(Note: these learning modules encompass the actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students. Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)

LEARNING MODULE: WEEK 10, Louisiana- Edwin Edwards Legacy

Louisiana is a unique Deep South state as the historic racism and discrimination wasn’t as great as in the other Deep South states, since the state has a significant Catholic population, due to the Cajuns living in south Louisiana (French Canadians who had fled there during a French-British war). Indeed, Louisiana had a very progressive governor and senator Democrat Huey P. Long during the Great Depression. His rise to power started on the state utility regulation board, where he compelled the electric and telephone companies to reduce their rates and protected small oil companies from the large ones. Elected governor in 1928, he raised taxes on virtually all of the large businesses in the state in order to provide free textbooks to school children, build highways and bridges, and create charity hospitals for the poor. Long was accused of corruption (granting oil and gambling concessions to political allies, assessing the salaries of government workers), but he argued that he needed the money to counteract the campaign spending of the big businesses. He was impeached by the state house of representatives, acquitted by the state senate, and the people then elected him to the U.S. Senate. Condemning the concentration of 65% of the nation’s wealth into the hands of only 2% of Americans, Long promised to “share the wealth” and was seen as a more left-wing alternative to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He continued to wield great power over Louisiana’s government when he was a Senator, with opponents viewing him as a dictator. Finally, in 1935 he was assassinated on the steps of the state capital by a man whose friends and relatives had been hurt by Long, and Long’s bodyguards pumped 61 bullets into the assassin.

For the next 35 years, Democratic party politics was split between pro and anti-Long factions with pro-Long governors being more progressive and anti-Long factions being more “reformist” (good government) and conservative. One governor in the 1950s, Earl Long, opposed legislative disenfranchisement efforts as they would hurt his political supporters. Another, Jimmie Davis, in the late 1950s and early 1960s called five special sessions of the legislature seeking to oppose school desegregation. We now turn to a more modern, New South Democrat, Edwin Edwards, who served four terms as governor. His life and career are so informative for electoral strategies for today’s Democrats that it undoubtedly will be on the test.

Edwin Edwards was the first Cajun governor in the century, a French-speaking Catholic from south Louisiana. He had a common man background, being the son of a tenant farmer. Edwards idolized FDR since economically liberal government programs provided his family with the basic necessities of life- electricity, free school lunches, textbooks, and other free food. Edwards was a fast talking, fancy dressing, witty and charismatic campaigner. Once asked about the chances of his keeping his New Year’s resolution of stopping his gambling, he quipped “The odds are eight to five.” Responding to stories about his womanizing, Edwards in one campaign joked that he would only lose if he were caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy (see full notes for sources).

Edwards had a moderate conservative voting record in the U.S. House in the late 1960s. He was elected governor in 1971 by beating a north Louisiana state senator (Bennett Johnston) and then beating a conservative Republican. Edwards narrowly won the runoff Democratic primary by assembling a coalition of Cajuns and African Americans. In the general election, Edwards faced conservative Republican Dave Treen who opposed Medicare, so Edwards was viewed as a moderate liberal in comparison. Though Edwards won, the suburbanite Treen’s 43% of the vote (and a slight majority of whites) was a signal that the GOP was becoming more of a political force in Louisiana. Angered over having to campaign in three tough contests (first primary, runoff, general election), Edwards and the Democratic legislature enacted a unique open primary (blanket primary) law whereby all candidates regardless of party would run on the same primary ballot, and if nobody got 50% of the vote there would be a runoff between the top two candidates (regardless of party).

Edwards was such a popular governor that he won re-election in 1975 without Republican opposition, and he easily polished off five Democratic opponents. In his first term, Edwards had been an economically progressive governor. He raised the oil and gas severance tax and eliminated the regressive sales tax on food and medicine. He increased support for vocational-technical education and for the education of the handicapped, and raised teacher and state employee salaries. A racial liberal for whom race meant nothing as long as a worker was doing his or her job, Edwards appointed African Americans to state government jobs, including the first black press secretary. Hints of corruption regarding the sale of government appointments and his holding stock in a company benefitting from government work did not prevent his landslide 62% re-election vote.

Louisiana elected their first Republican governor in 1979, when Edwards was constitutionally-barred from seeking a third term. Dave Treen finally won after bitter divisions among the Democrats. Indeed, Treen received the endorsements of the four Democrats who had trailing Treen and liberal Democratic Public Service Commissioner Louis Lambert. One bitter Democrat blasted Lambert as “lying Louie,” and another accused him of stealing the election due to vote shifts between the unofficial and official results. But then, the deep 1982 national economic recession hit, and Louisiana was especially impacted, so Treen’s popularity took a dive. Winning a third term in 1983, Edwards blasted Treen as a failed leader and an inept, do-nothing governor. Mocking Treen as dumb, Edwards said that he lacked anything between his ears and that it took him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes (an evening news program). Edwards won his third term with his biracial coalition of African Americans and whites of modest incomes. However, the corruption charges now really began to hurt, as Edwards became the target of 13 federal investigations for allegedly selling hospital and nursing home permits. Edwards’ popularity also took a nosedive after another economic recession in Louisiana, plus a big tax hike that it required. Edwards sought re-election in 1987 but trailed in the first primary; personally disappointed, Edwards graciously withdrew so Congressman Buddy Roemer became governor (elected as a Democrat, he then switched to the GOP).

Well, Edwards was back running for a fourth term in 1991, since Governor Roemer had a declining popularity and didn’t even make the runoff. Instead, we had the infamous race from hell, between the bigot and the crook! (I grew up in New Orleans so I wasn’t too surprised at this mess.) How can I explain this? Well, one of the candidates was a guy named David Duke, who used to be in the Ku Klux Klan, but he tried to improve his image by creating a group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People! After two unsuccessful state legislative campaigns as a Democrat, he finally barely got elected in 1989 to the state house as a Republican from an overwhelmingly white Metairie suburb of New Orleans. Duke then ran in 1990 as a Republican against Democratic incumbent U.S. Senator Bennett Johnston (Johnston had a moderate voting record), and horrified GOP state party leaders kept other Republicans out of the contest so that Duke would lose. Nevertheless, everyone was shocked that Duke still got 44% of the vote in this Senate race, which included 59% of the white vote. Duke convinced many whites that he wasn’t a racist, he was just a conservative. He called affirmative action discrimination against whites, and said that welfare recipients should be tested for drugs and should work for their checks.

Well, in the first primary for governor in 1991, the incumbent Roemer came in third, so Edwards was the leader with 34%, but David Duke came in a strong second with 32%. Thus, we had the famous runoff election between the crook and the bigot. Business and community leaders were horrified, as they envisioned businesses and conventions avoiding Louisiana like the plague if Duke won. People started putting bumper stickers on their cars that read: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important!” The hilarious and sarcastic Edwards in a televised debate highlighted the choice for voters: “While David Duke was burning crosses and scaring people, I was building hospitals to heal them. When he was parading around in a Nazi uniform to intimidate our citizens, I was in a National Guard uniform bringing relief to flood and hurricane victims.” (Bridges book, 1994, The Rise of David Duke, p. 229). Thankfully, Edwards won his fourth term with a sizable 61% vote.

The saga of Edwin Edwards ended with his serving 10 years in federal prison for receiving bribes of over one million dollars relating to the prison system and casino licenses. While in jail in 2011 the 84-year-old ladies-man Edwards married a 33-year-old, and two years later their son was born. Released from jail, he tried a political comeback but lost a 2014 congressional runoff to a Republican. (I saw a campaign picture of he and his wife; he looked like her grandfather.) He died in 2021 at the age of 93.

Republicans made important gains after the politically adept Edwards left the scene, and currently hold both of the U.S. Senate seats. One of the seats that Democrats lost was the three term (18 years) Senator Mary Landrieu, who was even endorsed by Dave Treen because she worked across the aisle with Republicans to get things done for Louisiana. She delivered a farm relief bill, a preschool education proposal, federal revenue sharing with the state for mineral exploration in offshore waters, and funding for a defense contractor in Louisiana. Landrieu kept beating GOP candidates who were too conservative and too partisan. So how did Landrieu finally lose in 2014 to a Republican? Well, she led in the first primary by 1% over conservative Republican congressman Bill Cassidy. She was hurt by President Obama’s 59% disapproval rating in Louisiana, and Cassidy focused on his opposition to illegal immigration. But the kiss of death was how her own national party wrote her off. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pulled its ads after the first primary, and when the Senator was pleading with her fellow Democratic Senators to support the Keystone oil pipeline project that helped Louisiana’s oil and gas industry, they spurned her. So Republican Bill Cassidy got elected Senator with 56% of the vote. Cassidy won a 59% re-election victory in 2020 with a vote margin mirroring the GOP party identification advantage among exit poll voters, as he used his massive war chest to beat Shreveport mayor and African American Adrian Perkins (a West Point and Harvard Law graduate with three combat tours). The other Senate seat (that used to be held by moderate Democrat John Breaux) had been won by conservative Republican David Vitter in 2004, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who then survived an “escort” scandal to win re-election. After retiring, he was replaced in 2016 by Republican John Kennedy, a former Democrat elected state treasurer five times who blasted his Democratic opponent for supporting Obamacare. Once again, the contrast in the two national parties support for their state party candidates was striking. Both Trump and Pence visited Louisiana to campaign for Kennedy. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee didn’t fund any advertising for their party’s candidate. Kennedy won a 61% landslide. Kennedy is up for reelection this year, and his seat is rated as a Solid Republican seat.

The governorship since Edwards has been more competitive, held by two 2-term Republicans and two Democrats (a 1-termer and a 2-termer). The one-termer was Democrat Kathleen Blanco, who along with the New Orleans mayor (unlike the Mississippi case) were viewed as miserable failures in handling Hurricane Katrina (my poor home of New Orleans was flooded!), so she didn’t even seek re-election. Republican Bobby Jindal, the son of immigrants from India with darker colored skin won in 2007. He had lost to Blanco four years earlier, as she had blasted him as too conservative. Jindal spent the next four years traveling across the state and giving speeches, especially in north Louisiana where he was weak. A bizarre state Democratic attack ad blasted him for writing in a Catholic journal about his soul-searching as a young man as he changed from his parents’ Hindu faith to a strong Catholic faith. The ad backfired, as Protestant leaders just responded that they appreciated that he had a strong faith, even if it wasn’t theirs. Jindall then won re-election four years later with a 66% landslide. Well, the state fell into hard economic times, so in 2015 Democrats regained the governorship with John Bel Edwards (no relation to the famous Edwards). Edwards is a notable success story for southern Democrats, so here’s how he did it. Edwards, a Democrat, graduated from West Point military academy, was an Army Ranger, and chaired the state House Veterans Affairs Committee. Though he was also the state house Democratic caucus chair, it was hard to paint him as a liberal. The dominant Republican Party had split each other up in the first primary with two losers refusing to endorse the Republican in the runoff election. And that Republican was former Senator David Vitter, the guy with the “escort” problem. Edwards put the nail in the coffin with a devastating ad that accused Vitter of skipping a floor vote honoring our troops killed in a missile strike but being on the phone 39 minutes later with the escort service. The ad ended with: “David Vitter chose prostitutes over patriots.” One of Edwards’ first acts was to expand Medicaid to the working poor under Obamacare, much in the vein of an Edwin Edwards economic populist act. As governor, Edwards kept a high job approval rating (56%) by working with the Republican-controlled legislature to balance the budget by raising the sales tax, to sign anti-abortion and pro-guns legislation, and to sign a criminal justice reform act that reduced the prison population (thereby beating the federal government’s recent bill). Edwards was narrowly reelected in 2019 after Republicans were split (some backing the losing Republican now supported Edwards). Edwards won about one-third of the white vote, and liberal organizations finally helped a Democrat get elected, as the state Democratic Party, Urban League backers, and historically black private college supporters funded aggressive get-out-the-vote drives in the black community.