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At the hospital the Senator was taken straight to the operating room. On examining his wound physicians found that the bullet had twice pierced his colon, made its way out through his back. On the operating table, the intestinal punctures were sewed up. Then Huey Long was put to bed and a mass vigil began: by his wife, daughter, two boys and three hastily reconciled brothers at the bedside; by his miscellaneous henchmen in the corridor outside; by a brigade of newshawks downstairs; by a truculent detachment of State troopers and bodyguards around the building who were ordered to shoot photographers on sight; and by a horde of onlookers who shuffled up & down in front of the hospital. While the Senator's political enemies buried Assassin Weiss with honor in a nearby Catholic cemetery next day, the Senator's doctors ordered five successive blood transfusions, adrenalin injections, an oxygen tent. Toward sunset, when his condition became hopeless, it was arranged that the lights would blink in the sickroom to signify the end to friends and kin on the porch below. At 4 a. m. two mornings after he was shot, Huey Long, breathing heavily, was staring wild-eyed at the canopy above him. At 4 :10 the lights in his room blinked, but he did not see them. . . .
Men look smaller when dead, but Huey Long, who developed the traditional figure of the American backwoods demagogue to its fullest stature, was not likely to shrink in the estimates of his contemporaries for some time to come. Twenty years ago but a traveling salesman, a peddler of baking powder and cotton seed oil, he married a girl who won a cake-baking contest which he staged. After seven months study of the law, he was a lawyer, wangled himself a job on Louisiana's Railway Commission, and began building up a political following. He made the Governorship in 1928. In short time an effort was made to impeach him, but in vain. He "reached" 15 Senators, enough to forestall his ousting, and from that time on no one in Louisiana could stand against him. After he had himself elected to the U. S. Senate, he refused to go to Washington until he could arrange to leave Louisiana bound and gagged in the hands of a Long-chosen Governor. At the Democratic Convention in 1932, he was not only Senator but Dictator of Louisiana and with his vital votes Franklin Roosevelt was nominated. But President Roosevelt refused to pay the political debts which Huey Long thought Candidate Roosevelt had contracted. So Huey Long, the ex-drummer, was a pariah instead of a leader in the most powerful Administration in U. S. history. All he had, besides Louisiana, was the right to clown, to get beaten in a Sands Point washroom, to filibuster and to hurl invective. Yet last week the U. S. realized that save for Franklin Roosevelt, no other public figure could by his death produce so great a change in U. S. politics.