From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Baton Rouge, Huey Long, and the Movie Industry

Baton Rouge, Huey Long, and the Movie Industry Baton Rouge lies on the east bank of the Mississippi River, so coming from New Roads, I crossed the river again. The river widens at every crossing. It’s now a monster. Baton Rouge got its name from a boundary line. The Indians marked the boundary between their hunting grounds on this bluff by stripping a red cypress tree of its bark. As the French explorers progressed up river, they noticed the tree and called the bluff “le baton rouge” or “the red stick.” The name stuck. Baton Rouge is the state capital. Its capitol building , at thirty-four stories, is the tallest in the country. During the Great Depression, Governor Huey Long directed, “Build it quick and build it big.” The Art Deco–style building was the tallest building in the South when it was completed in 1932, a few years before Jonathan Daniels visited Baton Rouge. Very few politicians have made as long-lasting an imprint on a city as Huey made on Baton Rouge. His presence is felt all around here. In addition to the capitol, he conceived of LSU’s football stadium. Huey had the stadium built—even though the legislature didn’t appropriate enough money to build one—using money meant for dormitory rooms to build a stadium with dorm rooms under the stands. Generations of LSU scholars lived underneath Tiger Stadium. Inventive and a man of 266 many talents, Huey also wrote a few fight songs for the Tigers, and some are still sung on Saturday afternoons in the fall. Though officially Tiger Stadium, the stadium has been known for some years throughout the Southeastern Conference as “death valley.” The nickname was originally “deaf valley” because fans here are really loud. In 1988, the crowd’s reaction to a touchdown in the waning seconds of a game against Auburn registered at the local geological survey office as an earthquake. The game became known as the “earthquake game.” I wasn’t there on a game day so it was quiet around the stadium. So quiet that Mike, the LSU mascot, napped in the luxurious digs that Athletic Department donors have graciously built for him. Mike is a live Bengal tiger. Six Mikes have served since 1936. The present Mike, Mike VI, has been on the job since 2007. Being the LSU mascot is a good gig. Four of the five Mikes have lived to be at least seventeen, which is almost Entrance to Mike’s lair 267 twice the normal life expectancy of a big cat. It’s not surprising—Mike’s habitat has 15,000 square feet of walking-around area, a viewing wall where fans can see him, a live oak tree, and a couple of water features. Mike has it goin’ on. Huey Long was a radical populist. His one term as governor was marked by huge public projects: 9,700 miles of new roads, 111 toll-free bridges, the new state capitol building, and the football stadium. He instituted free schools and distributed free school textbooks statewide. Elected to the U.S. Senate in November 1930, Huey didn’t take his Senate seat until 1932 because he had a few things he wanted to finish as governor; he just left the Senate position vacant until then. Even after moving to Washington, he still controlled the machinery of state government back home. From this power base, he created the Share Our Wealth Program, his plan for America’s recovery, which was considerably more liberal than Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Huey’s slogan, originally coined by the late nineteenth-century populist William Jennings Bryan, was “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” Long declared that the primary cause of the 1930s economic crisis was an unequal distribution of wealth and political power: God told you what the trouble was. The philosophers told you what the trouble was; and when you have a country where one man owns more than 100,000 people, or a million people, and when you have a country where there are four men, as in America, that have got more control over things than all the 120 million people together, you know what the trouble is… Now, my friends, we have got to hit the root with the ax. Centralized power in the hands of a few, with centralized credit in the hands of a...