An early sign of this was the Louisiana delegation to the 1928 Democratic National Convention. Usually, the party's central committee made up the delegation. Long called a special meeting, stacked it with his supporters, and elected a slate that was entirely controlled by him. Next he took on the state legislature. Writes Smith: "Abandoning protocol and any separation of powers, he stomped through committee rooms and scattered committees with a nod of his head or a crooking of a finger." When a senator cited the state constitution, and threw a copy at his head, Long replied, "I'm the constitution just now."
Not too long after that Long was impeached and brought to trial in the state senate for abuses of power. He bought off some senators and set about destroying the careers of those who had opposed him. From then on, the legislature was his — and so was the rest of state government, from the highway commission and the game department to the tax authorities and the cops. To a friend he said, "Give me the militia and they can have all the laws they want."
Long pumped up Louisiana State University (where the author teaches) and demanded its loyalty. When an English professor published a saucy book called "Cane Juice," Long had him fired. Later, when the student newspaper printed a letter attacking Long, he sent state police to the print shop to destroy 4,000 copies of the paper.
As for business interests, White writes, "His bureaucrats prescribed licenses, permits, property assessments and other commercial transactions not by necessity but often by political loyalty. They taxed misbehaving corporations into extinction and heaped contracts and largesse upon the businesses of their friends. Bank examiners stifled credit from opponents' businesses, and state dock inspectors banned fruit, vegetables and other cargo belonging to anti-Long shippers from being stored on state-owned wharfs."
The Depression came, and Louisiana was hit hard. Long "hired extra game wardens, bridge tenders, [and] state policemen, and added thousands of jobs with his huge road building program." He expected every state employee to contribute to his political fund. Because the New Orleans newspapers opposed him, he started his own paper and ordered every state employee to subscribe to it.
| When the LSU student
newspaper printed a letter attacking
Long, he sent state police
to the print shop to destroy
4,000 copies of the paper.
|
| He ordered the state to build a new governor's mansion and a new state capitol — a towering thing with a skyscraper instead of a dome. To pay for his excessive government, he increased taxes on business and sold Louisiana bonds until Wall Street refused to buy any more.
Early on, he began to have national ambitions. With the government of Louisiana in his pocket, he ran for U.S. Senate in 1930, and won. He could not be governor and senator at the same time, so he put off accepting his Senate seat while he arranged for a lackey with the initials "O.K." to become governor. In 1932 he went off to Washington to get a national audience by attacking the rich. In his first speech in the Senate he proposed a law to confiscate fortunes above $100 million and divide up the money among the poor.
That year Long supported Franklin Roosevelt for president, and he began the New Deal as an ardent supporter. But the two men did not get along. Roosevelt was not left-wing enough, nor populist enough, nor compliant enough for Huey Long. Long began setting up Share Our Wealth clubs across the United States. To run them he hired the anti-Semitic Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith, whom H.L. Mencken described as the "gustiest and goriest, the deadliest and damnedest orator ever heard on this or other earth." Long was quite the orator himself.
By 1935, the New Deal was injured, its chief instruments declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And yet in the land was a leftist belief that those remedies had not been strong enough. In California, Upton Sinclair had just run for governor as a socialist Democrat, and Dr. Francis Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin were filling the radio waves with socialistic nostrums. Into this cauldron bubbled Huey Long, a man who had led more fools more effectively than any of them.
He intended to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination of 1936. Probably he would have failed, because FDR had the wealth of the U.S. Treasury to hand out, and because Long's crudity hurt him in states of greater average education than Louisiana. But we will never know. In 1935, Huey Long was assassinated by a member of one of the many families he had wronged. The exact thinking of the assassin cannot be determined, because Long's bodyguards pumped his body full of bullets.
There is something to be said for assassins, at least some of the time. There is something, too, to be said for the normal incoordination of government.
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