Huey Long
Huey Long (1893-1935), nicknamed "Kingfish," was a powerful American politician in the 1920s and 1930s, who built a ruthless Democratic machine in Louisiana as governor (1928-32) and U.S. Senator (1932-35). A populist who fought the rich, and promised "Every Man a King," he was preparing to challenge the reelection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 when he was assassinated by the son of a political enemy. Although universally stereotyped a "Fascist", Long shunned ideology of all sorts, and his dictatorship by patronage, far from being alien, was the apogee of what many American machine politicians have attempted. Pernicious and impracticable as was his Share-Our-Wealth plan, its objective of plenty for all, without "brain trust" or dogma, was as intrinsically American as was the title "Kingfish."
Early Career
Huey Pierce Long, Jr. was born in Winnfield, Louisiana, in the piney woods region that had a strong Populist heritage. His father, a farmer, owned a medium-size farm, lived plainly but comfortably and sent six children to college. The family background was culturally meager and was most strongly marked by pious Baptist evangelicalism and by a Populistic animosity toward the wealth and sophistication of the planter class and of "evil" New Orleans. Huey became a salesman after completing his public schooling and married Rose McConnell in 1912. After finishing the three-year program at Tulane Law School in less than one year, he was admitted to the bar of Louisiana in 1914. He practiced law in Shreveport for the next few years, having secured deferment from military service during World War I.
In 1918, Long narrowly won election to the Third District seat on the three-member Railway Commission (renamed Public Service Commission after 1921). Both as member and as chairman (1922-1926), Long gained fame by his vocal battles with "the interests" which, he asserted, controlled state government, e.g., the Standard Oil Company, telephone companies, and other public utilities.
Governor
In the 1924 primary for governor, which was dominated by religious issues focusing on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan (south Louisiana has a large Catholic population), Long ran third in a three-man race. Legislation enacted in the 1924-1927 period eliminated the KKK issue, so that the 1928 contest revolved around those economic and class issues on which Huey's strength rested.
Long secured an easy victory in the gubernatorial primary in 1928, defeated the opposition's attempt to impeach him in 1929, and midway in his term of office (1930) won his race for the U.S. Senate. However, just as he had promised, he did not take his senate seat until January 1932, by which time his hand-picked candidate, Oscar K. Allen, had won the Democratic nomination for governor. Senator Long maintained his control over Louisiana state government until his death in 1935.
In Louisiana, Huey Long symbolized the rise to political power of lower-class whites. State government had been previously dominated by business interests and the New Orleans political machines. Going beyond mere symbolic gratification, Long pleased his followers by securing many material benefits, including free textbooks for all children in the public and private (religious) schools, construction of a network of free roads and bridges, increased expenditures for public education, and elimination of the poll tax. Many Louisiana demagogues attacked the African Americans (who were not allowed to vote); this was called "playing the race card." Long never played that card, and made sure that blacks received a share of the benefits. At the same time, the level of taxation was increased markedly, much of the increase being borne by consumers directly through sales taxes. Long built a virtual personal dictatorship in Louisiana -- the first (and last) in any American state--through the partisan administration of benefits, punitive actions against his opponents, and manipulation of the election laws.
Senator
In the U.S. Senate, Long early broke with the Roosevelt administration, conducted several spectacular filibusters against New Deal measures, and developed his own rival program --"Share Our Wealth"--by which poverty would be eliminated by redistributing confiscated personal fortunes. It was thought that Long, relying on his "Share Our Wealth" following, would try for the presidency in 1936. However, on Sept. 8, 1935, Huey was shot and fatally wounded by Dr. Carl A. Weiss, Jr., in the state capitol at Baton Rouge. Long's bodyguards killed the assassin on the spot; Long himself died on September 10th. Although Dr. Weiss was a member of a prominent anti-Long family, his motive probably was personal, not political; he believed that Long had sullied his family's honor.
Legacy
Huey Long's lasting contribution was to the state of Louisiana rather than to the nation. He set in motion two durable factions within the dominant Louisiana Democratic party--"pro-Long" and "anti-Long," each diverging meaningfully in terms of policies and voter support. A family dynasty emerged: his brother Earl Long was elected lieutenant-governor in 1936, governor in 1948 and 1956, and, shortly before his death, in 1960, won the Democratic nomination for U.S. representative for the Eighth District; his son Russell Long was a U.S. senator from 1948 to 1987. As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Russell Long shaped the nation's tax laws in a conservative fashion, with hardly any trace of his father's populism
Boisterous, scurrilous, and profane in speech; ruthless, violent, and unprincipled in action, Long was widely denounced in middle class circles and Democratic Party as a sinister ignoramus and buffoon. Dunb he was not; he showed disciplined intellectual performance of the highest order and was probably emotionally sincere in championing the cause of the underdog. His temperamental antagonism toward the socially privileged led to his ostentatious defiance of every propriety, kowing it was a sure-fire method of attracting the kind of alienated supporters he wanted.
He won in politics because of forcefulness and originality, and his perception that the governmental practices of Louisiana had become obsolete. He kept most of his promises and built roads, bridges, schools (including LSU) and other improvements which Louisiana needed. Flagrantly corrupt, he was primarily a coalition builder who used corruption to buy supporters. His improvement program was administered with relative efficiency. His success was in proportion to the weakness and confusion of his enemies, who were chiefly petty office-seekers, more decorous, but scarcely more ethical, than he. He was essentially a spokesman of a long-standing agrarian discontent that was much amplified and extended by the social and economic conditions of the great depression period.
Political historians, and--especially--novelists have explored the strange dictatorship Long created. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), by a Nobel-Prize winning novelits, portrayed a genuine American dictator on the Hitler model.[1] Starting in 1936 the WPA, a New Deal agency, performed the theatre version across the country. Hamilton Basso’s Cinnamon Seed and Sun in Capricorn, John Dos Passos’s Number One, Adria Locke Langley’s A Lion is in the Streets, and Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer prize-winning All the King’s Men form a powerful body of political fiction. Warren’s spellbinding Willie Stark, almost as much philosopher as politician, bears the least resemblance to Long though for almost six decades Stark has been Long’s best-known fictional embodiment as a novel and well-received movie. They all portray Long's rise to power as a justifiable popular reaction against the selfish policies pursued by the dominant economic interests prior to 1928. They speculate the degree his extremism reflected an overreaction to his enemies, or sprang inevitably from class conflict in the state. They all try to explain why Long enjoyed majority support in Louisiana, both during and after his lifetime.
Bibliography
- Perry, Keith Ronald. The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel (2004) 224pp ewxcerpt and text search
- Potter, David M. "Long, Huey Pierce, (Aug. 30, 1893 - Sept. 10, 1935),' Dictionary of American Biography
- Sanson, Jerry P., "'What he did and what he promised to do': Huey Long and the Horizons of Louisiana Politics," Louisiana History, 47 (Summer 2006), 261–76.
- Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long (1969); 949pp; Pulitzer Prize; the standard scholarly biography excerpt and text search