WALKER PERCY’S IMPACT ON LOUISIANA!

September 22ed, 2025

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

WALKER PERCY’S IMPACT ON LOUISIANA!

Many readers who love Louisiana literature will gather this weekend in St. Francisville to celebrate the live and works of novelist Walker Percy. He was, to me, a literary icon who spent most of his life in Louisiana. Many consider him to be America’s most significant Catholic writer. And he was passionate about Louisiana. So passionate that he took the time to give me some good advice about what he considered to be the insidious politics in the Bayou State.

I first heard about Dr. Percy (he was a psychiatrist by training) back in 1961 when I was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina. I was writing a weekly column for the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. Percy was a Carolina graduate, and had also written regular columns for the Tar Heel back in the late 1930s. His first novel, The Moviegoer, had just won the National Book award, and there was a lot of buzz about him in Chapel Hill.

One of the amusing stories that circulated around the English Department at Carolina was about Percy taking his freshman English placement test. He had just read Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” and wrote his entire essay in one long paragraph without punctuation. He was promptly placed into a class for slow learners and was told that he needed a lot of help to pass English composition.

The Moviegoer was set in New Orleans, a place I had never visited. Percy’s descriptions of the French Quarter, Mardi Gras, and the streets of the Crescent City were enchanting to me, and one of the reasons I decided to attend Tulane Law School. One of my courses in constitutional law was taught by Professor Billups Percy, Dr. Percy’s brother. His uncle, Will Percy, had written an important history titled “Lanterns on the Levee,” a memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood, where he describes life in the Mississippi Delta. The introduction was written by Walker Percy.

I went on to read all of Percy’ novels. His main characters are “seekers” who struggle with an existential crisis in their lives. They habitually search for God with varying success, and often look for some form of redemption. He writes how he personally found redemption in the Catholic Church.

I had never met Dr. Percy until receiving a phone call in 1987. At the time, I was serving as Secretary of State, and was running for governor. I had written a 180-page plan I called The Brown Papers; my vision of how Louisiana could prosper in future years. Few people read it. One spring day, my secretary buzzed that I had a phone call from someone named Walker Percy. I assumed it was someone with the same name.

When I returned the call, Dr. Percy told me he was some obscure writer from Covington, and he was impressed with my plan. Would I have time, if I were in the area, to come by for coffee and a chat? Would I have time? I drive over to his home the next afternoon. We talked late into the evening sharing ideas about what Louisiana could be with all its natural resources and creative talent.

He told me what he had repeatedly written in a number of publications. “What happened? Louisiana is a state richer in mineral resources, the top gas producer in the country, possessed of the largest port, endowed with a natural wealth, which in its use might have been expected to yield manifold benefits for its people. But its marshes have been plundered and polluted, one of the highest cancer rates in the county and the loss of fifty square miles of wetlands yearly.” He went on to lament that Louisiana should be much more than what he decried as “a slightly sleazy playground for tourists and conventioneers.”

He said he was still optimistic about the state’s future, that he was in my corner politically, and to call on him at any time. We visited on one other occasion in Covington, and exchanged a number of phone calls up until his death in 1990.

In one conversation before his death, he told me he didn’t consider himself to be a southern novelist, and did not want to be compared to William Faulkner. He felt that Faulkner had this tragic sense of history, and that Percy wrote about the new South. And he was deeply concerned about the state’s future. He was right on the money in so many things he wrote and said. Walker Percy would have been a pretty darn good Louisiana governor.

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownusa.com. 

 

 

THAT FRANTIC 9/11 DAY!

Monday, September 15th, 2025
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

THAT FRANTIC 9/11 DAY!

I have watched through a window a world that has fallen.
– W. H. Auden

It has been twenty four years since terrorists attacked the Twinn Towers in New York City. I was there last week to commemorate this terrible event in America’s history.

The date, 9/11, turned into the frantic dialing of 911. A surreal feeling of shock and helplessness enveloped me back then as I watched the day’s events unfold. A friend called at home a little after 8:00 A.M. central time to tell me about the first plane’s crashing into the World Trade Center. Like millions of Americans, I turned on my television set just in time to see the second plane hit the second tower

I was home alone, so I immediately felt the need to call the people closest to me. I was able to reach my mother, my brother Jack, and my daughters Gentry and Meredith; I told them all to turn on their TV sets. I reached son James on his portable phone as he was entering the LSU Lab School.

But, what about my daughter Campbell? I knew she had flown back to Washington late the previous night from California, where she was reporting on the retirement of the president’s plane, a former Air Force One. Perhaps she was still home. I called her apartment but got no answer. Then the third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington. Thoughts raced through my head. Was there a fourth plane—or more? Wasn’t the White House a likely target? Was my oldest daughter sitting in her NBC office in the White House?

Her portable phone didn’t answer. I called the White House switchboard, which is noted for being efficient. There was a brief recording saying to hold on for an operator; then the line went dead. For a moment I feared the worst: a plane crashing into the White House, my daughter inside. Then I heard Matt Lauer on the “Today Show” say, “Now let’s go to Campbell Brown for an update across the street from the White House.” Campbell told a national audience that the White House had been evacuated and she was broadcasting from a nearby hotel. She gave hourly reports throughout the day and late into the evening.

After staying glued to the TV all day, Gladys and I kept a long-standing dinner date with friends at Chris’s steakhouse in Baton Rouge. Halfway through dinner, around 9:00 o’clock, my portable phone rang. It was son James. “Dad, I’m still watching everything on television,” he said. “I just need to do something. Do we have an American flag here at home?” I told him we had one stored in our “flag box,” where we keep banners for the various seasons, as well as holiday flags for Christmas, Halloween, and Easter. When Gladys and I drove into our driveway that night, a large American flag was hanging from the front porch, waving in the wind.

I felt it important that you hear of my observations on this anniversary. Prior to 9/11, life was so normal and ordinary. Since then, for many of us, life would never be the same.

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide. You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownla.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.

CURTAILING ELECTION FRAUD IN LOUISIANA!

Monday, September 8th, 2025

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

CURTAILING ELECTION FRAUD IN LOUISIANA!

 Paper ballots and limited absentee balloting in our election?  That’s what the president is calling for. Does he have a point? The overwhelming majority of democratic countries require paper ballots in their elections. According to the Pew Research Center, paper ballot are used in 209 of the 227 countries that re democratic.. For example, the Associated Press reports that voters in France “use the same system that’s been used for generations: paper ballots that are cast in person and counted by hand.” And if there is no paper trail, you can see why voters can be suspicious. If we want to have the gold standard for voter security, then paper ballots are the key.

I served for eight years as Secretary Of State and the state chief elections officer back in the 1980s. Under my watch, Louisiana used large and bulky voting machines that had no electronic connections and gave a full paper display of the vote. The machines were opened after being removed back to a warehouse where any citizen could watch a review and final account. No one questioned the process.

And what happened to election day? It’s gone by the wayside. It used to be everyone voted on one day with military exceptions, and those who signed a notarized affidavit that they would not be present on election day. Now we have voting spread out over a month and absentee voting mailed to anyone who asks.  It’s become “too inconvenient” to drive a few blocks to a polling location.  The US is almost alone in not combining the voting process to one day.  So we now have election month.

Elections back in my day generally took place without a hitch.  Mail ballots were allowed only for servicemen serving outside the country, and for a limited number of essential public workers. When I first took office in 1980, there was so much public confidence in the elections process that the clerks of court shut down their offices when the polls closed. The only way the news media could report the election results was by having a stringer reporter hang out at the clerk’s office and write down the results as the court workers hand-delivered the ballot totals.  I changed this procedure by meeting with the clerks, and getting their commitment that they would call me in Baton Rouge at the Secretary Of State’s office to report the voting totals by telephone.

Absentee voting? You couldn’t do it unless you signed an affidavit swearing that you would be out of the state on election day.  I was voting at my home in Ferriday back then.  But I had to be in my Baton Rouge office to oversee the election process. How was I to legally vote? I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning, drove two hours to Ferriday, stopped at Hubert Lee’s donut shop to pick up a box of hot donuts for the commissioners, and arrived at ward one, precinct 1, held in the Flemings flying service hanger at 6:00 AM when the polls opened. After a brief visit with the commissioners, all who I knew well on a first name basis, I voted, then quickly headed back to Baton Rouge so as to be back in my office shortly after 8:00 AM. A real labor of love to cast my ballot which I did for a number of years.

Life seemed so much simpler then. My how our country is changed.  Unfortunately, manipulation of voting machines, widespread voter fraud, crooked elections officials, and foreign hacking have all become a rallying point for those who see conspiracies as our current election cycles roll around.

Personally, it’s hard for me to buy in to such schemes of election manipulation.  But we’re living in a different world today where claims of crooked elections have become a way for candidates to raise campaign money. And like it or not, allegations of voting fraud will be a part of numerous elections across the country in coming elections. So we better get used to it.

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownla.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.