Between the turn of the century and World War I, modern salesmanship was born. Salesmen were agents of change, bringing new products from the modern, urban centers to the rural, isolated ones. Peddlers gave way to drummers, then salesmen.
Systematized techniques of selling were taught. The sales structure was to attract attention, maintain interest, and create desire. Flirting, humor, wit, curiosity-inducing statements, and public relations events attracted attention. Words were malleable, language was expedient, but ideally concise, direct, forcible, and descriptive. A “circus whirl” of talk could “build a fence” around a customer and create desire. Spontaneity and improvisation were essential.
Experts studied the characteristics of a good salesman. Enthusiasm was a prized trait, a powerful economic force. It was compared with and may have been conceived from observing evangelism. Enthusiasm was associated with other desired traits of boldness, confidence, energy, optimism, hustle, pluck, and grit. Salesmen read peoples’ faces, were good mixers, engaging, and knew the latest jokes and stories.
Good salesmen excited fascination, even amid doubts about their claims. But the trend was against one-shot sales of the peddler and in favor of repeat business, which necessitated the development and maintenance of relationships and trust.1
Traveling salesmen then were “lustrous figures of the day, who wore the latest cuts of tight trousers [and] had a way with the ladies.”2 They faced and overcame travel hardships. They knew about new distribution methods and brand development that threatened the wholesaler and how credit worked. Worried about salesmen on the road, the Gideons in 1908 began their Bible-placement program in hotel rooms.3
James Guild wrote the earliest sales journal in 1818. It recorded his reasons for entering the profession: his “disposition would not allow [him] to work on a farm.”4 Huey was similarly disinclined to farmwork.
The records don’t show what Huey did immediately after school in 1910. But Bozeman found a job selling Cottolene, cooking oil made from cottonseed oil and beef suet. The N. K. Fairbank Company of Chicago made Cottolene, along with Gold Dust washing powder and bath and laundry soaps. Cottolene was advertised in magazines. The company published a cookbook featuring recipes using Cottolene.5 Bozeman had taken a training course at company facilities in New Orleans, probably learning a sales script that reflected the standard sales structure. The company sent him on the road as a junior salesman.
Cottolene salesmen solicited orders from grocers and from housewives door to door. Grocers would fill the orders obtained from the housewives. Posters and cookbooks were offered for display at the grocery stores. Most housewives at the time used lard or butter, so a good deal of resistance to this new product had to be overcome to make a sale.6
Victor Thorssen was Bozeman’s supervisor. His team of junior salesmen worked northern Louisiana, earning salaries that started at nineteen dollars per week, less hotel fare. In July 1910, two of the crew quit. Bozeman recommended Huey as a replacement. Huey joined them in Monroe, in the northeastern part of Louisiana, on a Sunday without decent clothes and with his possessions in a shoebox. Thorssen was dubious. Bozeman promised to buy Huey decent clothes. Thorssen reluctantly agreed to a one-week tryout.
Thorssen took the newly tailored Huey and another trainee, Louis Grieff, out on the road to teach them his techniques. After three or four house calls, Huey abruptly told Thorssen that he had gotten “the hang of this selling racket. How about cutting me loose, working one side of a street and you and Mr. Grieff the other side?” Thorssen agreed. At the time, the company considered fifteen orders a day good and twenty orders outstanding. At the end of the day, Huey turned in twenty-six orders; Grieff and Thorssen had fourteen. Twenty-five years later, Thorssen, an accountant living in Indiana, vividly recalled Huey: a gangling boy, not very attractive, fresh off the farm, very well read, with a gift of gab and a lot of nerve. Everyone remembered him after one meeting.7
Huey led Thorssen’s crew in sales. He liked overcoming resistance. He knew the habits, beliefs, and manners of his customers. It is likely that Huey improvised beyond any sales script offered by the company. Sometimes he interpreted the Bible to forbid cooking with lard but not eating pork, whereas Cottolene was pure and not blasphemous. Huey sometimes cooked dinner for families to secure an order. Grieff was good at display advertising, so Huey went with him to stores early to set up displays. Grieff wasn’t as good at door-to-door selling, and Huey would split his sales orders with him. Grieff had theatrical training. In the evenings, Huey listened to his dramatic readings.8
When the crew reached Alexandria, the company suggested that Thorssen hold baking contests to promote Cottolene. The company asked Thorssen to solicit prizes from local merchants in exchange for advertising at the event, a task that the gentle and timid Thorssen delegated to Huey. Huey accepted the challenge because “gall was one of his specialties, and rebuffs did not affect him at all.” He collected bags of flour, a ham, buckets of coffee, a rocking chair, a floor lamp, and an electric iron, among other grocery items. Thorssen was master of ceremonies, Huey was the judge, and the contests were successful.
Huey met his future wife at a baking contest. Rose McConnell was a stenographer for an insurance company. She had learned to cook from her mother, who was originally from southern Louisiana and had mastered French cooking. Huey’s approach wasn’t suave, but it was nervy and characteristically confrontational: “I bet you didn’t bake this cake,” he said. When she said she did, he asked her for a date to “prove it.”9 Huey awarded a prize to Rose and, diplomatically, another one to her mother.10
Rose liked Huey’s quick mind and excellent memory. Huey liked her looks and told her she had qualities that he lacked: the practical, common touch. They both loved music. Huey told Bozeman he had discovered his future wife. Their courtship lasted over two years, however. Rose disliked Huey’s controlling nature: at parties he prohibited her from having too much fun with others and would rush across a room to grab a drink from her hands. She learned not to argue with him because he pouted until he got his way.11 After giving her a tiny—the size of a pinpoint, not a pin—diamond ring, Huey requested its return, saying he wanted to date another girl. Later he returned it, saying the other girl didn’t look the same. Years later, Huey told a friend that he had loved a girl of the upper class, but she wasn’t able to follow his destiny or understand his crudeness. Political calculation motivated both the breakup with the upper-class girl and the courtship of Rose.12
In September 1910, Huey became unable to support a wife or even a girlfriend. The company terminated Thorssen and everyone else except Huey and Harley. The teenagers thought they were destined for promotion from junior to regular salesman (which would let them sell the other products rather than just Cottolene) and a raise to $175 a month. They redoubled their efforts. At Thanksgiving, the company dismissed them.13 The Southern Sentinel, which had taken over the Winnfield Comrade, welcomed Huey home and congratulated him for making good.14
Julius recommended that Huey complete high school and then attend law school. Huey refused to reenroll in Winnfield. The family arranged for him to go to Shreveport, instead, in January 1911, where he stayed with an aunt, attended high school, and continued his courtship of Rose. When the chemistry teacher asked Huey for an example of a chemical compound, he answered Cottolene, and then recited his sales pitch.15 But the school told him that he couldn’t graduate because he had not attended the fall semester. Huey nevertheless stayed in Shreveport, attending school only during the morning, and got a job in the afternoon.
Notwithstanding that he lacked any knowledge of shorthand, Huey became a stenographer for a plumbing company. When his boss doubted his qualifications, Huey proposed a tryout, invented symbols, used a notepad for effect, and relied on his memory and writing skills to produce letters. The plumber opined that “them letters” Huey produced were the best he had ever written.
In February 1911, Bozeman got an offer to sell for the Houston Packing Company. It sold cured meats, lard, and canned goods to wholesalers. Before going to Houston, Bozeman went to Shreveport to see Huey. Huey asked Bozeman to get him a job there, too, if he could, since he was making only nine dollars per week as a stenographer. Bozeman racked up so many orders that the company asked him to recommend others with similar talents. Bozeman suggested Huey. Huey left Shreveport for the job as soon as he got the offer.16
Originally working in Austin, Huey performed so impressively that the company sent him to Little Rock to supervise sales in Arkansas. For the first time in his life, Huey felt he “had hit a bed of ease.”17 He stayed in the best hotels in Arkansas or with farmers outside of town to save money, traveling by foot, train, or horse and buggy. He recorded the names and addresses of his friends and customers.18
The company thereafter expanded into Memphis and assigned Huey to its new office. He resided in the luxurious Gayoso Hotel. But the cotton crop and therefore all business were poor that year. Huey secured no significant orders. At the end of August, he was terminated. In his autobiography, Huey claimed that he turned in a good volume of orders but charged too many expenses and was “summarily discharged” after not heeding warnings to trim them,19 confessing to insubordination and padded expense accounts rather than failure.
Huey also wrote that he returned to Houston to seek reinstatement and, when that failed, sought other employment in Houston. When that failed, he sought work again in Memphis. Williams says he remained in Memphis, continued to live at the Gayoso, and looked for another job. Finding none, his money dwindled.
Huey moved into a cheaper rooming house but still could not find work. Prevailing on the proprietor for credit, he lasted a few more days at the rooming house, giving up his suitcase of clothes as security. Two days later, still unemployed, he couldn’t pay for his room and was physically kicked out of the premises, denied even the courtesy of getting clean clothes from his suitcase: “Git going, you little bum, I don’t never want to see no more of you.”20
Now Huey struggled to survive. He slept in parks, depots, and railroad yards, and ate free food sometimes offered by bars. Once he convinced a company to hire him as a painter despite his lack of overalls or equipment. He started to paint the wall from the bottom up. The supervisor told him he admired his gumption but couldn’t employ him. A kindly policeman rousted him from a park bench one night and referred him to the Salvation Army home, where he stayed for several nights. Getting a job breaking up boxcars—back-breaking work—proved too physically taxing, so he finally did the unthinkable, asking his family and Bozeman for help.
His mother proposed divinity school. His older brother, Shan, lived in Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he practiced dentistry, and where Oklahoma Baptist University was located. Shan agreed to supply the money and Huey agreed to attend the university, so he traveled to Shawnee late in September, without money, with a frayed suit, and with his few personal items wrapped in a newspaper. When he arrived, he bragged that he was on his way back up.
While he may have attended classes at the university, there is no record of his enrollment. During the Christmas holidays, he told Shan that he didn’t want to be a preacher and asked him for money to take law-school classes at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Shan provided a hundred dollars.
Years before, Huey’s brother Julius had won the money for his law-school tuition in a gambling house. Probably wanting to emulate this success, Huey stopped at Oklahoma City on his way to Norman. Playing roulette at a local gambling den on New Year’s Eve, he lost his money. On New Year’s Day, 1912, Huey woke up broke, without money to pay for registration, books, or hotel.
Desperate, he looked for a job. The owner of Dawson Produce Company, Mr. K. W. Dawson, a “serious but kindly faced gentleman,” moved by Huey’s ambition to attend law school, agreed to hire him on January 2 to solicit orders for produce in Norman and a few other towns, and gave him his produce price list. Even after pawning his overcoat to pay his hotel bill, Huey lacked the money to take the train to Norman, so he walked eighteen miles in the January cold—while “snow and sleet covered the ground” and the wind “was cold and cutting”—without an overcoat, arriving about midnight, warming himself by a stove at an oil mill, and grabbing a few hours of sleep in a cottonseed bin.21
Early on January 3, spending his last three nickels on breakfast, he ventured forth to sell produce. At the store of S. H. McCall, he secured an order for a carload of potatoes. Trying to place the order with a collect call, it was declined. Pawning a leather purse that “had been put to no use whatever,” Huey obtained coins to place the phone call. When his call went through, Dawson blithely told him he didn’t have any potatoes and couldn’t fill the order. Having “walked” and “starved” and “disposed of everything of value [he] had on the face of the earth,”22 Huey exploded: “The list you gave me yesterday has got spuds on it. If you did not have any spuds, why didn’t you mark them off the list? You caused me to spend my last two bits on this damn phone call.”23 Luckily, McCall was listening and offered to buy other items that were on the list. This appeased Dawson, who otherwise might have fired Huey on the spot. But because Huey would not receive the commissions immediately, he was still penniless.
At the railroad depot, Huey started a conversation with a “well groomed, rather stout looking gentleman,” a stranger named R. O. Jackson. He told Jackson that he lacked the funds to travel by train, that he had walked into town, and that he planned to study law and work part-time for Dawson. Moved, Jackson offered Huey a loan of twenty dollars. Huey said he could survive with five dollars and, if he couldn’t repay him, he would at least have saved Jackson fifteen. After securing the five dollars from Jackson, Huey told his brother that unexpected expenses had left him short, and his brother sent another seventy-five. Jackson used his influence with the local merchants to help Huey make sales and persuaded his brother-in-law to extend credit to Huey so he could purchase law books.24
In describing this low point in his life, Huey’s autobiography omitted the requests to his family and Bozeman, the plan to attend the Baptist University, and Shan’s provision of funds. Huey described the events involving Dawson and Jackson, in contrast (although he omitted cursing Dawson). They were friends for the rest of his life. When Huey wrote his autobiography twenty years later, he inscribed a copy for Jackson: “To my dear old friend R. O. Jackson with my love and appreciation for a real favor which can never be repaid by me—Sincerely Huey P. Long.”25 And when Jackson thereafter fell on hard times, Huey got him a job in Louisiana.26 Dawson hosted a reception for Huey in Oklahoma City days before Huey’s death.
Once he settled in at law school, Huey had some happy times. He made lifetime friends. They nicknamed him “Hugh Hanna Honolulu” because he decorated his room with lights. The job with Dawson paid about a hundred dollars per month, although he worked hard for his money. Sometimes he walked nine miles to the outlying towns, which made him late for or miss classes. On weekends he traveled to Oklahoma City and renewed his gambling contacts, with better results. One of the gambling houses hired him as a dealer and dice man. The money he made from gambling supplemented his commissions from Dawson.
Omitted from his autobiography—but not from other interviews Huey gave as an adult—was his entry into campus politics. The campaign of 1912 for the Democratic presidential nomination pitted Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton University, against Missourian Bennett Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives. The fraternities on campus lined up for Wilson. The independents lacked the leadership to do anything until Huey issued a circular charging that Wilson was a complete failure as a lawyer and successful only as a schoolteacher. Huey called for a mass meeting of the independents to organize for Clark. Enough independents showed up to form a club, and they elected Huey president.
The fraternity leaders called for a campus-wide convention to demonstrate Wilson’s support. Huey was outnumbered. He called his friends from town to swell his delegate count, but the fraternity leaders recognized the trick and insisted on a roll call. Huey then bolted the convention and formed his own rump caucus, but he left a few of his delegates behind to vote until the end for William Jennings Bryan. Thus, the public perceived Huey’s group as unanimous for Clark, but the fraternity convention, divided, with a mere plurality for Wilson. In a political fight, when you’ve got nothing on your side, Huey advised, “start a row in the opposition camp.”27
Huey audited some law courses and received Cs in others. Later Huey said that gambling diversions distracted him from learning law.28 In his autobiography, Huey said that, at the end of the spring 1912 semester, he took another selling job, intending to return in the fall, but incurred certain other, unnamed obligations that prevented it, which caused “much grief and heartache.”29
At the end of the spring term, Huey stayed with Shan, who had moved to a nearby town, and helped a congressional candidate that Shan supported by writing and distributing circulars. When Wilson won the Democratic Convention, which ended July 2, 1912, Williams reports that Huey joined with the fraternity leaders to start the first Young Democrats organization and was elected as its vice president. This might be an error, however, because school was not in session in July and Huey never returned in the fall.
It may be that Huey left Oklahoma because he observed that all lawyers and politicians there were broke or because he was discouraged by the lengthy process to get a degree. Huey asked Bozeman to get him a job. Huey wanted to make money.
Bozeman was working for the Faultless Starch Company of Kansas City and obliged Huey by asking his supervisor, John Nesbitt, to hire him. Nesbitt was considering opening a Memphis office, met Huey in Texarkana for a tryout of two weeks, and was sold almost immediately, saying he had never worked harder in his life and that Huey was “the damndest character I ever met. I don’t know whether he is crazy or a genius.”30
Once he got the job, Huey promptly returned to the Gayoso Hotel and directed a crew of salesmen and advertising men who covered four states. Huey’s salary climbed to $125 a month plus expenses, his highest compensation yet. Only once did he participate in politics, fighting in an election-eve brawl in Memphis in November 1912. He fought on behalf of the Democratic machine boss of Memphis, Ed Crump, who bailed him out of jail and promised to return the favor someday.31
During the Christmas holiday, Huey visited Shreveport to ask Rose to marry. What happened next remains a mystery. The police arrested Huey and charged him with carrying a concealed weapon in the African American red-light district of Shreveport. Bozeman bailed him out, and Julius, who was then a district attorney in Winnfield, got the charges dropped. In his autobiography, Huey claimed an alibi: he was attending Lohengrin with Rose. Her retention of the theater ticket stubs and statements from witnesses seated near them secured his release.32 According to author Hair, however, Lohengrin only played on December 16, four days before the incident. In newspaper reports in 1928, Huey said that a boyhood friend who resembled him admitted that he had done it but asked Huey not to expose him. This “double” fled to Texas where he became a successful businessman. As a loyal friend Huey proudly refused to divulge the man’s name.33
Bozeman’s account of the incident—that the charges against Huey were a frame-up—rings truer than Hair’s. Although newspapers reported the arrest in 1928 and Huey included it in his autobiography in 1933, no political opponent ever mentioned it, nor did his brother Julius, who, in later years, accused Huey of every other vice. Hair speculates that Rose refused to marry him then in part because of this incident,34 but Williams says the false charges drew them closer together, so Huey invited Rose to meet his family.
Visiting his family, Rose underwent the “critical scrutiny of his mother and his sisters.” The family advised Huey not to marry so young. Rose decided to wait. Huey went back to Memphis irritated. Rose was hurt. Friends thought the relationship was over.
Later in the spring, however, Huey renewed his entreaties with telegrams and letters. Rose thought he was drinking and went to save him from himself. This time he won her hand, and they married in Memphis on April 12, 1913, the day she arrived.35
The preacher who officiated at the wedding said Huey had a “stirring personality.”36 Huey had borrowed money from a friend to pay for the ring and the marriage license and had nothing left to pay the preacher. Rose stepped up with the money. Unlike Huey, Rose was gentle, tactful, calm, classy, and disciplined with money. She remained in the background of the man with the stirring personality.
After they married, they took an apartment in Memphis, where they stayed until October. Again, Huey’s company suffered economic reverses (the price of cotton dropped when World War I started in Europe) and eliminated the Memphis office, assigning Huey to go on the road in Texas, Oklahoma, and south Louisiana.37 And Huey’s mother died at age fifty-two of typhoid fever. Huey and Rose moved back to the Long home in Winnfield.
In 1914, the owner of Faultless Starch died. All company activities ceased while his estate was settled. Huey obtained another job immediately but for a company that left him open to ridicule.
The Chattanooga Medicine Company sold patent medicines, including Wine of Cardui to eliminate menstrual cramps and stimulate the blood, and Black Draught, a laxative. According to the American Medical Association, Wine of Cardui consisted of 40 proof alcohol and was a “vicious fraud,” one of many perpetrated on the public in the era before regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. The AMA lost a defamation suit brought by the company, but the damages awarded were 1 cent. In south Louisiana, the company employed Dudley LeBlanc, later Huey’s political rival and still later founder of the patent medicine Hadacol.38 Economic conditions worsened, however, and the company released Huey soon after he was hired.
Out of a job and with a wife to support, Huey called Julius in a panic. Julius took a train that afternoon to Alexandria to meet him. The prospects for another selling job were slight. Julius advised law school at Tulane in New Orleans. He promised to loan Huey the money to attend. This pledge by “a brother” was even acknowledged in his autobiography.39 Huey decided to change course, this time for good.
The term “fractal” describes a shape or object that has the same structure regardless of its size; that is, whether it is microscopic or the size of a continent, breaking off any piece of it shows it to be the same structurally. Huey’s career—not just his personal characteristics, but also how his environment interacted with him—is as close to a fractal as any human being is likely to get. Aspects of his selling career recurred: early success based on talent, gall, and confidence; bad luck, overconfidence, or carelessness resulting in a crisis or reverse; the resilience, guile, and energy to surmount it; a willingness to change course; and personal growth.
It is not possible to know whether Huey selected particular sentences from Cellini because they confirmed his previously existing thoughts or whether Cellini’s ideas were so powerful that they made an impression on Huey. Either way, one can see the relationship between those sentences and the way Huey lived, the things he did, and his thoughts about his life and career.
Similarly, no one knows how many salesmanship principles Huey was taught, even though the writings advocating techniques of salesmanship and desired characteristics of salesmen were extensive by the time he entered the profession; how many he learned on his own from trial and error; or whether he was a born salesman. Whether salesmanship was encoded in his DNA or learned, all his life he used the techniques and lived the lifestyle of a salesman.
A salesman initiates cold calls; Huey the lawyer and politician initiated cold calls on political leaders, newspapermen, and other influential people. As a salesman, Huey enjoyed hotel life; as a politician, he spent more time in hotels away from his family than he did in houses that he owned. Once while working as a lawyer, he was so engrossed in a case that he moved out of his house and into a hotel for two months so he could concentrate on it.
The type of humor and publicity stunts Huey produced as a public figure were the kind that someone hanging around a hotel would display and owed something to the flair of the cake-baking contests he conducted. The social skills he developed were those of a hotel lodger. Poems he wrote about bedbugs in various hotels amused his friends. He knew how to mix drinks and “cure” someone’s hangover. He was a good dancer. As a salesman for Cottolene, Huey cooked dinner for families; the adult Huey would demonstrate how to fix salads or cook potlikker.40
A prized skill for a salesman was reading peoples’ faces. Years later as a senator, Huey was a dinner guest at Senator Burton K. Wheeler’s house. Over the protests of Wheeler’s daughter, Huey insisted on removing the flower centerpiece from the dining table so that he could see the faces of those he was talking to.41 Speaking to newspaper reporters before a speech to ten thousand farmers, Huey said: “I watch faces when I speak. . . . I will study them until I can tell just what every man will do for two hours after he leaves.”42
The adult Huey was enthusiastic, optimistic, confident, and humorous. He excited fascination amid doubts about his claims. In private conversations, he would tell stories about his salesman days in which he made himself the rascal, beguiling his listeners, both by the stories and because he would tell them. People who disliked him because of his reputation could be charmed upon meeting him once they realized that he was a showman and they decided to enjoy the theatrics.43 Jokes and stories enlivened the opening of his speeches, much as a salesman tries to develop a rapport to interest someone in buying. Publicity stunts akin to cake-baking contests generated interest in him, attracting the attention he needed so that he could make meaningful presentations.
Huey could overwhelm people with a circus whirl of talk, building a verbal fence around them until they had to agree with him. In part it was a function of energy, in which he would simply outtalk others, wearing away their resistance. In part it was a function of instantaneously analyzing what promise would appeal to a prospect or what his objections were, rebutting each objection or minimizing them by stressing other relevant benefits, an argumentative structure of a salesman.
Huey’s most significant characteristics were grit, resiliency, and dedication. Any salesman faces rejection. A good salesman recovers from it and goes on to the next prospect and sometimes returns to the rejecter and tries again. Huey was disappointed by defeat but unfazed: “evil fortune” could rage at a good man, and the “strumpet, luck,” could help a rascal. There are many examples of Huey’s continued efforts to win over political opponents and rebound from defeat.
Huey’s later political campaigns combined modern print and display advertising theories with personal speechmaking as in an advertising campaign. Marketing personnel today emphasize promising benefits, not attributes,44 and using specific language.45 Huey made political promises in specific language of benefits. Running for governor, he didn’t just advocate support for education, he promised free schoolbooks for children.
His written election material—Huey wrote his own circulars as well as his own speeches—possessed the characteristics of the most effective advertising of his time. In particular, he wrote long headlines and long copy as, for example, Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy advocated.46 If they could read, his constituents had the time to read them and, if they didn’t read them, nevertheless they knew that Huey had set forth a lot of facts in support of what he was doing.
As a salesman, whether from other political speeches, Mr. Grieff’s declamations, or from the Victor Hugo literature that he read, Huey incorporated abstract, educated, or poetic appeals. The adult Huey asserted, “He who falls in this fight falls in the radiance of the future,” and he compared the suffering of Louisiana’s people to the unrequited love of Longfellow’s Evangeline. Huey didn’t originate the idea that he needed to speak in the language of his audience and above their heads,47 but this feature of his speeches was effective.
Apart from the personal characteristics he displayed or developed, the four years Huey spent on the road were invaluable. He had traveled all over Louisiana and in other southern states. He met other salesmen, farmers, and merchants and recorded the names of people of all types. He learned, too, that the French Cajuns of southern Louisiana resisted sales pressure and preferred to relax and socialize before doing business.
Huey read the political speeches of popular politicians while still in high school.48 As a salesman in Arkansas, Huey talked to associates of Arkansas senator Jefferson Davis who, although past his prime, denounced corporations and “potbellied” bankers and asked for the votes of “rednecks” and “hillbillies.”49 (None of the rednecks and hillbillies took offense.) Huey may have seen Davis’s speeches when Davis won reelection in 1912. In Mississippi, Huey may have observed virulent racist and isolationist Senator James K. Vardaman, who dressed in immaculate clothes. (No one resented Vardaman’s expensive garb. Vardamen’s supporters identified themselves as rednecks and wore red neckerchiefs to his rallies.)50 He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1911.51
Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo repulsed Huey but used one technique that Huey later adopted. In each town, Bilbo would denounce the richest, most powerful personality. The crowd paid attention to these attacks, and then in the rest of his speech Bilbo aroused their envy and, ultimately, their support. Bilbo had run for lieutenant governor as an ally of Vardaman in 1911.52
Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi was polished, scholarly, and dignified. Professor Williams reports that he spoke in unmistakable language and had a sharp wit that Huey admired. Given the dates of his campaigns, the only time Huey could have heard him speak was in September 1912, when, as a member of Wilson’s Executive Campaign Committee in the East, he delivered eight lectures on Thomas Jefferson at Columbia University in Jackson, Mississippi. The voters reelected Senator Williams in 1916 without opposition, but Huey was off the road by then.53 It may be that Huey read accounts of Senator Williams’s (and maybe the other politicians’) speeches before, during, and after his sales career.
Law school was a big change from selling. Thinking like a lawyer is a unique way of looking at problems, relationships, and society. Law school and law practice gave Huey additional tools beyond those of a salesman. But the money pledged by Julius for law school wouldn’t last forever. Huey had to learn the law fast before his money ran out.