Sixty Rayburn - Rayburn and Earl Long

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."