The Secret CODOFIL Papers

In the mid-1990s I interviewed Cajun activist and educator Richard Guidry (d. 2008), who at one time worked for the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) — an organization founded by the state of Louisiana in 1968 “to do any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization and preservation of the French language as found in the state of Louisiana for the cultural, economic and tourist[ic] benefit of the state.”

Today CODOFIL primarily helps to administer French education programs in Louisiana’s public school system.

During our interview, Guidry informed me that when he worked at CODOFIL a colleague confessed to him that she had been recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the organization. Her mission, she claimed, was to determine if CODOFIL was subversive. This notion will seem absurdly humorous to anyone who knows CODOFIL, which is hardly subversive. Innocuous, even conservative (politically and otherwise) during its infancy — but not subversive. One might as well suspect the Daughters of the American Revolution of subversion. I exaggerate only slightly.

As a historian trained to be skeptical, I neither believed nor disbelieved Guidry, though I did find his claim interesting. As such, I wrote to the FBI to request, through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), any documents it possessed concerning CODOFIL or its early president, former U.S. Congressman James "Jimmy" Domengeaux (pronounced in the French manner as DUH-MAZH-ZHEE-O, much like the surname of baseball great Joe DiMaggio).

Jimmy Domengeaux in 1968.
(Source: La Louisiane [documentary], INA.fr)

Two years later, in 1998, the FBI sent me twenty-seven pages of documents concerning Domengeaux.

Cover page of Domengeaux-related documents
sent to me by the FBI.

None of these documents, however, mentioned CODOFIL. Indeed, all twenty-seven pages predated CODOFIL’s origin. And while a cover letter noted that the FBI had never maintained a file on Domengeaux, the bureau had nonetheless located these Domengeaux-related documents in files pertaining to other subjects.

Those twenty-seven pages contained a hodgepodge of information: A request to investigate policemen who allegedly violated the civil rights of campaign volunteers working for Domengeaux’s brother; an appeal by Domengeaux to locate an individual who drove a US government vehicle involved in a traffic accident; an NAACP document accusing the former congressman of “racebaiting.”

Civil Rights complaint filed in 1956 by Domengeaux
on behalf of "a well-known 'winehead.'" (FBI Archives)

I wondered, however, why the FBI had chosen to withhold from me four additional pages of documents? 

Granted, the bureau’s cover letter explained that it withheld these four pages because, among lesser reasons, they had been “specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”

To be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy? What, had Domengeaux stumbled on America’s plans for the D-Day invasion of Normandy? After all, he left elected public office in the 1940s.

Request by Domengeaux in 1958 for information
on the driver of a US government vehicle
involved in an accident. (FBI Archives)

I appealed the FBI’s decision to withhold the documents — under President Clinton, under President Bush — each round of appeals taking years and never meeting with success. I was neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post, nor could I afford legal representation. “Appeal” simply meant writing letters to the FBI saying “I appeal your decision” and then waiting for an answer.

In early 2009 I again appealed the decision, but this time a new factor seemed as though it might work in my favor: Newly sworn-in President Barack Obama had issued a memorandum instructing “All agencies . . . [to] adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government.” The President added, “The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

NAACP document from 1948 accusing
Domengeaux of "race-baiting." (FBI Archives)

In response to my new appeal citing the President's instructions, the FBI released the four previously withheld pages — thirteen years after I first appealed the bureau’s decision to withhold them.

And what were these documents so vital to “national defense or foreign policy”? 

Well, one of them was a clipping of a 1992 article from the French Canadian newspaper Le Devoir. That’s right — a newspaper article that anyone had been free to read since publication. The article, about a 1970 government report on the French Canadian separatist movement, made no reference to Domengeaux or CODOFIL, but it bore the intriguing title (and I translate), “CIA Also Monitoring the Acadians."

Le Devoir article about the CIA monitoring
Acadians in Canada (30 December 1992). (FBI Archives)

By “Acadians” the article did not mean Louisiana Cajuns, but their long-lost cousins in French Canada. Indeed, the only reference to Cajuns appeared toward the end of the article, when its author stated, “While many Acadians [around 1970] — including Premier of New Brunswick Louis Robichaud — were opposed to the separation [of French Canada from the rest of the nation], many others saw in the independence process an opportunity to get money [from France, I presume] to ‘develop cultural links with these original Acadians living in Maine, Massachusetts and Louisiana.’. . .” [My italics.]

Another previously withheld “secret” document (and it really was stamped “secret”) concerned Congressman Domengeaux’s 1946 request to the federal government that a French diplomat, not he, award the Order of the French Army to a south Louisiana veteran “because of his work in organizing the Maquis” (the French Resistance in World War II).

Domengeaux is mentioned toward the middle of this
1946 document in reference to a south Louisiana veteran
who was to receive a French medal. (FBI Archives)

(The FBI redacted the name of the US serviceman to receive this award. I showed the document to my acquaintance, General Robert LeBlanc of Abbeville, Louisiana, who not only had been a Domengeaux constituent, but during World War II had joined the OSS and crossed Nazi lines in France to aid the Maquis. General LeBlanc thus believed that the name redacted by the FBI was probably his own. While he did not receive the “Order of the French Army” (l’Ordre de l’Armée Française), LeBlanc had been nominated by France for the Croix de Guerre. He never received the citation, however, because of his untimely reassignment to China.)

Interestingly, one of the previously withheld pages made reference to something called the “GUARD RAIL investigation” and bore the stamp “TOP SECRET / GUARD RAIL.”

I subsequently asked the FBI for information about GUARD RAIL, but it replied that nothing could be found on the subject. 

Document from 1976 that twice mentions
"GUARD RAIL," whatever that is. (FBI Archives)

It is interesting to me, however, that in response to my request for papers concerning CODOFIL and Domengeaux, the FBI should first withhold and then send me this document about something called the “GUARD RAIL investigation.” I say this because although the document in question made no reference to CODOFIL or Domengeaux (as far as I was permitted to see), the FBI nonetheless associated GUARD RAIL with these two subjects — otherwise it would not have sent me the document. Of course, it’s possible that GUARD RAIL had nothing to do with CODOFIL or Domengeaux and that the FBI merely sent me the document by mistake. Who knows?

This undated page mentions neither Domengeaux nor CODOFIL,
but it does demonstrate that positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale
took his marching orders from Joseph Goebbels. (FBI Archives)

So, what does all this mean? Does it mean that CODOFIL was a subversive organization or that the FBI once infiltrated it? 

No, it just means that the FBI was sitting on a bunch of fairly mundane papers that ultimately were of no real use to me as a historian. Regardless, they are interesting and I post a selection of them here for examination.

Debunking the Alleged Origin of the Word "Coonass"

Note: See also my new blog article on this topic, titled More on That Word "Coonass": A Labor Dispute Trial Documents Its Use in 1940.

The thing I enjoy most about being a historian is the detective work — piecing together clues in search of historical facts. And sometimes that search results in the debunking of myths.

Take the alleged etymology (that is, word origin) of the term coonass, an ethnic label that some use as a synonym for Cajun. It's a controversial word because while many Cajuns embrace the term and regard it as a badge of ethnic pride, other Cajuns consider it highly offensive.

A novelty "Registered Coonass" sticker.

This etymology goes as follows: During World War II native Frenchmen inexplicably derided their Cajun GI liberators as conasses, a standard French word meaning "stupid person" or "dirty prostitute." Anglo-American GIs overheard this slur, misunderstood it as coonass, and used it in reference to Cajun GIs. After the war, the term came to be applied to Cajuns in general.

This alleged etymology is well-known and is still cited on occasion as authoritative. It appears to have been thought up in the early 1970s by the late cultural activist, politician, and attorney James "Jimmy" Domengeaux (1907-1988). (His surname is pronounced in the French manner as DUH-MAZH-ZHEE-O, much like the surname of baseball great Joe DiMaggio.)* As head of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), Domengeaux railed against the term's use, including its use by then-Governor Edwin W. Edwards in jovial reference to himself.

Jimmy Domengeaux in 1968.
(Source: La Louisiane [documentary], INA.fr)

Even if Domengeaux himself did not concoct this etymology, he certainly did more than anyone else to popularize it. In fact, the Louisiana state legislature condemned the use of coonass in 1981 not because the word referred to a raccoon's posterior, but because, as Domengeaux claimed, it supposedly hailed from the French slur conasse.

Excerpt from a 1981 resolution
condemning the word coonass.
(Source: Louisiana State Legislature)

I myself had always assumed that a blue-ribbon panel of university-trained linguists must have formulated the conasse explanation. I was therefore surprised to learn that it was merely one man's hypothesis. (Someone who had not taken Domengeaux’s etymology at face value was Cajun scholar Barry Jean Ancelet of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Ancelet rejected Domengeaux's notion as "shaky linguistics at best.")

It was quite by accident, however, that I ended up debunking Domengeaux's popular conasse etymology.

In the late 1990s I was searching the online database of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration for anything having to do with the Nike-Cajun rocket. The U.S. military invented the Nike-Cajun in the 1950s as a sounding rocket for testing the atmosphere. But why, I wondered, had it been called the Nike-Cajun rocket? The name evoked a strange combination of ancient Greek mythology and rural south Louisiana folklife.

A Nike-Cajun rocket.
(Source: National Archives and Records Administration) 

I'll explain the origin of the Nike-Cajun in a later posting (see my article "The Nike-Cajun Rocket: How It Got Its Name") — but it was while researching this rocket that I stumbled across a reference to World War II stock footage depicting something called the Cajun Coonass.

What in the world was that? I wondered. As it turned out, the Cajun Coonass was the nickname of a U.S. warplane. In fact, the National Archives had a photograph of the airplane shot by the Army Signal Corps in April 1943.

The date’s significance took a few seconds to register. "That's over a year before D-Day.”

In other words, it was over a year before there were any Cajuns in France to be called conasse, the word that supposedly morphed into coonass: Domengeaux’s etymology was wrong.

Ordering a print of the photograph, I found that it did indeed show a U.S. airplane, specifically a C-47, sporting the word coonass on its fuselage — juxtaposed (some would say redundantly) with the word Cajun.

According to Army Signal Corps data on the back of the original print, the image was made not only over a year before the Allied invasion of France, but halfway around the world, in the South Pacific. (The plane's pilot, I should explain, was a Cajun from Sunset, Louisiana, and thus he had the privilege of naming the plane. It's therefore interesting that he chose the word coonass.)

1943 photograph of the C-47 Cajun Coonass (with enlarged inset).
(Source: National Archives and Records Administration)

Granted, Cajun GIs could have been called conasse as early as 1942, when U.S. troops went up against Vichy French forces in North Africa; or even during World War I, when U.S. doughboys served in France. But Domengeaux had not made these claims, nor had the Louisiana state legislature made them in its concurrent resolution condemning coonass. In fact, the resolution stated, "[S]ince World War II, certain persons commenced using the word 'coonass' in referring to an Acadian (Cajun)" because "[T]he word . . . originated when French-speaking Louisiana soldiers stationed in France were often called by native French soldiers as 'conasse.' . . ."

My own feeling is that coonass originated much closer to "home," that is, in the Acadiana region of south Louisiana or right across the border in east Texas, where Cajun culture mingled with the WASP-ish Bible-belt culture of the Lone Star State. This is mere speculation on my part, however, and for now the term's origin remains a mystery.

But thanks to this serendipitous discovery of the Cajun Coonass photograph in the National Archives, I now know the term did not arise as Domengeaux claimed in his conasse theory.

Some activists have expressed concern that debunking the conasse theory might set back the effort to stamp out coonass. My opinion is that the disproved conasse theory isn’t needed to stamp out the word: it should suffice to say, if one is so inclined, “I don’t want to be referred to as the backside of a raccoon!”

For more information on the word coonass and its colorful history, see my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003), pp. 8, 15, 96-97, 109, 138, 142.

Cover of my book
The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003)

Addendum of 13 March 2012

Here is World War II stock motion picture footage from the National Archives and Records Administration showing the Cajun Coonass and its crew. The pilot, Lt. Albert Burleigh, hailed from Sunset, Louisiana; he is shown first in line among the crew and is wearing an officer's cap. Like the above still photo (apparently taken at the same time), this film was shot in April 1943 at the Port Moresby airfield in Papua New Guinea.

(Source: National Archives and Records Administration)

A note on selected source material:

The original Cajun Coonass still photograph is in the National Archives and Records Administration and is photograph #342-FH-3A-32507-79171a.c. It is dated "April, 1943" on the back after a typewritten list of the plane's crewmembers; and it is dated "rec'd 7 Jan. 1944" on the front — both dates predating the D-Day arrival of Cajun GIs in France. I obtained photocopies (verso and recto) and a glossy print of this image from the National Archives in 1998.

Data from the front (verso) and back (recto)
of the Cajun Coonass still photograph
establishing when and where the image was taken.
(Click to enlarge.)

The Cajun Coonass motion picture footage also comes from the National Archives and is film NWDNM(m)-342-USAF-12835-1 (reel #2) or NWDNM(m)-342-USAF-19392 (reel #4), both reels being supplied to me by the National Archives in 1999 on a single VHS tape.

________

*This pronunciation is confirmed by the website of Domengeaux's own former law firm, which states "Our law firm was established in Lafayette in 1957 by attorney James R. 'Jimmy' Domengeaux (pronounced like DiMaggio). . . ." Source: Domengeaux, Wright, Roy & Edwards website, http://www.wrightroy.com/Firm-Overview/, accessed 17 February 2013.