Rather than accept such a demotion he resigned in August of 1937. Returning to Ville Platte, he founded a private hospital there, and maintained it until his retirement in ill health from active practice in 1950. Five years later he died.
Death also thwarted Long’s design to place the Pavy gerrymander at the head of what became his last demonstration of dictatorship as the legislature’s Act Number One. It became Act Number Three, since the first two were concurrent resolutions, one expressing the grief of House and Senate over the leader’s untimely end, the other creating a committee to select a burial place on the capitol grounds for what remained of his physical presence among them.
As for the gerrymander, it never really took effect, though it automatically became law twenty days after the legislature adjourned. To be sure, it did provide for an additional judge in a newly enlarged judicial district, he to be chosen some fourteen months later at the time of the Congressional election of November 1936.
But a new legislature, meeting in May 1936, adopted another statute, superseding this law and reshuffling Louisiana’s judicial districts once more to add a new one--the twenty-seventh--consisting of St. Landry parish alone. This act, a constitutional amendment, would not become operative until ratified by popular vote at the November elections. That obviously made it impossible to elect a judge at the same time, so the new bill provided that within thirty days after its ratification, the governor should _appoint_ a judge for the new district, his term not to end until that of the judges _elected_ in 1936 should have run its course. In other words, the appointee would serve for six years.
Needless to say, the appointee was not Benjamin Pavy.
Another facet of the Long paradox is presented by the saint-or-sinner image which his contemporaries and their successors yet seek to preserve. Until the Kingfish’s name has lost all popular significance, debates will be waged over the issue of whether the man was an uninhibited genius, or merely a conscienceless opportunist endowed with exceptional mental agility. On this point the testimony of one of the three brothers Huey so heartily disliked might well shed some light.