From Spying on the South (Tony Horwitz, 2019) pp 131-2
The thirty-four-floor Beaux-Arts skyscraper, built in the depth of the Depression, was decorated with two-ton chandeliers and double-life-sized sculptures of Louisiana governors. Even larger was a bronze of Long, towering atop a plinth facing the capitol. “Here Lies Louisiana’s Great Son” the inscription read. A bas-relief depicted Huey with outstretched arms, and citizens gazing adoringly at him, as if at Christ.
Pilgrims could also visit the site of his martyrdom beside a chipped marble column in the capitol. Long’s dictatorial ways made him many enemies, including a young doctor who confronted Huey one night in 1935 and shot him in the side. Long’s bodyguards replied with a fusillade that riddled the doctor with thirty bullets and sent shots ricocheting off walls and columns.
Researchers had since poked holes in this version of events, raising the possibility that it was Long’s trigger-happy security men, rather than the aggrieved doctor, who killed him.
The nearby state museum exhibited tommy guns carried by Long’s thuggish bodyguards, called brownshirts, one example of why foes often likened Huey to Hitler and Mussolini. Long’s political machine so thoroughly rigged elections that a henchman boasted of registering trees as voters.
The cronies he installed at every level also allowed him to maintain his iron-fisted rule of Louisiana, even after he left to become a senator in Washington. Long’s brother joked that Huey’s handpicked successor as governor, O. K. Allen, was so pliant he once signed a leaf that blew through his office window and onto his desk.
Old newsreels at the museum were also a reminder of Long’s fiery populism, radical in his day and strikingly resonant in mine. “None shall be too big, none shall be too poor,” he bellowed, waving his fists. He further decried the “financial masters” who “have taken off the barbecue table 90 percent of the food placed thereon by God, even before the feast begins.”
As governor, he raised taxes and spent lavishly on roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Then, as senator, he launched a national “Share Our Wealth” campaign that called for both a minimum family income and 4 maximum, so that “1 percent of the people” would no longer control so much of the nation’s wealth. Heavy levies on fortunes “above the few millions” would be used to fund old-age pensions, health, and other benefits aimed at the masses.
As I listened to Long fulminate against the “favored few” and champion the little man, Bernie Sanders was voicing similar themes on the campaign trail. Trump tapped this populism, too, with a style and tactics that Huey foreshadowed.
A belligerent entertainer, Long mocked Washington “elites” and disparaged the character and appearance of other candidates, calling them “thieves, bugs, and lice,” or belittling them with nicknames like “Turkey Head” and “Old Buzzard Back.”
He went after judges, told bodyguards to rough up the press, warned supporters to “watch out for the lying newspapers!,” and started his own, American Progress, so he could speak directly to the public, as he did at huge rallies and on radio.
Long could also be extremely crude. In one of many instances of incivility, he grabbed a dinner plate from a woman at a fancy party, telling her: “I’ll eat this for you. You’re too fat already.”
A dangerous buffoon in the eyes of the political establishment, Long attracted millions of fervent followers and was poised to challenge FDR in the 1936 election. “I can take this Roosevelt,” he crowed. “I can out-promise him and he knows it.”
Though shot dead a few months later, at the age of forty-two, Long had a very long afterlife in Louisiana, where his family and political machine ruled for half a century. Huey’s bridges and roads endured, and so did his legacy of graft, patronage, concentrated power, and flagrant disregard for the law.
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