Ballad of Earl K. Long - Recordings of speeches by Earl K.Long & of songs by Jay Chevalier.

The Rebellious Spirit of Huey P. Long - By Richard Wall Page 1, Page2

The state capitol building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a fine example of the period of Art Deco architecture in America, the age of the Empire State building , the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the Great Depression.

I can imagine parties of today's schoolchildren being trooped around the building, "the tallest state house in America," there to be subjected to a mind-deadening statistical barrage about how much sand, gravel, limestone, brick, tile, marble, bronze, granite and ornamental iron was used in its construction.

They will also be shown the 35-foot high sculpture in the gardens, on which stands the statue of one who is described on its pedestal as "Louisiana's greatest son," Huey Pierce Long (1893–1935). As governor of the state in 1930, he was the man responsible for commissioning this huge phallic symbol of a structure, erected to a height of 450 feet in double quick time (14 months) to his unambiguous command: "Build it big and build it quick."

He never did have much time. In September 1935, not even five years after its construction began, he was to be shot in the corridors of that very same building. He died two days later, on September 10th, aged 42. On his deathbed he is reported to have said, "Don't let me die, I have got so much to do." As with JFK, assassination puts a convenient lid on all that was yet to be done and what might have been, and allows the state officially to mourn, love and eulogize one of its own. Meanwhile those who suspect foul play and cover-up develop conspiracy theories, and those who had it in for him gloat, first privately and then more brazenly as time goes by, that "he got what was coming to him." Over time a consensus emerges, literally cast in stone, that whatever his faults, "he did a lot for Louisiana."

Or did he really? When superlatives are used for propagating state mythology into the future like this, sooner or later someone is bound to call a halt and say: stop all this golden boy stuff! Camelot was rotten! The pied piper had feet of clay!

The Dictator of Louisiana?

Actually Huey Long has had a bad press for most of his after-life in American political history. It began on September 11, 1935, the very day after he died, with a subtly vicious obituary notice in the New York Times, then as now the mouthpiece of the establishment's party line. Taking his own words (" If Fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag") out of his dead mouth and twisting them into a parody of his original meaning, the paper used them to tar him as a dictator in his own patch, comparable to his worst contemporaries – Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini.

"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…. 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." ~ The New York Times , September 11, 1935.

Paradoxes

This is just one of the infinite number of paradoxes and contradictions surrounding a man who openly believed in using the machinery of state for economic intervention in pursuit of social and political ends, spending in the process money which he had to take from others, and yet has been hailed as a champion of the little man, enfranchiser of the poor and the disadvantaged, defender of those with anti-war views and of the Constitution, and sharp critic of the price-fixing contained in the New Deal and of monopolistic concentration in restraint of trade. The story of Huey Long still exerts a surprising fascination.

Born in the "piney woods" of Winnfield, Northern Louisiana, he grew up poor. At 16 he began to work as a travelling salesman. In 8 months in 1914 he completed a law degree in New Orleans (normally a 3-year course) and then set up his own law practice, at the age of 21. Still in his twenties he entered public office first as a railroad commissioner, then as chairman of the Public Services Commission.

He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1924, but was successful four years later, running on a similar platform of unabashed state intervention – including road construction, free textbooks for all, greater state support for public schools, and increased taxation on the oil corporations, particularly Louisiana's biggest, Standard Oil. From 1930 to 1935 he had a seat in the US Senate as representative of the Democratic Party. A month before he was shot, he had announced his intention to run for President in 1936, against the incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Political Machine

The main reason why Long has had a very bad press over the years is the focus on the means he used to consolidate his political power, which brought him a raft of enemies. With the natural gift of cleverness, his proverbial razor-sharp wit, and claimed affinity with the common man, he learned to use and abuse those time-honoured methods for ensuring the absolute supremacy of a political machine: filling virtually every local government post with his own stooges, clamping down on any freedom of expression to criticize what he did, and not hesitating to beat up and silence any who ventured to do so. In 1934, in his overthrow of the old regime of local government in New Orleans, he would resort to even more violent methods, at one point sending in the national guard in his (successful) attempt to oust the "old regular" mayor and replace him with one of his own. Not surprisingly, this permanently soured his relationship with the city.

That, incidentally, did not prevent the dual-purpose road and rail bridge over the Mississippi in New Orleans, completed in December 1935 and only recently widened, being named the Huey P. Long Bridge.

As a consummate political animal, he was in fact in no way exceptional in his use of the political means, as history shows. He was innovative, however, in his use of mailed circulars, automobile stumping, radio speeches, sound trucks, and cruel personal invective designed to appeal to perhaps the baser sentiments of those among the people who were not sitting in the halls and offices of power. What was exceptional, in that it came as an unpleasant surprise to established Louisiana political interests in the late 1920s, was the speed and effectiveness of Long's consolidation of power: all their theory and prior, untroubled experience indicated that a young populist from the backwoods could be expected to be thoroughly naïve about practical politics, promising the earth to the people and delivering not much.

Huey Long was not like this, and they could not forgive him for his uppitiness.His canny use of the political means is not, however, the only reason for his continuing bad press. It also extends to the ends – his strategies and schemes for dealing with the social problems he identified by redistributing wealth. Details of his schemes are widely available on the Internet and links to them and some of his speeches 1 are provided at the end of this article.

Throughout the nearly 70 years which have passed since his death – and this is another of the fascinations of the Huey Long story – the officially sanctioned disapproval of his political tactics, always considered by the liberal press to be at the very least "anti-democratic" (others, like the NYT obituary writer, did not mince their words, and as we have seen, called him a Fascist) has been used to overshadow and smother the actual issues raised by his career, his achievements and his plans, and discussion of their (possible) merits and (very real) defects.

There are three main reasons why discussions of the actual issues surrounding Long's political career have been effectively suppressed: the first is that his tactics were no different to those used by many "successful" politicians who enlarge the power and scope of government. To criticize them too openly would expose others, possibly in the anti-Long camp, who used – and continue to use – similar methods.

The second reason is that by attributing only base motives to the man it is possible to discredit the substance of those points on which he might actually be right, or be telling the truth. In Huey Long's case, he was right about certain forms of tyranny which may result if a ruling oligarchy's disposition to seek ways of keeping the majority of the people in ignorance, poverty or nowadays fear, goes unchecked for a long enough period of time.

A typical example of this is the views of historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, which have long held sway (and can be heard briefly in a clip from an interview for Ken Burns' 1986 well-regarded PBS documentary film on Long). He actually denied to Long any recognition that his views or aims had ideological content, seeing him as being interested only in the means – power and money. In other words, this view (which is still widely held) could be called the cynical view that Long the politician merely made promises to help poor people because poor people represented the largest number of votes.

The inconsistency (or beauty) of this approach is that if you accuse a man of having no ideology, it is difficult to attribute to him any impact on the minds of men, either way. In other words, his ideas were the far-fetched notions of a power-crazed maniac. Therefore, disregard them.

Thirdly, as is generally recognized, and despite enormous fiscal cost which would burden the state for years to come after his demise, he had actually delivered on many of the promises he made to the people in the form of improved roads (or roads, period), free textbooks for all, etc., hoisting the state of Louisiana out of what some have described as a near-feudal condition and laying the foundations for modernity.

Suppression of the substance of debate on these issues should not surprise us, for here we enter into another paradox: since the state itself was and is active in the business of seizing and actively redistributing wealth, it always was much easier for the state to smother any real debate on these issues by focusing on Long's "fascist" political methods, condemnation of which was palatable to a much broader constituency – in fact to nearly everyone under the sun.

Fiscal conservatives thought him profligate and irresponsible, the established corporations (including the media) rightly felt that he wanted to take from them, and assorted Communists and Socialists thought him dangerously naïve, believing that he had no idea of the strength and viciousness of the forces of the system of business concentration he was taking on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, very little has been made of the fact that when confronted by the good advice that his economic schemes would be impracticable and perhaps impossible to implement (despite the fact that they were not as radical as is often suggested), Huey Long is said to have responded quite reasonably that he would have to call in people to help him work things out.

It is in this context of economic policy, particularly at the local level of what is good for Louisiana, that the legacy of intractable argument is even stronger, because it vehemently opposes those who believe in the beneficent power of government against those who believe that government intervention will by its very nature have nefarious political and economic consequences.

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