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When Gov. Jeff Landry opened this year’s redistricting-focused special session, he jokingly referenced the shooting of one of his predecessors.

“Now I am aware Huey Long was shot over redistricting,” Landry said. “I am hopeful and confident we can dispose of this matter without you disposing of me.”

On Sept. 8, 1935 Long, then a U.S. senator effectively running the state from D.C., was at the State Capitol for a special session that included legislation to gerrymander anti-Long Judge Benjamin Pavy out of his job. According to the generally accepted version of events, Pavy’s son-in-law, Dr. Carl Weiss, approached Huey in a corridor and shot him at close range in the abdomen. 

Long’s bodyguards immediately fired on Weiss, hitting him 61 times as Long ran to safety. Weiss was killed instantly, and Long was rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium downtown, where emergency surgery failed to stop internal bleeding.

Long died two days later on September 10, eleven days after his 42nd birthday. His last words reportedly were, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.”

But how accurate is the official story? Carl Weiss Jr., who was three months old at the time, argued until his death in 2019 that his father not only didn’t fire the fatal shot, he didn’t even bring a gun to the Capitol. 

The most popular counternarrative asserts that the doctor had only punched Long, and the bodyguards overreacted with a hail of bullets that killed Weiss and Long. The guards were said to have then covered up their reckless response by pinning the death on Weiss.

“As a historian I cannot say either way, but deep in my heart I do not believe Carl shot Huey, but instead a stray bodyguard bullet hit him,” Richard D. White Jr., author of “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long,” told The New York Times. “It just doesn’t add up that he was an assassin. I believe he punched Huey and that the bodyguards went berserk.”

Even if Weiss fired the fatal shot, theories were rampant at the time that he had not acted alone. The man that President Franklin Roosevelt called one of the most dangerous in America had plenty of enemies, and assassination rumors had been rampant. 

T. Harry Williams, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Huey Long,” endorsed the official account. He portrayed Weiss as a sincere and idealistic young man who was willing to martyr himself after agonizing “over the evils that he believed Huey Long was inflicting on his class and his state.”

A State Police investigation concluded in 1992 that “observations made of the photographic and other evidence was supportive of the official version of the shooting. A careful examination of literary sources and historical information provides no credible contradictions.”

Over 200,000 people attended Long’s funeral at the State Capitol, where he is buried beneath a statue that celebrates his achievements.

Editor’s note: Sources of information reviewed for this piece include NOLA, The New York Times, Gambit and this sitededicated to Long. 

This piece first ran in the Sept. 5, 2024 edition of LaPolitics Weekly. Wish you could have read it then? Subscribe today!

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