One day some of the VIP’s of the Long political hierarchy were gathered in the office of Governor Oscar Allen when a matter of legislative procedure was under discussion. It is worth noting for the record that the Governor’s chair was occupied by Senator Huey Long. Governor Allen sat at one side of his desk. The names of the others do not matter. Among them were highway commissioners, a state purchasing agent, floor leaders from House and Senate, the head of an upstate levee board, and the like.

Huey was issuing orders and lost his temper over the apparent inattention of some conferees, who were conducting a low-voiced conversation in a corner of the room.

“Shut up, damn it!” he shouted suddenly. “Shut up and listen to me. This is the Kingfish of the Lodge talking!”

From that day on he was “Kingfish.” Even Franklin Roosevelt, telephoning him from New York during the hectic maneuvering which preceded that summer’s Democratic national convention, greeted him with the words: “Hello, Kingfish!”

The self-proclaimed Kingfish was named Huey Pierce Long at his birth on August 30, 1893, the third of four sons born to Huey Pierce Long, Sr., and Caledonia Tyson Long. The family farm was near Winnfield, and by the standards of that place and time the Longs were well off; not wealthy, to be sure, but never in want. Winnfield, seat of Winn parish, is a small wholly rural community not far from the center of the state.

“Just near the center of the state?” Westbrook Pegler once asked Senator Long incredulously after watching him put his legislative trained seals through their paces. “Just near the center of the state? I’m surprised you haven’t had the legislature declare it to be the center of the state.”

Scholastically, Huey did not distinguish himself, and he took no part in athletics, lacking the physical pugnacity that is the heritage of most young males. His brother Earl, two years younger than Huey, frequently asserted that “I had to do all Huey’s fighting for him.” But as long as he remained in high school (he left after a disagreement with the principal and before graduation) he was the best debater that institution ever numbered among its pupils.

His first essay into the realm of self-support came at age fourteen, when he loaded a rented buggy with books and drove about the countryside selling these at public auction. In doing so he laid the foundation for what became the largest personal acquaintance any one individual ever had among the farm folk of Louisiana.

“I’d never stay at a hotel, even later on, when I was out selling Cottolene or baking powder or lamp chimneys or whatever,” he would boast. “I always drove out beyond town to a farmhouse where they’d take me in and put up my horse, and I would pay them something and put in the evening talking to them, and later I would make it my business to drop those folks a post card so they’d be sure to remember me.”

At summer’s end he entered Oklahoma University at Norman, hoping to work his way through law school as weekend drummer for the Kaye Dawson wholesale grocery. That did not work out. After a heated disagreement with the head of the business he returned to Louisiana and became a door-to-door salesman for Cottolene. In glorifying this product he held cake-baking contests here, there, and yonder.

“My job was to convince those women they could fry chickens, steaks, or fish in something else besides hog lard, and bake a cake using something else besides cow butter,” he explained. “I would quote the Bible to them where it said not to use any part of the flesh of swine, and if I couldn’t convince them out of the Bible, I would go into the kitchen and bake a cake for them myself.”

First prize for one of his cake-baking contests in Shreveport was awarded to pretty Rose McConnell. Not long thereafter, she and Huey were married. With all his savings and a substantial loan from his older brother Julius, he managed to finance nearly a year of special study at Tulane University’s law school in New Orleans. He and Rose shared a room in a private home not far from the university, where among other furnishings, a rented typewriter was installed.

Young Mr. Long would bring home a law book, drive through it in furious haste while his phenomenally retentive memory seized every really salient detail, “and then I would abstract the hell out of it, dictating to my wife, who would type it out for me.” With barely enough money for housing, carfare, short rations, and such essentials as paper and pencils, it is none the less probable that these were the least troubled, most nearly contented and carefree days the couple would ever know. Before year’s end he was admitted to the bar, and returned to Winnfield with Rose to begin practice.

He soon realized that despite local successes, the ambitious goals he had set for himself could be attained only in a much larger field. So he moved to Shreveport, which was just at the threshold of a tremendous boom following the discovery of oil in the nearby Pine Island areas. By accepting royalty shares and acreage allotments for legal services in examining titles and the like, Huey was on the threshold of becoming very wealthy, when he and the other Pine Islanders discovered that they could not send their black gold to market unless they sold it at ruinously low prices to owners of the only available pipeline. Long’s implacable hostility toward the Standard Oil Company had its inception then and there.

As first step in a campaign to have pipelines declared common carriers, he became a candidate for the Railroad (now Public Service) Commission and was elected. The brothers Long presented a solid front on this occasion, Julius and Earl working like beavers to help Huey win. George (“Shan”) had moved to Oklahoma by that time to practice dentistry. Only once thereafter were they politically united, and that was when Huey ran for governor in 1928.

Commissioner Long made his first state-wide stump speech the following year at a rally and picnic which six candidates for governor had been called to address. He had not been invited to speak, but asked permission to say a few words—and stole the show!

One must picture him: a young man whose bizarre garb was accented by the fact that since he was wearing a bow tie, the gleaming stickpin with its big diamond sparkled from the otherwise bare band of his shirt front. The unruly forelock of rusty brown hair, a fleshy, cleft chin, and a general air of earnest fury all radiated anger. His blistering denunciation of the then governor as a pliant tool of the Standard Oil Company, and his attack on the state fire marshal, an anti-Long politico from Winnfield, as “the official barfly of the state of Louisiana” captured all the next day’s headlines.

Thenceforth the pattern of his future was set. He continued his attacks on trusts and large corporations, certain that this would enlarge his image as defender and champion of the downtrodden “pore folks.” His assaults became so intemperate that in 1921, Governor John M. Parker filed an affidavit against him with the Baton Rouge district attorney, and thus brought about his arrest and trial on charges of criminal libel.

His attorneys were his brother Julius, Judge James G. Palmer of Shreveport, and Judge Robert R. Reid of Amite. He was found guilty, but his reputation as a pitiless opponent was already so great that only a token sentence was imposed: one hour’s detention, which he served in the Judge’s chambers, and a one-dollar fine. He was so delighted by the outcome that he gave his youngest son, born that day, the names of his attorneys: Palmer Reid Long. Also, some years later, he saw to it that the judge who had imposed the token penalties was elected to the state supreme court.

Continuing his onslaughts against millionaires and monopolies, he ran for governor in 1924 on a platform of taxing the owners of great fortunes to aid the underprivileged in their struggle for a reasonable share of the better life: education for their children, medical care for all who could not afford to pay, and some sort of economic security for all who toiled, be it in factory, market place, mine, or farm.

He now inveighed against Wall Street as a whole, not merely against isolated corporations as before. The Mellon fortune and the House of Morgan came in for their oratorical lumps; but it is a matter of record that later, when Earl and Huey had fallen out, the former testified under oath before a Senate investigating committee that he had seen his brother accept $10,000 from an official of the Electric Bond and Share Company “in bills so new they looked like they’d just come off the press.”

However, from every stump Huey proclaimed that “ninety per cent of this nation’s wealth is in the hands of ten per cent of its people.... The Bible tells us that unless we redistribute the wealth of a country amongst all of the people every so often, that country’s going to smash; but we got too many folks running things in Louisiana and in Washington that think they’re smarter than the Bible.”

None the less he ran third in a three-man first primary. In view of the fact that he had no organized backing it must be conceded that it was a close third, an amazing achievement the credit for which must be given to his wide acquaintance among the farm population and the matchless fire of his eloquence. A number of factors contributed to his defeat. One of them undeniably was his refusal, or inability, to recognize that he “could not hold his liquor.” After a convivial evening at a lake-front resort in New Orleans, he drove back to town with his campaign manager at a wildly illicit speed and was promptly halted by a motorcycle officer. His campaign manager hastily explained to the patrolman that the car was his, and that his chauffeur, one Harold Swan, had merely acted under orders. But the fact that Huey Long and Harold Swan in this instance were one and the same came out later, along with accounts of how Huey had gone tipsily from table to table at the Moulin Rouge inviting all and sundry to be his personal guests at his inaugural ball.

Ordinarily, this might have won him votes in tolerant south Louisiana, where prohibition was regarded as the figment of sick imaginations, like the loup garou. But in south Louisiana he had few backers in that campaign to begin with, being a north Louisiana hillman; and in north Louisiana, where drinking had to be done in secret even before the Volstead Act became nominally the law of the land, such reports were sheer poison.

Finally, the weather on election day turned foul. The wretched dirt roads of the hinterlands where Huey’s voting strength was concentrated became impassable, so that many of his supporters could not reach their polling places. But four years later, when he once more ran for governor in yet another three-man race, he barely missed a majority in the first primary. No run-off was held, however, because one of his opponents announced he would throw his support to Long, pulling with him many followers, including a young St. Landry parish physician, Dr. F. Octave Pavy, who had run for lieutenant governor. Under the circumstances a second primary would have been merely an empty gesture of defiance.

As governor, he rode roughshod over all opposition to his proposal to furnish free textbooks to every school child, not merely in the public schools, but in the Catholic parochial schools and the posh private academies as well; for a highway-improvement program which he proposed to finance out of increased gasoline taxes. Nor was he one to hide his light under a bushel in pretended modesty. On the contrary, after each success he rang the changes on Jack Horner’s classic “What a good [in the sense of great] boy am I.” Moreover, it made little difference to his devotees whether his promises of still greater benefits for the future, or boasts about the wonders he had already achieved, were based on fact or fiction.

By way of illustration: Dr. Arthur Vidrine, a back-country physician, was catapulted into the superintendency of the state’s huge Charity Hospital at New Orleans, and later was additionally made dean of the new state university College of Medicine Long decided to found. Vidrine had won the new governor’s warm regard by captaining the Long cause in Ville Platte, where he was a general practitioner.

In some quarters there is a disposition to regard Arthur Vidrine as no more than a hack who relied on political manipulation to secure professional advancement. While it is obvious that his original support of, and later complete subservience to, Huey Long brought him extraordinary preferment, it must not be overlooked that in 1920, when he was graduated from Tulane University’s college of medicine, he was a sufficiently brilliant student to be chosen in open, nonpolitical competition for the award of a Rhodes scholarship, and that for two years he took advantage of this grant to pursue his studies abroad.

After his return he served for a time as junior intern at New Orleans’ huge Charity Hospital ... and within four years he was made superintendent of that famous institution and dean of his state university’s new medical school, both appointments being conferred on him by newly elected Governor Huey Long, who lost no opportunity to picture his protÉgÉ as something of a miracle man in the realm of healing.

To an early joint session of the legislature, His Excellency announced that under his administration Dr. Vidrine had reduced cancer mortality at Charity Hospital by one third. This was obvious nonsense. Had it not been, the medical world would long since have beaten a path to the ornamental iron gates of the century-old hospital in quest of further enlightenment.

One of the newspapers finally solved the mystery of this miracle of healing. It stemmed solely from a change in the system of tabulating mortality statistics. Calculated on the old basis, the death rate was precisely what it had been before, a little better in some years, a little worse in others. All this was set forth publicly in clear, simple wording. But except for a few of the palace guard, who cynically shrugged the explanation aside, not one of the Long followers accorded it the slightest heed. They and their peerless standard bearer continued to glory in the “fact” that he had reduced Charity’s cancer death rate by a third.

This accomplishment was by no means the only one of which young Governor Long boasted. Less tactfully, and certainly less judiciously, he made vainglorious public statements to the effect that “I hold all fifty-two cards at Baton Rouge, and shuffle and deal them as I please”; also that he had bought this legislator or that, “like you’d buy a sack of potatoes to be delivered at your gate.”

Within a year the House of Representatives impeached him on nine counts. Huey had learned that such a movement was to be launched at a special session in late March of 1929, and sent word to his legislative legions to adjourn sine die before an impeachment resolution could be introduced. But an electric malfunction in the voting machine made it appear that the House voted almost unanimously to adjourn, when in fact opinion was sharply divided. A riot ensued, which was finally quelled when Representative Mason Spencer of Tallulah, a brawny giant, bellowed the words: “In the name of sanity and common sense!” Momentarily this stilled the tumult and Spencer, not an official of the House, but merely one of its members, called the roll himself, by voice, on which tally only seven of the hundred members voted to adjourn.

The committee of impeachment managers in the House was headed by Spencer and by his close friend, another huge man, George Perrault of Opelousas. However, the impeachment charges were aborted in the Senate, when Long induced fifteen members of that thirty-nine-man body to sign a round robin to the effect that on technical grounds they would refuse to convict regardless of evidence. Since this was one vote more than enough to block the two-thirds majority needed for conviction, the impeachment charges were dropped.

Spencer and Perrault remained inseparable friends, occupying adjacent seats in the House to the day of Perrault’s death during the winter of 1934. On the night of September 8, 1935, Huey stopped to chat momentarily with Spencer, who took occasion to protest against the appointment of Edward Loeb, who had replaced his friend Perrault

“All these years I’ve got used to having a man the size of George Perrault sitting next to me,” he complained. “Did you have to make Oscar appoint a pint-size member like Eddie Loeb to sit in his place here?”

“You remind me,” retorted Long, “of the old nigger woman that was in a bind of some sort, and her boss helped her out, giving her clothes or money or vittles or whatever. So she said to him: ‘Mist’ Pete, you got a white face, fo’ true, but you’s so good you’s bound to have a black heart.’ That’s you, Mason. Your face is white, but you’ve sure enough got a black heart.”

A year after the abortive impeachment Long announced he would run for the Senate forthwith, though his gubernatorial tenure would not be terminated for another two years. In this way, he said, he would submit his case to the people. If they elected him, they would thereby express approval of his program. If not, they would elect his opponent, the long-time incumbent senator. Long was elected overwhelmingly, and then went from one political success to another, electing another Winnfieldian, his boyhood chum Oscar Allen, to succeed him as governor, and smashingly defeating a ticket on which his brother Earl was running for lieutenant governor with his brother Julius’ active support. It was later that year that Earl testified against Huey before a Senate committee.

In that same year Huey Long entered Arkansas politics. Mrs. Hattie Caraway, widow of Senator Thad Caraway, had been appointed to serve the few remaining months of her husband’s term, then announced as a candidate for re-election. Huey had two reasons for espousing her candidacy. First, she had voted with him for a resolution favoring the limitation of individual incomes by law to a maximum of a million dollars a year. Secondly, the senior senator from Arkansas, Majority Leader Joe T. Robinson, who had turned thumbs down on this resolution, had endorsed one of the candidates opposing Mrs. Caraway’s election. Thirdly, he felt it was time to put the country on notice that Kingfishing could be carried successfully beyond the borders of its home state.

Mrs. Caraway was accorded no chance to win. Every organized political group in the state had endorsed one or another of her six opponents, among whom were included a national commander of the American Legion, two former governors, a Supreme Court justice, and other bigwigs. The opening address of the nine-day campaign Huey Long waged with Mrs. Caraway was delivered at Magnolia, just north of the Louisiana border. At its close, a dazed local political Pooh-Bah wired a major campaign headquarters in Little Rock: “A tornado just passed through here. Very few trees left standing, and even those are badly scarred up.”

It was here that Long first formulated what later became the Share-Our-Wealth clubs’ credo.

“In this country,” he proclaimed, “we raise so much food there’d be plenty for all if we never slaughtered another hog or harvested another bushel of grain for the next two years, and yet people are going hungry. We’ve got enough material for clothes if in the next two years we never tanned another hide or raised another lock of cotton, and yet people are going barefoot and naked. Enough houses in this land are standing empty to put a roof over every head at night, and yet people are wandering the highways for lack of shelter.”

The remedy he proposed was simple: share our wealth instead of leaving almost all of it in the hands of a greedy few.

“All in this living world you’ve got to do,” he insisted, “is to limit individual incomes to one million dollars a year, and fix it so nobody when he dies can leave to any one child more than five million dollars. And let me tell you something: holding one of those birds down to a measly million dollars a year’s no sort of hardship on him. At that rate of income, if he stopped to bathe and shave, he’d be just about five hundred dollars the richer by the time he got his clothes back on.

“What we got to do is break up those enormous fortunes like the billion-dollar Mellon estate. By allowing them a million dollars a year for spending-money you’ll agree we wouldn’t be hurting ’em any to speak of. We’d have the balance to distribute amongst all the people, and that would fix things so everybody’d be able to live like he could right now if he made five thousand a year. Yes sir, like he was having five thousand a year and a team of mules to work with, once we share the wealth!”

Today it is almost impossible to visualize the effect of so alluring a prospect on a countryside forced at that time to rely on the Red Cross for seed corn and sweet-potato slips to assure a winter’s food supply. The rural Negroes in particular, their “furnish” sadly shrunken as a result of the depression, accepted it almost as gospel that Huey Long was promising them five thousand dollars a year and a team of mules.

The impact of Long’s oratory was so clearly obvious that a special committee waited on him at Texarkana, where he planned to close the campaign on Saturday night, to ask that he remain in Arkansas over the weekend to address meetings in the tier of counties along the Mississippi River on Monday, the day before the election. He agreed to do this, canceled plans to drive to Shreveport from Texarkana, and drove back to Little Rock instead. Since this left the accompanying newsmen with no grist for the early Monday editions, and since he had been quoting the Bible right and left in his speeches, not to mention the fact that in the glove compartment of his Cadillac a well-thumbed Bible reposed beside a loaded revolver and an atomizer of throat spray, he was asked where he expected to attend church the next morning.

“Me go to church?” he inquired incredulously. “Why I haven’t been to a church in so many years I don’t know when.”

“But you’re always quoting the Bible and so....”

“Bible’s the greatest book ever written,” he interrupted, “but I sure don’t need anybody I can buy for six bits and a chew of tobacco to explain it to me. When I need preachers I buy ’em cheap.”

Mrs. Caraway’s first primary victory was a landslide. Well pleased, Huey returned to Louisiana to defeat two-term incumbent Senator Edwin S. Broussard and elect one of his chief attorneys in the impeachment case, John H. Overton, in his stead. It was this election which a Senate committee later investigated to sift allegations of fraud. The investigation was recessed midway to give Senator Long an opportunity to halt a threatened bank run by the simple expedient of having Oscar Allen proclaim Saturday, February 4, a holiday celebrating the fact that sixteen years before, on February 3 and 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson had severed diplomatic relations with Germany!

PROCLAMATION

STATE OF LOUISIANA
EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT
BATON ROUGE

Whereas, on the nights of February 3 and 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, severed diplomatic relations with the Imperial German government; and

Whereas, more than 16 years has intervened before the great American people have turned their eyes back to the lofty ideals of human uplift and new freedom as propounded by Woodrow Wilson; and

Whereas, it is now fitting that due recognition be given by the great State of Louisiana in line with the far-reaching principles enunciated by the illustrious southerner who sought to break the fetters of mankind throughout the world;

Now, therefore, I, Oscar Kelly Allen, governor of the State of Louisiana, do hereby ordain that Saturday, the fourth day of February, 1933, the 16th anniversary of the severance of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Imperial German government be, and the same is hereby declared, a holiday throughout the State of Louisiana and I do hereby order that all public business, including schools, colleges, banks and other public enterprises be suspended on said day and that the proper ceremonies to commemorate that event be held.

In witness whereof I have caused to be affixed the great seal of the State of Louisiana on this, the third day of February, in the year of Our Lord, A.D. 1933.

This meant that all public offices, schools—and banks—were legally forbidden to open their doors on that Saturday; by Sunday the Federal Reserve authorities had put $20,000,000 at the disposal of the menaced bank and the run which might have spread panic throughout the country died a-borning. However, bank closures on a national scale were thus postponed for only a month. March 4, while Franklin Roosevelt was taking his first oath as president, state after state was ordering its banks to close, as financial consternation (vectored from Detroit, however, and not from New Orleans) stampeded across the land.

One of the newly inaugurated President’s first acts—“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”—was to order all the nation’s banks to close until individually authorized by executive permit to reopen. But the onus of having initiated the disaster had been averted from Louisiana by Huey’s bizarre bank holiday, and this underscored the fact that for some time past, the number and ratio of bank failures in Louisiana had been far, far below the national average. It also strengthened the growing conviction that Louisiana’s Long was something more than another Southern demagogue like Mississippi’s Bilbo or Texas’ Pa Ferguson.

Franklin Roosevelt was probably never under any illusions on that score. He gauged quite correctly the omen of Share-Our-Wealth’s growing strength. It had been blueprinted for all to see when Mrs. Caraway’s candidacy swept the boards in Arkansas, and again when this movement, plus the oratorical spell cast by the Louisianian in stumping the Midwestern prairie states, carried them for Roosevelt later that same autumn. According to Long’s subsequent diatribes, he had campaigned thus for “Roosevelt the Little” on the express understanding that the president-to-be would back the program for limiting individual incomes and bequests by statute.

There is ample ground for the belief that Long was secretly gratified when he realized that the New Dealers would have none of this proposal. The issue which had served him so well in the past could thus be turned against Roosevelt four years later, when Long planned to enter the lists as a rival candidate for the world’s loftiest office. Publicly, to be sure, he professed himself outraged by “this double cross,” bolted the administration ranks once more, repeated an earlier, defiant fulmination to the effect that if the New Dealers wished to withhold control over Louisiana’s federal appointments from him, they could take this patronage and “go slap dab to hell with it.”

Roosevelt and his fidus Achates, Harry Hopkins, took him at his word, and gave the anti-Long faction, headed by Mayor Walmsley of New Orleans, a controlling voice in the distribution of federal patronage. The breach between the two standard bearers—one heading the New Deal and a federal bureaucracy tremendously swollen by a swarm of new alphabetical agencies, the other all but worshiped as archangel of Share-Our-Wealth—widened from month to month.

Roosevelt left the anti-Long philippics to members of his cabinet and other department heads: Hugh Johnson, NRA administrator, for example, or Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. The climax to these interchanges came in the late summer of 1935, when in an address delivered on the Senate floor, Long charged that “Franklin Delano Roosevelt the first, the last, and the littlest” was linked to a plot against his—Huey Long’s—life.