Huey Long: The Kingfish

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American politics rarely features controversial heroes. Figures like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt have had public opinion settle around them, offering rosy soliloquies of their patriotic fortitude that echo through generations. The American institution rarely examines the complex reality of its historical figures. This is not possible with today’s protagonist, a modern-day Machiavelli whose quick rise and fall to power forces us to weigh his intents against his methods. He was a smooth-talking Louisianan who considered himself a righteous everyman, both before and after he took complete control over his state’s political machine. He threatened assassinations, installed puppet governors, and ruthlessly taxed enemy factions, but it was all for the greater good of his people. Is there room in a republic for autocratic benevolence? You be the judge as we examine the life and times of Huey Long.

Huey Pierce Long was born on August 30, 1893, in Winfield, Louisiana. Long’s family was quite large; his mother, Caledonia Tisson, and father, Huey Senior, had nine living children, with Huey being the seventh. At the turn of the century, much of Louisiana was poor and uneducated, but even by local standards, Winfield was a tough place to make a living. The Long family was far from rich but was well-off relative to their surrounding community. Huey Senior and Caledonia made a living as livestock farmers and lived in a small southern manor house. While the Longs rarely had trouble making ends meet, many people around them did, which greatly influenced young Huey.

One story recounts how, as an eight-year-old boy, he watched his neighbor lose his house and farm at auction when the neighbor failed to pay his debts on time. The farmer begged to be given his home back, swearing that he would pay his debts if he just had a few more days to gather the money. Just as the sheriff was about to stop the auction and grant the neighbor’s request, a creditor made a bid, winning the farm. As an adult, Huey Long recalled the event, remarking that he was horrified.

Winfield helped mold Huey Long in more ways than one. It wasn’t just the poverty around him; it was also the unfiltered contempt that many of the northern Louisianans felt for their richer southern neighbors. Louisiana has never really been a wealthy state, but much of the money it does have is concentrated in large population hubs like Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Many people from quaint, poor northern Louisiana towns like Winfield often resented the upper class that primarily resided closer to the coast.

Take the Civil War as an example. Like most of its southern neighbors, Louisiana seceded from the Union and fought as part of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. When state representatives gathered for a vote on secession, delegates from Winfield voted to remain in the Union—not because of any forward-thinking positions on slavery or states’ rights, but as the Winfield delegate put it, “Who wants to fight to keep the wealthy planters?” It wasn’t a civil rights argument at all; it was class warfare.

In the late 19th century, Winfield and the surrounding area became a local hub of populist politics. In 1912, the local parish actually supported the Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs over all other candidates. It was not a place that trusted corporate priorities or power structures. Those who did have jobs worked in blue-collar industries at local lumber mills and salt mines. Huey Long’s worldview was highly influenced by his childhood in Winfield. He was a curious child, exploring the farm and the world around him, asking questions and listening to political philosophy from a young age.

Public schooling was sporadic in rural parts of Louisiana at the turn of the century, so Huey was homeschooled until adolescence, as was common for many boys at the time. When he finally reached public school, he was initially praised as gifted, with an uncommonly good memory. He routinely asked teachers to allow him to skip coursework or even entire grades when he was already familiar with the material. At Winfield High, Huey began to really use his intelligence on the debate team. At one point, he traveled to Baton Rouge and finished third in a statewide debate contest, earning himself an academic scholarship to attend LSU after high school.

Unfortunately, he would never be able to cash in on the winnings; he couldn’t afford the textbooks or room and board. Huey returned to Winfield with his only remaining prize being the increased attention from female classmates that skilled high school debate club winners are accustomed to. Huey soldiered on throughout his remaining coursework, graduating from Winfield High School in 1910 after completing the 11th grade—or at least that’s what he thought. Just as Huey Long finished the 11th grade and was set to receive his diploma, the state board of education passed a new law saying that the 12th grade would be the new ending point for high school students. Huey, the skilled debater, thought the new law was unreasonable and began circulating a formal petition denouncing the idea of the 12th grade, formally criticizing the principal and teachers at Winfield High. Ultimately, Huey got his wish; he never had to complete the 12th grade because the school expelled him. As a result, he never graduated from high school.

With Huey Long’s high school education officially over, he knew he needed to find a job. Like many protagonists in biographies, Mr. Long was a multi-talented man who could adequately perform quite a few tasks. He signed up for just about any job that didn’t involve farm work. He wasn’t keen on chores around the house as a child, and he wasn’t about to sign up for any more of it as an adult. Long wanted to be out in the world, around people and things; he never wanted to end up back at home surrounded by chickens and goats. So at the age of 17, Long became a traveling salesman, touring much of the American South and selling everything from cooking sherry to home medicines. It was a job he had quite a bit of natural talent for, and as such, he found success right out of school for a solid year. But as the economy stalled and sales became harder, Long was forced out of his budding young sales career and had to consider a new line of work.

His mother, who had always hoped her seventh son would use his intellect and communication skills in a more righteous calling, pushed him to move to Oklahoma so that he might live with his older brother George and study the Bible. In the fall of 1911, he began attending seminary lectures at Oklahoma Baptist College in Shawnee. Well, “attending lectures” is a rather loose way of putting it; Long quickly deduced that he was no man of the cloth and began skipping classes. He washed out of seminary school after one semester, much to the chagrin of his devout Baptist mother. But before he left Oklahoma, he thought he might want to give law school a try. George lent him a hundred dollars and pointed him toward the University of Oklahoma School of Law, where he similarly lasted one semester. He received average grades and didn’t learn very much due to a slew of distractions ranging from girls to gambling. He enjoyed the local political scene in Norman, where the University of Oklahoma is, but he never focused enough on law while he was in town to really get serious about a career in litigation. He lost his hundred dollars in a gambling ring, leaving town to return to a promising sales position that had opened up for him.

Long was still a teenager when he left Oklahoma, but he had a real mind for sales. He learned early on that dressing well enhanced his credibility as a salesman, and that playing music could help him draw a crowd and foster a commercially appealing atmosphere. He tapped into his natural powers of empathy to connect with potential clients. As a traveling salesman who encountered working-class people all over the American South, he quickly developed a sense of fellowship with everyday Americans. There was another relationship that Huey Long was quickly developing too—a blooming romance with a woman named Rose McConnell. Long and McConnell met in 1910 early in his sales career at a bake sale organized in Shreveport to promote the sale of a large substitute called Kotlin. Huey had a little bit of game, so he awarded the top two prizes to Rose and her mother. They married two and a half years later on April 12, 1913, at the Gayosa Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. They went on to have three children named Rose, Russell, and Palmer.

Sales remained a good career choice for Long, but it also continued to prove inconsistent and fickle. In 1914, the economy again threw Huey and Rose out of the industry and back toward formal schooling. This time, he had a much clearer plan. His eldest brother, Julius, who was already a working attorney, helped him create a streamlined law school outline specifically targeting course material that he would need to know in order to pass the bar exam. Rose moved to New Orleans, and just three semesters later, in 1915, Huey had cobbled together enough knowledge and information to pass the bar exam. He was 21 at the time.

Long returned to Winfield, now equipped with the legal tools he needed to grind his axe against the corporate interests he had grown to loathe over the course of his young life. He began building his reputation as a lawyer by representing poor, powerless, or disenfranchised Louisianans. He opened a law office in the space above the Winfield Bank, which was run by his uncle George. He promptly sent waves through both the community and his own family by representing a widow in court against the very bank he shared a building with. His uncle was incredulous that young Huey had taken the case, as it appeared to represent a conflict of interest. Huey remarked that his uncle should feel complimented.

After three years in Winfield, he and Rose moved to Shreveport, where they had more clients and resources at their disposal. He also began one of his life’s biggest conflicts—his ongoing standoff with John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Around the time that Long moved to Shreveport, he invested about a thousand dollars into a local well that eventually struck oil. Long was set to make a major profit off the investment, but Rockefeller’s Standard Oil wasn’t interested in buying the oil from this particular well, making it theoretically valuable but practically useless. Long had made a sizable investment and gambled correctly, yet he still lost his money because of the whims of Standard Oil. His righteous anger, alongside his established animosity towards power and corporations, touched off an ongoing feud that he would continue to stoke for the remainder of his life. He called Standard Oil an invisible empire run by petroleum magnates.

He made his first formal shot across the bow in 1921 when he began representing a small oil company that had a disputed lease with Standard Oil. Long lost this court case, which only fueled his hatred more. But there was one interest for Huey Long that captured his attention much more than legal battles and oil wells. What began as a natural curiosity for politics had grown into a full-fledged career interest, and Long was no longer content to attack the power structure as a private citizen; he wanted to do it as an elected official.

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Huey Long officially became a politician when he earned elections at the State Railroad Commission in 1918 at the age of 25. He used his position on the three-man board to limit corporate monopolies and reduce utility rates for average households. He believed he was the sort of populist everyman that 20th-century American politics should rely upon. Just as Long had quickly gained local acclaim as a populist-minded attorney, he similarly gained statewide notoriety for the help he raised from his elected position. The State Railroad Commission was eventually re-christened as the broader Public Service Commission, and Long became its chairman in 1922. His first act was to sue the Cumberland Telephone Company for raising their rates by 20% for no particular reason. His first attempt lost, but he argued his appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court and won. Cumberland was forced to cut refund checks totaling $440,000, which were distributed to 80,000 customers who had been overcharged. Subsequently, Chief Justice William Howard Taft described Long as the most brilliant lawyer who ever practiced before the United States Supreme Court.

The Cumberland case won Long thousands of statewide fans, so he decided to run for governor in 1924. As he had done his entire life, he mocked the ruling political establishment in New Orleans, labeling them as toothless pawns of malevolent companies like Standard Oil. Ultimately, he finished third in the race, missing the runoff by about 7,000 votes. Long blamed the poor weather, which wasn’t an entirely unfair observation on his part. With only 200 miles of paved roads in all of Louisiana at the time, heavy downpours transformed dirt roads into intractable muddy messes. Given that the core of Long’s base was the rural populist contingent, the weather almost certainly impacted his showing to some degree.

But the weather wouldn’t be a problem four years later when Long successfully took the mantle from acting Governor Oramel Simpson. By 1928, Long had carefully constructed a massive populist alliance in Louisiana. He spent four years traipsing across the isolated northern parishes, building his coalition by a dozen blue-collar workers at a time. He also improved his reputation in the more gilded southern parts of the state by supporting Roman Catholic candidates in an area dominated by traditional Spanish and French heritage. He tied everything together with a slogan he adopted from 19th-century populist William Jennings Bryan: “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.” Long won the Democratic primary election on January 17, 1928, despite the fact that it was a heated three-way election. Long won by what was at the time the largest margin in state history. Predictably, he cruised in the general election, winning more than 95% of the vote over Republican candidate Etienne Claire. At 34 years old, Huey Long became the youngest governor in the history of Louisiana—a record that still holds to this day.

Long’s ascendance to the governorship was a radical departure for state politics. Since Louisiana had become a state 116 years prior, it had more or less been governed by the same corrupt members of the “good old boys” network, all of whom had clear ties to the church, the upper class, or powerful corporate interests. Long’s election undid all of that, giving the average Louisianan a much more accessible ally in the governor’s mansion. Most Louisiana residents needed that ally in the late 1920s. Louisiana was arguably the poorest state in the U.S., with grossly underfunded public works and public education systems. Those who could afford to navigate their children to and from school every day still had to purchase their own textbooks among other supplies, making regular primary schools a huge burden for most families. Twenty-five percent of adults could not read. Massive bridge tolls limited people’s ability to move around in their own communities, and poll taxes had disenfranchised poor people of all racial backgrounds. And keep in mind, these were the good times—this was in 1928, just months before the start of the Great Depression. Everything was about to get a whole lot worse.

Long had solutions to many of these problems, but his methodology is what catapulted him to national fame almost immediately. He fired hundreds of old guard bureaucrats, replacing them with friends and young populists who he believed would serve his vision of what Louisiana politics could be. After consolidating his executive power and installing yes-men wherever he could, he began an ambitious 1929 legislative session designed to push through a number of bills that he had promised in his campaign, focusing on economic stimulus and improved state infrastructure. He lowered one bridge toll from $1.40 to $0.60. He instituted night courses for adult literacy that taught more than 100,000 people to read by the end of his term. He levied a new tax on Standard Oil that paid for all textbooks for grade school children. Long was undoubtedly enacting large-scale wealth distribution—a political prospect that rarely succeeds on American soil. But Louisiana was so fundamentally broken by a hundred years of corruption that most everyday people didn’t seem to mind.

That’s not to say that everyone was on board, however. Long’s strongman methods were well-meaning, but they were also democratically dangerous, and it didn’t take long for an organized political movement to rise up against him. In 1929, while Long was trying to levy a new occupational license tax against his friends at Standard Oil, his project was met with cries of foul play. Opponents in the legislature called for an impeachment on the grounds of abuse of power, among several other charges, and the impeachment was sustained with a 67-13 vote. When some in the Long camp discerned that the electric voting machine used for the impeachment vote may have been tampered with, an all-out brawl broke out on the floor of the state house, which was locally christened “Bloody Monday.” It reached its crescendo when Huey’s brother Earl bit a legislator on the neck. No word on whether or not Earl Long was secretly a vampire; I assume this will be covered in a future season of “True Detective.”

Regarding the ongoing political charges, Huey continued to speak directly to the people of Louisiana, where he knew he could best plead his case. This money he was trying to earmark was for them, the people, and it was a good cause—social programs that would help lift Louisiana out of the icy grips of poverty. Ultimately, the state house passed seven articles of impeachment to the Senate, which immediately declared its intent to acquit Long of the charges. Regardless of whether or not he was guilty in their eyes, the impeachment should have