There is no one deader than a dead senator. So said Don Devol, Huey’s assistant secretary.1 The hospital cleared out fast and the infighting began. Seymour Weiss oversaw the funeral arrangements and let Gerald L. K. Smith deliver the eulogy. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people—Black and white—showed up for it or to pass by the open casket, the largest Louisiana funeral of all time.2 Today Huey’s statue is perched over his tomb, facing the state capitol. The Senate was represented at the service by Caraway, Overton, Schall, Thomas, and Wheeler.
John M. Parker, J. Y. Sanders Jr., former LSU Law School dean Robert Lee Tullis, District Attorney Fred Odom, and two thousand others attended Dr. Carl Austin Weiss’s funeral, the largest funeral of all time for an assassin. Father Gassler presided.3
Robert Maestri and Seymour Weiss won the political infighting and nominated their candidates, Judge Richard Leche for governor, O. K. Allen for Huey’s unexpired Senate term, Allen Ellender for the following full Senate term, and Earl Long for lieutenant governor. Noe and others were alienated.
In the fall of 1935, Cleveland Dear (for governor) and John Sandlin (for the Senate) opposed the Long slate.4 Dear avoided criticism of Huey, promised old-age pensions, and charged that Win or Lose Corporation with Governor “Oily Oscar” Allen’s help had bilked the state.5 Leche reduced criticism of Roosevelt and promised cooperation with federal programs, defended lease 309 as aboveboard and the big fees as necessary to entice oilmen to lease state lands, and said pensions were a national issue and part of the SOW plan.
Dear and Sandlin were tagged with leading the “assassination” ticket. Dear counterattacked that a shot by one of Huey’s bodyguards ricocheted into Huey. This theory has persisted. A videotaped conference about it was held as late as 2010.6 Evidence cited included someone quoting a nurse who said that Huey pointed to his lip and said, “this is where he hit me”; the funeral director said a doctor removed large bullets (Weiss’s gun was small caliber) from Huey’s body while it was in the funeral home; Dr. Weiss’s Sunday with his family and his call to set up a surgery the next morning seem to bely any premeditation; Weiss’s car’s glove compartment was rifled, so perhaps someone grabbed the gun and planted it. The head of the state police in the 1950s quoted bodyguard John DeArmond as saying the official version was wrong,7 but DeArmond refused to confirm this under oath and didn’t say this to Professor Williams.
Deutsch supported the official version, but books by Zinman, Reed, and Pavy opined that Dr. Weiss verbally confronted Huey—perhaps impulsively—and may have struck him, after which the bodyguards shot him, with a stray bullet hitting Huey. This requires believing the hearsay testimony of the nurse and disbelieving (1) eyewitnesses Roden, Coleman, and Fournet, who described what happened, and (2) O’Connor, Lorio, and Frampton, who said that Huey wondered why the man shot him. The medical records lacked any mention of other wounds or multiple bullets, so if more bullets were removed from Huey’s body, the doctors—even the anesthesiologist who hated Huey—conspired in a cover-up. Even Huey’s last words are disputed.8
Because of the Zinman and Reed books, the state police reopened the investigation into Huey’s death in the 1990s. Pictures of Huey’s clothes were found. They showed powder burns and a single bullet hole. A ricocheted bullet leaves no powder burns. Without additional holes in Huey’s clothes, only one bullet must have hit him.
Weiss’s gun, a unique Belgian pistol, was also recovered along with a gun clip and a previously fired bullet from the Guerre family. Ballistics tests concluded that the bullet was not fired from that gun. No care had been taken to safeguard the gun or bullets as evidence. Weiss’s heirs won a court challenge against the Guerre family to recover the gun and then donated it as the assassination weapon to the Louisiana State Archives for a big tax deduction.
The issue of motive is still a puzzle. Some think that Weiss was told that Huey was going to smear a relative with being part Black, and that he killed Huey to prevent this humiliation. Pavy’s wife’s father had a Black family on the side. Most people close to Huey never heard him say that he planned to so smear Pavy. It is at odds with his efforts to recruit Black voters in the North.9 To speculate, maybe one or more of Huey’s opponents or a traitor told this falsehood to Weiss, with the deadly consequences either unforeseen or intended.
Others think that, in Europe, Weiss observed Hitler, Dollfuss, and Mussolini and brooded that Huey, too, was a fascist. Witnesses say he cried or got angry whenever Huey was mentioned.10
The gerrymander of Weiss’s father-in-law and the firing of a relative who was a school principal probably did not provide the motive. Pavy was considering retiring anyway. The family treated these matters lightly.
David Haas said that Weiss was a member of a group of five that plotted to kill Huey at the DeSoto conference. But Weiss was in Opelousas visiting with his wife’s family on one day and in his office seeing patients the other day of the conference, which is when Haas said Weiss drew the deadly straw.11
Wallace, Ponder, and Roy quoted Weiss as saying that Huey must die and he might be the one to do it or that he was seen in the capitol the day before the assassination, casing the scene.12 Weiss’s mother reported that he left the home at 9:00 p.m., to go on a sick call. If that is what he said, it was likely a premeditated lie. He went straight to the capitol.
The idea that Weiss went to the capitol rather than to his stated appointment, decided to confront Huey, hit him, got killed, and then the guards identified him, located his car, searched it, stole his gun, which coincidentally was of the same size as the mortal weapon, and then fired it or just planted it near him, all without being seen by any anti-Long politician or spectator in the crowd that immediately assembled or even the next day, seems implausible. Preparation preceded the murder, but he made no plans for a getaway.13 Jack McGuire’s forthcoming book on the assassination is likely to be definitive.
Huey’s political heirs won a smashing triumph, 362,502 votes to 176,150 in January 1936. All pro-Roosevelt, anti-Long congressmen were defeated. Allen died, however, and Noe, who succeeded briefly to the governorship, appointed Rose Long to Huey’s unexpired Senate term, and Ellender took over when that term shortly ended. Martyrdom might explain the victory. But before the election Roosevelt thought Huey’s machine would disintegrate, so he “reinvigorated” the tax prosecutions; expanded relief, CCC, and WPA programs; had work vouchers distributed by anti-Long candidates or their campaign managers; and had federal workers and relief recipients instructed to vote for Dear and Sandlin.14
Whereas Allen thought the results repudiated Roosevelt, Noe was a true SOW believer, and Smith wanted the national spotlight,15 Weiss, Maestri, Ellender, Maloney, and Leche were practical. They coveted federal public works money and patronage, and Weiss feared criminal tax prosecutions.
In a cynical deal called the second Louisiana purchase, Roosevelt—concerned about the loss—dropped the remaining tax prosecutions (civil IRS cases collected additional tax payments from a variety of leaders) and Huey’s heirs lined up behind Roosevelt. Through a series of machinations, Mayor Walmsley resigned, and Maestri became mayor of New Orleans.16 Anti-Long politicians felt double-crossed by Roosevelt.17
Roosevelt even visited New Orleans in 1936. During the entire lunch with the president of the United States at Antoine’s Restaurant, Maestri’s only remark was, “How do you like them ersters?” When Roosevelt bloviated at length about their many great qualities, Maestri replied, “So you liked them, huh?” Neither man impressed the other.18 Introduced as Huey’s bodyguard, Landry met Roosevelt and got the coldest handshake of his life.19 Perhaps because of Huey’s absence, despite Roosevelt’s 1936 electoral mandate, his reforms ended.
Leche quashed any effort to investigate Huey’s death. A few of the power laws were repealed, but not most of them. Conservatives weren’t for home rule so much as they were against Huey’s rule. With Huey’s death, the joy went out of politics, Leche said. In consolation, perhaps, or because the restraint of the IRS investigation was removed, Leche issued a contemptible quote: “When I took the oath of office, I didn’t take any vows of poverty.” The American Progress, owned by Leche, coerced advertising and subscriptions that made him rich. The superintendent of LSU Construction, George Caldwell, stole 2 percent of all contractual sums. Flaunting his wealth, he built a fancy house with gold fixtures.20
In the late 1930s, angry over the machine’s betrayal of Huey’s program and his exclusion from the ruling circle, and just as Roosevelt considered making Leche a federal judge, Noe collected hundreds of affidavits establishing theft of WPA money, materials, and labor and sent them to journalist Drew Pearson. Pearson’s stories were sensational, the talk of the country.
Sixteen months after Huey’s death, James Monroe Smith began grafting from LSU. Smith speculated on wheat futures with forged LSU bonds, betting that war in Europe would break out and the price of wheat would skyrocket. When Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler instead in 1939, announcing peace in our time, the price of wheat plummeted, and Smith lost the money.21
After ordering Smith arrested, Leche resigned the governorship, falsely claiming ill health. Grand juries defied machine prosecutors and judges to investigate corruption. Some of Huey’s old leaders (such as Harvey Fields, as a U.S. attorney) helped ferret out the corruption,22 but the most powerful ones were guilty: Leche, Weiss, and Shushan went to jail, although President Truman later pardoned Leche.23
The corruption centered on construction kickbacks and use of WPA money for private purposes, fees on the refinancing of bonds that provided no benefit to the government, and violations of production restrictions on oil. Fifty-nine indictments were filed against 149 individuals and forty-two companies and sought tax deficiencies of $6 million (the graft was multiples of this).24 There were suicides. V. O. Key Jr. entitled his chapter on Louisiana “the seamy side of democracy.”25
The number of Long leaders who stayed out of jail is not as impressive, but included Earle Christenberry, Don Devol, Allen Ellender (thoroughly investigated but spotless), John Fournet, Wade Martin, Harvey Fields, Paul Maloney, Bathtub Joe Fernandez, Alice Lee Grosjean Tharpe (fired by Leche), and Earl Long. Maestri’s mayoral term started out good—with refinanced debt and economies—but investigation of his term as conservation commissioner and his business interests with Seymour Weiss resulted in prosecutions even though he was never convicted.26
Rumors persisted that Weiss got the deduct box money and laundered it through Ralph Hitz, who owned the New Yorker Hotel, or Hitz’s lawyer, Max Stein, and used the funds to buy the Roosevelt Hotel or pay off its mortgage, held by his friend and Huey’s enemy, Samuel Zemurray. When Williams asked Weiss about the deduct box, Weiss asked him to turn off the recorder until they decided what he would say. Weiss then told Williams (as he had previously told Deutsch) a fantastic tale that Huey had moved the deduct box and lost consciousness in the hospital without telling him where it was, murmuring “later, Seymour, later.”27 Unlike the Ark of the Covenant, it was not lost. The noncash items stored there, such as the original affidavits against Farley, have been acquired at private auctions.
The legacy of Weiss, Maestri, and Leche was depressing. There was no vision beyond plunder. Lieutenant Governor Earl Long served the rest of Leche’s gubernatorial term. In 1940, reformer Sam Jones opposed Earl in the gubernatorial election, supported by Noe, Harvey Fields, and others enraged by the corruption. At one speech Earl said he hadn’t always agreed with Huey. Someone in the crowd yelled, “We always did!”28 Earl tried to deny knowledge of the graft, after which he was accused of being stupid for not seeing it, after which he said he could have gotten his but didn’t, thereby inadvertently confessing that he knew what was going on and failed to stop it.29 An FBI agent observing Earl Long in 1939 thought he was dumb, cocky without reason, and had opinions on subjects he knew nothing about.30 Earl lost the race.
Earl ran for governor again in 1948 and this time defeated Sam Jones. While Earl was better than Huey at retail politics—one-on-one communications, aided by a great memory for names and faces—mostly Earl has been unfavorably compared to him. His derivative program included some solid accomplishments, however: old-age pensions, hot school lunches, and founding the University of New Orleans, among others. Once a group of politicians were extolling Huey and bemoaning his absence when Earl in a contemplative voice remarked, “Well, Huey ain’t here, is he.”31
Earl won the governorship again in 1956. While opposing virulent segregationists Leander Perez and Willie Rainach, he displayed the Long realism about the power of the federal government to compel civil rights: “Watcha gonna do now, Leander? The feds have got the atomic bomb.” Later, during an infamous nervous breakdown in the legislature caused by a series of strokes, he spoke poetically: “After this [is] over, [Rainach will] probably go up there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at the moon and get close to God. And when you do, you got to recognize that n——s is human beings!”32 He was led off the floor. Later he was photographed traveling with a bag over his head. Placed in a mental institution by his wife, he escaped, resumed the governorship, was seen with stripper Blaze Starr, and fired those who institutionalized him. A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker chronicled the drama sympathetically, and it was unconscionably fictionalized in the 1989 movie Blaze. Earl ran for Congress in 1960 against an incumbent to rehabilitate his standing. Jack McGuire’s great book gives the best account of it.33 Earl was determined to win the campaign or die trying. He did both.
With Earl’s support in 1948, Huey’s son Russell won a Senate seat, replacing John Overton, who had died. Russell’s Senate career was the opposite of his father’s. An insider as chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, his great memory made him the Kingfish of the intricacies of the tax code; he also fought to expand Social Security and enact Medicare. Ironically, he torpedoed the Nixon-Moynihan plan to provide a minimum income for families, a variant of Huey’s idea, because he thought it would incentivize laziness, and advocated workfare instead of welfare. He kept an eye on the distribution of wealth statistics, however, which had improved after World War II government spending. Later, he helped pass employee stock-ownership legislation, quipping that his father wanted to make every man a king, but he wanted to make every man a capitalist. Russell defended the oil industry’s tax breaks. Henry Wallace told him that a fascinating videotaped interview with his father predicted the future. They couldn’t find it. Perhaps it is stored with the Ark of the Covenant.
Periodic public disagreements with his Uncle Earl were caused by Russell’s alignment with aristocratic reformers in New Orleans that Earl disliked. In one of their spats, Earl said Russell was picked too green on the vine. Russell retorted that Earl was too ripe on the vine and should be picked at once.34
Some people die leaving tantalizing questions. How would Lincoln have handled Reconstruction? Would President Kennedy have ended the war in Vietnam? Would John Lennon have made music with Kurt Cobain?
Whether Huey could have become president in 1936 or 1940 is one of those questions. The soldiers’ bonus bill was again passed and again vetoed by Roosevelt in January 1936, but this time without a speech and with a wink. Congress overrode the veto. The bonus checks were issued just in time for the 1936 elections. With $5 billion in relief money and $2 billion in the bonus, the economy had its best year under the New Deal and many thought that, with this money, Roosevelt was unbeatable. Huey had a great slogan as an antidote to politicized government expenditures: take the money and vote your conscience. In the New Mexico election of 1934,35 the WPA workers had taken the WPA money and voted against Roosevelt’s candidate. Agriculture Secretary Wallace was ordered to keep cotton prices at 12 cents a bale. One can imagine Huey in an improving economy attributing it to the soldiers’ bonus, his fight for 12 cents cotton, and his support of other progressive legislation, and asking the voters to enact the rest of his plan, a classic case of incremental change giving way to radical change in a period of rising expectations. But the voters might have considered the improvements as evidence that the New Deal was working and that they should give it more time. Social scientists note that, when a pressure group succeeds, it might thereafter weaken now that its issue is removed from contention, or it might gain strength by claiming credit for the victory.36
It is easy to assume that Huey would have won reelection in Louisiana as his heirs did. He would have been helped by the success of the LSU football team—it won all its regular season games—and the completion of the spillway and the then-spectacular Mississippi River Bridge (now the Huey P. Long Bridge) in December and January 1936.
If Huey had won some presidential primaries,37 Coughlin—who had flip-flopped against Roosevelt in August 193538—and progressives such as Wheeler, LaFollette, Amlie, Maverick, Olson, and others might have been welcomed by Roosevelt to help him fight off Huey or might have thrown in with Huey once they thought he could win.
The experience of the Union Party that was formed by Coughlin, Smith, Townsend, and Representative William Lemke after Huey’s death has no relevance to what would have happened had Huey lived. The party was formed at the last minute, on a whim of Coughlin. It failed to get on the ballot in Ohio, one of Coughlin’s strongest states, or Louisiana. It lacked the SOW membership lists. (Christenberry gave them to Rose to keep them away from Smith.) It lacked money to campaign. Its presidential candidate, Lemke, was a poor speaker.
Reflecting conventional wisdom, Schlesinger wrote that Roosevelt would have been reelected if Huey had lived.39 Conventional wisdom like this predicted Churchill’s victory in the United Kingdom elections after his heroic leadership in World War II, Thomas Dewey’s defeat of Truman in 1948, and Hillary Clinton’s victory over Donald Trump in 2016.
Most contemporaries commenting on Huey’s death acknowledged his intelligence and deplored both his assassination and his “dictatorship.” Hugh Johnson and others respected his open advocacy. Some said he created the conditions that caused his own death. One congressman said Huey got what was coming to him.40
The demagogue charge has become a verdict, too. In 1916, Huey said any champion of the people would be called a demagogue, whereas defenders of the status quo would be christened as statesmen. There is truth in that, but many of those called demagogues have not been friends of the people.
“Demagogue” has been defined as one who appealed to the “rabble.” Other definitions have emphasized evil traits of the leader. One academic paper listed these characteristics: simplicity; repetition; verbal perpetuation of problems; evasion of issues; invective; emotionalism; scapegoating; attacking a corporate enemy; appeals to religious, class, or race hatreds; exploitation of men and issues; common-man appeal, and anti-intellectualism.41 This is too broad to be useful. Simplicity was one of Roosevelt’s communication strengths. Repetition is required to break through the clutter of competing messages. The emotional identification with one’s audience is useful.
Lies, irrelevancy, and destructiveness are hallmarks of demagoguery. Joseph McCarthy said he had in his hand a list of communists in the State Department, but he didn’t. Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson said he would punch King George of England in the snout. It was a lie because he was not going to do it, and it was irrelevant because it wouldn’t do anyone any good. James Vardaman, Thomas Heflin, and Theodore Bilbo played on demeaning stereotypes about Black people to incite hatred. The link from that to lynching can be drawn. Academics call it stochastic terrorism.
A leader denouncing racism might have moved public opinion one degree or more away from racism or toward tolerance, but Abraham Lincoln articulated a reason not to: “A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot safely be disregarded.”42 A lawyer would call this a rule of necessity. During the 1932 Caraway campaign, Huey used the N-word and portrayed Black people as comical connivers in two anecdotes intended to be humorous. This wasn’t constructive, but his anecdotes wouldn’t have incited lynching.
A sense of humor can be irrelevant and conceal issue evasion, but when Huey said opponents of a new governor’s mansion reminded him of the boardinghouse operator who told his boarders that his dirty towels were good enough for the prior boarders and therefore should be good enough for them, this humorous barb got right to the issue. While Hitler, Mussolini, and Joseph McCarthy, for example, sometimes displayed a sense of humor, more often their speeches were serious and fanatical. The clearest difference between Willie Stark of All the King’s Men and Huey was that Willie didn’t display much humor, joy, and enthusiasm. This shouldn’t surprise. Willie was modeled after the bronze man of Greek mythology, Talos, an automaton who guarded the island of Crete and dispensed a remorseless justice, featured in book 5 of Spencer’s Faerie Queen. Huey was no automaton; he had fun.
Divorced from the concepts of truth, relevancy, and destructiveness, scapegoating, invective, class-based appeals, and emotionalism are problematic indicators of demagoguery. If billionaires are paying no taxes, is it a demagogic appeal to argue that this is wrong? If England is occupying India, is it a demagogic appeal to say that India is for the Indians? Invective against injustice, oppression, crime, poverty, illiteracy, or colonialism ought to be applauded. Jesus could have approached the “moneychanger problem” in a “nuanced” way without calling them a den of robbers.
Beals said Huey was “called a demagogue too freely, or at least without proper examination of the word”:
Is the man who has the power to rouse the multitude necessarily a demagogue? Is the one who promises what he cannot fulfill more of a demagogue than the one who deceives the public without such promises? Certainly no President in the history of the Republic has so departed from his original campaign promises as has President Roosevelt. Is there any worse demagogue in America than Herbert Hoover with his inane platitudes about liberty. . . . Is not a demagogue a thousand times more desirable in public life than a gross machine politician like Mr. Farley?43
Ernest Bormann wrote an MA thesis about Huey’s reply to Hugh Johnson—which included emotional, class-based appeals, invective, and simplifying analogies—and concluded that, while Huey was not a “good man” like Gandhi (who is?),44 he used appropriate rhetorical techniques.45
Huey’s program included relevant, realistic appeals for achievable goals, and then he delivered on his promises. Joseph McCarthy never delivered because he had nothing to deliver. Racist demagogues not only failed to deliver but led their followers down a path of inevitable defeat. The feds had the power, and Black people are human beings.
The relevance, specificity, and realism of Huey’s program belies the demagogue label and frightens the ordinary politician. Most politicians follow the FDR model and straddle the issues. Huey’s approach was to find some issue on which to confront his opponents, something on which they could not or would not retreat, and on which he believed that he could convince a majority of voters before the next election that he was right. Many historians believe that SOW was a lie, but it was closer to the truth than the economic orthodoxy of the time or other prescribed remedies such as the NRA. Huey offered his program two years before any presidential campaign, with plenty of time to debate it. Isn’t that how democracy should work?
At every level of achievement, Huey fought on behalf of capitalist underdogs, challenged the biggest target, was attacked, capitalized on the attacks, won, overreached, was counterattacked, recovered, grew, gained new strength, and advanced to his next goal. At each stage, he used the tools of salesmen and lawyers, measured the circumstances, planned what to do, disregarded reprimands, refused to play it safe, and got things done.
It was a series of all-in gambles, akin to what Jim Collins in the business world calls the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG). Collins believes companies that make the jump from good companies to great companies have a BHAG, but he concedes that he hasn’t measured the number of companies that had a BHAG and failed, when they might have survived as good companies.46 Most politicians don’t emulate Huey. The Saturday Evening Post’s article about Lost Leaders could be written today. It is safer to be mediocre or above average.
It is time to retire the historical caricature of Huey as a menace. It took Huey seventeen years to attain his preeminence in Louisiana (population 2.2 million), which is less significant than Mayor Daley’s control over Chicago (in 1955 or so, population 3.5 million), and Huey endured an indictment, electoral defeats (1924 and January 1934), impeachment (1929), and legislative failure (1930). His opposition never bent, so, ultimately, he broke it. Huey could not have attained a similar preeminence over the Congress, representing forty-eight states.
Huey’s humor, enthusiasm, optimism, perseverance, resilience, intelligence, energy, originality, and dedication to a worthy cause of helping 99 percent of the people are admirable. Huey proposed original but realistic ideas. Huey’s realism included its cousin: cynicism. Ruthlessness was caused or necessitated in part by the unreasonable behavior of his opponents and in part was ingrained by heredity or environment. Huey had a temper and, for several years before 1934, a drinking problem. His concept of friendship approximated Cellini’s extravagant description. Huey said he could handle his enemies; it was his friends who got him in trouble.47 Huey had some strange ideas: that someone’s deformities meant that the Lord had marked him48 and that the state government and its agencies belonged to him. Faults shouldn’t obscure Huey any more than describing Roosevelt’s great qualities should blind us to his flaws.
Whether as caricature or not, Huey’s memory has outlived most of his contemporaries: Ashurst, Barkley, Byrnes, Connally, Frazier, George, Harrison, Lewis, McKellar, Reynolds, Robinson, Tydings, Walsh, bit players all. Huey bent the national debate and forced Roosevelt to the best principles of the Banking Act and the second New Deal in ways that no one else did.
Tracing Huey’s ideas from 1928 to 1935 (or from 1932 to 1935) shows a phenomenal analytical development. Huey’s ideas wrapped around problems. They were big ideas. Many of them were obvious, or at least appear so now. For people unhappy with the Louisiana workers’ compensation law, the obvious solution was to ask some expert what a better law would look like, draft a proposal, give it to a sympathetic representative, and ask others to support it. To promote LSU, Huey started with the obvious symbols: the band and the football team. In the Depression, too few had too much money and most of the people lacked it. The obvious solution was to tax the wealthy and provide everyone else with a minimum.
It is speculative to wonder whether Huey read the Saturday Evening Post story about Obvious Adams in April 1916. Obvious Adams was a fictional advertising executive who became successful because he developed big, obvious solutions. It became a small cult classic.49 It required sustained, concentrated thought to produce big ideas. A big idea explodes in a listener or reader’s consciousness. Whether Huey read that story or not, he had the capacity to think through a problem, and his proposals exploded into the public’s consciousness. To a significant extent, he obtained power—rising from his inconsequential town and family—from his ideas.
Persistence and sincerity were other notable qualities. Huey advocated redistribution of wealth in 1918, 1919, and during the middle of the general prosperity during the Coolidge administration, long before the Depression. He outlawed mortgage deficiency judgments and restrictive employment covenants, which benefit the class of people Huey tried to help. He didn’t have to pass these laws to portray himself as their champion.50
Huey was willing to face criticism, to be considered a nuisance, to fight for his ideas. There is something admirable about a man who would give a speech for hours and drop exhausted into his seat. There is something courageous about a man who would take on the entire U.S. Senate. There is something revolting about senators who agreed with him but stayed silent, leaving him to fight alone.
Resilience is easily stated as a trait. But to see someone engage in a sustained period of hard work to survive a bad time—even if self-inflicted—such as his post-impeachment work in 1929 and early 1930 and his exertions in 1934 after the disastrous events of 1933, is remarkable.
Huey’s personal growth included ending his undisciplined life as a salesman to attend law school and curbing his overbearing conduct after his impeachment. When drinking got the best of him in 1933, he stopped. His relationship with his wife must have been strained between 1928 and 1933 but, if never normal, it improved in 1934 and 1935. Huey spent more time with his children than Williams relates, although not as much as they would have liked.51
Revolutions sometimes result in tyranny, and this was the charge leveled at Huey, despite the concession that he enjoyed majority support. The Jim Crow laws represented a majoritarian or legislative tyranny. The concentration camps set up by Roosevelt to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II were executive tyranny. The Supreme Court engaged in judicial tyranny by striking down all New Deal legislation and allowed the Jim Crow laws and concentration camps. While the three branches of government are designed to check and balance each other, if erroneous decisions are made by the president, Congress, or the Supreme Court, they can frustrate the legitimate decisions of the majority or permit the violation of individual rights.
In the aftermath of Roosevelt’s politicization of relief funds and government officials, the Hatch Act was passed in 1939 to prohibit this. After Roosevelt left office, the Constitution was amended to restrict presidents to two terms. After Huey, some civil service and home rule protections were enacted, but nothing was done to improve the independence of the judiciary or tax assessors, and the state police force still exists. Criticism on these issues was overblown. The Supreme Court now believes that Jim Crow laws are unconstitutional. After Roosevelt, the government admitted that putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps was wrong. After Huey, LSU apologized for expelling students in the Reveille controversy.
Is Huey relevant now? A politician who today talked about a louse in Davy Crocket’s eyebrow would be laughed off the stage and screen. Huey’s style was a product of his times, as his specific plan resulted from the general ideas of William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford, John Truslow Adams, Felix Frankfurter, Rexford Guy Tugwell, Marriner Eccles, William Allen White, and many others. An article about Ford’s ideas in Collier’s in the early 1920s reads almost like Huey’s SOW plan, although the author thought it would occur naturally and voluntarily.52 Whether that idea is strong enough or prevalent enough today to support a political candidate or whether there is some other strong or prevalent idea that could support a political candidate now is well beyond the scope of this book.
Harry Truman in 1948 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 showed the power of advocating a program before an actual campaign, however, as Huey did.53 Truman used Congress to dramatize his proposals to get elected. Reagan used his electoral mandate to get much of his program enacted by a Congress dominated by the opposing political party.
Former president Donald Trump has been compared to Huey. There are a few superficial similarities: domination of the media, a persuasive slogan, a warts-and-all-authenticity, demeaning nicknames for opponents, the violation of norms. But Trump’s criticism of ethnic groups (Huey made ethnic groups feel appreciated),54 incompetence in dealing with the COVID crisis, and solicitude for the wealthy distinguish him from Huey. Trump showed little growth or evidence of study. Without legal training, Trump failed to think like a lawyer when many of the issues he confronted were legal ones or had important legal components. People who worked closely with Huey never called him a moron, and opponents conceded Huey’s legal skill, capacity for cold logic, and that he had a certain “genius” for governing. Huey’s promised benefits were more specific than Trump’s and were immediately achievable, and his legal skill, creativity, and energy in proposing and then implementing these solutions were evident.
Much like Trump, Huey capitalized on resentments held by farmers, laborers, and veterans, but he directed those resentments against the wealthy and powerful, and government bureaucrats. Huey wanted real jobs because, while relief was better than starvation, it often consisted of “sweeping leaves from one side of the street to the other.” Huey had a way of blending resentments against big government with those against big business in ways that appeal to members of the left and the right.
Anti-Long senator Cecil Morgan and journalist Harnett Kane believed that Louisianans feared Huey because of his vindictiveness and his power over the courts, the banks, local government, the taxing authorities, and the police.55 Facing Huey as inquisitor at the murder-plot hearings in February 1935, however, the anti-Longs displayed an insouciant, carefree insolence. The number of politicians who broke with Huey at various points, including in 1935, when he was at the height of his power, diminishes the accusation. Stories in 1935 described significant acceptance of Huey by the wealthy.
There was the fear that Huey could not be beaten. He was always one step ahead of his opponents, was resourceful and persistent, and would pay the price to win. Even after being appointed counsel for Standard Oil, Cecil Morgan “seethed” as he described Huey’s cleverness.56
The various individuals and groups plotting to kill Huey or threatening to do so manifested fear and rage. Assassination plotter Dave Haas equated Huey with the Kennedys. One is reminded of the newspaper ads accusing Kennedy of treason before his visit to Dallas in 1963.
Today, fear and rage—and an awful illogic—now infect some on every side of political issues. Discourse now often consists of shouting confirmatory facts that fit a predefined worldview and disregarding facts that don’t. The left and the right often select ridiculous representatives of their opponent to mock, evading legitimate debate. Huey and the forces that made him helped usher in this distasteful aspect of modern politics. The lack of a sensible worldliness is now characteristic of American democracy. This could be a tragedy in the making, a tragedy All the King’s Men reflected, a tragedy that Louisiana already experienced.