The Earl of Louisiana by A.J. Liebling

A.J. Liebling was a New Yorker feature writer - he covered politics and WWII and boxing and the media, among some other things - from 1935 through his death in 1963. He's famous enough, even sixty years later, that the Library of America has published two big volumes of his writings.

I've been working through the miscellaneous one - the other covers his WWII writings; authoritative non-fiction about big wars will always command a huge audience among middle-aged dads everywhere - for much of the past year. So far, I've read The Jollity Building, Between Meals, and The Sweet Science.

This time out, I have The Earl of Louisiana, a 1961 fix-up of New Yorker articles from 1959 and 1960 that were - I assume - supposed to showcase what Liebling thought would be Earl Long's re-election run for Governor of Louisiana. (Louisiana, in those days and maybe still even now, had a rule that Governors could only serve one consecutive term, but Long was planning to resign the day before the primary, roll to victory, and pick back up - in the event, things went differently.)

I'm finding books about the politics of sixty or a hundred years ago weirdly soothing right now: huge swaths of the US were deeply, horribly corrupt, run as fiefdoms by little dictators (like Long, though he's fairly benevolent and his core aims are ones Liebling agrees with), and discussions of politics were nakedly about power and influence. The media landscape is different than now, but there's still cynical big outlets (here the major New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune). And the racism is frankly shocking in the later parts of the book: Long himself, as Liebling presents him, was about the most successful possible left-wing politician in the Deep South of that era, doing that mostly through a kind of verbal judo of racism. One major plank of the campaign - across all of the candidates - was how strongly they all were for segregation and how strongly they condemned the NAACP as evil Northern agitators and tools of the international Communist menace. (I am not exaggerating by a single hair.)

So the US has had absolutely horrible, evil politics within living memory: if your grandparents lived in the South, and were white, they were probably segregationists, just by the law of averages. (And the odds aren't necessarily vastly better if they lived in the North, either.)

Earl starts with Long just getting out of an asylum, into which he was forcibly consigned by his wife and some of his appointees. The rabble-rousing Long gets some great stump speechmaking out of this, talking about being dragged through three hospitals in Texas and Louisiana without "clothes to cover a red bug." That sets the tone for the rest of the story: Louisiana politics was then (and might still be) combative, personal, and full of the same major characters for a couple of decades. In that era, it was dominated by the Democratic party, and organized around a two-primary system: the first had the huge list of candidates, the second just the top two vote-getters, who then schemed to get the followers of the losing candidates through granting favors and promises of jobs. The actual real election was a formality; there were hardly any Republicans at all, and whoever won the second Dem primary was guaranteed to win, in every race. (My sense is that something similar still occurs, in many states, though primarily under the aegis of Republicans these days.)

Liebling was an energetic, lively writer - he was a horseplayer, and wrote about politics like a horse race, which is not just traditional, but worked well for this era of Louisiana. This is a book full of colorful characters, but none more than Long himself. And it's a book of retail, brass-knuckle politics, over the course of one year, with a lot of changes and surprises along the way. The favorite - whichever favorite, at whichever point - doesn't win, and many of them don't even come close. It's a great view of a kind of politics that in these specific details is gone, but the spirit and style of which will always live on, and can help illuminate later iterations.

And just knowing that it used to be like this is oddly comforting: politics can be corrupt, and personal in the worst ways, and nakedly about the abuse of power, for an extended period of time, and that's "normal." There never was a golden age; it's abuses of various kinds all the way down.