The Fish That Ate the Whale (19 page)

But Zemurray's most notorious struggle was waged at home, against the governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, the plump, red-cheeked country boy in overalls, with colic and grin, the scourge of fat-cat businessmen who promised to burn it all down and take it all away.

Huey Long grew up in Winnfield, Louisiana. His father was a farmer, as was
his
father, as was
his
father. He won a scholarship to Louisiana State University but could not afford the textbooks so went on the road instead, working, variously, as a salesman of canned goods, a hawker of elixir medicine, and an auctioneer. He had a wonderful voice, a beautiful way of phrasing. He entered politics in 1918 as an elected member of the Louisiana Railroad Commission, where he made his name in fiery public hearings. By twenty-five, he was the dreaded foe of Standard Oil. He had the advantage of being underestimated, condescended to, and dismissed as a buffoon, all the while amassing a huge popular following. A. J. Liebling described him as “a chubby man [with] ginger hair and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. It was an uneasy color combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt. His face faintly suggested mumps.” He broadened his attack from Standard Oil to corporations in general; from corporations in general to the corporatist mentality; from the corporatist mentality to the handful of oligarchs and politicians who were remorseless and cunning in their control of our markets and lives. He referred to them as the “Old Regulars” or “the Ring.” When Long ran for governor, he promised to kick out the bosses and soak the rich, the parasites, relieve them of their ill-gotten gains and remind them of the people on the farms and in the small towns who one day, and that day is coming, brother, will shake off the old regulars like so many fleas. He campaigned under the slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”

“How many men ever went to a barbecue,” he asked in a speech, “and would let one man take off the table what's intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain't got no business with!”

It's not just what Long said, but also how he said it. His face was expressive in a way unimaginable in the pallid politics of today. He spoke with his hands, got his whole body into it. Goofy yet strong, he seemed like he was having a great time. Here's the crucial quality often overlooked by historians of the era: Huey Long was funny; comedy was a big part of his appeal from the beginning. He delivered his kickers not to shouts but to laughter. The man who wanted to make the bastards pay was the scariest thing of all: an evil clown.

Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928. He had been prominent in the state for years, but the Depression turned him into a star. With a quarter of the American people out of work, his talk of upending the establishment, of making the whalelike corporations disgorge bellyfuls of fish, rang like a bell. He shouted, cajoled, threatened, becoming a national figure in the process. In the 1930s, after many years as a Roosevelt man, he began to distance himself from the Democratic Party. He hinted at making his own presidential run. To some, Long was the best hope for a more equitable distribution of wealth. And yet, even at the height of his power, he remained small-town, fixated on Louisiana. Though he served in the U.S. Senate, his internal map of the world, the friends and foes who really mattered, the secret hierarchy that controlled everything, was focused on a handful of clubs in New Orleans. To Long, “the people” meant the farmers of Louisiana, and “the establishment” meant a dozen or so machine politicians who had sworn to defeat not just Long but Long-ism, that terrible uprising of the rabble-rousing trash.

Long was truly hated by his opponents. It had less to do with policy than with taste. To them, Huey stood for everything crass. “They despised him,” John Barry wrote in
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
. “In the evenings they literally sat around their drawing rooms discussing ways to murder him.”

By 1930, Long was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, challenging the incumbent Joseph Ransdell for the Democratic nomination. In the course of this campaign, Long believed he uncovered the shadow force bankrolling all his enemies. “Our opposition undertook to form a coalition of practically every political element in the City of New Orleans to overcome whatever lead I might have in the country outside that city,” Long wrote in
Every Man a King
, his autobiography. “The opposition was well on its way toward effecting such alignment, when I discovered the power behind the throne.”

Long identified this power as Sam Zemurray, a friend and ally of Senator Ransdell. Long then spent several weeks crossing Louisiana, denouncing the Banana Man—parasite of parasites, the worst offender in a den of thieves. He did this from the stage and he did it from sound trucks, driven in and out of towns in northern Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast beaches, through the parking lot of LSU stadium. Long's organization printed two million copies of a circular—it appeared as a bulletin from
The Louisiana Progress
, a newspaper owned by Long—which was plastered to every telephone pole and tree in the state, stuffed into every mailbox and beneath the wiper on every windshield.

WHY THE ZEMURRAY MILLIONS

SUPPORT THE RING—

THE BLOOD OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS THAT IS SPILLED

FOR ZEMURRAY—

HIS REASON FOR BACKING RANSDELL—

WHY RANSDELL FOUGHT HIS PEOPLE ON FLOOD CONTROL—

THE BARTER OF THE JUDICIARY AND SEATS IN CONGRESS—

It is not a matter of very common knowledge, but it is nevertheless a fact, that the United States has kept a standing army down in Central America to fight for certain interests “making investments” in such countries as Nicaragua and Honduras. The story runs that, when one of these large American interests is not pleased with what he can get at the hands of the Central American governments, they “change the government.”

Among the men who have made millions in Central America out of the work of the soldiers of this country is one Sam Zemurray of New Orleans. He has many concessions in the Central American countries. Time after time, except for the blood of the soldiers of this country, his “concessions” would have gone up in smoke. Wherever he drove down his stob and laid claim to a few hundred miles of property, no matter what side of a revolution he bought it from, he was able to make good his claim by the fact that the United States would send soldiers there to back him up.

It took influence to have the army of the United States in a constant war to make money for Zemurray. There was no war declared, and yet the U.S. soldiers spent their blood for the cause of the financial gain of Mr. Zemurray, just the same as if war had been declared. Why? Mr. Zemurray took in as an associate, we find, a nephew of Senator Joe Ransdell, Joe Montgomery, and this Zemurray and Ransdell's kinfolks' combination made millions on top of millions that anybody else could have made if they had only been furnished with the United States army to back them up in their concessions and grants, in the revolutions of Central America.

Many a mother's son lies in an unmarked grave in the tropics for the cause of Zemurray's millions.

It must have been a nightmare for Zemurray, a private man who disdained publicity, to be dragged out into the spotlight where the multitudes gawk, the sort of thing that got him cursing and threatening that miserable, rotten, no-good son of a bitch.

Long turned paranoid. He began to speak of himself as a target of assassins. He was especially fearful of the former New Orleans police official Guy Molony, who turned up in the city in 1934 after a lengthy stay in Honduras. Long believed that Molony had returned at the request of an anonymous third party to lead a mercenary army to overthrow Long and replace him with T. Semmes Walmsley, the mayor of New Orleans. When questioned about this at a public hearing, Molony laughed as he denied the charges. There is no such plot, said Molony, but he would be happy to participate if one was organized.

Long began to travel amid a phalanx of bodyguards, Louisiana state troopers in squeaky black boots and mirror shades. He investigated his enemies, had their tax returns scutinized, desks rifled, comings and goings monitored.

At first glance, Zemurray and Long seemed to have had a lot in common: both were self-made men who grew up on farms; both were seen as interlopers, shut out of the best clubs; both were Democrats with a similar critique of the New Deal—neither far enough nor fast enough. But unlike Zemurray, who wanted to reform the system to save it, Long wanted to tear it down. In him, Zemurray would have recognized an old foe: the charlatan, the snake-oil salesman, the Cossack. When Huey said, “Let's soak the rich,” Sam heard, “Let's soak Zemurray.” When Huey said, “Let's crush the Ring,” Sam heard, “Let's crush Zemurray.” To Long, Zemurray represented everything that was wrong in America: the fat cat who had taken more than his share, the tycoon whose fortune was built on the backs of the poor. His brain is money; his teeth are rifle shells; his eyes are the stolen jade of the Mayan highlands; his fingers are ripes; his diet is human misery and human blood. On foreign policy, Long seemed to have just one concern: he did not want U.S. troops sent to the isthmus, where, Long claimed, they would protect the interests of Zemurray, whom Long denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

It seemed the conflict would turn into something truly ugly. Then it didn't. Or maybe it did. On September 8, 1935, at 9:20 p.m., Senator Long, who had returned to Baton Rogue to attend to legislative business, was approached by a man in the hall of the Capitol building, Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a Louisiana judge. Weiss shot Long in the chest, then struggled with his bodyguards, who knocked the assassin to the ground and shot him thirty times. As for Long, after he was hit, wrote A. J. Liebling, he “spun around, made one whoop, and ran down the hall like a hit deer.” He was taken to a hospital, where he died two days later. He was forty-two years old.

I'm not saying Zemurray was behind the Huey Long assassination, though skeptics still contest the official version of the killing: Dr. Weiss, acting on a mad impulse of his own, sneaks into the statehouse and fixes Huey good. There was enough doubt to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Justice Department in the fall of 1935. I once knew one of the investigators, Morris Leibman, who had worked for the Justice Department when he was a young attorney. When I asked him about the killing, he said, “Louisiana—you never know.” Later evidence suggested the bullet that killed Long came from a .38-caliber or .45-caliber pistol. Dr. Weiss owned a gun, but it was a .32-caliber. In fact, the bullet that killed Huey Long matched the guns carried by his own bodyguards. And we know for certain they fired their weapons that night, a number of times. Some people suggest Long's death was a tragic accident: a jumpy bodyguard set off another jumpy bodyguard, until the air was full of lead; others suggest Dr. Weiss fired and missed, but Long was accidentally shot in the ensuing melee. In either scenario, Dr. Weiss is framed by the bodyguards, wishing to avoid a scandal. Others suggest a darker conspiracy, a collusion of interests determined to prevent Long from challenging Roosevelt in the upcoming presidential election, in which case Dr. Weiss was the patsy. Or perhaps the assassination was the Ring settling a score. In this scenario, the bodyguards were paid off, corrupted. (“In the evenings they literally sat around their drawing rooms discussing ways to murder him.”) So, no, I'm not saying Zemurray was behind the assassination of Huey Long, knew about it in advance, or did anything other than mourn when he got the news. But the fact is, the few men stupid enough to outrage Sam Zemurray, to challenge him, or disrespect him, or get in his way, from Miguel Dávila to Huey Long, had a habit of coming to a bad end.

 

14

The Fish That Ate the Whale

One morning in 1931, Zemurray woke early, had a breakfast of figs and water, stood on his head for fifteen minutes, went through his front door, crossed St. Charles Avenue, and headed downtown. This was Sam in early retirement, unable to keep away from the wharves, the ships, the machinery. He followed Calhoun Street to Magazine, which is curio shops and storefronts, then turned onto Nashville. The streets run down as you approach the river. The potholes fill with oily water and truck drivers grip their wheels tight as if bouncing across the face of the moon. Zemurray took a right on Annunciation Street, which is as sleepy and small as a street in the hills above Cannery Row—it being understood, I hope, that I'm re-creating a typical walk, not saying this is the route he followed every day. He cut down Octavia and turned left on Tchoupitoulas, then crossed the overpass that carried him above the railroad tracks to the Mississippi.

He walked along the river most mornings, now and then following it for miles. Did Sam miss the jungle? Did he long for the isthmus, where he could get out of these itchy clothes and away from this polite society? He lingered on the Erato Wharf, the Desire Wharf, the Pauline Wharf, where twenty-five hundred bunches of bananas were unloaded every hour. He liked the smell of the river and the ships covered in produce, the fishermen in the rigging. He liked the shop talk of sea captains. He liked the fruit piled on the railroad sidings, greens and ripes and browns. But the morning I speak of he would have seen something terrible and new, a feature that appeared on the river as if overnight: a shantytown built by the homeless. In New York City, the Hoovervilles were built in Central and Riverside parks, great agglomerations of lean-tos ands tents. In New Orleans, the Hooverville was like Venice, built on the water with rafts and barges. It was a mirror of the city laid out by the French, a prophecy of what that city would become in the time of the Flood. Most of the structures were made of driftwood that came down the river. Hoboes fished out the scrap and lashed it into shelters. It grew by accretion, a monument of ingenuity, a chaos of rafts and skiffs that lined the river from Thalia Street all the way to Carrollton. This picturesque slum must have impressed Zemurray in a way he would never be impressed by statistics or employment rolls. It was the future if nothing was done.