Dead Grip Loosened

If Franklin Roosevelt were to appoint six new justices to the Supreme Court and the Court were to declare one of the New Deal's favorite laws unconstitutional, most people in the U. S. would be magnificently astounded. Astounded last week, in just such a way, were the people of Louisiana.

Huey Long did not increase the size of Louisiana's Supreme Court in order to get himself a majority. He did not need to. He, and his machine, had the opportunity to get four friendly justices out of seven on the bench. It took a little more finagling, however, to make Louisiana elections safe for Long. As elsewhere in the South the important part of Louisiana elections is the primary. Louisiana's primary law provided that every candidate could hand in the names of his choices for election clerks and commissioners. All the names were written on slips and five chosen by lot for each polling place. By entering plenty of dummy candidates one side could, by the law of chance, practically exclude opposing factions from the important job of counting votes. Then the dummy candidates could quit the race.

Only trouble with this system from the Long standpoint was that in 1934 his enemy T. Semmes Walmsley used it to get re-elected Mayor of New Orleans. So two years ago Huey Long, striding up and down the aisles of his Legislature and cracking the whip, passed a law placing the naming of election officials in the hands of a board the majority of which was appointed by his Governor. Thereafter Longsters counted the votes.

Lawyer Eugene Stanley--onetime district attorney of New Orleans, who quit when Long appointed an entire staff of Longsters to serve under him--recently culminated his old war with the Long machine by setting out to kill Long's primary election law. As attorney for John W. Ward, candidate for mayor of Alexandria in primaries to be held next week, Mr. Stanley got his case against Long's primary law up to the State supreme court. For the State Constitution says: "the Legislature shall enact laws to secure fairness in party primary elections. . . ."

Political wiseacres were sure of the result. It would be a 4-3 decision upholding the law, Justices Higgins, Ponder, Land and Fournet (proLong) voting for it, Justices Rogers, Odom and Chief Justice Charles Austin O'Niell (anti-Long) voting against it. They were bewildered last week when by vote of 6-1, only Justice Ponder dissenting, the Court held Huey Long's primary law unconstitutional. What that signified puzzled many.

One suggestion was that former Governor James A. Noe, wealthy north Louisiana oilman, had influenced the decision. He is planning to run for Governor at the next election against Earl Long, Huey's brother and the present lieutenant governor, and naturally would not like to be counted out in the primaries by the other faction of the machine. More startling was another report. The present Governor, Richard Webster Leche, has everything lined up for appointment to the Federal bench when a new judgeship is created "to clear crowded dockets." In some quarters Governor Leche was thought to be the man who quietly arranged the Court decision, for he is trying to woo back to the State some of the industries which Long laws drove away and by the Court decision he could help to reassure them without offending the gullible electorate which still worships the murdered Huey. Whatever the explanation, it was undeniable that the dead hand of Long was losing its grip on the Pelican State.

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