by getting leases on state lands and turning that into wealth that lasted for generations.  A prime example is Win or Lose Oil Co., which his family is probably still benefiting from, although not under that name.”

I asked, “In the impeachment, what were the charges against Huey Long?”

He said the charges included solicitation for murder,  bribery of legislators, threatening newspaper publisher Charles Manship, holding undated letters of resignation from appointees, misappropriation of funds, paying hush money, using state money to pay for his personal law books, forcing the Highway Department to pay for defective construction, and others.

Dean Morgan said, “During the impeachment, Long had thugs even among his legislators.  They provoked a fight on the House floor and beat other legislators with brass knuckles.  Finally, order was restored.  When it came to a vote, the House voted to impeach Huey Long, something I don’t think he believed would ever happen.”

“Why why didn’t the Louisiana Senate vote not to convict Huey Long and remove him from office?” I asked.

Dean Morgan said, “Long’s supporters came up with the idea of senators signing a petition saying that under no circumstances, no matter what facts were produced, they would not vote for impeachment.”

“Long had a little over one-third of the senators for him. However, his supporters were afraid of the repercussions that they would encounter by signing the petition.  No one wanted to be at the top of petition pledging they would vote not to convict.”

“However, they came up with a plan. They got a group of 14 senators to sign a petition pledging to vote No.  To make sure no one was at the top of the page, the 14 senators signed their names in a circle around the page.  It was called ‘The round robin.’”

So, while there was never a trial or a vote in the Senate and Hey Long was not removed from office, Dean Morgan said he felt the impeachment was both a victory and a defeat.  It was a victory because it exposed the tyranny that Huey Long was imposing on the people of Louisiana.  However, it was a failure because Long remained in office and was energized to destroy his political opposition. There seemed to be no limit to the tyranny he would impose on people. 

Dean Morgan summarized the many governors who came after Huey Long this way: “Basically, after Huey Long’s death, Louisiana experienced one crooked governor after the other.  But occasionally, we have had an honest governor to clean up the mess.”

On that day in 1990 Dean Morgan said he thought Govs. Sam Jones, Robert Kennon, Dave Treen, and Buddy Roemer were honest.  He said he though Gov. Jimmy Davis was honest too but surrounded himself with too many men who weren’t.

I asked Dean Morgan about the impeachment process.  He said, “It takes a lot of hard work.  You need strong Articles of Impeachment that document the wrongdoing a governor has caused. The House will probably consider it fairly, but the Senate is always a problem in Louisiana.  You have to keep the governor from getting one-third of the Senate plus one, and that’s not easy to do.  The governor can always buy off a large number of senators.”

Dean Cecil Morgan lived to be 100, but my favorite day with him was April 16, 1990 in the House chamber of the Old State Capitol.