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Huey Pierce Long Jr
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Continued Control Over Louisiana, 1932-1935
Long continued to maintain effective control of Louisiana while he was a senator. Though he had no constitutional authority to do so, he continued to draft and press bills through the Louisiana legislature, which remained in the hands of Long's allies. He made frequent trips back to Baton Rouge to pressure the legislature into continuing to enact his legislation, including new consumer taxes, elimination of the poll tax, a homestead exemption and increases in the number of state employees. His loyal lieutenant, Governor Oscar K. Allen, dutifully followed Long’s policy proposals, though Long was known to frequently berate the governor in public and take over the governor’s office in the state capitol when he was visiting Baton Rouge. Having broken with the Old Regulars and T. Semmes Walmsley in the fall of 1933, Long inserted himself into the New Orleans mayoral election of 1934 and began a dramatic public feud with the city’s government that lasted for two years.
Huey Long and James A. Noe, an independent oilman and state legislator, formed the controversial Win or Lose Oil Company. The firm was established to obtain leases on state-owned lands so that the directors might collect bonuses and sublease the mineral rights to the major oil companies. Although ruled legal, these activities were done in secret and the stockholders were unknown to the public. Long made a profit on the bonuses and the resale of those state leases, using the funds primarily for political purposes.
By 1934 Long began a reorganization of the state government that all but abolished local governments in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Alexandria, and gave the governor the power to appoint all state employees. Long passed what he called “a tax on lying” and a two-percent tax on newspaper advertising revenue, and he created the Bureau of Criminal Identification, a special force of plainclothes police answerable only to the governor. He also had the legislature enact the same tax on refined oil that had nearly gotten him impeached in 1929, but he refunded most of the money after Standard Oil agreed that eighty percent of the oil sent to its refineries would be drilled in Louisiana.
1935: Long's Final Year-Presidential Ambitions
Even during his days as a traveling salesman, Long confided to his wife that his planned career trajectory would begin with election to a minor state office, then governor, then senator, and ultimately election as President of the United States. In his final months, Long wrote a second book entitled My First Days in the White House, laying out his plans for the presidency after victory in the election of 1936. The book was published posthumously.
According to Long biographers T. Harry Williams and William Ivy Hair, the senator had never, in fact, intended to run for the presidency in 1936. Long instead had planned to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1936, knowing he would lose the nomination but gain valuable publicity in the process. Then he would break from the Democrats and form a third party using the Share Our Wealth plan as a basis for its program, along with Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist talk radio personality from Royal Oak, Michigan, Iowa agrarian radical Milo Reno, and other dissidents. The new party would run someone else as its 1936 candidate, but Long would be the primary campaigner. This candidate would split the liberal vote with Roosevelt, thereby electing a Republican as president but proving the electoral appeal of Share Our Wealth. Long would then wait four years and run for president as a Democrat in 1940. Long undertook a national speaking tour and regular radio appearances in the spring of 1935, attracting large crowds and further increasing his stature.
Increased Tensions in Louisiana
By 1935, Long’s most recent consolidation of personal power led to talk of armed opposition from his enemies. Opponents increasingly invoked the memory of the Battle of Liberty Place of 1874, in which the white supremacist White League staged an uprising against Louisiana’s Reconstruction-era government. In January 1935, an anti-Long paramilitary organization called the Square Deal Association was formed; its members included former governors John M. Parker and Ruffin G. Pleasant and New Orleans mayor T. Semmes Walmsley. On January 25, two hundred armed Square Dealers took over the courthouse of East Baton Rouge Parish. Long had Governor Allen call out the National Guard, declare martial law, ban public gatherings of two or more persons, and forbid the publication of criticism of state officials. The Square Dealers left the courthouse, but there was a brief armed skirmish at the Baton Rouge Airport. Tear gas and live ammunition were fired; one person was wounded but there were no fatalities.
In the summer of 1935, Long called for two more special sessions of the legislature; bills were passed in rapid-fire succession without being read or discussed. The new laws further centralized Long’s control over the state by creating several new Long-appointed state agencies: a state bond and tax board holding sole authority to approve all loans to parish and municipal governments, a new state printing board which could withhold "official printer" status from uncooperative newspapers, a new board of election supervisors which would appoint all poll watchers, and a State Board of Censors. They also stripped away the remaining powers of the mayor of New Orleans. Long boasted that he had "taken over every board and commission in New Orleans except the Community Chest and the Red Cross."
Assassination
Two months prior to his death, in July 1935, Long claimed that he had uncovered a plot to assassinate him, which had been discussed in a meeting at New Orleans’s DeSoto Hotel. According to Long, four U.S. representatives, Mayor Walmsley, and former governors Parker and Sanders had been present. Long read what he claimed was a transcript of a recording of this meeting on the floor of the Senate. [1]
Long had called for a third special session of the Louisiana legislature to begin in September 1935, and he traveled from Washington to Baton Rouge to oversee its progress. According to the generally accepted version of the assassination, on September 8, 1935, Huey Long was shot once by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss in the Capitol building at Baton Rouge. Weiss was immediately shot dead by Long's bodyguards, and a stray bullet from one of the bodyguards also hit Long. Dr. Weiss was a physician and the son-in-law of Judge Benjamin Pavy, who had been gerrymandered out of his district due to his long-time political opposition to Long. Long died two days later of internal bleeding following an attempt to close the wounds by Dr. Arthur Vidrine. The walls of the capitol hallway are still nicked from the bullets fired in the shootout.
An alternative theory suggests that Dr. Weiss was actually unarmed, and had punched Long, not shot him. Instead, the senator was shot to death by a stray bullet from his bodyguards, who shot Weiss because they mistakenly believed that Weiss was going to shoot Long. One who takes this view is former Louisiana state police superintendent Francis Grevemberg.
Long was buried on the grounds of the new State Capitol he built, where a statue depicts his achievements. More than 100,000 Louisianians attended Long's funeral at the Capitol.
Click here for further reading on Huey P. Long assassination.
Legacy
In his four-year term as governor, Long increased the mileage of paved highways in Louisiana from 331 to 2,301, plus an additional 4,508 km (2,816 miles) of gravel roads. By 1936, the infrastructure program begun by Long had completed some 15,000 km (9,000 miles) of new roads, doubling the state's road system. He built 111 bridges, and started construction on the first bridge over the lower Mississippi, the Huey P. Long Bridge in Jefferson Parish, near New Orleans. He built the new Louisiana State Capitol, at the time the tallest building in the South. All of these construction projects provided thousands of much-needed jobs during the Great Depression. (Long, however, disapproved of welfare and unemployment payments; any such programs in Louisiana during his tenure were federal in origin.)
Long's free textbooks, school-building program, and free busing improved and expanded the public education system, and his night schools taught 100,000 adults to read. He greatly expanded funding for LSU, lowered tuition, established scholarships for poor students, and founded the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans. He also doubled funding for the public Charity Hospital System, built a new Charity Hospital building for New Orleans, and reformed and increased funding for the state's mental institutions. His administration funded the piping of natural gas to New Orleans and other cities and built the 14-kilometer (seven-mile) Lake Pontchartrain seawall and New Orleans airport. Long slashed personal property taxes and reduced utility rates. His repeal of the poll tax in 1935 increased voter registration by 76 percent in one year.
After Long’s death, the political machine he had built up was weakened, but it remained a powerful force in state politics until the election of 1960. Likewise, the Long platform of social programs and populist rhetoric created the state’s main political division; in every state election until 1960, the main factions were organized along pro-Long and anti-Long lines. Even today in Louisiana, opinions on Long are sharply divided. Some remember Long as a popular folk hero, while others revile him as an unscrupulous demagogue and dictator. For several decades after his death, Long’s personal political style inspired imitation among Louisiana politicians who borrowed his colorful speaking style, vicious verbal attacks on opponents, and promises of social programs. His brother Earl Long later inherited Long’s political machine as well as his platform and rhetorical style. After Earl Long’s death, many saw John McKeithen and Edwin Edwards as heirs to the Long tradition. Most recently, Claude "Buddy" Leach ran a populist campaign in the Louisiana gubernatorial election of 2003 that was compared to Huey Long’s by some observers.
Huey Long’s death did not end the political strength of the Long family. Huey's brother, Earl Long, was elected governor of Louisiana on three occasions. Another brother, George S. Long, was elected to Congress in 1952. Huey Long's wife, Rose McConnell Long, was appointed to replace him in the Senate, and his son Russell B. Long was elected to the Senate in 1948 and stayed there until 1987. Other more distant relatives, including Gillis William Long and Speedy O. Long, have also been elected to Congress.
A statue of Long [2] stands in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol building. The other statue representing Louisiana is that of former U.S. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White.
Two bridges crossing the Mississippi River are named for Long: Huey P. Long Bridge (Baton Rouge) and Huey P. Long Bridge (Jefferson Parish). Another Huey P. Long Bridge crosses the Red River in Alexandria, LA. There is also a Huey P. Long Hospital in Pineville.
Long's first autobiography, Every Man a King, was published in 1933. Affordably priced to allow it to be read by poor Americans, it laid out his plan to redistribute the nation's wealth. His second book, My First Days in the White House, was published posthumously. It emphatically laid out his presidential ambitions for the election of 1936 [3].
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