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Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana: A Biography, by Thomas A. Becnel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. vx, 300 pp. Cloth. $30.00.
RECENT DECADES HAVE SEEN THE APPEARANCE OF BIOGRAPHIES dealing with a number of modem Louisiana's most important political leaders. Starting with T. Harry Williams's award-winning study of Huey P. Long, published in 1970, important and scholarly biographies have appeared dealing with DeLesseps S. Morrison, Leander Perez, Earl K Long, and Gerald L. K Smith, along with additional fine studies of Senator Long. Thomas A. Becnel's biography of Allen Ellender will quickly join that distinguished assemblage of Louisiana political biographies.
Ellender was not the most colorful of the state's modern political leaders. He was, however, undoubtedly one of the most enduring. Trained as a lawyer, Ellender's public career began in the 1930s with service in the state legislature at Baton Rouge. Although initially not a supporter of Huey Long, the young representative from Terrebone Parish soon became a member of the Kingfish's loyal inner circle. Indeed, Representative Ellender was presiding over the House of Representatives, busily pushing through Long's controversial legislative program, on the fateful September evening in 1935 when the Senator was assassinated in a nearby corridor of the State Capitol. Unlike almost everyone else at the center of the Long machine, Ellender remained untouched and untainted in the Louisiana...