From Spying on the South (Tony Horwitz, 2019) pp130-
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 a 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 mil-lions” 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.
“When I took the oath of office, I didn’t take any vow of poverty,” declared one Long crony who went from the governor’s office to federal prison.
A later governor, Edwin Edwards, laughed off the frequent charges against him, boasting that the only way he’d lose an dection is if lin caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
He won four times before going to prison for bribery, fraud, and other crimes. But Louisiana was more forgiving of crooked politicians than of the felons I’d met at Angola. Released after eight years, Edwards married a woman fifty-two years his junior, starred with her in a reality show, and won a primary for Congress.
“People say, well, they’re all crooks anyhow,” Edwards told a reporter, when asked about going to Washington. “You might as well send an experienced one.”
It was easy to regard Louisiana’s political culture and Huey Long’s legacy as lurid exceptions to American norms. But inequality, class resentment, and distrust of “elites” was running strong in the 2000s, as it had in the 1930s, and an emerging candidate bore striking similarities to Long and some of his successors.
A demagogue; a crude and clever bully; a putative champion of the little man who erected towers that exalted him; a divisive figure lashing out at judges, the press, and other brakes on unbridled power; a womanizer and wheeler-dealer of dubious ethics who boasted he could shoot someone in public and get away with it.
Many Americans know Huey Long best from Robert Penn Warren’s fictional classic, All the King’s Men. Warren also wrote nonfiction and had a dark awareness of how the past haunted and weighed on the present.
“History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he observed in 1956, writing about white resistance to civil rights. “Except the jump backward.”
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