Huey Pierce Long, Jr Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

(Born: August 30, 1893 ,Winnfield, Louisiana, USA Died: September 10, 1935 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA) Huey Pierce Long Jr., was an American politician from the U.S. state of Louisiana. A Democrat, he was noted for his radical populist policies. He served as governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and as a U.S. senator from 1932 to 1935. Though a backer of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, Long split with Roosevelt in June 1933 and planned to mount his own presidential bid. Long created the Share Our Wealth program in 1934, with the motto "Every Man a King," proposing new income redistribution measures in the form of taxes on large corporations and individuals of great wealth to curb the poverty and crime resulting from the Great Depression. Charismatic and immensely popular for his social reform programs and willingness to take forceful action, Long was accused by his opponents of dictatorial tendencies for his near-total control of the state government. At the height of his popularity, the colorful and flamboyant Long was shot on September 8, 1935, at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge; he died two days later at the age of 42. His last words were reportedly, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do."

Early Life & Legal Career

He was born on August 30, 1893, in Winnfield, Winn Parish, Louisiana, a rural community in the north-central part of the state. He was the son of Huey Pierce Long and Caledonia Tison, and was the seventh of nine children in a farm-owning middle-class family. He attended local schools, where he was an excellent student and said to have a photographic memory. In 1910, Long was expelled from school for distributing a petition against adding a 12th year of schooling as a graduation requirement.

Long won a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University (LSU), but he was unable to afford the textbooks required for attendance. Instead, he spent the next four years as a traveling salesman, selling books, canned goods and patent medicines, as well as working as an auctioneer.

In 1913, Huey Long married Rose McConnell. She was a stenographer who had won a baking contest that he promoted to sell "Cottolene," one of the most popular of the early vegetable shortenings to come on the market. The Longs had a daughter, also named Rose, and two sons, Russell and Palmer.

When sales jobs grew scarce during World War I, Long attended seminary classes at Oklahoma Baptist University at the urging of his mother, a devout Baptist. However, he concluded he was not suited to preaching.

Huey P. Long briefly attended the University of Oklahoma School of Law in Norman, Oklahoma and later Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. In 1915, he convinced a board to let him take the bar exam after only a year at Tulane. He passed and began private practice in Winnfield and later in Shreveport, where he spent 10 years representing small plaintiffs against large businesses, including workers' compensation cases. He often said proudly that he never took a case against a poor man.

He won notoriety by taking on the powerful Standard Oil Company, which he sued for unfair business practices. Over the course of his career, Long continued to challenge Standard Oil's influence in state politics and charged the company with exploiting the state's vast oil and gas resources..

Political Career & Rise to Power

Long was elected to the Louisiana Railroad Commission in 1918 at age 25 on an anti-Standard Oil platform. (The commission was renamed the Louisiana Public Service Commission in 1921.) His campaign for the Railroad Commission used techniques he would perfect later in his political career: heavy use of printed circulars and posters, an exhausting schedule of personal campaign stops throughout rural Louisiana, and vehement attacks on his opponents. He used his position on the commission to enhance his populist reputation as an opponent of large oil and utility companies, fighting against rate increases and pipeline monopolies. In the gubernatorial election of 1920, he campaigned prominently for John M. Parker, but later became his vocal opponent after the new governor proved to be insufficiently committed to reform; Long called Parker the “chattel” of the corporations.

As chairman of the commission in 1922, Long won a lawsuit against the Cumberland Telephone Company for unfair rate increases, resulting in cash refunds of $440,000 to 80,000 overcharged customers. Long successfully argued the case on appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, prompting Chief Justice William Howard Taft to describe Long as one of the best legal minds he had ever encountered.

Election of 1924

Long ran for governor of Louisiana in the election of 1924, attacking Parker, Standard Oil and the established political hierarchy both local and state-wide. In that campaign he became one of the first Southern politicians to use radio addresses and sound trucks in a campaign. Around this time, he also began wearing a distinctive white linen suit. He came in third, due perhaps in part to his unwillingness to take a stand either for or against the Ku Klux Klan, whose prominence in Louisiana had become the primary issue of the campaign. Long cited rain on election day as suppressing voter turnout in rural north Louisiana, where voters were unable to reach the polls on dirt roads that had turned to mud. Instead, he was reelected to the Public Service Commission.

Election of 1928

Long spent the intervening four years building his reputation and his political organization, meanwhile supporting Catholic candidates in an effort to build support in Catholic south Louisiana. In 1928 he again ran for governor, campaigning with the slogan, "Every man a king, but no one wears a crown," a phrase adopted from populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Long's attacks on the utilities industry and corporate privileges were enormously popular, as was his depiction of the wealthy as "parasites" who grabbed more than their fair share of the public wealth while marginalizing the poor. Long crisscrossed the state, campaigning in rural areas disenfranchised by the New Orleans-based political establishment, known as the "Old Regulars," who controlled the state through alliances with sheriffs and other local officials. At the time, the entire state had roughly 500 km (300 miles) of paved roads and only three major bridges. The illiteracy rate was the highest in the nation (25 percent), as most families could not afford to purchase the textbooks required for their children to attend school. A poll tax hindered the poor from voting.

Long won by tapping into the class resentment of rural Louisianians and by giving them hope for a better future in the form of government services long ignored by Louisiana's traditional political leaders. He won by the largest margin in Louisiana history, 126,842 votes compared with 81,747 for Riley J. Wilson and 80,326 for Oramel H. Simpson. Long's support bridged the traditional north-south, Protestant-Catholic divide of Louisiana politics, and replaced it with a class-based schism between poor farmers and the wealthy planters, businessmen and machine politicians who supported his opponents.

Huey P. Long as Governor, 1928-32

As governor, Long inherited a dysfunctional system of government tainted by influence peddling. Corporations often wrote the laws governing their practices and rewarded part-time legislators and other officials with jobs and bribes. Long moved quickly to consolidate his power, firing hundreds of opponents in the state bureaucracy from cabinet-level heads of departments and board members to rank-and-file civil servants and state road workers. Like previous governors, he filled the vacancies with patronage appointments from his own network of political supporters. Every state employee who depended on Long for a job was expected to pay a portion of his or her salary directly into Long’s political war-chest; these funds were kept in a famous locked “deduct box” to be used at his discretion for political purposes.

Once his control over the state’s political apparatus was strengthened, Long pushed a number of bills through the 1928 session of the state legislature fulfilling some of his campaign promises, including a free textbook program for schoolchildren, night courses for adult literacy and a supply of cheap natural gas for the city of New Orleans. He also began an unprecedented building program of roads, bridges, hospitals and educational institutions. His bills met opposition from many legislators and the media, but Long used aggressive tactics to ensure passage of the legislation he favored. He would show up unannounced on the floor of the legislature or in house committees, corralling reluctant legislators and bullying opponents. These tactics were unprecedented, but they resulted in the passage of most of Long’s legislative agenda. By delivering on his campaign promises, Long achieved hero status among the state's majority rural poor population.

When Long secured passage of his free textbook program, the school board of Caddo Parish (home of conservative Shreveport), sued to prevent the books from being distributed, saying they would not accept "charity" from the state. Long responded by withholding authorization for the siting of a nearby Air Force base until the parish accepted the books.

Impeachment

In 1929, Long called a special session of the legislature in order to enact a new five-cent per barrel "occupational license tax" on production of refined oil, in order to help fund his social programs. The bill met with a storm of opposition from the state’s oil interests, and opponents in the legislature moved to impeach Long on charges ranging from blasphemy to corruption, bribery and misuse of state funds. Long tried to cut the session short, but after an infamous brawl on the floor of the legislature known as "Bloody Monday," the legislature voted to remain in session and proceed with the impeachment. Long took his case to the people, using his trademark printed circulars and a speaking tour around the state to argue that the impeachment was an attempt by Standard Oil and other corporate interests to prevent his social programs from being carried out. One of his famous speeches was, "Your will is my strength and your need is my justice. They want to ruin me so they can ruin you, and I won't let them!" Several of the charges passed in the House, but once the trial began in the Senate, Long produced the “Round Robin,” a document signed by over one-third of the senators, stating that they would vote "not guilty" no matter what the evidence, because the charges did not merit removal from office and they considered the trial to be unconsitutional. With a two-thirds majority required to convict now impossible, Long’s opponents halted the proceedings. The Round Robin signers were later rewarded with state jobs or other favors. Some legislators claimed they had been offered $25,000 to vote for conviction.

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