Huey Long, 1932-1935
Digital History ID 1162

Date:1932

Annotation: He was the Kingfish, a nickname borrowed from the “Amos and Andy” radio show.

Huey P. Long was one of the most colorful and flamboyant American politicians of the twentieth century. He owned more than a hundred suits, and wore them with orchid shirts, bizarre floral ties and spats. Sometimes he wore green pajamas to greet visitors. He had convicts replace Louisiana’s governor’s mansion with a virtual replica of the White House

To his supporters, he was a champion of the downtrodden, who taxed the rich in order to build 9,000 miles of concrete highways, put 600,000 free textbooks in the hands of poor students, and establish programs that taught 175,000 illiterate adults to read.

To his detractors, he was a buffoon, a corrupt demagogue, or even worse, a potential fascist, who used bribery, blackmail, and strong-arm tactics to get his way. One opponent called Long "a common, sordid, dirty soul with the greed and coarseness of the swine . . . the venom of the snake, the cruel cowardice of the skulking hyena." He had a “deduct" system requiring each state employee to pay 10 percent of his salary to Long’s political machine.

In Louisiana, he overthrew a political system dominated by wealthy planters and industrialists and the oil industry. State spending rose from $29 million in 1928, when he took office to $83 million in 1931. Meanwhile, the state’s debt climbed from $11 million to $125 million.

He attracted a national following with his promise to make “Every Man a King.” Millions of Americans joined “Share Our Wealth” clubs, which proposed that Congress confiscate all incomes over $1 million a year, and use the revenue to guarantee every family had a home, an old age pension, and a radio. President Roosevelt called him “one of the two most dangerous men in the country”; the other was Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

In 1935, when he was just 42 years old, Long was assassinated in the 34 story state capital that he had built by a doctor whose family had been feuding with Long’s machine. His last words were: . ''God, don't let me die,'' Huey whispered. ''I have so much to do.''

Document:

Obituary, New York Times, September 11, 1935

Of Huey Long personally it is no longer necessary to speak except with charity. His motives, his character, have passed beyond human judgment. People will long talk of his picturesque career and extraordinary individual qualities. He carried daring to the point of audacity. He did not hesitate to flaunt his great personal vainglory in public. This he would probably have defended both as a form of self-confidence, and a means of impressing the public. He had a knack of always getting into the picture, and often bursting out of its frame. There would be no end if one were to try to enumerate all his traits, so distinct and so full of color. He succeeded in establishing a legend about himself - a legend of invincibility - which it will be hard to dissipate.

It is to Senator Long as a public man, rather than as a dashing personality, that the thoughts of Americans should chiefly turn as his tragic death extinguishe the envy. What he did and what he promised to do are full of political instruction and also of warning. In his own State of Louisiana he showed how it is possible to destroy self-government while maintaining its ostensible and legal form. He made himself an unquestioned dictator, though a State Legislature was still elected by a nominally free people, as was also a Governor, who was, however, nothing but a dummy for Huey Long. In reality. Senator Long set up a Fascist government in Louisiana. It was disguised, but only thinly. There was no outward appearance of a revolution, no march of Black Shirts upon Baton Rouge, but the effectual result was to lodge all the power of the State in the hands of one man.

If Fascism ever comes in the United States it will come in something like that way. No one will set himself up as an avowed dictator, but if he can succeed in dictating everything, the name does not matter. Laws and Constitutions guaranteeing liberty and individual rights may remain on the statute books, but the life will have gone out of them. Institutions may be designated as before, but they will have become only empty shells. We thus have an indication of the points at which American vigilance must be eternal if it desires to withstand the subtle inroads of the Fascist spirit. There is no need to be on the watch for a revolutionary leader to rise up and call upon his followers to march on Washington. No such sinister figure is likely to appear. The danger is, as Senator Long demonstrated in Louisiana, that freedom may be done away with in the name of efficiency and a strong paternal government.

Senator Long's career is also a reminder that material for the agitator and the demagogue is always ample in this country. He found it and played upon it skillfully, first of all in what may be called the lower levels of society in Louisiana. Afterward, when he began to swell with national ambition, and cast about for a fetching cry, he found it, or thought he did, in his vague formulas, never worked out, about the "distribution of wealth." For a time he seemed in this way to be about to fascinate and capture a great multitude of followers, or at least endorsers, mainly in the cities of this country. There is reason to believe that his hold upon them was relaxing before his assassination. Many observers thought that he had already passed the peak of his national influence. Be that as it may, the moral of his remarkable adventure in politics remains the same. It is that in the United States we have to re-educate each generation in the fundamentals of self government and in the principles of sound finance. And we must have leaders able to defend the faith that is in them. When such masses of people are all too ready to run after a professed miracle-worker, it is essential that we have trained minds to confront the ignorant, to show to the credulous the error of their ways, and to keep alive and fresh the true tradition of democracy in which this country was cradled and brought to maturity.