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

Economic Intervention, Political Intervention

These substantive arguments remain topical today, and so keep re-surfacing and re-emerging in new ways. A Baton Rouge business magazine article from June 2002 entitled " Ghost of Huey Long Lives" complains that, at the end of a recent legislative session, "taxes ruled, big business took it on the chin and the people got a chance to "tax the wealthy" at the ballot box," showing that argument still rages between the inheritors of the pro-Long (interventionist) and anti-Long (non-interventionist) factions over what is best for the state:

Business and the wealthy are easy targets but are responsible for most of the jobs in the state – the lifeblood to government, quality of life and the entire economy. If someone has no job, he or she can't pay taxes and their family doesn't eat. Does discouraging new business growth help the poor get jobs?

So why would you want to send a message to those in business and those with money that "you're easy pickins and we are coming after you?" I think that would drive many of them out of the state – and keep others away. When the poor are the only ones left, who will we tax then?

Inevitably, policy dead-ends identical to these, and their advocacy in combination with ruthless power tactics, brought Huey Long into conflict with established interests of the left and right, both public and private, but particularly with corporate interests. In Louisiana at least, those in control of such interests had for years successfully carried on a policy of political intervention in the machinery of state in pursuit of economic and corporate ends, very much geared to maintaining a comfortable and privileged status quo. As T. Harry Williams was to write in his 1969 biography of Long:

[Educational and other services] were poor for the additional reason that the ruling hierarchy was little interested in using what resources the state had available to provide services and was even less interested in employing the power of the state to create new resources so that more services could be supported.... A woman who was a member of the caste described its psychology frankly: "We were secure. We were the old families. We had what we wanted. We didn't bother anybody. All we wanted was to keep it." ~ T. Harry Williams, Huey Long, Bantam, 1969.

Of Liberty & Prosperity

The fact is that neither the old conservative "hold on to it at all costs" option nor the "tax tax tax, spend spend spend" option of the populist are conducive to true free markets, to the flowering of individual liberty or to freedom of expression.

Restrictive practices, business concentration, cartels, monopoly power, bidding for "licenses" to operate, lobbying for government subsidies and price or tariff controls are, ipso facto, constraints on the operation of open competition and free markets, and thus reduce both economic freedom and, ultimately, the general prosperity, often preventing outsiders – those without access to membership of the respective monopoly or concentration – from even earning a decent living. Protests against this state of affairs often lead to the suppression of dissent through barely plausible but deceptively reassuring arguments that "national interests" are at stake.

On the other hand, increased state spending to pay for socially ambitious programmes has to be funded from somewhere, and leads to the populist zeal of campaigns to "soak the rich," "clobber the greedy corporations" and increase taxation. Since historically this all goes hand-in-hand with the personal enrichment and growing delusions of grandeur, not to say of immortality, of those who control the distribution of such booty, these policies also require the suppression of dissent regarding the real prospects for the promised collective good which is held out as the ultimate end of such intervention, leading in the long term to the reduction and even elimination of political freedom.

It is in the arguments that these camps use against each other, and in those which they consciously exclude from discourse, that those who strive for human liberty, moral responsibility and financially solid economic well-being find the gaps where political and economic labels such as "left and right" and "laissez-faire vs. dirigiste" are plainly inadequate. It is in those sometimes narrow gaps also that we find the true reasons for the continuing fascination and relevance for political history of the brief but eventful career of Huey Pierce Long.

Assassination Conspiracy Theory: The Silencing of a Troublesome Prophet?

Was Huey Long assassinated because he was too likely to succeed in his fight against those he called the "a handful of financial slave-owning overlords who make the tyrant of Great Britain seem mild"? He was killed just about a month after declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States.

Consider for a moment not just this case, but also that of another Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy (shot while on campaign in Los Angeles 33 years later), the shooting which left candidate George Wallace paralysed in 1972, and the disappearance of John Kennedy Jr., whose plane crashed into the Atlantic in July 1999, it having emerged subsequently that he had discussed plans for declaring himself a presidential candidate in 2000. Would you not be inclined to agree that conspiracy buffs are fully entitled to believe that declaring yourself a candidate for the presidency of the United States, unless you know and cultivate the right people, can be seriously inimical to your survival?

Long was shot outside what is now the Speaker's office in the state capitol building which he had caused to be built. He was wounded and taken to the hospital. His shooting was blamed on an alleged lone gunman, Dr. Carl Weiss, who was said to bear a personal grudge against Long's attempts to unseat his father-in-law, Benjamin Pavy, from a judgeship, or perhaps as a result of an alleged racial smear. That remains the official story to this day. Weiss was killed on the spot in a hail of bullets from Long's bodyguards.

New evidence which emerged in 1991 suggested that Weiss had been unarmed, that a gun had been planted on him to make him look like the lone assassin, that Long was shot by accident rather than design (a bullet fired by one of his bodyguards at the "assailant" apparently ricocheting into Long), and that this latter version of the story had been deliberately covered up.

This new and somewhat implausible version of events does not quell quite legitimate speculation that powerful interests might well have wanted to stop Long in his tracks in his incipient presidential campaign, which gave all the appearance of having the potential to succeed. In this connection some have also charged that proper attention was not given to all Long's wounds: competent top surgeons may have been prevented from getting to him in time, the doctor who was on hand did not carry out a test for blood in the urine, and fatal damage to the kidneys was accordingly overlooked.

For those who might be interested in greater detail on the assassination and cover-up this is well documented on the Internet, in particular on two websites to which links 2 are provided at the end of this article. One of them is called "The Lone Conspirators" (motto: "Only the Paranoid Survive"), and another is a personal website where three main possible theories and various threads of evidence are explored.

Of Diagnoses & Cures

It is rather an axiom of libertarian, anti-state theory that politicians – especially those who show skills in manipulating the mechanisms of power rather than in delivering on substantive policies, are a bunch of crooks interested only in feathering their own nest and accumulating as much power and pelf as possible while in office. Many politicians who have convinced themselves of their good intentions understandably get quite upset by the accusation, because of course it is largely true.

The unspoken danger of this approach is that sometimes you may also throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So are we left with anything more today of Huey Long than the image of the colorful demagogue with wacky notions of economics and a couple of monuments or structures named after him?

I believe we are left with much more than this, but that this has been obscured, because the real issues of freedom, moral responsibility and financially sound economic well-being have not been issues on which those in power, right down to the present day, have encouraged open debate, let alone helped people to think for themselves.

Instead, they have concocted a diet of entertainment, propaganda and easy money precisely so that little thought will be generally given to who is pulling the strings. This has permitted the size and reach of government to be enlarged exponentially since Huey Long's days, and the continuation of precisely that use of political intervention to secure economic advantage against which he fought. As a result, despite the huge material progress which has been made, many of the disparities and distortions at which Long pointed an accusing finger are still in place and, certainly in times of increased intervention by government in the economy and in the private lives of citizens, have even become exacerbated.

In such a climate, Huey Long's ideas for forcibly transferring wealth from one group of the population to another continue to have a strong appeal, however misguided they may be as a remedy for the ills he diagnosed, and however much history may have shown that forcible transfers of this kind, based on completely arbitrary judgments as to what is a living wage or a minimum value of a homestead inevitably lead to tyranny by the oligarchy which decides on how the wealth is the distributed. None of those difficulties of practical implementation diminish the liveliness of the spirit of rebellion and idealism in Huey Long's vision, which was based on a defence of the underdog and his revulsion at the suffering and poverty which he saw around him in Louisiana as he grew up.

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