Carl Weiss
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- For the World War II Navy Cross recipient, USMC, see Carl W. Weiss.
Carl Austin Weiss (December 6, 1906 – September 8, 1935) was a gifted young Louisiana physician who was the apparent assassin of U.S. Senator Huey Pierce Long, Jr., though his family has long disputed the assertion.
Weiss was born in Baton Rouge to Dr. Carl Adam Weiss and the former Viola Maine. He was educated in local schools and obtained a bachelor's degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1925. He obtained his medical degree from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1927. He did postgraduate work in Austria and was thereafter awarded internships at American Hospital in Paris, France, (1928) and then Bellevue Hospital in New York City (1930). In 1932, he returned to Baton Rouge to enter private practice with his father. He was president of the Louisiana Medical Society in 1933. He was of German and Catholic heritage and faith and was a member of the Kiwanis Club. ["Carl A. Weiss", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 2 (1988), p. 831]
In 1933, Dr. Weiss married the former Louise Yvonne Pavy of Opelousas, the seat of St. Landry Parish. The couple had one son, Carl Austin Weiss, Jr. She was the daughter of Judge Benjamin Henry Pavy (1874-1943) and the former Ida Veazie (died 1941). Judge Pavy was a member of the anti-Long political faction. Pavy's brother, Felix Octave Pavy, Sr., an Opelousas physician, had run for lieutenant governor in 1928 on an intraparty ticket opposite the Huey Long slate. Pavy was the Sixteenth District state judge from St. Landry and Evangeline parishes whom Long had gerrymandered out of office. ["Benjamin Henry Pavy", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 2 (1988), p. 635] Weiss' father was a prominent eye specialist who had once treated Senator Long. [citation needed]
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[edit] The shooting
On September 8, 1935, Weiss allegedly shot Huey Long in the Capitol building in Baton Rouge. Long's bodyguards then opened fire and riddled his body with as many as fifty bullets. Weiss died at the scene. He is interred in Roselawn Cemetery in Baton Rouge.
[edit] Doubts
Persistent claims allege that Weiss actually was unarmed and struck Long with his hand. The scenario then contends that Long was accidentally shot by his own guards when they opened fire on Weiss [1]. These rumors are supported by several witnesses and the fact that Long had a bruised lip at the time of his emergency surgery. Followers of Long say that he slipped and hit the marble wall at the scene of the crime. Other theories hold that Long's assassination was arranged to prevent him from winning the presidency in 1936, either from within the Democratic Party or as a third party candidate backed by the Share Our Wealth organization. It was widely understood that Long's populist progressive policies had earned him many powerful enemies who would not have wanted him to become president [2]. Two months prior to his death, in July 1935, Long had claimed that he had uncovered a plot to assassinate him [3].
Long had positioned himself to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 elections, announcing his bid in August 1935. One month later, he was dead.
It was later claimed by historian and Long biographer T. Harry Williams that the senator had never, in fact, intended to run for the presidency in 1936. Instead, he had been plotting with Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist talk radio personality, to run someone else on the soon-to-be-formed Share Our Wealth Party ticket. According to Williams, the idea was that this candidate would split the leftist vote with President Roosevelt and thereby elect a Republican president and demonstrate the electoral appeal of "Share Our Wealth". Long would then wait four years and run for president as a Democrat in 1940.
During the 1990s, the NBC television series Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by the late Robert Stack raised the possibility that Weiss did not kill Long but that the powerful senator was accidentally shot to death by his own bodyguards protecting him from danger.
Mrs. Yvonne Weiss (born 1907) and her son Carl moved to New York City, where she was a member of the faculty of Columbia University. Ida Pavy Boudreaux of Opelousas, Yvonne's youngest sister and the aunt of Carl Weiss, Jr., recalled that the move was necessary to avoid the political climate against the Weisses in Louisiana in the late 1930s. Yvonne Weiss subsequently married Henri Samuel Bourgeois, a Canadian. She died in 1963. Carl Weiss, Jr., who resides on Long Island in New York, has been trying to clear his father's name for years.
[edit] Notes
- The character of Adam Stanton in Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men is partially based on Weiss.
- Weiss was valedictorian of Catholic High School in Baton Rouge.
