Anthropologist Lorraine Hawkins (M.A. LSU 1991) drew on the more than seventy oral history
interviews she had conducted to explore the history and social structures of this rural area.
Hawkins supplemented her talk with an exhibit featuring photographs of community leaders and
landmarks. Characteristic of the support she received throughout her research, the audience
joined in an enthusiastic discussion after the formal address, confirming and correcting their
neighbors' contributions.
"This participation added an important element to the overall presentation by making the entity
of community a reality for the audience," said Hawkins. "One of the comments that came back
from the audience's evaluations was that the presentation conveyed a `sense of community,' and
in my opinion, that response was due to the discussion."
Hawkins began studying Pride, which is predominantly white, and Chaneyville, predominantly
black, for her master's thesis. Finding few written historical works for the rural northeastern
section of East Baton Rouge Parish, Hawkins turned to oral history to supplement such sources
as censuses, conveyance records, maps, school board and church minutes and country store
accounts. She found that in addition to the land itself, schools, families and churches defined the
communities.
Reflecting this emphasis, the topics of her talk included: the Sandy Creek settlement; early
Chaneyville and the Philadelphia Church; place names, post offices and schools; early black
landownership; staves, sawmills, railroads and Milldale; Pride leadership and Pride School;
Chaneyville School, Wheeler Hughes and Masonry; rural change and modernization; church life
and benevolent societies; and community life today.
"The continuation of an oral history project to document the history of all the churches, which
make up the fabric of rural community life, would be well worthwhile, added Hawkins. "There is
a great deal of interest in these churches to participate in such a project."
The presentation was supported by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities
and sponsored by Chaneyville Community Builders, Inc. It was professionally videotaped and
will be made available locally to allow those in the community who were unable to attend to
enjoy also. Hawkins is currently working on her Ph.D. in anthropology at the State University of
New York at Binghamton. Her interviews were conducted with the assistance of the Williams
Center, and the tapes have been deposited at Hill Memorial Library.
"I've Got a University:"
Huey Long and LSU's Golden Years
by Mary Hebert
"I've Got a University," Huey Long declared proudly in 1935. Long's preoccupation with LSU
was so great that T. Harry Williams devoted a whole chapter to it in his Pulitzer Prize winning
biography Huey Long. By 1930, Long had taken an interest in LSU and decided to make it into
one of the nation's premier schools. As a result, while the Depression was decimating other
colleges, the thirties are remembered as LSU's Golden Years.
Long, however, was not always a fan of the university. In fact, as former Dean of Men Fred Frey
recalls, the governor attacked it. "He [Long] was elected in '28, and of course, Baton Rouge was
solidly against him and most of our higher deans and so on out at the university were against
him. He said, "When I'm elected, I'm going to make a cow pasture out of Third Street, and I
want to invite all of you people out in the state to come to the big parade when I fire all these
pot-bellied professors."
Of course, Long did not destroy LSU or fire those "pot-bellied professors." Instead, improving
the university became one of his pet projects. It was not LSU's academic standing, however, that
first attracted his attention--it was the band. On his first visit to LSU in the fall of 1930, Long
demanded that Band Director Pop Guilbeau be fired. Frey, in the absence of the president and
business manager the only administrator available, met with the governor and tried to dissuade
him. Frey said he invited the governor into the president's office, and Long "walked around and
went and sat down in the president's chair . . . then he put his feet on the desk . . . and looked at
me with that million dollar grin and said, `How do you think I would look as president of this
damn outfit?'
"I said, `I think you would look wonderful, Governor. You look like a college president.'
"He said, `Just as well get serious. Since I can't get hold of the president, I want you to send for
Pop Guilbeau. I'm going to fire the s.o.b. . . . I want a band.'
"I said, `Well, that's the wrong way to get it. I have seen in the paper in the last few weeks a
statement that you have made publicly that you are going to make a great university of this.'
"`Yes, that's what I'm getting ready to do.'
"I said, `No, you are getting ready to ruin it. You can't fire somebody and get away with it. You
might be a good politician, but you don't know how to run a university.'
"He said, `Yes, but I want a band. . . I want you to get him [Guilbeau]. I'm going to fire him. I
have made up my mind.'
"I said, `Governor . . . if you really want to help the university, I think I can give you some
suggestions. Now, you tell us what you think ought to be done out here and go back to the
governor's office and help us get the money. But you can't do it. The president is the man who
has to do it.'
"He said, `Well, I'll get me another president. . . . Pops is not the only one I'm going to fire. He's
only the first one I'm going to fire.'"
Long did not fire Pop Guilbeau. Instead, Guilbeau, who was also superintendent of grounds,
stepped down and was replaced by A.W. Wickboldt. The governor then demanded that the band
be enlarged from twenty-eight to one- hundred-twenty-five pieces. In 1934, he decided that both
further expansion (100 pieces) and a new band director were required. His band would be one of
the largest in the country. Ordell Griffith, '36, describes the new band's premier performance.
"LSU had a military band. It was a wonderful band, but it was military. Huey was very much
interested, in every aspect of the university, and he was interested in the band. He had Castro
Carazo, who was the Cuban orchestra leader down at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, to be
the band leader of this military band. I remember the consternation because people were very
proud of that military band . . . The first football game started off very well. Everything was very
fine until half time, when they were used to having a close ordered drill and all that kind of
thing. The boys came waltzing on the football field, just a nice waltz. It was a tune as well as I
can remember, it was called `Dancing On The Moon.' I thought it was wonderful. I'll tell you,
some of those die hard Tigers didn't like it."
If Long loved "his" band, he was obsessed with the football team. He hired and fired coaches
and even presented them with game plans. He also wanted to ensure that students were able to
attend at least one out-of-town football game per year. Roe Cangleosi, '38, recalled, "He said he
wanted the whole student body to go up to Nashville. And so the round trip was $19, but he got
the railroad company and pulled something over on them and said, `It's got to be $6.' He got it
for $6. He said he would loan each student $6 to take this trip to Nashville."
Long's interest in LSU, however, did not remain restricted to the band and football team. In
1934, as he had promised Frey, Long, now a senator, hired himself another president, Dr. James
Monroe Smith. John Thompson, former professor of Romance languages, describes how Smith
was hired. "He reportedly got James Monroe Smith, who was on the faculty at Southwestern
Louisiana Institute, and called him up and talked to him, said, `Go get yourself a new suit of
clothes, run that old Ford into the lake, and get a decent car. I want you to be president of
LSU.'"
Once his own man was in place, Long began to pour money into the university. Frey recalls that
other universities "didn't have enough money to pay the professors. They started cutting salaries
and laying off faculty people. Here, we had more money than we knew what to do with." Cleanth
Brooks, former English professor and founding co-editor with Robert Penn Warren of The
Southern Review remembers that LSU "had some of the most brilliant young writers and
professors I have ever known. The other universities in the country weren't expanding. Huey
Long was pouring money into the university. It [LSU] was swelling its ranks. It was taking on
new scholars, faculty people and students. It was in a buyer's market, for everybody was looking
for a job. It got one from Oxford in [Robert Penn] Warren, it got one from Harvard in [Robert]
Heilman, it got two more, from Johns Hopkins,[Thomas] Kirby and [Nathaniel] Caffee."
Chancellor Emeritus Cecil Taylor, discussing his appointment to the faculty, confirms Brooks's
account. "When I was offered the position I conferred with one of my former Chapel Hill
professors. . . and he said he thought this was one of the most promising places in the country.
The Depression had not hit LSU in the same way that it had hit the rest of the country. . . by the
mid-thirties, LSU was booming ahead of the other parts of the country, and it was one of the few
places where there were university positions available. "
In addition to bringing a top-notch faculty to LSU, Long pumped money into other programs that
brought almost immediate praise to the university. One of them was The Southern Review.
Cleanth Brooks describes its founding. "Warren reported to me one morning, he said, `You know
yesterday morning, President Smith drove up to my house in his car and asked me and my wife to
get in the car, ride around, presumably to see the landscape. And finally asked me, `Mr. Warren,
what would it cost to produce a quarterly review?' Warren, who could think very fast on his feet,
said, `Ten thousand dollars would do it.' `Ah, ten thousand dollars.' (This is in February.) `Do
you think you could get one out by June first?' Warren said, `Yes,'" and the Southern Review
became one of the country's most prestigious literary journals.
To further improve the quality of the faculty, the university encouraged members to complete
advanced degrees and even gave them financial support to do so. Claude Shaver, a former
speech professor, was one of the faculty members who took part in this program.
"[Smith] called a faculty meeting. He said that he thought that if a number of young faculty
members who did not have advance degrees would plan to go away and study that the university
would support them in a limited sense and that they wouldn't be replaced if the rest of the faculty
would agree to carry their load. Well, I was one of the recipients. I went to the University of
Wisconsin, and the university [LSU] paid me a hundred dollars a month, and we could live on it
in those days."
Despite Long's largesse, faculty members and students felt the bite of the Depression from time
to time. Faculty members never took a pay cut, but for a while, the university paid them in script
instead of cash.
"They set up a commissary system," Shaver recalled, "and you received, half, maybe a little
more, of the money in script, but it was good in the grocery store, the meat market, the dairy, so
we had almost complete shopping in the script. You couldn't buy suits or dresses or this kind of
thing, but everything else we could buy with script. We got along very well. In fact, some people
asked them to continue the script." The Depression also affected LSU's students, but Long took
steps to see that those in need received financial aid. Frey contended that "we had less political
interference during Huey's time than we ever did. Huey said this, with these scholarships we
were setting up, given by the legislature. The legislators started running out there, wanting this
and that. I don't know who conveyed it to him, whether Smith or somebody else, he issued a
public statement that if he caught any politician out at the university telling anybody what to do
with it, it was his neck. They better stay away from the university."
Ordell Griffith worked in the business office as a student and recalls a similar situation in 1935.
"Of course he [Long] had fallen into disfavor with the federal government. And as I understand
it, for some reason they were withdrawing the funds for the NYA [National Youth
Administration] program, from LSU. I was in the student employment office, and we had
already written to the students and told them that (they were they neediest students) those jobs
would be available. He [Long] heard about, and he told Mr. [Ian] Jackson [LSU's business
manager] that we could not start these students and then leave them in the lurch, so to speak. So
at the time he was killed, we were writing letters to all those students telling them that their jobs
were safe, and of course they were."
Though anti-Long sentiment existed in Louisiana, Huey Long for the most part reigned supreme
in his home state; no doubt his aid to the university helped. But he had aspirations to extend his
realm to include the entire nation. As Roe Cangleosi recalls, Long was not the only one who
believed the Louisiana senator and former governor could be president. His support was evident
as the train carrying LSU students to the football game in Nashville passed through "all these
towns from Baton Rouge to Nashville--Vicksburg, everything--they wanted to see Huey Long. . . .
They crowded down wherever the train passed. They thought he was--they knew that he was
going to succeed Franklin Roosevelt as president."
Huey Long never had a chance to run for president though. An assassin's bullet took his life in
1935, and his death had an almost immediate impact on the university. In his book, The
Southern Connection, former English professor Robert Heilman recalls the day Long was shot.
"On our seventh day in Baton Rouge, we walked the block or two to the Capitol to look in on a
meeting of the state legislature, which, it had been announced, United States Senator Long
would attend. We had already toured the imposing skyscraper Capitol. . . . We found our way to
the visitors' gallery at the rear of the lower-house chamber. In time Huey appeared on the floor,
and we saw him in operation--chatting with members at various desks, striding from spot to spot,
gesturing, sitting on the speaker's dais, summoning and sending. . . . Before too long, Huey
strode out passing underneath our gallery; my memory is of many henchmen running along or
following, and a chamber still formally at business but now semi-empty, all but dead. A few
seconds later there was a strange outburst of sounds in a rapid but irregular sequence.
Firecrackers, I thought, puzzled. Then men came running back into the chamber below us and
ducking behind desks. It had to be gunfire, thought to a new young Ph.D., fresh out of Harvard,
this was unbelievable. We were hearing the shots that killed R. Carl Weiss and fatally wounded
Senator Long, who died a day and a half later.
"Several days later, another shock: Dr. William A. Read, then head of the English department,
dropped in at our flat to tell us that he wasn't sure that the university would open on schedule the
next week. Longer mourning period was my first thought. But no; Dr. Read evidently feared
that Senator Long's death would totally disrupt all the institutional processes of the state. . . .
What kind of world was it in which one man's death might bring a whole state to a standstill?
Happily, Dr. Read's fears were not borne out by fact. Though still shaken, we began teaching on
schedule."
John Thompson also remembers Long's death.
"During the summer of 1935, I returned to complete research for my doctoral dissertation at
North Carolina and had just gotten up early and went downtown to catch breakfast before
returning to Baton Rouge. The morning newspaper had headlines that Huey Long had been
assassinated. A dignified and, I may say, even pompous university professor whom I did not
know was reading that and commenting, `Well, I guess that's a good thing maybe,' and I told
him that I knew Huey Long very well and that, in my opinion, he was a great statesman as far as
bringing Louisiana out of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, that he was in the process of
building a fine university, that he was not enriching himself at the cost of the state. The only
flaw I could find in him was that he had had to use some tactics, political tactics to get his loan
for the highway system, for the university, for the state capitol, and various other things, and that
his followers had learned how to wangle political concessions for themselves, and they were
likely to take advantage of the techniques that they had learned from Huey Long, as far as
politics were concerned."
Long's followers did take advantage of the techniques they learned from him, but they did not
have his savvy. Within five years of his death, their lack of political acumen became apparent,
and the world that Huey Long built at LSU fell apart. The story of how and why this occurred
will appear in the next edition of the newsletter.
[Based on interviews from T. Harry Williams Papers and Williams Center for Oral History Collection, LLMVC.]
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