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9 “When I Took the Oath of Office, I Took No Vow of Poverty”: Race, Corruption, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1928–2000 I In James Lee Burke’s novel, A Stained White Radiance, reformed alcoholic policeman Dave Robicheaux is driving across the bridge that carries I–10 over the Mississippi and into Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state’s political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor’s brother, and the most famous and enigmatic of all the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machinegun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building. My first concern is unashamedly self-indulgent: to look at Long and the colorful cast of characters described by Dave Robicheaux who have occupied the 144 Louisiana governor’s mansion since. As one observer noted, “Politics plays the role in Louisiana that TV wrestling does in the rest of the nation. It is fixed. It is surreal. It is our spectator sport.” I have been a spectator for over forty years, when as a twelve-year-old I first heard of Huey Long.1 My second concern is to examine the darker side of that legacy. Dave Robicheaux, who operates a boating dock in New Iberia, lamented: Over the years I had seen all the dark players get to southern Louisiana in one form or another: the oil and the chemical companies who drained and polluted the wetlands; the developers who could turn sugarcane acreage and pecan orchards into miles of tract homes and shopping malls that had the aesthetic qualities of a sewer works; and the Mafia, who operated out of New Orleans and brought in prostitution, slot machines, control of at least two big labor unions, and finally narcotics. They hunted on the game reserve. They came into an area where large numbers of people were poor and illiterate, where many were unable to speak English and the politicians were traditionally inept or corrupt, and they took everything that was best from the Cajun world in which I had grown up, treated it cynically and with contempt, and left us with oil sludge in the oyster beds, Levittown and the abiding knowledge that we had done virtually nothing to stop them.2 Put another way, 1995 in Louisiana. The entire membership of the state house of representatives had been subpoenaed by a grand jury examining the FBI’s investigation of payments by the gambling interests to state legislators. The payments were designed to secure passage of a bill legalizing gambling, a bill which even its supporters acknowledged could not have passed a referendum of voters. When the bill passed the state senate the president of the senate had walked round the floor openly distributing checks for $2,500 to every legislator. Newspaper investigation of Medicaid showed that by exploiting changes in Medicaid rules, politically well connected developers had set up private psychiatric hospitals: public spending on private psychiatric hospitalization had exploded 9,000 percent in five years. These hospitals were running up profits at ten times the national average. They provided inadequate care that sometimes made patients worse: most of the new beds weren’t needed in the first place. Their owners usually included state representatives and their companies invariably made contributions to Governor Edwin Edwards’s campaign. Some individual psychiatrists were making almost a million dollars a year treating Medicaid patients. The state Department of Health failed to enforce its accreditation requirements.3 An alleged serial killer, believed by the FBI to be responsible for twentyfour murders was at large: you could talk to the suspect by ringing his number at the New...

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