Jerry Sanson
Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum
July 2026
At a time when Americans politics is a divided system and it is all too easy for someone to label as a “Nazi” or a “Fascist” another person with politically different opinions, it is worthwhile to remember an election in Louisiana during World War II when similar charges overshadowed the real issue that the candidates should have been discussing.
Former Governor James A. Noe considered himself a probable candidate for Louisiana’s U. S. Senate seat occupied by Allen J. Ellender in 1942, but political reality ended his campaign before it began. Noe was then estranged from his former allies in the Longite faction of the Democratic Party and had also ended his alliance with reform Anti-Longite Governor Sam H. Jones, leaving him with no real base of voters for a campaign. A federal investigation on tax evasion charges ended any hope he might have for the office.
Noe’s wilted hopes led Anti-Longite New Orleans businessman and former Dock Board Chairman E.A. Stephens to announce his campaign to unseat Ellender.
Ellender and his Longite friends immediately tried to derail Stephens’ campaign by announcing that they had considered him a suspicious character since Jones appointed him to the Dock Board. A newspaper friendly to the Longites called Stephens a “pal and cohort of Hitler’s No. 1 U. S. agent, Baron von Spiegel.” Stephens and Jones, the newspaper claimed, “will give the Nazis an inside track into the biggest and most important utility in Louisiana.”
Edgar von Speigel was the German consul in New Orleans until President Franklin Roosevelt expelled him along with other German diplomats in June 1941. Stephens responded to the attack by maintaining that his association with von Speigel did not mean that he supported the Nazi cause. He maintained that he treated the German Consul in the city with civility just as he did with any other consul in his role as chair of the Dock Board but had not developed a close association with him. Moreover, Anti-Longites also pointed out that Governor Jones asked U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull to investigate von Speigel’s activities in June 1940. Obviously, Stephens concluded, he and Gov. Jones had no interest in promoting Naziism in Louisiana.
Even though Ellender tried to create a facade of unity in his formal statement of candidacy, remarking that “I do not believe that we should turn . . . to personal matters, but that we should all pull together” on issues related to the war, those pious words did not keep him or his allies from raising the issue that Stephens was not a native-born and –raised Louisianian. Longites emphasized in their speeches and statements that Stephens was a native of Virginia and therefore did not have Louisiana’s best interests in focus.
Stephens responded by revealing how humorous this line of attack appeared. He wondered publicly if New Orleans Mayor Robert Maestri and Sen. Ellender, had they been alive during the Battle of New Orleans, would have rushed to the Chalmette Battlefield and shouted to Gen. Andrew Jackson: “Stop! You can’t save our city! You are a foreigner from Tennessee!”
Dr. George Long, Huey and Earl Long’s older brother, in his endorsement of Stephens foreshadowed Lloyd Bentsen’s famous remark in his vice-presidential debate with Dan Quayle in 1988.
Dr. Long’s reference to Ellender was not kind: “I know the friends of Huey Long. I know the Huey Long program inside out, and I also know a hypocrite when I see one.”
One of the hallmarks of the 1942 election for the U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana was its aura of “politics as usual.” The war, which should have been a major campaign focus, became a second-rate issue as the Democratic factions hurled the usual charges and countercharges of corruption at each other.
Ellender’s victory over Stephens signaled that even though the Longite faction lost most statewide races in the 1940 campaign, it had survived that defeat and was again a factor to be considered in state politics by 1942. He remained in the Senate from 1937 when he was sworn in to fill Huey Long’s vacant seat until 1972 when he died while campaigning for his seventh term.
