Long for President!!
Louisiana politics were just campus politics writ large, one might argue. Just as sound trucks,
fiery speeches, and political deals marked state political campaigns, so they characterized many
student elections at LSU. The Williams Center is launching a series of interviews with former
student body presidents to record their memories of the political process on the campus.
The following article is based on interviews with Russell Long by Robert Mann. The son of the
charismatic governor and later senator Huey Long, Russell no doubt learned much from his
father, but as he told Mann, he didn't initially share Huey's passion for LSU.
"When I mentioned [to my father] that [I wanted to go to Princeton,] the roof blew off the house.
'My God,' he said, 'I worked and strived and risked impeachment to build a university here that
the state could be proud of and the people could send their sons and daughters to, and it's not
good enough for my own son.' He was utterly disgusted that I would even suggest it.
"When my father was assassinated, as far as I was concerned he wanted me to go to LSU, and
that's what I was going to do. I respected his wish. Looking back I'm glad I did because in future
years it proved to be a tremendous asset to me that I went to LSU, mainly because I knew so
many people from around the state.
"The first year at LSU, it seems to me as though they spent mainly bringing these young people
from those rural schools to qualify them to do college work. Because by my lights I learned
practically nothing that freshman year. I learned a lot about campus politics. I made a fair
average, but I could have passed a final exam with a decent grade when I signed up as freshman.
So, I spent my time running for president of the freshman class, which I won.
"I was rushed by quite a few fraternities. But none of them offered me a bid. I think that's
because, in every last one of them, there's somebody that didn't like Huey Long who would black
ball me, even though my father had been assassinated. Oscar Allen [Jr.] had recommended me at
the DKE [Delta Kappa Epsilon], which I thought was the best fraternity out there. When I was
black balled, he proceeded to sit there and black ball everybody. I did not know this [then].
"It came up to the point that these fellows were getting desperate. They couldn't get anybody past
the chapter. [They] said, 'Look, something's got to happen here. This fraternity will go out of
existence. We've got to get some in. Who in the hell is doing this black balling?' So, Oscar
said, 'I am, and I'll tell you why.' He said, 'You've got a man down there who's not being
considered for what he is. Someone's judging him because they don't like his father, and that's
not right.' He said, 'Now, whoever is black balling that man stand up and admit what he's doing.
If he's willing to do what's right, I'm willing to quit black balling the others.'
"So, the guy who'd been black balling me got up and said, 'Well, fellows, I'm sorry to admit this,
but Oscar's right. I'm the guy who's been black balling Russell Long. I quite agree that Russell's
a decent kid, and there's no reason why he shouldn't be offered a bid.' He was the son of a judge
who'd been very, very much anti-Long, and he said, 'If you'll pass the box again, I don't think
you'll find a black ball in it.' So, I was given a bid. If I had known that, I probably wouldn't have
accepted the bid.
"They also had these political fraternities [on campus]. They had an outfit named the TNEs,
which means The New Era, and the Cavaliers. Those outfits were dominated by fraternity
members. The Cavaliers would be stronger in one fraternity, the TNEs in another. Those two
political fraternities dominated the campus. They elected president of the student body, and
president of most the colleges.
"Well, when I ran for president of freshmen, of course, I didn't have any one of those outfits for
me. I just went from room-to-room all through the barracks. Every night, I'd just start right out
until they had lights out, shaking hands, and asking them to vote for me. I had a lot of fellows
who were offering to help.
"There were several young people running, including some TNEs and Cavaliers. I got a lot more
votes than all the rest of them put together. That's because I worked at it. It just proves they're
no substitutes. It's one thing for some fraternity to tell their pledges to vote for somebody, but
hell, there are so many more kids out there hadn't been offered a bid in a fraternity. If you go out
and talk to them and act like you're interested, then they'll vote for you.
"I organized my friends in the freshmen class [into] a nice little political organization. We'd
meet about once a week, and each fellow would bring somebody with him that he'd like to
recommend to us. We built a massive organization there. There were more votes in that lower
division than there were anywhere else, about a third of the votes.
"So, in the race that followed, we just absolutely swamped them. We had that gang out at the
polls, talking to people and urging them to vote for this ticket that we were supporting. We
called [ourselves] the Independent Party. Basically, our pitch was, 'We'll nominate our
candidates. We'll hold our own convention. You're invited to join our cry. We'd love to have
you. Just one condition, you can't be one of their gang.' [We were] overwhelmingly successful.
I guess that's why they referred to me as the dictator [of the] campus. I guess I was a dictator of
the campus in the same way Huey Long was a dictator, a dictator by a world of people.
"That first year we, we slaughtered the other gangs. The second year they united to form one
political fraternity, and we just slaughtered them all over again, just beat the living bejesus out of
them. After that they ceased to exist as political fraternities. I don't know whether they thought
of me to even bring my name up in the Cavalier crowd, but somebody at the TNE had the
privilege of black balling old Russell, but I would think they lived to regret it because it's mainly
because of my work [that they went] out of business.
"My sophomore year, I was president of sophomores in Arts and Sciences, and I was chairman of
the sophomore presidents. Then, I felt like I was losing esteem with some of the students
because they think I was just always out there running for something. So, I dropped out. I was
involved in campaigns in my sophomore year, but I didn't run for anything, nor was I running for
anything in the fall as a junior. Then, I ran for president of the student body, and that was a real
hot campaign.
"In our sophomore year, when we just pretty well cleaned up the operation, there was one fellow
who survived that landslide. That was a fellow named Blondie Bennett. He was the guy out
there [at LSU] who would announce those fights, and people liked the way he'd announce. His
voice would reach way out, a high pitched voice. He was an entrepreneur and a promoter. He
established his own laundry off the campus [and] had guys who were working for him pick up
laundry, strictly against [university] regulations. But he'd get away with it. He was popular on
the campus.
"So, I made a deal with him. 'When you're a junior, I'll support you for president of the student
body. If you do the same thing for me when my turn comes.' That was the understanding, but he
made a mistake in his junior year. He thought I was going to move in on him and get a head
start. So, [when the] time came to make his move, he had been preempted by some of the other
fellows. So, he never got around to asking me to do what I could to help him. Since he let this
thing get away from him, he [decided he] was just going to wait and run against me for that job,
which is not a nice thing to do.
"He planned all that time to run against me for president of the student body, when he promised
me he was going to support me for it. He was working to undermine me thereafter, finding
fellows I'd be counting on to support me. So, he did have the advantage over me. It gave me
some question whether I should run at all, and I just decided that, well, I'd go ahead and make
that effort. After I got started, I saw I could win it.
"Things were going well. I had this fellow named Dayton McCain, who was later a state senator,
willing to be my campaign manager, and Dayton was doing a great job working for me and
bringing fellows [to my side]. I was hustling votes and was doing fine.
"[About that time,] Blondie and his gang set a trap for me. I had talked to him about if he'd
support me, that I might be able to get him help with his laundry, and that I would think that if I
wanted to, I could help him get that job I had at the state legislature. As far as I was concerned,
that was a political deal. There's a fellow who was an engineering major who said, 'You ought to
find what that guy wants.' He said, 'My guess is that if you find what he wants, then he'll make a
deal with you.' So, I discussed this deal, and frankly, he [Blondie] had decided that he was going
to do that. He was going to go back and talk to some friends of his. But, one of his friends, I'd
always been opposed to everything that guy ran for, which wasn't much. That guy absolutely
raised unsure hell about the idea of making a deal with Russell Long. So, it didn't come off.
"Finally, we had this meeting [in the Field House], and Blondie accused me of trying to buy him
out of the race. He was a bigger man than I was, and he grabbed me by the arm and had his gang
all set to spring that trap. Well, I just said, 'That's all a lie,' and I walked out of there.
"But the one thing I did in the course of it that came to my advantage, I said, 'Now, Blondie, if
you want to lie about me, you made your one great mistake. You told such a big lie that nobody's
going to believe you.' I said, 'Anybody in his right sense who knows who Blondie Bennett is and
knows your record, knows if I'd offered you all that, you would have taken it.' That thing just
blew over. He really thought he had something on me, but that was kind of a mark of
desperation. If they hadn't been losing, they wouldn't have done that.
"Then another fellow got in the act, a fellow named Claiborne Dameron. He was well regarded
and well respected. He was in law school. That's who I had to run it off with. Now, frankly, by
the time the election occurred, Bennett was a poor third. He just dropped completely by the
wayside. He saw he was losing and didn't know what he could do to offset it. So, he just kind of
kept going down, down, and down.
"At that time, I had a yard man working for me who had an old beat up automobile. It was a big
old thing. We put some magnifying horns on that thing and some kind of a turntable. We could
run around and play music right on campus. You could talk from inside that thing. So, some of
our gang, like Dayton McCain would drive around, talk to all the guys they saw on the street, call
them by name and so forth. They had a sign about Long on the side of the car and all that. At
the time, they had no regulations about sound trucks.
"My buddy Bill Dugan was very helpful. I had helped Bill to buy an airplane. I loaned Billy's
brother six hundred dollars to make a down payment on a piper cub airplane. So, they were
teaching people how to fly and working their way through school. Well, I wanted Bill to drop
some circulars on the campus. They got this big bunch of circulars, and at the regulation height,
he turned a bunch of them loose, didn't even hit the campus. The wind just blew them
completely away. He had to go about a thousand feet in the air to be within regulation. He said,
'Well, Russell's my friend. Am I going to come through for my friend or not? Well, I'm going to
do it.' So, he just came on down. He just flew that thing so low he could almost shake the
students' hands as he zoomed through. He just put those circulars all over the place. Thank God
the inspector wasn't there that day to see, because he would have been grounded the rest of his
life. He just broke all the laws that day to do that for me.
"One side thing about that election that's sort of amusing, [Morgan] Goodheart ran that magazine,
thatPell Mell magazine. He did an issue and put a straw ballot in that magazine. They're going to
put out an edition before the election. They're going to print on the front page [saying] the guy
who won the straw vote would be the next student body president. So, we talked it over. The
run-off headed down the pike, and the question was, did we want to take an interest in that straw
vote? We concluded that we had to take an interest in it.
"I'd done our printing, circulars and all that and knowing something about how the businesses
worked, I said, 'Look, we can buy a bunch of them off the stand. But that gets to be pretty
obvious. By the time they hit the stand, we ought to have somebody ask how many they've got
left out there at the printers.' See, we were going to have somebody go out there and buy all they
had left. We had one guy go down and buy about three hundred magazines right down there at
the printers. About thirty-five cents each , which was a lot of money for us. Anyway, I came up
with the dough. We went down and bought them on the stands. We went down and bought them
at the printer. I don't know what the other side was doing, but [Goodheart] ran the results of his
straw [poll], which I won. The amazing thing about it was that when they had the election a few
days later, that's exactly the percentage of votes I got at the polls.
"[Goodheart] said, 'That's the most accurate poll I've ever seen in my life.' He said, 'Well, how in
the hell did that happen?' I just had to assume that the other side was doing some of the same
type things we were doing. Because I know we didn't mark any of our ballots for that guy. I'd
have to assume that while we're figuring our angles about how to win that straw vote, that they
were doing something at the same time.
"The thing that really clinched [the election] for me was when Ted Lewis's band came through. I
asked Seymour Weiss [a long-time Huey Long friend and supporter] if he would speak to Ted
Lewis and ask if Ted would be willing to come out [to LSU] and make an appearance on my
behalf. He was great stuff at that time. [He was playing at the] Heidelberg Hotel which was in
the Capital House, now closed, but he was willing to come out there and play at my meeting. I
think at that time he had in mind just bringing a few pieces and performing a bit and do two or
three numbers.
"We started out printing circulars [that] said, 'Come out and see that great show with Ted Lewis
and your next student body president Russell Long.' [The Dameron faction] proceeded to go
down there and threaten that man. If he did that, they're going to throw stink bombs on him and
cabbage and rotten eggs and everything else. They were going to do whatever they could because
they didn't think that's fair. They had that man intimidated.
"So, that guy [Lewis] said look, 'I've never been stink bombed and rotten egged in my life. I'm
not going to do it now.' He said, 'You've got to find a way to get me out of this. You've got to
help get me out of this thing.' He said, 'I just can't do it. That's how it's going to be. I didn't
realize what I was getting into.' He sat down, 'I'll tell you what I'm willing to do for you. If you
invite those other people to be at that meeting, I'll handle it so that people know who got me
down there, and people will appreciate the fact that you're responsible for me being there. And
they'll all have a good time. Don't you worry, you'll be glad you did it.' I said, 'What good is it
going to do me to have them in the meeting.' He said, 'Well you watch, it will all work out to
your advantage. Now your option is not to have me there at all.' [I said,] 'Well, if that's how it's
got to be, I guess that's how it's got to be. As far as I'm concerned, I'm going to say that it's a deal
and shake on it. Just one condition, don't tell my opposition that you're going to do that for the
next forty-five minutes. Give me forty-five minutes head start.' Then I said, 'Stop that press over
there. Just tell them to take those circulars and write across the bottom, "Dameron faction also
invited."' We put all those circulars out and got them out there on campus.
"So, when all our students came out, my God, we had a huge meeting. That was in the old
gymnasium, which is back near the Field House. Even the state legislature recessed, [and] a
whole bunch of those senators and representatives came out there [to the campus]. Lewis did a
hell of a job. He brought the whole floor show out there. Ted Lewis said he was there because
of a debt he owed a dear friend. I suspect he was talking about a debt he owed Seymour Weiss.
It sounded to people like he was talking about Huey Long.
"He introduced Claiborne, and Claiborne made his speech. He tried to pretend in his speech that
he was primarily responsible for this man being here. So, when I made my speech, I said, 'To
hear this man talk about it, you'd think they had as much to do with [Ted Lewis] coming out here
as I did. I'll tell you how much they had to do with it. They made all kinds of threats that they
were going to subject this man to all kinds of indignities if he came out here on this campus to
my meeting.' I said, 'But that's fine, I'm glad they're here. In case you have any doubt about it,
here's a pamphlet where I invited them to be here.' I said, 'If you think Claiborne Dameron
brought this man out here to this campus, you're a lot simpler than I think you are.' I went on and
they appreciated what I was hoping to do. The following day, I won it by a good vote.
Long not only won the election by a large majority, he also kept his campaign promises, which
included providing students living in the stadium with ice water and setting up a student run
laundry. On 3 November 1995, the Russell Long Collection, housed in the Louisiana Lower
Mississippi Valley Collection (LLMVC) at Hill Memorial Library, was officially opened to
researchers. The LMVC also houses the interviews conducted by Robert Mann for his biography
Legacy to Power: Senator Russell Long of Louisiana.
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