Sen. Huey P. Long, Jr. of Louisiana died 75 years ago on September 10, 1935, after being shot in the state capitol in Baton Rouge two days earlier. He was a man with a legacy that is far more complicated than he's portrayed in the snippets of references to him in most histories or the distortions of popular fiction.
The piece I'd like to refer everyone to on this 75th observance of his death is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from 1969: Huey Long by T. Harry Williams, which was written while many of the sources from Long's political career and life were still alive. Below are a couple of paragraphs from the beginning of Chapter 1, "Not Even a Horse" (with apologies to Mssr. Williams, I have elided a couple of terms he used for historical verisimilitude).
The story seems too good to be true--but people who should know swear that it is true. The first time Huey P. Long campaigned in rural, Latin, Catholic south Louisiana, the local boss who had him in charge said at the beginning of the tour: "Huey, you ought to remember one thing in your speeches today. You're from north Louisiana, but now you're in south Louisiana. And we got a lot of Catholic voters down here."
"I know," Huey answered. And throughout the day in every small town Long would begin by saying: "When I was a boy, I would get up at six o'clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o'clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist grandparents to church." The effect of the anecdote on the audiences was obvious, and on the way back to Baton Rouge that night the local leader said admiringly: "Why, Huey, you've been holding out on us. I didn't know you had any Catholic grandparents." "Don't be a fool," replied Huey. "We didn't even have a horse."
…
He burst on the Louisiana scene in the mid-1920's, and nothing in that hitherto placid and planter-ruled state would ever be the same again. After a spectacular stint on the state Public Service Commission, where he made his name a household word by enforcing the law on the previously sacrosanct big corporations, he won the governorship by the time he was not quite thirty-five years old. He won it by promising to enact an expansive program of economic and political reform. His victory was a new departure in Louisiana, which since Reconstruction had lived submissively under the sway of the upper-income groups. But nobody worried very much that Long would put through his program, least of all the ruling hierarchy, which would suffer its impact. After all, he was just another demagogue and demagogues promised much but delivered little—and usually nothing. He could be easily handled, as his counterparts in other Southern states had been handled. The way you dealt with a demagogue was to defeat his bills in the legislature or deflect him into forays against harmless objectives or, if things got really bad, absorb him into your own organization. Whatever the method, the end was the same. The demagogue, in helpless frustration, would go to cussing "n*****s" or "Y*****s"—and life would continue as before, and the right people would still monopolize the profits and the prestige.
That should have been the story, but this time it was different, startlingly so. As governor , Long broke completely with the established pattern for leaders of his type—the promising demagogue who forgot his promises or the idealistic liberal or progressive governor who permitted reactionary elements to stall and then sabotage his program. He put through the whole of his program and even added to it as he went along. And because from the first he faced an unrelenting and sometimes an unreasoning opposition, and because he was fascinated with power and its usage and became more fascinated as he grasped more of it, he erected a machine whose like had never existed before in American politics and has not existed since.