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 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, physician who was the apparent assassin of U.S. Senator Huey Pierce Long, Jr., though his family has vigorously disputed the assertion.

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[edit] Baton Rouge doctor

Weiss was born in Baton Rouge to Dr. Carl Adam Weiss and the former Viola Maine. He was educated in local schools and graduated as the valedictorian of Catholic High School. He then obtained his bachelor's degree in 1925 from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He received his medical degree from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1927. He did postgraduate work in Vienna, Austria, and was thereafter awarded internships in Vienna and at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. 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. He was a member of the Kiwanis Club (Conrad 1988, 2:831).

[edit] The Pavy-Opelousas connection

In 1933, Dr. Weiss married the former Yvonne Louise Pavy of Opelousas, the seat of St. Landry Parish. The couple had one son, Carl Austin Weiss, Jr. (born 1934). She was the daughter of Judge Benjamin Henry Pavy (1874–1943) and the former Ida Veazie (died 1941). Judge Pavy was part of the anti-Long political faction. Pavy's brother Felix Octave Pavy, Sr. (died 1962), an Opelousas physician, had run for lieutenant governor in 1928 on an intraparty ticket opposite the Long slate. Pavy was the Sixteenth Judicial District state judge from St. Landry and Evangeline parishes, whom Long had gerrymandered out of office (Conrad 1988, 2:635). Weiss's father was a prominent eye specialist who had once treated Senator Long.[citation needed]

[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 Weiss's body with as many as thirty, perhaps fifty, bullets. Weiss died at the scene. Dr. Weiss's sister-in-law, Ida Catherine Pavy Boudreaux (born 1922) of Opelousas recalls that his body was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for a study of bullets entering and exiting the body. Dr. Weiss was interred in Roselawn Cemetery in Baton Rouge.

[edit] Doubts persist

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. This is a view voiced by Francis C. Grevemberg (born 1914), the former head of the Louisiana state police and twice a candidate for governor.

Long backers contend that the senator slipped and hit the marble wall at the scene of the gunfire. 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]. In July 1935, two months prior to his death, Long claimed that he had uncovered an assassination plot against himself[3].

Long had positioned himself to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 elections. He even announced his bid in August 1935. A month later, he was dead.

Historian and Long biographer T. Harry Williams of LSU later claimed that the senator had never intended to run for the presidency in 1936. Instead, he had been plotting with Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist 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 in 1940 as a Democrat against a sitting Republican incumbent.

During the 1990s the NBC television series Unsolved Mysteries raised the possibility that Weiss did not kill Long, but that the powerful senator was accidentally shot to death by his own bodyguards who failed to protect him from danger.

Another doubt rests on the contention that Dr. Weiss was a man of goodwill and kind disposition who loved his family, had a zest for living, looked forward to a long life, and would never have taken foolish chances with his own safety in a moment of rage or foolhardiness.

[edit] The Weiss family thereafter

Yvonne Weiss (born 1908) and her son Carl moved to New York City, where she was a member of the faculty of Columbia University. Ida Boudreaux, Yvonne's youngest sister and the maternal aunt of Carl Weiss, Jr., recalled that the move was necessary to avoid the hostile political climate against the Weiss family in Louisiana in the late 1930s. Yvonne Weiss subsequently married Henri Samuel Bourgeois, a Canadian. She died on December 22, 1963, exactly one month after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Carl Weiss, Jr., who resides on Long Island in New York, has been trying for years to clear his father's name. Weiss, Jr., met with U.S. Senator Russell B. Long (1918–2003), Long's son and successor in the Senate, and the two agreed to put aside past differences and reach a reconciliation.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

Conrad, Glenn R. 1988. A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography. Lafayette: Louisiana Historical Association.

Ida Catherine Pavy Boudreaux to Billy Hathorn, November 3, 2006; February 7, 2007.

[edit] Links

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