Rayburn and Earl Long
In 1959, Rayburn acted as a lieutenant for Earl Long and helped to get the governor sprung from a mental institution where he had been confined by his wife, Blanche R. Long. Ironically, it was Jesse Bankston, later the longtime Democratic Party state chairman, who had signed the original commitment papers because he thought that he was acting in his friend Long's best interest. Rayburn, however, remained loyal to Long even as family members, concerned about the governor's drinking and public relationships with Bourbon Street strippers, had Bankston, then the state director of hospitals, commit Long to Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville. With Rayburn's help, Long famously worked from his hospital bed to fire Bankston and then get released.
Upon Rayburn's death, Bankston said that the veteran lawmaker had excelled in speechmaking but was also strong on Democratic issues involving education and labor. The two had long since reconciled their differences over Long's hospitalization.
Former Senate secretary Mike Baer, himself a native of Rayburn's Bogalusa, declared the former lawmaker the "last of the Red Hot Poppas," a term that Earl Long had applied to himself in the 1950s to refer to politicians traveling from one community to another with sound trucks for stump speaking, rather than reliance on slick television advertising. Baer noted that Rayburn could stop a bill by making a familiar argument that the proposed law would "hurt the poor people. . . . Even the author of a bill withdrew it or voted against his own bill after Sixty spoke against it."
Read more about this topic: Sixty Rayburn
Famous quotes containing the words earl and/or long:
“There is a sort of veteran women of condition, who, having lived always in the grand mode, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“If after all this any one will be so sceptical, as to distrust his Senses, and to affirm, that all we see and hear, feel and taste, think and do, during our whole Being, is but the series and deluding appearances of a long Dream, whereof there is no reality,... I must ask him to consider, if all be a Dream, then he doth but dream, that he makes the Question; and so it is not much matter, that a waking Man should answer him.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)