Remembering the Scandals
by Mary Hebert
"I've Got a University," Huey Long declared proudly in 1935. Since 1930, Long had pumped
large amounts of money into LSU, intending to make it into one of the nation's premier schools.
During those years, the University flourished, but his death brought dramatic changes. "Boys, if I
ever get killed, all of you are going to the penitentiary," Long warned his associates, J.D. Whitty
of the LSU physical plant recalled. "Long, you see, he controlled it. Well, the minute he got
killed, it just went wild. Everybody was getting all they could get." Money that had once flowed
freely into the University now flowed freely into the pockets of University administrators,
contractors, and politicians.
LSU's president James Monroe Smith appointed his cronies to key administrative positions. He
made George Caldwell, a Baton Rouge contractor, building superintendent and named E. N.
Jackson business manager. Smith also used his office to ensure that he and his associates
prospered financially. He circumvented the Board of Supervisors to give himself and Jackson
thousands of dollars in pay raises and Caldwell a 2 percent kickback on all University
construction.
Smith and his friends also banded together with several business and political leaders to
overcharge the University for goods and services. They formed a supply company which was
given an exclusive, unwritten contract with LSU and charged inflated prices for goods. George
Schwab, bookstore manager in 1939, recalls , "I'd been manager about two and a half months
when Ike Mayeux [soda fountain manager] came in and said he needed some dishes. For some
unknown reason, I started getting quotations when I was over there. I had quotations from
Lubback's in New Orleans, from another firm in New Orleans, and from Baton Rouge Supply in
Baton Rouge here. I placed an order with Lubback's. The day that I placed the order the sales
representative came out from Baton Rouge Supply wanting to know about the order. I told him
that I had placed the order with Lubback's. He questioned me about that. Did I know anything
about buying china. 'Why did you buy this china from Lubback's?' I said, 'Well, because I got the
best buy there.'"
"I thought he would leave then, but he didn't." The salesman kept probing, "'How do you know
you got the best buy?' By this time, I was more or less shaky, knowing the background of Baton
Rouge Supply and who owned it. . . . Emory Adams [Mrs. Smith's nephew], E. N. Jackson,
George Caldwell, [James] Monroe Smith, and Dr. Clarence Lorio [a prominent Baton Rouge
physician and director of LSU's Student Health Center], and a few other people. I was really
nervous, turning red, white and blue and purple and gold. He turned and opened the door and
put his hand on the doorknob to close it as he was going out. He said, 'Well, I'll have to report
this one to the Doc.'" Schwab feared that he would be fired for not purchasing the china from
Baton Rouge Supply, but E. N. Jackson laughed and told him, "If it happens again, tell them the
same darn thing."
Many blamed Thelma Smith for her husband's downfall, charging that her desire for a lavish
lifestyle led Smith to misappropriate University funds. In his book, Louisiana Hayride, Harnett
Kane claims that Thelma Smith wanted to be a "great lady" and that she emulated the lifestyle of
the very wealthy, purchasing fine silver from Mexico and crystal from France. Her lavish parties
featured catered delicacies trucked in from New Orleans's Roosevelt Hotel. She engaged LSU's
landscaper, Steele Burden, to design a formal garden at the President's House. "I developed it
into a formal garden," Burden said, "in which they had a stage outside and a little section where
they had all kinds of birds, and, of course, a formal rose garden, and then in one end of the
garden they had sort of an allée which led to an arbor that you sat in."
The Smith's daughter, Marjorie, was the focus of some of her mother's greatest extravagance.
George Schwab remembers, "When the daughter made her debut in New Orleans. They called
on Roe Cangelosi [who owned Crescent Laundry] and got his largest truck, which was a covered
vehicle, and had it crammed full of evening gowns and accessories that belonged to the daughter
and Mrs. Smith." Chancellor Emeritus Cecil Taylor, who as a young professor, tutored Mrs.
Smith in French, commented on the "highfalutin pretentiousness" that surrounded the Smiths.
For Marjorie's debut, "They rented a floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Of course,
here were the really the arrivistes coming to the city, you see. You can imagine the reaction of
the real established society of New Orleans. Imagine trying to sort of invade that society."
When Marjorie married, the extravagance escalated. J.D. Whitty vividly recalls her wedding
cake. "They had the wedding here on the LSU campus over at the president's house. A baker
made a fruitcake, wedding fruitcake, in New Orleans. It was so big they couldn't bring it in a
van, so I went in a ton-and-a-half truck from LSU, picked it up, brought it back, and unloaded it
over there at Dr. Smith's house. Can you imagine it being big enough to haul in a ton-and-a-half
truck?"
Using University vehicles for transporting material (often purchased by the University) for
private use was not unusual, and Whitty drove many of these missions. "When they got trucks,
they told me to take one home, told me, 'You'll be called day and night, anytime we need
you.'"University officials were true to their word. Whitty recalls, "I'd been all over the state to
different places, in Covington, Metairie, and all over where it was necessary to go. But I was
given orders to go, to pick up its material, haul this material and stuff there." He often made
these deliveries in the early morning hours. On such occasion, Whitty noticed he was being
followed. "I went to Baton Rouge Lumber Company and loaded it up with 6' x 6'. Right on the
river front, the Baton Rouge Lumber Company was right on the riverfront. I had it loaded, I
guess, at six or seven o'clock, so I just went on home and put it in the yard, put the truck in the
yard, loaded. So, I got up, two o'clock, and got dressed, got in my truck an backed out in the
street. When I backed out in the street, starting off, car lights came in the back glass, you know.
I said, 'Well, that's funny, for those people to just be parked down there.' The more I looked in
that rear view mirror, the more I could tell they were following me. When I'd speed up, they'd
speed up. When I'd slow up, they'd slow up. So, those lights stayed in my mirror all the way to
Hammond. . . . So, I went on and went into Covington."
The men trailed Whitty to his destination. "I pulled up into this gentleman's driveway. It was
[Governor Richard] Dick Leche. Pulled across the cattle guard, pulled down just a ways and
stopped. And they pulled up to the cattle guard but would not come in. So, I drove on down in
there, and we got the stuff unloaded"
The men following Whitty were FBI agents. In addition to using University vehicles and
materials, University and state officials, including Governor Richard Leche, had also been using
federal Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration (PWA and WPA)
workers for private construction. Whitty remembers, "When Roosevelt came out with the PWA
and the NRA [National Recovery Administration] and all the other A's. They were funding
money for the workmen. And, we were abusing PWA labor, you know, using them around on
campus and off campus, in people's private homes. . . . They had those WPA workers and WPA
money in here, you know, and we were picking those workers up at Istrouma at 4:30 and 5
o'clock in the morning and hauling them to Covington, staying all day with them, and hauling
them back."
When this misuse of federal employees came to the attention U.S. Attorney General Frank
Murphy, he instructed J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, to investigate. Murphy and Hoover
even visited LSU in June of 1939. On that visit, Smith awarded Murphy an honorary doctorate.
Law Professor Melvin Dakin remembers their visit. "I have the recollection from sitting in the
stadium being eaten up by mosquitoes in June of 1939. The principle speaker was to be then
Attorney General Murphy. The proceedings were delayed for an hour or more while
conversations were going on evidently in the governor's mansion attempting to temper the
attorney general's zeal in the general matter of the violations of federal law and so on. But the
commencement exercises did finally get moving, and the president was finally in the act of
conferring the doctor of philosophy degrees. We thought President Smith said, as he conferred
the degree on the candidate, invested him with his hood, that he said, 'And I confer upon you all
the rights and privileges and immunities thereto appertaining,' instead of 'emoluments.'"
The subject of immunity may well have been on Smith's mind in June of 1939. By the end of
that month, what would forever after be known as the Scandals broke, and the corruption that
permeated both the University and the state were exposed.
The end began with a seemingly minor incident. J. D. Whitty recalls, "That morning Sam
Boudreaux and I loaded a bunch of door frames, window frames and doors, out of the old tin
warehouse where the extension of the brick warehouse is. They built all these doors and stored
all these door frames and doors in there, and we loaded up that morning, bright and early with
the door frames and went to Metairie, where Dick Leche's father-in-law lived. They were
building a new house.
"Sam and I pulled in there, and we were in a hurry to unload our truck so we could get through,
I was on the ground, and Sam was up there handing it off to me. I looked up over there in a live
oak tree, and I said, 'Sam!' He said, 'What?!' I turned that thing a loose. He said, 'What?!' I
said, 'Look at that guy up there taking our picture!' I say, 'Boy, look a here. He's taking pictures
of us unloading this stuff." So, I said, "Let's get it off of here and let's go. Let's get out of here.'
Man, we got in those trucks and hauled off. The next morning, the damn scandal broke, and
there was pictures of us and the trucks on the paper."
After the door frame incident, the corruption at LSU and in the state government soon came to
light. Louisianians learned that Smith had been playing the stock market with LSU money under
an assumed name. According to Cecil Taylor, "Well, he was secretary to the Board of
Supervisors, that is, he wrote up the minutes. And he was playing the futures market. He had his
own office in New Orleans for the future markets, and he ran short. He had to put up some
money to back up his futures. So, he wrote up a set of minutes authorizing him to borrow in the
name of the university, and he borrowed, if I remember, the first three hundred thousand. I think
that he borrowed that from a New Orleans bank, and some bank in Baton Rouge said, 'Why do
you always go down there to borrow when you can borrow some here?' So he wrote up another
set of minutes authorizing him to borrow two hundred thousand more. So he borrowed a half
million dollars to keep his enterprise afloat down there in New Orleans." Smith later claimed he
had planned to use the profits from these investments to create a student aid fund.
To escape prosecution, Smith and his wife fled to Canada. In the days prior to the Smiths'
departure, J. D. Whitty realized that something was wrong. "I knew something was funny the day
before he left, though. You see, I was just mainly a flunkey. I did anything and everything. What
they wanted done, that's what I did. Two days before, I went over to the president's house, and I
started packing crystal and silver, crystal she'd brought back from France. I thought it was
funny then, 'She isn't going to move. Why pack all this stuff?' We, my crew and I packed for two
days over there. So, I went back there that last day, and we'd packed up all the crystal, all the
silver, and everything else. I asked Mr. Nabors [head of physical plant], 'Where's it going?' He
said, 'J. D., I don't know. They don't tell me nothing. They just told me to send you over there to
do it.'"
The FBI conducted a nation-wide manhunt for the Smiths and even had law enforcement
agencies in Mexico and Canada looking for them. LSU Foundation president James Peltier, a boy
at the time, recalls "In 1939, my father and mother took the family, there were four of us, to the
World's Fair in New York and then went on into Canada. It was a summer vacation for the
whole family. We were driving through Canada and stopped at this small town. The car was
parked out in front of this hotel. As I remember it, around seven o'clock at night the police from
Canada had knocked on the door and asked to speak to my father. The first question they asked
him was, 'Do you know James Monroe Smith?'. He said, 'Oh yes, he's very good friend of mine.'
My father had been on the Board of Supervisors so he knew James Monroe Smith very well. We
had been gone from home for so long that we hadn't gotten the news about the Louisiana
Scandals, which were just breaking. They had noticed the Louisiana license plate, and that's
how they came to knock on the door. They took him down to the police station to answer some
questions."
Smith, George Caldwell and several others, including Governor Richard Leche, served time in
prison for their illegal activities. Despite his transgressions, many within the University
continued to support Smith, in part in recognition of his significant contributions to LSU. Cecil
Taylor was one. "President Smith was, by associates in the University, sort of fairly well
regarded, respected, I think. When he returned there was a matter of putting up money to
assure, bond money, I guess. Even some of my friends actually went bond for him, so to speak.
When we saw him walking around the campus, we, I guess being just I, I had a little sense of pity
for him. He looked like a man heavily burdened with a weight of things upon him, and I think we
all thought that he was conscientious in his concerns for the University." Taylor and another
foreign language professor, John Thompson, even arranged for a scholarship for Smith's son at
their alma mater, the University of North Carolina, allowing the young man to escape the
anti-Smith attitude that permeated Louisiana. Some, including Thompson, believed Smith's
claim that he intended to use his profits from the future's market for student aid. "President
Smith was a victim of some of the political background, and he was doing the best he could for
the university. He got caught playing the commodities market, which I think he was doing with
sincerity, expecting to turn the money over to the university, but he was caught and left in
disgrace. His cronies had deserted him like rats deserting a sinking ship." Thompson also cites
Thelma Smith as the cause of her husband's criminal activities. "One of the big problems that
President Smith had was the social ambitions of his wife. She may have urged him to get
involved in this . . . commodities market where he lost money and lost his job and his reputation,
but I think not his character. I think he was a sincere friend of the university and did everything
he could to promote the welfare of the university. Similarly, Dean of the University Fred Frey
recalls, "He [John Monroe Smith] told me this three years later when he got out [of prison]. He
would have made two million dollars, and he was planning this for a student aid fund. See, after
Huey got killed, they [the state legislature] just started cutting down on the student aid funds."
In 1939, Huey Long's university went from being one of the country's premier schools to being a
laughingstock. In the aftermath of the Scandals, several outside agencies, including special state
auditors, investigated LSU's internal and financial operations. Following their suggestions,
University administrators created new organizational structures with financial safeguards built in.
This restructuring allowed LSU to recover, rebuild, and become a better institution. According to
Walter Calhoun, formerly of the business office, people who worked at LSU "could recognize a
vast difference in the operation of this University before and after this happened. Of course,
there was a lot of good, as far as LSU was concerned, that happened because of that. But for a
period at least, I'd say twenty years. I think the University attained the stability and reputation
for integrity and straight dealings that made it a real wonderful place for us to work."
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