The Waterbury Democrat., 1940-08-12
LOUISIANA CLEANUP FIRST oF EVE ARTICLES Battling Reform Governor Leads Charge On Last Remains Of Huey's Dictatorship
Bayou State Story Carries Meaning For All America
This Is the first of five articles on the return of political decency to LOuistana.
BY BRUCE CATION NEA Service Staff Correspondent

NEA Service Staff Correspondent
 Baton Rouge, La., Aug. 12 A political revolution has taken place in Louisiana, and Americas first working model of a dictatorship has been thrown into the ashbin.
 The power of the Huey Long machine has been broken, and one of the most amazing chapters in the history of American politics has come to close.
 The man who broke it is a lean, dark man with haggard eyes = Sam Houston Jones, the reform governor of Louisiana, political amateur who now has the job of clearing away the accumulated mess piled up by decade of fam tastically dishonest, cynical and brutal misrule.
 The job may break him. He is not too robust; cursed with del- icate digestive apparatus, he has to put in 12 hours a day at his desk, and in addition must wres- tie with one of the toughest pat ronage problems that ever beSet a governor. The day I went to see him things had got him down; he was stretched out in bed, at home, trying to get the better of an attack of nervous indigestion which had pulled him away from his desk that morning.
 were in for four years of the hardest work any people ever had" says Governor Jones.
 "The first task of the new ad- ministration has been to wipe out the basis of the dictatorship by repeating the laws which made that condition possible.
 That part of the job has been done.
 Beating these people was an almost impossible job. They had the law on their side. They had unlimited means of getting finances. There was shake down on every single thing.
 Take on illustration-orderS for highway materials. In the old days A per cent of the total price was paid in commissions to various par ties, which means that of the money the state was spending only 56 per cent was actually buying the ma | terialS.
 When your opposition has unlim- ited resources of that kind it's hard to buck 'em." KNOCKED OUT PROPS
 OF DICTATORSHIP
 Jones started in oi1ce, as he says, by knocking out the laws on which the dictatorship rested. Chief steps were the following:
 l. Wiping out the legal kid- naping" law, under which the state police could (and often did) arrest a man, spirit him of to far part of the state, and hold him without placing any charge. One such pri- soner was held a couple of days on a lonely, mosquito-infeSted island in the gulf, while his lawyer and his family sought frantically to learn what had become of him. New laws put through by Governor Jones compel the state police to lodge any arrested person immediately in the jail of the parish where the arrest took place, with a formal charge placed against him.
 2. Throwing public records open to pubic inspection forbidden under the Long regime.
 3. Revising the election laws, providing (among other things) that all polling places must be in public buildings. Under the old regime, they had way of putting polling places in disreputable shacks in bad neighborhoods, where decent people could easily be intim-