In view of Long’s past obsession with racial issues of this sort, Carl Weiss had good grounds for apprehension on that score. In past campaigns and polemics Long had never hesitated to use such innuendos, as when he referred to a prominent Orleanian as “Kinky” Soandso in issue after issue of his weekly newspaper, _The American Progress_. Nor had he hesitated to make direct attacks on this front, as in his campaigns against Dudley LeBlanc in the matter of the latter’s Negro fellow officers of his burial-insurance society.
In his fancy the young physician could readily imagine Long’s insistence that “this isn’t what I’m saying; I’m not even a-saying it’s so. All I’m telling you is this is what Sheriff Swords said time after time....”
If Long, true to form, had made up his mind to drag this rejected canard back into the open, there was one sure way in which Dr. Weiss could keep him from his purpose and prevent a single syllable of that baseless and forgotten slander from being uttered. True, he could accomplish this only at the cost of his life. Surrounded as the Kingfish was by heavily armed guards, anyone who attacked him, even though he cut him down with the first shot, was sure to die himself, in the next instant, under a rain of bullets. Carl Weiss “just wasn’t the sort of person that would ever do a thing like that,” for any ordinary motive. But to shield the wife he adored and the infant son he idolized from a slander, groundless though it be, that would impute to them by innuendo a remote trace of Negro blood, he could--and in the opinion of many he did--lay down his life.
In that case, the real tragedy inherent in his act was not the sacrifice of his own future, so rich with promise, nor even the extinction of Huey Long, one of the most notable, challenging, and controversial figures in the public life of his era. Unschooled in the labyrinthine windings and turnings of politics in general and more particularly the ins and outs of Louisiana’s politics during that hectic era, Dr. Weiss had no intimation of the fact that nothing could have been farther from Huey Long’s plans than raising any racial issue at this time.
He did not know that Long was preparing to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for re-election by running against him for the presidency; that he was no longer campaigning merely in the Deep South where Negroes, disfranchised ever since the final rout of carpetbaggery in the 1870s, were kept from the polls first by force, then by the Grandfather Clause, and after that by the Understanding Clause, but above all by the one-party device of settling campaigns not at a general election but in a Democratic (i.e., white) primary.