It was Sunday, a month before Election Day 1932, and the Roosevelts were having a guest to lunch at their Hyde Park estate. When Eleanor Roosevelt greeted him at the door, the guest was dressed in a plaid suit that could politely be described as “loud.” The suit was complemented by a pink tie and a purple shirt. Mrs. Roosevelt escorted him to the dining room and seated him next to her husband. The guest then proceeded to lecture—or perhaps hector—the Democratic party’s presidential nominee. It went on for the duration of the lunch and at one point, Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, said in a voice loud enough to be heard up and down the table, “Who is that awful man?”
This didn’t seem to bother Huey P. Long. He had been called worse. Much worse. And by people who would have been happy to do more than shame him for his bad manners—who would have been delighted to kill him and dance on his grave.
As for the man who would soon be president of the United States, he saw past Long’s uncouth clothes and undisciplined mouth and got to the essentials. As he later said to one of his principal advisers, he considered Long to be one of the “two most dangerous men in America.” The other was General Douglas MacArthur.
It can be fairly assumed that Long never gave Roosevelt reason to revise that opinion. Or, for that matter, that he ever would have objected to that characterization. If he did, it was probably because he thought he had no rivals for the title and that the president should fear him far beyond any other. After all, he would soon be president himself.
He was known as the “Kingfish,” a name that came to him from the Amos ‘n’ Andy radio show and stuck. The comedy character was all big talk, and Huey P. Long could, as they say, talk the bark off a tree. But he was also capable of action. Brutal, ruthless, and even sadistic action.
But of course that is only part of the story. If there were no more to it, then Randy Newman would not be singing about Huey Long, decades after his death:
Long has fascinated artists and biographers from the time of his death, and one suspects that it will never end. He was an American original, as T. Harry Williams made abundantly clear in his magisterial Huey Long, which came out in 1969 and won both a Pulitzer and National Book Award for biography. Forty years later, came Richard D. White’s Kingfish, which does not so much rival Williams’s book as complement it at half its length. Then, of course, there was Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, which won a Pulitzer in 1947. The film adaptation won the Academy Award for best picture in 1949. Broderick Crawford was named best actor for his role as Governor Willie Stark, Warren’s fictionalized Huey Long, and Mercedes McCambridge won best supporting actress as Sadie Burke, Stark’s indispensable aide and sometime lover. The story was told again, in film, in 2006, with Sean Penn playing Stark. It flopped, not least because the filmmakers decided—for reasons understood only in Hollywood—to set the action in the 1950s. Huey Long was purely a phenomenon of the 1930s. For him and his ambitions, the Great Depression was . . . opportunity. Perhaps even revolutionary opportunity.
Long had an instinctive, almost feral feeling for the wounds and woes suffered by the common man during those bleak years. In 1933 unemployment nationally reached nearly 25 percent. In Long’s Louisiana, if you were poor and lived in the rural portions of the state, life had been plenty hard before the Depression. And then it got worse.
Long was not himself what was once called “poor white trash,” but he was not above encouraging people to think he was. Among the dozens of stories about his gift for empathetic and improvisational speech-making, there is one about how in the middle of a campaign speech, he asked the crowd of hard-pressed farmers, sharecroppers, laborers, and generally put-upon and burdened voters, “How many of you wear silk socks?”
No hands went up.
“How many wear cotton socks?”
When he saw hands raised in answer, Long raised a pant leg and showed the crowd that he, too, wore cotton socks.
“And how many of you have holes in your socks?”
The hands went up again, and now Long took off a shoe and showed the audience his big toe, sticking through a hole in his sock.
At that moment, and perhaps for evermore, the people in that audience were his. Even if they knew he wasn’t really one of them.
If he wasn’t born poor and could have worn silk socks from very early in his political career, it didn’t matter. Huey Long made the visceral connection and at its roots, it was pure. He felt the right resentments and hated the right people and institutions. From the beginning of his political career, he made the right enemies, including Standard Oil.
He had been a traveling salesman—a good one—and a lawyer—a combative one—before he ran for a seat on the Louisiana Railroad Commission in 1918. He was 25 and had found his true calling and his eternal enemy. He had his reasons, personal and political, which for Huey Long always amounted to the same thing.
A $1,000 investment that he’d made when he was a young attorney had looked good for a while. There was oil where the company he’d invested with was looking. But Standard Oil, which did the all the storage and refining in Louisiana, refused to take oil from independent producers and Long, like many others, was wiped out. He never forgot nor, certainly, did he forgive. Later, when he was running for governor, he would charge Standard with being among “the world’s greatest criminals,” and he would point out that Louisiana’s farmers paid 40 times more in taxes than Standard Oil, on earnings of a third less.
He had run indefatigably for his seat on the Railroad Commission, a powerful agency that also regulated public utilities. His energy was legendary. He needed very little sleep, and he seemed to run at only one speed, flat out. In just two years he’d moved up to chairman of the commission and went after a telephone company that had raised rates some 20 percent. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Long won. People who received their small refund checks from the phone company never forgot who had made it happen. Chief Justice William Howard Taft later said that Long was one of the best legal minds he’d seen appear before the court.
He was neither dumb nor a redneck, as some of his enemies—and he was making them quickly and by the bushel—wanted to believe. Those enemies tried to get rid of him, claiming he had abused his authority on the commission. It was not the last such effort.
He was a man in a hurry and in 1924, just 30 years old, he ran for governor. He would lose, everyone said, and lose badly. Then he would sink back into the obscurity from which he had emerged. But he campaigned like a demon. He crossed the state on its pitiful 300 miles of paved roads, which he made into a campaign issue, along with free schoolbooks for the children and increased taxation on Standard and the other big players. He made speech after speech. He was young, lacking an organization, and he wore cheap, ill-fitting suits. But when he talked about how Standard’s lawyers had written the tax laws, and the political insiders in Baton Rouge were in the saddle and riding the common man into the dirt, he made people listen. The influence of the KKK became an issue in the election and he straddled it. He preferred, through his career, class war to race war, though it would be a long reach to call him “enlightened” on race.
He missed making it to a runoff by 7,400 votes. The next day, he bought a new suit and began campaigning for the office again. He’d never made any secret of his ambitions. He’d told his wife, just after they were married, that he would first run for some statewide office and when they knew his name, he would go for governor, then senator, and finally for president. And, of course, win.
He was both more energetic and more polished in his second run for the governorship in 1928. He had a slogan, borrowed from William Jennings Bryan, whom he admired: “Every man a king.” He was already relying on the themes he would work and rework for the rest of his life. For the common man, it was a stacked deck, in a rigged game, against a crooked house. Of the many speeches he gave in that campaign, there was one that stood out and is still talked about.
He gave the speech in St. Martinville, under the Evangeline Oak of the famous Longfellow poem. Long’s theme was not lost love, though, but betrayal.
The worst fears of the establishment were realized when he finished first in the Democratic primary and by such a convincing margin that the runoff was conceded to him. A reporter at Long’s headquarters on primary night heard him say, loudly and exuberantly, “You fellows stick to me. We’re just getting started. This is only the beginning. . . . From now on, I’m the Kingfish. I’m gonna be president some day.”
But first, he had to be governor. And he meant to do what he’d said he would. The history of American politics is littered with the corpses of candidates who promised big and delivered small. Huey Long may have been a demagogue, but he meant to build roads and schools and hospitals and to get after Standard Oil. Not only was he not afraid of a political fight, he relished one. (Actual fistfights were another thing, and he would go out of his way to avoid those.)
So he went to Baton Rouge and got to work. He filled the government with supporters and cronies. It might be said that there was never an American politician who better understood the uses of patronage. He rammed bills through the legislature. To build the roads and bridges and supply the schoolbooks he had promised, he went after his old nemesis and proposed a 5-cent-per-barrel tax on the production of refined oil.
For his opponents who were, by now, many and fevered, that broke it. They passed an impeachment resolution.
But Long had seen it before. “I was elected Railroad Commissioner of Louisiana in 1918, and they tried to impeach me in 1920. When they failed to impeach me in 1920, they indicted me in 1921. And when I wiggled through that, I managed to become governor in 1928, and they impeached me in 1929.”
Long stumped the state in his own defense and on the attack, against enemies old and new, including especially Standard Oil. They were, he said, handing out bribe money to the legislature in amounts of as much as $25,000. It was, he said in an idiom unlike the one he used under the Evangeline Oak, “enough money to burn a wet mule.”
The Louisiana House passed out a dog’s breakfast of impeachment charges, but there was no trial in the Senate. Long had already secured commitments from the necessary one-third of that body’s members. They would not vote to convict, so there was no point in proceeding.
The impeachment failed but things had changed. If Long had played rough before, he was now prepared to play dirty. Ominously for that era, he began traveling with bodyguards.
Then he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in the 1930 campaign. There was already an occupant of that Senate seat. And Long was only two years into his term as governor. But he planned neither to resign as governor nor immediately serve as senator, if he won the election.
He would, he promised, resign as governor if he were not elected to the Senate. This was, of course, more threat than promise. Long viewed the Senate race both as a referendum on his service as governor and as a way to get his feet wet in Washington. Which didn’t mean he would be turning his back on Louisiana. He would still run the state while, in Washington, he ran for president.
He won in a landslide. Now his power in the state was of an entirely new magnitude, and it drove his enemies to greater fury. He continued to push his programs, including some that seemed like extravagances or personal vanities or both. He wanted a new capitol building in Baton Rouge so he built the tallest one in the entire United States: 34 stories. This, in a poor, rural, Southern state where many people still got along without electricity. But Huey wanted the capitol building and he got it.
He decided that Louisiana State University was underfunded and inadequate. So he threw himself passionately into a program to raise its profile, beginning with improving and enlarging the band and making the football team more competitive. He fired the coach, then rehired him. He gave locker room speeches to the team and walked the sidelines during games. He was the number-one fan.
And, in truth, LSU improved thanks to his attentions and not only on the football field. The university added a badly needed medical school and generally raised the quality of the faculty.
He had put his mark on LSU and had, in fact, broken the state of Louisiana to his considerable and ferocious will. Now . . . it was on to Washington where the entire country would see him at work and make up its mind.
The mood of the times was right for the man. It was 1932. Herbert Hoover was still in the White House, and the Depression was deepening. Pessimism, and something more, was in the air. There was a sense that the old order of things might not survive, and Huey Long’s presence in Washington and membership in the U.S. Senate was an indicator of this.
He rode the L&N Crescent City Limited from New Orleans to Washington, arriving on January 25, 1932, in the early morning. He took the oath of office and, in the Senate chamber, a desk that had once been John C. Calhoun’s.
He stayed in Washington exactly one day, then returned to Louisiana to put down an attempt by the sitting lieutenant governor to assume the role of governor. That one was easy. He bought a house and launched a law practice and then, since it was Mardi Gras, he ordered the LSU band down to New Orleans, all 250 pieces. When he’d said he wanted the band to be big, Huey had meant . . . big.
He returned to Washington in February and immediately began making headlines and enemies. In early April he made a speech in which he argued for what became his singular cause, the crusade of his political life: Share the Wealth. The particulars would evolve but it came down to a radical redistribution of wealth. Fortunes would be limited to $100 million. Incomes over $2 million would be taxed at 65 percent. And so on.
Long made it personal, which was his way. He attacked Joe Robinson, the leader of the Senate’s Democrats—nominally his party—as an ally of Herbert Hoover and then accused him of being in the grip of his corporate law clients back in Arkansas. Long went on to name those clients and then went after Robinson’s looks, saying, “he doesn’t look really as well with his hair dyed.”
This was typical of Long, who enjoyed mocking opponents at a personal level. (One inevitably thinks of parallels with a current presidential hopeful.) He would give his opponents nicknames that his rural Louisiana audiences found amusing. For instance, U.S. senator Joseph “Feather Duster” Ransdell, New Orleans mayor T. Semmes “Turkey Head” Walmsley, and Esmond “Shinola” Phelps, of the New Orleans family that published the Times-Picayune for decades.
That sort of thing was not appreciated in the Senate chamber, where Long plainly relished violating the heavy sense of decorum, thus offending all the right people and institutions, among them the Washington Post, which called for him to resign.
But he could be utterly serious when he had to be. This was an essential element of the Long mystique. When the situation called for him to play the crude, ill-mannered redneck, he could do that and do it so none would think it an act. But when he needed to be sober, serious, and even scholarly, he could do that, too. As he did at the Democratic convention in Chicago in the summer of 1932, when two slates of delegates arrived from Louisiana. One of these was loyal to Long. The other represented his bitter enemies. The convention would decide which to recognize.
Long took to the podium with a stack of law books for a prop. He was not dressed in his usual colorful fashion. He wore, instead, a cream-colored suit. He made his case without the usual wild gestures and table thumping. As he spoke, the crowd—which had begun by booing him—began to come around, and by the end of the speech he had them. The vote went his way and, later, Clarence Darrow complimented Long on one of the “greatest summaries of fact and evidence he had ever heard.”
The convention nominated Franklin Roosevelt on a fifth ballot. During the fourth ballot, Long got in the face of a senator from Mississippi and threatened to “break” him if he allowed his state’s delegates to vote as individuals rather than as a unit. This was the other Huey, not the one who had so impressed Clarence Darrow but the one who ran Louisiana with an iron fist and made sure no one forgot it.
Long could have run for president against Roosevelt as the candidate of the Farmer-Labor party. But he passed and campaigned hard for Roosevelt in the hope that FDR would support the Share the Wealth plan. Roosevelt had made the right noises. He had, in fact, talked about “the forgotten man at the bottom on the economic pyramid.”
Long also, no doubt, saw the Farmer-Labor candidacy as a losing proposition and sensed that it was not yet his time. But this did not mean his time might not come soon.
Unsurprisingly, not long after Roosevelt’s inauguration Long’s patience with the president began running out. But, then, Huey was an impatient man. He pushed his Share the Wealth plan, which was far too radical for Roosevelt and might, indeed, have been too radical for anyone until the advent of Bernie Sanders. The scheme called for heavy and escalating taxation on fortunes of more than $1 million. A limit of $5 million on inheritances. (Long believed the Bible sanctioned this, and that taxing estates was protection against the accumulation of great fortunes.) He called, additionally, for a $1 billion program to pay college tuition for needy students.
It was extreme and radical and—according to the economists who studied it—impossible. It would require confiscation of incomes over $4,000 in order to provide guaranteed subsidies of $1,400 to the poor. The plan was widely dismissed as impractical and utopian.
But not to Huey Long and not to his growing national following. As Roosevelt’s New Deal attempted to gain traction against the Depression, Share the Wealth looked like a promising alternative to people who were struggling. So Huey created a Share Our Wealth Society and gave a nationwide radio speech to launch it. He urged listeners to “join with us.” And people did. There were 3 million members by the end of 1934 and more than 7.5 million members of 27,000 local clubs by summer 1935.
Long was soon receiving more mail than all the other senators combined. Additional help was hired to handle all this volume and to run the organization. To this end, he recruited Gerald L. K. Smith, then in the advent of a career as an orator and radio evangelist. Smith preached the Gospel of Anti—anticommunism, antisemitism, anti-New Deal. And he was good at it. Very good.
H. L. Mencken wrote, “Gerald L. K. Smith is the greatest orator of them all, not the greatest by an inch or a foot or a yard or a mile, but the greatest by at least two light years. He begins where the next best leaves off.”
Huey recognized Smith’s gift, saying he was “the only man I ever saw who is a better rabble-rouser than I am.”
Smith was a force himself but a sycophant to Long. When he concluded one of his rallies, Smith would say, prayerfully, “Lift us out of this wretchedness, O Lord, out of this poverty. . . . Rally us under this young man who came out of the woods of north Louisiana, who leads us like a Moses out of the land of bondage into the land of milk and honey.”
While Smith was the public face of Share Our Wealth, Huey was the soul and the muscle and the man who might become president if he ran in 1936. The times were right for demagogues and dictators. It was the age of the strongman. Mussolini in Italy. Hitler in Germany. And, perhaps, Long in America.
He seemed, increasingly, like he belonged to the breed. In summer 1934, he had sent troops armed with rifles and machine guns into New Orleans to settle one of his many political battles. The New York Times reported, “Huey P. Long became de facto dictator of this state at noon today and immediately began acting the part.” Long had ordered the troops in because, he said, “Hasn’t a governor got the right to protect a state office with the militia if he wants to?” On other occasions, he referred to a need to “preserve law and order,” which only drove his enemies to great fury.
Hodding Carter II, whose career in journalism made him into something of a legend as an enlightened voice from the primitive South, wrote that Long was “the first true dictator out of the soil of America.”
Roosevelt feared him, which accounts for IRS and FBI investigations that turned up all manner of corruption in Louisiana. This was no more surprising than if the Department of Agriculture had discovered that crawfish thrived in the bayous.
The investigations never came up with anything on Long, though they might have, given a little more time.
But time ran out for Huey Long on September 8, 1935, when a young doctor managed to get close, in spite of the bodyguards, as Long walked a corridor in the capitol building. The doctor got off one shot. Huey’s bodyguards took him down in a fusillade. He had dozens of gunshot wounds in his shredded body. The one wound he inflicted, though, a small-caliber one at that, was enough to finish Long, who died two days later.
Two hundred thousand people attended his funeral. Had the song been written by then, they might have raised a chorus from Randy Newman’s ballad to the Kingfish,
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
