“Kingfish”
Huey Long Spends the Night
At
4006 Cherry Street in Pine Bluff
By
David Trulock
Senators Huey P. Long of Louisiana and Hattie W.
Caraway of Arkansas spent the first day of August in 1932 speaking in five
south Arkansas cities on the first leg of an eight-day campaign to promote Mrs.
Caraway’s re-election. Pine Bluff was their final stop on that hot August day
that had turned to evening by the time they spoke to a large crowd at the
Missouri Pacific Park on East Sixth Avenue.
After giving their speeches, both Caraway and Long
repaired to the Hotel Pines. In those
days, even a venerable establishment like the Pines was still dependent on
ceiling fans and oscillating fans for cooling.
Mrs. Caraway presumably spent the night there, along with others
traveling in the political caravan. According
to the next day’s newspapers, however, one of Huey Long’s supporters offered
him a better deal—a cooler place to sleep—and he accepted.
Pre-history of 1932 Campaign
Hattie Caraway had only recently been appointed to
fill the Senate seat of her husband, Thaddeus Caraway, who’d died unexpectedly on
November 6, 1931. The appointment also
involved a special election. An article written
some fifty years later by Patrick Kelly, a freelance journalist from Magnolia, described
the nature of the election: [i]
Governor Harvey Parnell
appointed Mrs. Caraway to take his [Mr. Caraway’s] seat in the Senate, pending
a special election in January 1932.
Custom dictated, however, that the governor’s appointee be given the
Democratic nomination (hence, victory) for that election. After some infighting among the Democrats,
Mrs. Caraway was nominated in December, and on January 12, 1932, she was
elected against token opposition.
Then, very unexpectedly, Hattie Caraway decided to
run against real opposition in the real election, or what amounted to the real
election, the Democratic primary of August 9, 1932. She and Huey Long had seats next to each
other in the senate chamber, and were in agreement on most issues, but,
according to Caraway’s published diary, Silent
Hattie Speaks, she was initially not a fan of his loud, long-winded oratory. Nevertheless, when Long offered to help her
on what became a statewide whirlwind campaign —“the first Arkansas had ever
seen,” according to Patrick Kelly—she could hardly refuse.
Caraway and Long in Pine Bluff
Long, of course, was doing most of the speaking on
the tour. He and his entourage also introduced
into the campaign a portable public address system known as the sound truck, of
which he had two. While one truck was
amplifying sound (recorded music was used prior to the speeches), the other would
travel to the next town on the schedule and be ready when Long and Caraway
arrived. Long also provided thousands of
campaign leaflets carried in two vans that followed the same leapfrog pattern
as the trucks.
On that first day of August, when the caravan made
stops in Magnolia, El Dorado, Camden, Fordyce and Pine Bluff, the temperature had
reached 103, according to the next morning’s Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, which opened its banner-headlined article
about Long and Caraway’s visit to the city by discussing the fast-paced nature
of the campaign tour, while also giving a nod to the heat at the end of the
second paragraph:
Kingfish
Huey P. Long of Louisiana roared into Pine Bluff on a tailwind last night to
climax the first day of his joint stumping tour with Mrs. T. H. Caraway,
telling an enormous crowd of southeast Arkansas residents that “the classes are
trying to destroy this little woman who is the friend of the masses.”
For
nearly an hour the fiery Louisiana senator, who dropped eight other campaigns
in which he is interested in various parts of the south to pick up the standard
of the nation’s first woman senator, roared appeals in her behalf to a sweating
but thoroughly interested audience.
Long used the “little woman” epithet to refer to
Hattie Caraway throughout the campaign.
That would not be acceptable today, even though it was literally true
in Caraway’s case. On the other hand, Long’s
catchphrases regarding the classes versus the masses are very much in harmony
with today’s discussions of income inequality, except no one today could match
Long in his fervent use of Biblical quotations to support the cause.
The Pine Bluff
Commercial, the afternoon paper, opened its August 2nd article about
the Caraway-Long campaign tour with a report on Long’s speech given that
morning in Stuttgart. The news of the
previous night’s speeches in Pine Bluff, having been reported by the Graphic
that morning and thus being old news by afternoon, was relegated to the middle of
the article.
But perhaps there was another reason the Commercial was less effusive than the Graphic
about the presence of Huey Long in Pine
Bluff. The editor of the Graphic, Edgar B. Chestnutt, was responsible—or at
least claimed responsibility—for bringing Long to Pine Bluff. In a page-one sidebar to the main article
about Long’s and Caraway’s speeches, the Graphic reported that Chestnutt, “at
whose invitation the Kingfish visited here,” made a presentation to Long after
the speeches were over, saying: “Senator
… you have a nickname that never has been formally and officially given to you
… we usurp the authority somewhere to formally and officially name you ‘the
Kingfish.’”
The article continues: “Wherewith he [Long] was presented with a
beautiful floral design of a large fish, wearing a gold crown, the idea of Ben
A. Pearson of the Pearson Flower and Garden Shop.”
Where Huey Long Spent the Night
Despite the differences in their coverage of the
Caraway-Long political speeches, both the Graphic and the Commercial ended their articles with a few
paragraphs on where Long spent the night of August 1st.
The Commercial:
At the conclusion of
his speech he retired to the Hotel Pines here and from there went to the home
of Clarence Philpot.
He became acquainted
with Mr. Philpot while the paving contractor was engaged in work on Louisiana
highways, and appeared in Mr. Philpot’s behalf after paving equipment had been
damaged by dynamite explosion on a Louisiana job, getting help for Mr. Philpot
in the form of a state appropriation to partially cover the damage.
The Graphic:
Immediately after the
speaking, Sen. Long returned to the Pines Hotel, where he had been making
headquarters, shook hands with many of his friends, and went out to be the
guest for the night of C. E. Philpot, Pine Bluff contractor, whose equipment
was dynamited by radicals in Louisiana and for whom Sen. Long personally
appeared before the legislature and obtained financial restitution for Mr.
Philpot.
“Have you got a
sleeping porch, Mr. Philpot?” asked the senator when extended an invitation to
be his house guest.
“Yes, a nice cool one,”
replied the host.
“Let’s go,” answered
the Kingfish, and he pushed through the crowd in his room and disappeared.
Huey P. Long apparently had a knack for disappearing
right after his speeches. The Graphic
concluded its sidebar about Long being presented the “Kingfish” floral bouquet
with this description of his response: “‘Thank
you, put it in the car and let’s take it to the hotel,’ the Kingfish said,
elbowing his way through the crowd.”
Addendum
Clarence Philpot lived at 4006 Cherry Street in 1932,
in the house my family later lived in (1963-2007).
For a photo showing the sleeping porch see “When We Moved To Pine Bluff,”
in the Spring 2014 issue of the Quarterly.
The caption on the photo referred to the sleeping porch as a sunroom, to
Huey Long as being Louisiana’s governor when he was “rumored” to have slept
there, and to Clarence Philpot as a former Jefferson county judge. [In this web version of the article, the photo is shown below. It was taken in August or September of 1963 by my dad, Walter Trulock III.]
In the present article, each of these
misidentifications has been corrected except the last: Clarence’s older brother Charles M. Philpot
was the Jefferson County judge, not Clarence.
As county judge from 1910 through 1916, Charles was involved with the
construction of the Dollarway in 1913-14.
Charles Philpot died at his daughter’s home in
Birmingham, Alabama in 1935[ii],
the same year Huey Long was assassinated by the son a political rival. Clarence Philpot died in the house at 4006
Cherry Street on August 14, 1937, at age 71, of a heart attack brought on by
injuries he sustained when hit by a car in Moscow (Arkansas) in late 1936.[iii]
