However, with what still appears to be a positive genius for fumbling, the anti-Long leadership guarded with such butter-fingered zeal the secret of whether, where, or when they were to meet that even before they assembled, Long aides had ample time to install the microphone of a dictograph in the room where the anti-Long General Staff was to confer. The device functioned very fuzzily. Its recording (which it was hoped to duplicate and replay from sound trucks throughout the ensuing campaign) was only spottily intelligible. But a couple of court reporters had also been equipped with earphones at a listening post, and their stenographic transcript, though incomplete, afforded some excerpts which Senator Long inflated into what he presented as a full-scale murder plot. His fulmination was delivered before a crowded gallery, as usual. This popularity annoyed many of his senior colleagues, none more so than Vice-President Garner, whom John L. Lewis was soon to stigmatize as “that labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man.” More than once, as the galleries emptied with a rush the moment Long finished, Mr. Garner would call to the departing auditors, saying: “Yes, you can go now! The show’s over!” In this instance, as on many previous occasions, there was no advance hint of the fireworks to come. The fuse was a debate over the Frazier-Lemke bill, and Senator Long contented himself at the outset with charging that the administration was conducting “government by blackmail.” In making this statement he was referring to NIRA, which had succeeded NRA, the latter having been declared unconstitutional some three months earlier. This had nothing to do with the Frazier-Lemke bill, but it gave Mr. Long an opportunity to charge that no contracts for PWA work were being financed unless the contractor agreed to abide by all the provisions of the NRA code which the Supreme Court had invalidated. That led to the statement that “we in Louisiana have never stood for [such] blackmail from anybody,” which in turn led to a section of his arraignment the _Congressional Record_ headed: “THE PLAN OF ROBBERY, MURDER, BLACKMAIL, OR THEFT” He then loosed his farewell salvo. “I have a record of an anti-Long conference held by the anti-Long Representatives from Louisiana in Congress,” he said in part. “The faithful Roosevelt Congressmen had gone down there to put the Long crowd out.... Here is what happened among the Congressmen representing Roosevelt the first, the last and the littlest.”