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No. 1 Outsider is Public Service Commissioner Wade O. Martin of St. Martinville. It seemed likely that a sizeable slice of the dead Kingfish's power would fall his way. A fiery, gun-toting Creole from Southern Louisiana, Martin is the best vote-getter the Long cabal ever produced. The first transfusion pumped into the dying Dictator's veins came from the sporty blood of Lieutenant Governor James A. Noe. This gay and friendly politician of 38 has a good field record as an A. E. F. infantryman, is a stumpster second only to Commissioner Martin.
No. 3 Outside Man of the Long machine is Speaker Allen J. Ellender of the State House of Representatives. A bilingual Bayou character, he and Martin have equally burning ambitions to be Governor, may precipitate the internal split which would start the Long machine's dissolution.
Opposition. "Without Long, not for long," was the way Southern politicians viewed the Louisiana Administration last week. A strong qualification to that sentiment came from local observers who noted the lack of harmony or homogeneity among the anti-Longsters. They, too, had their funeral-mass meeting when they buried their man, Assassin-Doctor Carl Austin Weiss Jr., at Baton Rouge three days before the Kingfish's interment, talked of erecting a national memorial to him at Washington.
Most militant force is the Square Deal Association which claims 70,000 members, started a vague, abortive uprising on the airport outside Baton Rouge last winter. President is a onetime Standard Oil fore man named Fred O'Rourke. Most formidable officer is probably the steering committee chairman, Oscar Whilden, a New Orleans horse & mule dealer with a rich background of Latin American revolutionary experience.
Outside New Orleans, Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley is viewed with suspicion because of his previous affiliation with Long. Nor is Colonel John Patrick Sullivan, another big old-line Democrat, persona grata beyond his urban district, because of his horse track, gambling and brewing connections. Most potent unit the Opposition could put into the field against the Long faction in the January Democratic primaries is that of the five united, New Deal, anti-Long Congressmen from Louisiana, led by scrappy Jared Young Sanders Jr. of Baton Rouge. Last July they met in an obscure New Orleans hotel for three days to study strategy for the January primaries. Last week this quiet conclave made lurid national news.
Headline-hunting Harry Brundidge of the St. Louis Star-Times discovered that Herbert Christenberry, brother of Long's Washington secretary and small-bore lawyer whom the Kingfish made an Assistant District Attorney at New Orleans, was telling a tall tale about hiding a dictaphone in the conference room. According to him, the records repeated a reference to a "Dr. Wise," and one voice said: "I will draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long." Month after the meeting, jittery Senator Long had caused little excitement in the U. S. Senate when he produced the dictaphone evidence as part of a plot to murder him. With Reporter Brundidge as its broadcaster, the tale secured a better audience. "Dr. Wise," it seemed, was none other than Dr. Weiss, and Congressman Sanders' Democrats had chosen him to do away with Senator Long.*