When I was a kid I used to watch the political conventions. I thought they were pretty exciting. Nowadays you couldn’t catch me dead watching one. Or a Presidential debate either. Although I have to say that I watched the first Biden-Trump debate. But that was only after my late brother Dave texted me an oedipal description of the Republican standard bearer. He was pretty non-political. If Donald Trump could get that kind of rise out of my usually phlegmatic brother I figured I had better go see what the fuss was about.
Anyway, I remember the first time I ever saw Edwin Edwards. It was back when he was a Congressman. Before he had established a stranglehold on Louisiana state politics. The chairman had asked for a roll call vote of the state delegations for some reason or another. Edwards, resplendent in a gold blazer with fleur des lis festooned thereon, took the mic.
“Le grande etat de Louisianne dit NON NON NON,” he thundered.
I thought he was drunk. In any event, I was pretty sure, judging from the raucous cheering behind him, that a good number of his fellow delegates were hammered.
Turns out that Edwin Edwards neither drank nor smoke. He made up for these overtly abstemious attributes with a negotiable relationship with various other temptations. And I will let it go at that.
I don’t know where to begin. I won’t bore you with a factual recitation of his history. You can go read any of a number of obits for that.
Edwards wasn’t in office when I was at Tulane. The governor during my tenure there was a Republican named Dave Treen of whom Edwards once said was so slow “it takes him an hour and a half to watch Sixty Minutes.” Actually Treen was nothing of the sort. He made Moot Court and Law Review while at Tulane. He also had a pretty good sense of humor. He was once asked by some ole boy at a town hall if the State would add another month to the deer hunting season. “What would we call it,”Treen replied. “Y’all already hunt 12 months a year.”
Treen was the first Republican elected Governor since Reconstruction. And, although nobody knew it at the time, he was the herald of Louisiana’s shift to becoming a red state.
Like I said earlier, I don’t know where to begin. So I will just make an observation. Edwin Edwards was the last of the old time populists in the tradition of the Kingfish and Uncle Earl. Say what you will about the Longs and Edwards, and there is much to be said, they were “populists” is the sense that they believed in making Louisiana government work for the average guy. Huey Long taxed the hell out of the oil companies from that revenue built roads and schools. Earl Long continued the policies of his brother and was the first governor to put blacks in government. Edwards’ core constituents were African-Americans and Cajuns. He put blacks and women in important positions in state government. He streamlined the bureaucracy and was a major force behind updating Louisiana’s Constitution.
Did they take these solely actions out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not. Each were ruthless in their pursuit of power. None more so than Huey, who pretty much continued to run the State of Louisiana from his office in the US Senate while he plotted a run for the presidency. Indeed, he might have wound up in the Oval Office if he had not gotten himself shot during a visit to Baton Rouge.
And we have to be frank. Edwin Edwards screwed up big time. After his final turn in office, he got sloppy. He also got caught on tape agreeing to a bribe in order to facilitate the grant of casino and hospital licenses in his capacity as a private attorney. For this he got sent to Federal prison in his late seventies where to his everlasting credit he taught prisoners how to read and helped them attain their GEDs. And typical Edwards, while in the joint he corresponded with a woman who eventually became his third wife and whom bore him a child in his eighties.
But let us now consider someone else who is occasionally referred to as a populist. Donald Trump is, was, a populist only in the sense that he has a feral ability to arouse the passion of a certain sector of the electorate that is either disaffected by politics and/or is fearful of its place in the changing demographics of the present age. People that Donald Trump would otherwise have nothing to do with. He is not motivated by anything other than his juvenile ego needs and toxic narcissism.
Of Edwin Edwards, flawed as he was, we can say this. He cared about Louisiana. He, like the Longs before him, believed that the greater good was also politically expedient.
They were true populists. And who knows when we will see their kind again.
