All you ever wanted to know about Louisiana

Here are some interesting (and a few sad/ironic) facts about Baton Rouge and Louisiana history in general:

LSU keeps a live tiger in a pen adjacent to its football stadium.

The current governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, is the child of Indian immigrants, currently the youngest governor in the US, and (sadly) a Republican.

The current state capitol faces the tomb of Huey Long in one direction and in the other, one of the largest Exxon refineries in the US.

The auditor's room in the former state capitol is called the Exxon room and is devoted entirely to the political career of Billy Tauzin, who I had the undistinguished honor of serving messages to when I worked in the Republican cloakroom in the US House of Representatives.

The other auditor's room has a mechanical Huey Long that recites all of Long's political feats and adds a few moralizing tidbits about Long's rule for posterity's sake. The small office space adjoining that room explores Long's assassination and states that he was assassinated by Dr. Weiss, a Jewish physician, who was angered by a bill Long had sponsored that gerrymandered Dr. Weiss' father-in-law's judicial district out of existence.

Dr. Weiss killed Long with two very small caliber bullets. The bodyguard attached to Long responded by firing 10 bullets into Weiss. Even after Weiss was long dead, other bodyguards arrived and emptied their guns into Weiss.

The Louisiana Purchase would not have been possible if it had not been for Napoleon and the Russians. Napoleon was necessary for two reasons -- first, to force the Spanish to relinquish the Lousiana Territory after the French had gifted the Spanish the territory in recompense for Spain taking the losing side of France in the French-Indian War some forty years prior, and second, to create another expensive European war that required immediate international financing (sound familiar?). Just as is the case now, the Russians were the unspoken war financiers/profiteers, while British banks served as the brokers, taking their cut from the same country, with which they had fought one war and would soon fight another (out of which Lake Erie would remain part of Ohio and a large swath of Washington, including the White House and Capitol, would be burnt to the ground). When Jefferson and his emissaries, James Monroe and Robert Livingston, realized Napoleon wanted to get rid of not just New Orleans but the entire Louisiana Territory, they also realized they needed to come up with 15 million in immediately saleable securities to pay the French. The US could issue the bonds, of course, but in order to make that debt liquid (after all, Napoleon didn't want bonds from a newly created country with no credit history -- he wanted cold, hard bullion), the US needed the help of the Brits and the Russians. After handing over the bonds in exchange for the three treaties that gave the US the right to call the Louisiana Purchase its own, British banks immediately bought the US bonds from the French and then proceeded to sell many of them to the Russians, making the Russians in part responsible for the present-day shape of the United States -- 160 years before the Russians repeated the same folly as Napoleon in selling another piece of land replete in oil and other natural resources to finance their own unspoken war with the US and Europe.

President Jefferson, who is known in Republican circles to this day as the father of states' rights, was adamantly un-states' rights when it came to the Louisiana Purchase. In fact, the very first Republicans from the New England states during Jefferson's presidency were diametrically opposed to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory and sought to derail the purchase by requiring that each state ratify the purchase. Jefferson, a supposed believer in original intent of the constitutional framers, instead, turned to Article II in the US Constitution and argued that the purchase fell under the right of a president to make and sign treaties, using the analogy of a parent buying a child a piece of land. Because the "children" didn't complain too much about the acquisition of 52 million acres of cheap farmland with the added benefit of the largest river in North America serving as a transit route for farm products, the original fears of the New England Republicans eventually came true, and there was a gradual shift in political and economic power away from New England, across the Cumberland Pass, and toward the Ohio and Mississippi Valley regions. So, the next time someone asks, why Ohio and Iowa matter more today than New York and Massachusetts in deciding who becomes the next US President, answer Jefferson!

One final interesting tidbit -- the US consulate stamp on the Treaty of Cession as delivered to Napoleon in 1803 looks almost identical to the stamp used in any US embassy in the world today.