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Victor. Nobody believed that the popularity or political acumen of Sam Houston Jones, 42, accounted for the victory. Five months ago Sam Jones was known only as a moderately prosperous Lake Charles attorney. He comes from that stretch of Southwest Louisiana that is more akin to Texas than to the Old South, where the French-speaking Acadian country of the bayous, live-oaks, sugar & rice plantations, shades off into oil and cattle country.
When Huey Long was practicing oratory and salesmanship on the hillbillies of his native Winn Parish, Sam Jones was going to high school in the sleepy cattle town of DeRidder, 15 miles from the Texas line. When Huey was making a name for himself as a young lawyer, handling compensation cases for hillbillies hurt in Winn Parish's new lumber mills (1915), Sam Jones was working his way through Louisiana State University. When Huey Long was baiting the Interests—especially Standard Oil—claiming draft exemption because he was a notary public, and proclaiming that only suckers would fight, plodding Sam Jones, true to his commonplace name, was drilling away in the army. (His boyhood sweetheart, pretty, vivacious Louise Gambrell, meanwhile married somebody else.)
When Huey Long—his voice getting a little more raucous, his face a little puffier, his eyes more noticeably protuberant—was Railroad Commissioner, stridently upholding the rights of the people, but somehow mixing them up with a belief that Standard Oil had cheated him of $1,050, Sam Jones was getting admitted to the bar. And when Huey Long was getting licked for Governor in 1924, and plunging into the politician's purgatory of private practice, deals, publicity hunting, Local Boy Sam Jones, 26, was wrenching himself away from DeRidder and moving to Lake Charles (population then: 13,000), where an oil boom had started.
When Huey Long was elected in 1928, Lake Charles was still booming, had financed locally a $6,500,000 port improvement fund to build up its port, and Sam Jones was stumping for Al Smith in a pro-Klan district. When Huey Long was being impeached on 19 charges, including a plot to murder a legislator, Sam Jones was working in Lake Charles as assistant district attorney. When Long was making the Legislature of Louisiana a savage parody of democratic processes, packing the courts, building the Capitol, putting in roads, trapping his opponents, calling out the troops, and boasting, "There are not many people in the United States who are smarter than I am, and none in Louisiana"—when Huey Long, with five bodyguards now, and a passionate, vituperative voice, was being hit in a Sands Point washroom, clowning and shouting in the Senate, posing in green pajamas, filibustering in a torrent of disconnected sentences, plodding Sam Jones was unexcitingly being chosen State Commander of the American Legion (and keeping the Legion out of politics). When Long launched his Share the Wealth Plan, fast-growing Lake Charles, with 20 oil fields in the region, was still growing, and Sam Jones had gone back to private practice. The smartest man in Louisiana, with all his bodyguards around him, was shot in the Capitol he had built; and Sam Jones's career had also taken a new turn: Louise Gambrell, 33, reappeared on the scene, her first husband having died, and married Sam Jones, 37.