In trying to run LSU, Jeff Landry is repeating Huey Long's mistakes

Long's meddling with LSU's Law School in the 1930s almost cost the school its accreditation; Landry should be careful he doesn't inflict similar damage on the state's flagship university

Huey Long on the field in LSU’s Tiger Stadium

As a wise person observed that history “doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” When LSU recently kicked law professor Ken Levy out of his courses for insulting Gov. Jeff Landry, a few readers heard the rhyme of events from 1929-30 described in my 2023 book, Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

They saw similarities between Long’s often-damaging domination of LSU and Landry’s current authority over the university and its cowardly leaders.

In both cases, a law student with contacts in the governor’s office complained about a professor’s conduct. In both cases, it appears that the governor responded by trying to push around LSU’s leaders and the law school.

In the first case, Long tried to depose the school’s dean, Robert Lee Tullis, and, later, President Thomas Atkinson when they resisted Long’s orders.

Last month, LSU showed no sign of resisting the governor when Landry appears to have directed LSU to punish the Law Center faculty member after a student complained about Levy’s criticismed of him.

In both cases, the governor damaged the law school’s reputation and undermined its leaders.

In the earlier case, however, the law school dean and the university president had the courage and self-respect to confront Long, even though it eventually cost both men their jobs.

I doubt LSU President William Tate has read my book, but he doesn’t need to read a book by me or anyone else to know how to save his job: Obey the governor’s orders without question.

Like LSU President James Monroe Smith (who Long hired in 1930), Tate seems to regard himself as a member of the governor’s staff. (Tate would be wise to read uo on how Smith’s story at LSU ended in 1939: a prison sentence.)

Below are excerpts from two chapters from Kingfish U that tell the bizarre story of Long’s meddling with the law school.

Spoiler alert: By 1935, Long’s constant interference with the law school would almost cost the school its accreditation. Only Long’s assassination in September 1935 spared it from that fate.

As I always tell audiences when talking about my book, Long did his best work for LSU (and its football team) when he functioned as the school’s and the team’s head cheerleader. He did his worst damage when he acted as LSU’s president and head coach.

If Landry wants to help LSU become a better university, he would be wise to learn from history. Instead of trying to run the System Office and the Athletic Deparment, he should stay on the sidelines cheering away and give the school and its leaders what they need to succeed.

But he will only hurt LSU by trying to run it as Long did.

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Chapter 6

I Don’t Fool Around With Losers

Long made his first move to influence the academic life of LSU in December 1929. He tried to depose the aging founding dean of the LSU Law School, Robert Lee Tullis. An institution in Baton Rouge, Tullis had ruled the Law School since 1908. His colleagues regarded him as a brilliant lawyer, while some students saw him more as a harsh taskmaster. “He was a pretty hard . . . Simon Legree type,” one student recalled. Behind his back, students called the Tensas Parish native the “Tensas Terror.” Adding to Tullis’s problems in late 1929 was his deteriorating eyesight, a consequence of worsening cataracts in both eyes.

LSU Law School Dean Robert L. Tullis

Long got much of his information about Tullis from Kemble K. Kennedy, a brash, ambitious twenty-six-year-old LSU law student from Farmerville, a Union Parish town about seventy miles north of Long’s hometown of Winnfield. Long first met Kennedy years earlier when he represented him in a personal injury case. Kennedy’s father died when he was ten, and the precocious young man, in search of a father figure, attached himself to the charismatic future governor. Kennedy campaigned for Long in Union Parish during the 1928 governor’s race. Long encouraged the friendship and treated Kennedy as a protégé. No student on the LSU campus was closer to Long. Some suits Kennedy wore around campus were hand-me-downs from the governor’s closet.

Kemble Kennedy

“K.K.,” as classmates called him, served as student body president before he entered law school. He was now president of the school’s new Law Club and vice president of the LSU Student Council. And Kennedy was not shy about challenging university officials. The Law Club he helped create declared in October 1929 that its purpose was to “function as a union” to make “the law student body more of a unit in seeking what they term as ‘justifiable concessions’ from the faculty and the university.” That fall, Kennedy led a successful student revolt against the school’s athletic council, which tried to raise the admission price to the LSU-Tulane game by a dollar.
Only after Kennedy and others threatened a campus-wide strike did President Atkinson revoke the surcharge.

In early November 1929, Kennedy wrote to Long with a complaint about the deportment of a law professor, James B. Smith. He asked the governor to intervene to stop LSU from renewing the professor’s contract. Among other alleged offenses, Kennedy complained that “Smith does not conduct himself as a gentleman in the presence of his classes [and] that his general attitude towards students is not friendly.” When Kennedy and nine members of the Law Club asked to meet with Long in early December 1929, the governor was happy to receive them.

Whatever Kennedy told Long about Tullis, it was enough to persuade him that the dean must go. It could not have hurt Kennedy’s case that Tullis was a vocal Long opponent. Soon, Long made it clear he wanted Tullis out, saying he relied on the advice of many students in asking the LSU Board to force Tullis’s retirement at its January 1930 meeting.

That prompted a brief-but-fierce protest among the law students who had joined Kennedy in the meeting with Long. These students now complained that Kennedy did not speak for them. Rather, they understood they were meeting with the governor to discuss students’ concerns about Professor Smith, not Tullis. And some claimed Long seemed determined to seek Tullis’s dismissal before the meeting began. “It seems perfectly clear that Governor Long desired something to use as justification for his meddling with the state university when he obtains control of the board of supervisors in January, which, as members of the Law School, we heartily resent,” three students from the meeting said in a statement.

On the heels of the students’ protest came an open letter signed by twenty-one LSU Law School alumni from New Orleans. They opposed Tullis’s forced retirement, urging Long to “spare the people of the state, and the Louisiana State university, from the great and irreparable loss which would be the result if Dean Robert L. Tullis were removed.” Long remained undaunted. “In recognition of Dean Tullis’ long service,” the governor announced in late December, “I believe, and feel that the university’s board of administrators will agree with me, that Mr. Tullis should be made dean emeritus. I believe it is generally agreed that the wearing administrative routine of the school should be turned over to a younger and more active man.”

Such meddling by a governor in its internal affairs, one former LSU law professor told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate in early January, might cost the school its membership in the Association of American Law Schools. In a front-page story headlined “Rating of Law School and L.S.U. Threatened by Long’s Dickerings,” Clarence Updegraff of the University of Iowa Law School opined: “It is greatly to be regretted that the irregularity of a student conference with the governor took place; it is still more to be deplored that the governor has been led to take seriously any suggestion made in such a conference.”

Despite his stated desire to see Tullis retired, Long could not yet count on all his orders being obeyed by LSU Board members. Most were men appointed by his predecessor. For that reason and, perhaps, because of the vocal opposition from various allies of Tullis and the school, Long dropped the matter in January. Tullis would remain Law School dean for another three and a half years.

Beyond objecting that Kennedy misrepresented their views about Tullis to Long, some law students also complained that he worked as a campus spy for the governor. This was likely the case. Kennedy came close to admitting the charge in an interview with the New Orleans Item. “They stamp me as a ‘representative’ of Governor Long and intimate that I’m being used as a ‘tool’ whereby the governor can find out the inside workings at the university. Such is false, but if Governor Long ever feels disposed to call on me for such information, I can give assurances that my services will go at the asking.”

Kennedy made it clear, however, that he did not believe all was well at LSU, a message he, no doubt, conveyed to Long. “All the troubles at LSU are not confined to the law school by any means. I’m not attempting to run the university or any part of it because I’m just a student, but I can foresee changes that will be welcomed by the student body.” Although he insisted he was not prodding Long to intervene in the daily affairs of LSU, it was not long before the ambitious law student from Farmerville precipitated an incident that prompted Long to do just that.

Chapter 7

The Whangdoodle

In spring 1930, a mysterious, pink, four-page broadsheet appeared on the LSU campus and around Baton Rouge. Produced by a group of LSU students, the Whangdoodle resembled other humorous, rump college newspapers of the era. It ridiculed what its editors and writers regarded as the stuffy administrators and professors who ran the university. Under the headline “The Doodle Dares Suggest,” an anonymous writer offered various proposals, including: “That the fossils in our administrative and faculty bodies be cleared out for more progressive blood”; “That our dairy barns and maternity wards for pigs be converted into dormitories for coeds”; and, “That all due credit be given those university authorities who have worked for our school, but that those who have served out their terms be retired on a pension. This is not an asylum for dependents—it is a modern state institution.”

Beyond the Whangdoodle’s mild attacks on the faculty and the Law School—described as the “prize joke of [the] L.S.U. campus”—there was little to alarm university officials. Perhaps most bothersome was a front-page story detailing “groundless rumors” about the arrest of an unnamed faculty member said to have assaulted a coed with an ink bottle after she expressed doubts about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Those who recalled the Whangdoodle’s original 1925 incarnation may have worried about how far another edition of the paper might go. Five years earlier, horrified LSU administrators had persuaded local authorities to arrest three men, including an LSU sophomore, and charge them with criminal libel for writing that police had arrested a faculty member in a local brothel. University officials and some Louisiana newspapers denounced the 1925 paper which some suspected was produced by the LSU chapter of Theta Nu Epsilon. TNE’s national organization did not recognize LSU’s chapter, and the university considered it an “outlaw” society. “Theta Nu Epsilon is a national ‘sub-rosa’ fraternity, operating wherever it exists in defiance of college regulations forbidding its existence,” the twice-weekly student newspaper, the Reveille, explained in March 1925. The paper added that it had no “definite proof ” that a TNE chapter even existed at LSU. Despite the arrests and a lengthy investigation, a Baton Rouge grand jury declined to indict the students and others involved in its publication. Three years later, in May 1928, a variation of the Whangdoodle—its editors called this one the Tattler—attacked some LSU administrators. One story featured the alliterative headline, “The Asinine Actors of Atkinson’s Administration.”

When a new Whangdoodle turned up in spring of 1930, editors announced its reappearance in a brief story headlined, “The Doodle Returns.” The editors wrote:

Like a thief in the night this scurrilous pink sheet once more invades the sacred precincts of our dear old campus. Unheralded, unwanted, yet un-daunted, hiding under the shameful cloak of anonymity, it dares to thrust itself upon our unsuspecting student body and [Baton Rouge police] Chief[King A.] Strenzke. It makes no excuse for its existence. It asks no quarter—it expects none. If it is pressed for a defense of its publication it has but one argument to advance—a feeble attempt to awaken the dumbest of student-bodies [sic] in the whole United States.

Despite its efforts to arouse students, the Whangdoodle’s first 1930 edition attracted little attention. The same would not be said for what followed.

On Thursday, April 24, a second edition of the paper appeared with a banner headline guaranteed to provoke LSU leaders: “Himes Steals $21,000; Law Library Money Missing.” The story claimed that the school’s business manager, Robert L. “Tighty” Himes, and Law School dean Robert L. Tullis had embezzled student fee revenue intended for the law library’s operation. “Himes has stolen the money, just as he has fraudulently escaped with the other thousands of dollars during his regime,” the paper alleged, adding, “‘Tensas Terror’ Tullis demanded $6,122.50 for his share three years ago to help his disinherited son from going to the Federal penitentiary, when the latter embezzled a large sum from [the] U.S. post office.”

Elsewhere in the paper, editors wrote that LSU fired an employee for having intimate relations with her boss, a sergeant in the school’s military unit. The editors also claimed a prominent English professor, John Earle Uhler, “acknowledged to two plain clothes officers in Istrouma Hotel that he was hopelessly addicted” to “the excessive use of drugs.” Finally, the paper said a law professor, James B. Smith (the faculty member about whom Kemble K. Kennedy and others complained to Long the previous year), had been “indicted and convicted of sodomy, a crime against nature.”

The paper scandalized the campus. The Reveille condemned it as “libelous.” LSU’s cadet colonel, Claude Fernandez, issued a statement on behalf of the Cadet Corps, denouncing it as “an insult and disgrace to society.” Fernandez said cadets would “render all available initiative and unrestrained assistance” to help the school determine the identity of “the offenders.” In a May 7 mass meeting in the Greek Theatre, the student body adopted a resolution condemning the publication as “vulgar and malicious” and demanded the school and local authorities arrest those responsible for the Whangdoodle.

“You may be assured that no effort will be spared to discover and punish the authors of this crime,” President Atkinson told the LSU Law Club. Kennedy, who chaired the club and worked part-time as a clerk on the state senate’s Agriculture Committee during the 1930 legislative session, also helped prepare a statement on behalf of his club that condemned the paper and called for “a thorough investigation” to “disclose and apprehend . . . the perpetrators of this revolting offense.” Atkinson was furious about the Whangdoodle. “The assault upon the character of the student body,” he wrote to Kennedy and the secretary of the Law Club on May 5, “is the worst thing in the sheet and your just indignation impels you to do everything in your power to punish the perpetrators.”

Anyone with passing knowledge of the Whangdoodle’s lineage suspected the school’s renegade Theta Nu Epsilon chapter was involved in its 1930 iteration. One obvious clue was that the paper listed the fraternity’s membership on the front page of the second edition. TNE members were, in fact, responsible. Among the fraternity’s thirty-five members who signed a secret oath pledging to protect the identities of those behind the Whangdoodle was Kennedy, who was also featured on the front page. It soon became clear to LSU leaders that Kennedy was the paper’s editor.

An East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury indicted Kennedy in early June for circulating obscene and indecent matter and for libeling Himes. Just days before he hoped to graduate law school, LSU suspended Kennedy, meaning he would not receive his degree. At first, Long sympathized with his young friend, regarding the paper as a harmless prank. “If they don’t give Kennedy his degree,” he was overheard saying, “there is going to be a hot time down at the university.” Long phoned Atkinson about Kennedy. “I want him kept in his examinations,” the governor said, according to an LSU faculty member who listened to the conversation on an extension in Atkinson’s office. Atkinson, who some LSU students had nicknamed “Guts” for his fearless demeanor, balked. “I don’t intend to keep him in his examination,” the president told the governor. Long kept pushing, but Atkinson stood firm. “All right, my friend,” Long said, ominously, “I’ll see you later.” Long did not deny advocating for Kennedy when details of the phone call leaked, but he insisted he had not threatened Atkinson. And Atkinson backed up Long on that point when he spoke to reporters.

When Atkinson went to the governor’s office a few days later, he made sure Long had read the Whangdoodle. Speaking with reporters afterward, Atkinson acknowledged his brief disagreement with the governor but also credited him with having seen the light. “He told me that he had, since our talk over the phone on Monday, secured a copy of The Whangdoodle, and he now understood my position and he approved of it. He denounced the villainous publication, as people have done universally after reading it.” Of the paper, Long told the New Orleans States, “I cannot condone the publication of such a sheet as The Whangdoodle, a copy of which I examined only yesterday.” The LSU Board, with Long absent, ratified Kennedy’s suspension shortly thereafter.

Among those who testified against Kennedy at his criminal trial in Baton Rouge in November 1930 was J. J. Stovall of Winn Parish, a former LSU student who said he helped distribute the papers. Stovall said the Theta Nu Epsilon fraternity, of which Kennedy was president, was responsible for the Whangdoodle. Several TNE members who took the stand supported Stovall’s testimony. They each insisted they knew little about the paper’s production, despite having signed a pledge of secrecy in which they acknowledged their roles.

Also testifying was John Earle Uhler, the English professor whose imaginary drug addiction was described in the Whangdoodle’s second edition. Uhler denied all the deviant and illegal behavior ascribed to him by the paper. “They are not only indecent but disgraceful and brutal to the person attacked,” he said, after being asked by the prosecutor to read aloud from the paper. Tullis and Himes also testified against Kennedy, denouncing as false the charges of embezzlement alleged by the newspaper. The testimony was overwhelming and damning. Most harmful to Kennedy was that his TNE brothers lied about their part in the paper’s production or downplayed their knowledge of its contents. Kennedy’s attorney, W. T. Bennett, called only one witness in his client’s defense, Harvey G. Fields of Farmerville, Kennedy’s hometown. The public service commissioner for northern Louisiana, Fields praised Kennedy’s “good character and reputation.”

In his closing argument, Bennett told the judge that his client, who did not testify, was “taking the rap” for “forty or fifty other members of TNE, who had just as much to do with the Whangdoodle as Kennedy had.” Bennett also said Kennedy refused to submit the pledge signed by other TNE members in which they affirmed their participation in the paper’s publication because Kennedy “will not squeal.” Bennett argued that, despite other students having helped publish the paper, Kennedy was singled out and “persecuted.” Unpersuaded, the judge declared Kennedy guilty on all counts. “I have no words to express the contempt the court has for the outrageous assassination of character contained in this sheet,” he said before sentencing Kennedy to a year in prison, three months for each of the four counts.

In applying to the LSU Board for reinstatement in 1931, Kennedy acknowledged he “made a very serious mistake” by participating in the Whangdoodle’s publication. “However, I most emphatically [deny] being the instigator, as charged. There were to my personal knowledge 76 students, 63 boys and 13 girls, equally guilty, implicated, and responsible for the appearance of the said paper.” Kennedy said that, because he refused to disclose the names of those involved, “I bore the brunt of criticism and punishment, shouldered the entire load, and was the ‘goat’ for all concerned.”

After Kennedy’s conviction, his friends in northern Louisiana urged Long to grant the former law student a one-year reprieve. If Long did so, it was all the mercy he could command until he gained control of the state’s Board of Pardons. A majority of that panel were men appointed by Long’s predecessors. Louisiana’s constitution allowed the governor to issue a pardon only after the board recommended it. Still, a gubernatorial reprieve would keep Kennedy out of prison until Long could engineer a pardon. The Union Parish state representative, its clerk of court, its sheriff, and the mayor of Farmerville organized a petition, signed by hundreds of Union Parish residents, asking Long to sign the reprieve, and argued that Kennedy was “largely a victim of political prejudice and partisanship.” Kennedy, whose trial had been delayed after he was injured in a car accident in the summer, was also in poor health, the petitioners claimed. Furthermore, they said, dozens who helped Kennedy publish the paper were never charged.

Huey Long sits among students during an assembly in LSU’s Greek Theatre.

Long was amenable to Kennedy’s request for leniency, likely for several reasons. First, he was fond of Kennedy, who treated him as a surrogate father. Second, the Baton Rouge district attorney who prosecuted Kennedy, John Fred Odom, was the same official who prosecuted Long in 1920 for criminal libel, one of the charges brought against Kennedy. Finally, Long knew well that the secret Theta Nu Epsilon society was not only a rogue group of LSU students; it was also the unofficial Huey Long student organization. In its early years on the campus, TNE had not been especially political. But Kennedy’s involvement with the group, according to some of his classmates, transformed it into a pro-Long society. (To counter the Long-supporting students, the LSU chapter of the Cavalier Society became the campus anti-Long organization.) TNE members not only helped turn out voters for Long and his candidates in state elections; they also were an unofficial employment agency, helping pro-Long LSU students find state jobs.

In producing the Whangdoodle, however, Kennedy and TNE members went too far. Long could not defend such a profane and scurrilous publication, but he found a way to justify giving Kennedy a break. “I’d like to see the whole fifty or sixty that were in on getting out these sheets have about thirty or sixty days each in jail, and then they would all learn the lesson they need,” Long told a reporter a week after Kennedy’s conviction. “I don’t think it does near the good to pick out one for a year and the balance go free, particularly when the one picked out happens to be a poor down-and-out or-phan boy, however, wrong he may have acted.” Further defending Kennedy, Long added, “There’s no such thing as a ringleader in these kinds of college debacles. All of them were mean as the dickens or they couldn’t have been in it.” After Kennedy spent a week in the East Baton Rouge Parish jail, Long signed his reprieve.

Nothing appeared to have sparked Long’s desire to apply a firmer hand over affairs at LSU than his frustrating experience with the Whangdoodle case. He had no interest in defending the publication, but he believed Atkinson should have acceded to his wishes and awarded Kennedy his law degree. In his phone conversation with Atkinson in early June, Long told the LSU president he had no right to judge the young man’s case prior to his criminal trial. “I am not doing that,” Atkinson had replied. “He is charged with a grave offense which comes within the rules of this university and as its president, I do not intend to graduate him.” Long backed off because of the paper’s scurrilous nature, but more so, perhaps, because he did not have full control of the LSU Board of Supervisors. Any credible threat to fire Atkinson over the incident meant persuading board members appointed by his predecessor. In July, Long took the first of several steps that year to dominate the university. He filled six vacancies on the board with his political allies. In August, when he filled an additional vacancy, he controlled a majority of the board.

Atkinson and others at LSU no doubt sensed their time running the university was short. The New Orleans States first reported that Long was scrutinizing the school. “A first class political explosion is expected to occur next Monday when the board of supervisors of the Louisiana State University is scheduled to meet in annual session on the university grounds,” the paper reported in early June. It explained that Atkinson and Tullis “are said to be slated for official decapitation because of their refusal to give a diploma to K. K. Kennedy.” The paper claimed that LSU officials were alarmed enough to have alerted alumni about the threat. “An SOS signal is being sent to alumni of the Louisiana State University all over the state. Those who are really interested in the future of the university are urged to come to Baton Rouge and bring what pressure they can to prevent the catastrophe threatened by Gov. Long.” The paper even reported Long would soon name Atkinson’s successor: “A member of the faculty who came to Louisiana from Texas about two years ago. The faculty member is reported to be a Russian by birth with decidedly radical tendencies.” Long had not chosen a new LSU president, but Atkinson must have known his job was in jeopardy.

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