Huey Long

American governor of Louisiana (1928-1932) and senator (1932-1935)

• Born: August 30, 1893
• Birthplace: Near Winnfield, Louisiana
• Died: September 10, 1935
• Place of death: Baton Rouge, Louisiana

As a governor and a senator, Long joined a sincere concern for the economic plight of the common people with an overwhelming desire to realize his ideas and plans to fashion a political career of great accomplishment for both good and ill.

Early Life

Huey Pierce Long was the second son of seven children born to Huey Long, Sr., and Caledonia Tison Long. All the children would receive at least part of a secondary education, an achievement insisted on by their mother. The Long family was not poor, as later stories would claim, chief among them told by Huey Long himself. The elder Long was actually a moderately prosperous farmer whose wealth consisted of land, crops, and animals rather than actual cash.

From his earliest days, Huey Long was restless and energetic; he would undertake any prank to be the center of attention. He read widely, chiefly in history, the works of William Shakespeare, and the Bible, but his favorite book was Alexandre Dumas, père’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1845); he was impressed by the hero’s tenacious quest for power and revenge.

In school, Huey was able and demonstrated early his remarkable memory. He often gained his wishes through sheer boldness and manipulation, as when he convinced the faculty to promote him a grade on his own recommendation. In 1910, Huey left school without graduating. He worked for a while as a salesman, and he met his future wife, Rose McConnell, at a cake-baking contest. They were married in 1913 and had three sons and one daughter. In 1914, Huey entered Tulane Law School in New Orleans as a special student; he did not pursue a formal degree but instead concentrated on the courses needed for the bar exam, which he passed in 1915.

As a lawyer, Long took cases protecting the economic rights of the common folk, such as workers’ compensation claims. He became convinced of the need to redistribute wealth and found precedence for this particularly in the Bible, which enjoined the periodic remission of debts and readjustment of riches.

Early in his twenties, Long looked much as he would for the remainder of his life. He was not quite six feet tall and generally weighed around 160 pounds; as he grew older, he had a tendency to become heavier. His face was full, even fleshy, with a round, prominent nose, dark eyes, a wide mouth, and a dimpled chin. Depending on his mood, his appearance could be comical or impressive. His reddish-brown hair was unruly, and he often ran his fingers through it while speaking; one strand usually drooped over his forehead. His most notable characteristic was his unbounded energy: constantly in motion, he ran rather than walked and spoke with an intensity that kept his listeners spellbound.

Long delighted in his courtroom battles, but early in life he had already settled on the path he intended to follow: state office, the governorship, the Senate, the presidency. In 1918, he decided that he was ready to begin.

Life’s Work

In 1918, Louisiana was a state ruled by a few, powerful interests: a handful of large corporations, chief among them Standard Oil; the banks and railroads; and the remnants of the old plantation aristocracy. The average citizen earned little, received few services, traveled on wretched dirt roads, and sent his or her children to ill-funded schools. This was the situation that Long was determined to change.

He ran for a position on the State Railroad Commission, a regulatory body much like modern public service commissions. A tireless campaigner, Long spoke widely and also began the use of circulars short, vividly written handbills stating his views and attacking his opponent. He would make brilliant use of this technique throughout his career, always writing the copy himself, using a pithy style that appealed to the voters.

Elected to the Railroad Commission, Long vigorously attacked the dominant force in Louisiana political and economic life, the giant Standard Oil Company. In speeches, commission hearings, and circulars, he detailed the improper influence the company had on Louisiana state government, and, in 1921, Long was found “technically guilty” of libeling the state’s governor. His fine was nominal, but his position as champion of the common folk of Louisiana was firmly established. In 1923, he ran for governor.

He had none of the traditional supporters a candidate of that time was careful to recruit: no banks, no sugar barons, no railroads, no corporations, no political machine. The small, elite group that had dominated Louisiana politics for a century was against Long, and Long was fundamentally hostile to their rule. He was opposed by the only large corporation then in the South Standard Oil and by the region’s only true big city machine the Old Regulars in New Orleans.

With such a combination against him, it is not surprising that Long lost in 1923, but the size of his vote revealed that Huey Long and his ideas of economic and political reforms had substantial approval across the state. This fact was evident in 1924, when he was reelected to the Public Service Commission (the new name of the Railroad Commission) by an 80 percent majority. When he ran again for governor in 1928, he won decisively, and his victory signaled a new day for Louisiana.

As governor, Long moved to implement programs that would benefit the majority of Louisiana residents: paved roads and highways, public bridges, free textbooks to students (not schools, thus bypassing the church-state controversy in largely Roman Catholic Louisiana), and increased taxes on corporations and business to pay for these programs. Remarkably, most of his agenda was enacted during his first year in office, a tribute to his own personal magnetism, his brilliant political skills, and his immense popular support. His enemies were repulsed, rather than convinced, by this support. When Long asked the legislature for a tax on the huge profits of Standard Oil, the result was an effort to impeach him in April, 1929. The charges, many of them absurd, were all rejected. After the impeachment fight, Huey Long was stronger than ever; he secured a tax on Standard Oil and expanded the reach of his programs.

It was during this time that his political strength and the efforts of his enemies combined to undermine much of the idealist nature of Long. Realizing that his opponents would use any tactics to destroy him and wreck his programs, he came to believe that he must crush his adversaries, leaving them no option but to join him or face extinction. It was also at this time that the fabled Long machine came into being: a powerful institution that reached into every parish in Louisiana, able to dispense jobs, help friends, harm foes, and, most important, get out the vote. One by one, the existing political factions were absorbed; the last to submit was the once-mighty Old Regular machine in New Orleans, which finally yielded to Long in the mid-1930’s.

Long became known as the Kingfish, a name adopted from the popular “Amos and Andy” radio program. It perfectly suited his style of leadership: a combination of low comedy and high political acumen. His opponents sneered at him as a buffoon, only to realize too late that they had underestimated the Kingfish.

In 1930, Long’s term as governor ended with an impressive list of accomplishments: paved roads and public bridges, better hospital facilities, the expansion of Louisiana State University into a nationally recognized educational institution, more and better public education, free schoolbooks, improved port facilities and an airport for New Orleans, and, symbolic of it all, a new state capitol building. Typically, the construction was a modern, up-to-date skyscraper, visually demonstrating how Huey Long had brought Louisiana into the twentieth century.

Unable to serve a second term as governor, Long was elected to the United States Senate in 1930, but for the remainder of his life, Long remained the effective, if not official, chief executive of Louisiana, commanding special sessions of the legislature whenever he pleased and ordering passage of the laws he desired. This heavy-handed, unmasked expression of power was the most unpleasant aspect of Long’s career; apparently he had reached the conclusion probably confirmed by the impeachment battle that his enemies had forced him to employ any means, however questionable or undemocratic, to achieve his high-minded and progressive ideals.

Long used the Senate to espouse with fervent intensity his plans to redistribute wealth in the United States. Pointing out that a minority of the population owned the majority of the riches, Long urged taxes that would limit both earned and inherited wealth and spread the wealth among everyone. Every Man a King was his slogan, and he used it as the title of his 1933 autobiography. Spread the Wealth clubs were organized throughout the country to support the Long program.

Long supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1932, but the honeymoon with Roosevelt soon ended. The president moved too slowly for Long, and Long was often an annoyance, sometimes a threat to the president, who was trying to hold a Depression-shaken country together. Long made some positive efforts increasing federal banking insurance, for example but was generally opposed to Roosevelt’s plans as being too timid and too superficial. He grew more open in his plans to defeat Roosevelt in 1936 by supporting a Republican or third-party candidate, then sweeping into office himself in 1940 as the only man who could save the country.

While involved in national affairs, Long remained closely connected with events in Louisiana. He had his selected governor summon sessions of the state legislature to pass bills that Long wrote, rushed through committee, and shepherded through the final vote. His efforts were increasingly aimed at overawing his opponents; during the 1934 mayoral elections in New Orleans, he ordered out the state militia to control the balloting. Such high-handed techniques, combined with his vitriolic attacks on the popular Roosevelt, began to erode his support. Undeterred, he pressed onward. In 1934, he had a series of radical measures introduced into the Louisiana legislature, which were a preview of what he soon hoped to attempt on a national level. His consistent theme had not changed: He urged economic opportunity for all, but his reliance on brute power had greatly increased.

There had always been strong, indeed violent, opposition to Long in Louisiana. He had fought too many entrenched interests and helped too many of the poor and oppressed for it to be otherwise. Now this opposition began to organize and become dangerous. The Square Deal League raised an armed force that seized control of the Baton Rouge jail in early 1935; it dispersed only after a siege by the state militia. Later that year, the Minute Men of Louisiana formed, claiming to have ten thousand members, all ready to end the rule of the Kingfish, by murder if necessary.

It was in such a climate of violence that Huey Long’s life and career ended. On the evening of September 8, 1935, Long was confronted in the state capitol by a young doctor, Carl Austin Weiss, who apparently hated Long for both personal and political reasons; there is no evidence that he was part of any organized plot. Weiss fired two shots at Long and was immediately gunned down himself by Long’s bodyguards. The wounded Long was rushed to the hospital. An operation to save him failed, and on September 10, 1935, Huey Long died. His last words were, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.”

Significance

In his 1928 race for governor, Long gave a speech that so well expressed his political philosophy that he reprinted it later in his biography, Every Man a King (1933). He began by referring to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline,” and then continued,

But Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here!

The bright side of Huey Long’s career and legacy was that he answered the needs of the people of Louisiana for the schools, roads, institutions, and services that they so desperately needed. He broke a century-old tradition of rule by the few and wealthy, and he made the government benefit all the people.

On the dark side, however, he turned the state legislature into his personal tool and the state government into an extension of the Long machine. His supporters have insisted that he was driven to these tactics by the implacable opposition of his foes. There is truth to this; Huey Long was intensely despised and feared by many in Louisiana, often for the good that he had done. Long was not the first popular leader to use questionable methods to obtain worthwhile ends.

During his career, Huey Long was passionately loved and hated; he was called both a fascist and a friend of the common man. His enemies admitted his political brilliance; his friends acknowledged his irregular methods. His many accomplishments have never resolved some basic questions: Was he the best leader to arise in Louisiana, or its worst political disaster? Had he lived, would he have proven to be a national figure of genius or the architect of a homegrown fascist state? These puzzles have no answer or too many answers and the life and career of Huey Long remain an American enigma.

Bibliography

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Helps to place Long in the context of the economic and social situation of the 1930’s, when the country was wracked by depression and a number of theories competed with Share the Wealth and Roosevelt’s New Deal as solutions to the United States’ economic problems.

Cortner, Richard C. The Kingfish and the Constitution: Huey Long, the First Amendment, and the Emergence of Modern Press Freedom in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Examines Long in relation to freedom of the press.

Davis, Forrest. Huey Long: A Candid Biography. New York: Dodge, 1935. Reprint. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1969. A contemporary portrait of Long, this biography is more balanced than most produced at the time. Davis used his extensive interviews with Long.

Dethloft, Henry, ed. Huey P. Long: Southern Demagogue or American Democrat? Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1967. Part of the Problems in American Civilization series and contains essays and articles by a variety of authors, including Huey Long and historians such as T. Harry Williams and V. O. Key, Jr. A good source for sampling the intense emotions that Long and his program could arouse.

Deutsch, Hermann. The Huey Long Murder Case. New York: Doubleday, 1963. While this work concentrates on Long’s assassination, it does provide some helpful background on his political career, especially in relationship to the Louisiana legislature.

Hair, William Ivy. The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. A biography of Long that looks at the range of his power.

Long, Huey. Every Man a King. New Orleans, La.: National Books, 1933. Reprint. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964. This reprint of Long’s 1933 autobiography was edited with an excellent introduction by T. Harry Williams. The autobiographical section can be lean on facts and naturally stops with Long in midcareer, but it offers a fascinating glimpse of his energetic personality.

Opotowsky, Stan. The Longs of Louisiana. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1960. A general biography of the Long family and their roles in state, regional, and national politics. It clearly shows that, while Huey Long was the most brilliant politician of his family, others shared some of his gifts.

White, Richard D., Jr. Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long. New York: Random House, 2006. Well-researched and readable biography recounting the details of Long’s life and political career.

Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. This is the definitive biography of Long, unlikely to be surpassed. Williams worked extensively with contemporaries of Long, including many members of the Long organization, who spoke remarkably freely. The book is excellently researched and extremely well written; it is a classic of modern American biography.