POLITICAL NOTES: Revolting Parishes

To add a new character to his political puppet show, Louisiana's Huey Pierce ("Kingfish") Long went up to Arkansas last year, stumped the State with a motorcade and sound truck, elected Hattie Caraway to the Senate seat of her late husband. Wild was the uproar of outraged Louisianans last week when button-nosed, pugnacious Senator Long set out to ride Lallie Conner Kemp into Congress on his ruthless machine.

Representative Bolivar Kemp of the 6th Louisiana District died in June. In accordance with unwritten Congressional custom, Widow Lallie Kemp was endorsed by the Long faction to succeed him. Four other candidates also prepared to enter the primary to win a Democratic nomination which in Louisiana is the same thing as an election. Suddenly last fortnight, Governor Oscar Kelly Allen, a Longster, called a special election, to be held eight days after his proclamation. He boldly named Widow Kemp as "the unopposed Democratic nominee because there will not be time to hold a primary." At this latest piece of the "Kingfish's" political audacity, the 6th District was hopping mad. At mass meetings voters shouted "Hitlerism!", screamed that Messrs. Long and Allen should be lynched.

Of the twelve parishes in the election district, balloting was held only in nine last week. Injunctions prevented voting in the rest. In Livingston parish, masked men seized ballots at Centerville, burned them. In nine precincts of West Feliciana and Washington parishes, citizens marched to the polls, seized ballot boxes borrowed from New Orleans, dumped their contents into the street, set them afire. At St. Francisville seven boxes were emptied and spiked on the courthouse fence.

Tangipahoa parishioners showed more invention. Only "ballot box'' they provided was a garbage can on Hammond's main street, labeled "Vote here if you want to." On a gallows in the Hammond town square they hanged a two-faced effigy. One face was that of the local Longster, Judge Amos Lee Ponder Jr. The other had a black eye and was labeled: LONG ISLAND HUEY LONG, Every Dog Has His Day. When the sun set on the revolting parishes, Mrs. Kemp had received 5,000 votes. Normal vote: 45,000.

Mrs. Kemp, fiftyish, mother of two children, herself daughter of one of the first families of Tangipahoa Parish, a woman who had never put her hand into political mud, looked on with dismay at the whole scandalous proceeding. Then she took a hand herself, offered to resign as Congresswoman to stand for nomination in regular primaries if her opponents would abandon their plan to hold a "citizens' election." To the Kingfish, sitting in his New Orleans hotel room surrounded by bodyguards, the news of her offer was a severe jolt.