Huey Long

He was one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history—a great natural politician who looked, and often seemed to behave, like a caricature of the red-neck Southern politico, and yet who had become at the time of his death a serious rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency. In this, the first full-scale biography, Huey Long stands wholly revealed, analyzed, and understood.

The eminent historian T. Harry Williams has created a work masterly in its scope and detail. He delves behind the "log cabin, poor white" myth that Huey Long created about his family, and shows them for the substantial country-town people they were. The roots of Long's personality are traced from his childhood and early wanderings as a traveling salesman—discovering "what makes people tick" across the South, formulating his own political ambitions, picking up tricks of style and oratory from every speechifying politician he encountered. Williams follows Long's career as a lawyer, showing how his early cases (he specialized in worker's compensation) affected his later political ideas and techniques of publicizing himself as the little man's friend. He describes Long's energetic, innovative campaign (he was the first to use automobiles, loudspeakers, and circulars) in 1918 for railroad commissioner—his vehicle for gaining renown as the attacker of big corporations like the Cumberland Telephone Company and Standard Oil. He re-creates Huey's whirlwind campaigns for governor in 1923 and 1927: the impassioned espousal of such radical populist ideas as free schoolbooks and taxes on industry; the strategic use of power-hungry Outs against the wealthy planters and New Orleans Old Regulars. Williams shows how, once ensconced in the governor's mansion, Long broke all the rules of the game: he smashed the opposition and built up unlimited personal power, partly through voter manipulation, while engineering a revolutionary program of beneficent legislation.

Finally, the biography brings fresh life to the sensation-ridden last years, when Long had become a figure of national importance: the Louisiana state legislature's unsuccessful impeachment, his brief an fiery term in the U.S. Senate, the famous Share Your Wealth program, his bitter personal rivalry with Roosevelt (whom Long forced leftwards), and finally his assassination in 1935.

For more than ten years the author has been amassing material from sources both public and private. He has interviewed some three hundred men and women who know the Kingfish intimately, including members of the family who had never before talked to a biographer and leaders of the Long organization who divulged for the first time the inner workings of the "machine." The rich portrait that comes from these researches breaks through the conventional labels—demagogue, friend of the people, native fascist—to capture for the first time the essential quality of Huey Long: the gut politician, the man who intuitively sensed and answered the unarticulate needs of the time.