Huey Long (1893-1935) could be a visionary or a scoundrel depending on the day. A hundred years ago he already defended the fight against inequality or universal basic income, but he also said phrases like “of course I have given my brother-in-law a public job. I have to live with his sister!” A complicated guy with a complicated legacy.
In just over forty years, Huey Long came from a poor small town to the summit of power in Washington, and he always did it in the same way: attacking big companies and the richest 1%, and proposing and implementing policies that benefited to everyone else. Also crushing anyone who got in his way.
When he dreamed of the White House, they killed him. He couldn’t have caught him by surprise because he had announced it himself. He knew that he had many and very powerful enemies who had tried before, that’s why he was always surrounded by bodyguards. However, in the end, what killed him was not his revolutionary ideas, but his viperous tongue. He was killed by the son-in-law of a rival whom he had accused of the worst sin anyone could have in the southern United States in the 1930s: having blacks in the family.
The memory of Huey Long still fascinates Americans. Dozens of books have been written about him and Oscar movies have been made. So many theories have been published about his murder that, sixty years after his death, the body of his murderer was exhumed to look for more clues. Was he ahead of his time, an agitator, a profiteer, a genius, a petty dictator, a brazen…? Probably all of those things and more.
Huey Long was the seventh of nine children of farmers in Winn, the poorest parish in one of the poorest states in the US. Winn did, however, have a well-deserved reputation for being rebel territory. During the Civil War, his representatives had distanced themselves from the rest of Louisiana, asking themselves: “Who would want to fight so that the rich continue to have black slaves?”
His family was one of those who enjoyed a better situation in Winn, but they fully participated in that tradition of distrust towards the wealthy. Or so Huey Long’s father said: “The rich don’t care about the poor, or their pain, or their illness, or their death. You may be surprised to hear me talk like this, but this is the way my son grew up with and I grew up with.”
Huey dedicated himself to street vending in his early years, touring towns and organizing raffles and demonstrations, thus honing the crowd-puller skills that would later be so useful to him. Only when he met his wife did he take his studies seriously again: he put together his savings and attended law school for a year. Then he somehow convinced the university to let him take the final exam and became a lawyer at 21.
From the beginning he made clear the cases he wanted: he boasted of “only defending the poor” and of looking for litigation in which he could most annoy banks, oil companies and other large companies. At 25 he ran for the only public office he could access by age in Louisiana, the state public services commission, and from there he forced the telephone company to lower its rates. At 31, he ran for governor of Louisiana for the first time.
On that occasion he lost. He said his voters, poor farmers, had not been able to get to the polls because there had been torrential rains and rural roads were muddy. Four years later he achieved it. There was a splendid sun and Huey Long was elected governor, the youngest in the history of the state, with the motto that would always accompany him: “Every man, a king.”
“Where are the schools that you hoped to take your children to and that never came? Where are the roads and highways that you gave your taxes for? Where are the institutions to care for the sick?” Huey Long came to power with such concrete promises and a plan to fulfill them. He even made a campaign song: “Every man, a king. Because you can be a millionaire, but there is something that is for others, there is enough for all of us to share.
And I was clear about who had to share first. He lowered property taxes, which were paid primarily by the poor, and raised income taxes. He also approved a tax of 15 cents per barrel on the oil industry that mainly affected Standard Oil, the company founded by Rockefeller, which had enormous power in Louisiana.
Several legislators close to the oil company began a procedure to remove him. The accusations against the governor were varied: they ranged from embezzlement of public funds to the use of profanity, and also included the alleged hiring of a hitman to kill a legislator. His enemies failed and he was not convicted, although, according to him, Standard Oil spent “enough money to roast a wet mule” on bribes.
The governor managed to use the money from those taxes to promote a plan to give free textbooks to all students in a state where a quarter of the population did not know how to read. In addition, he made sure that the mud on the roads would never again cause him to lose an election: when he came to office there were less than 500 kilometers of paved roads in Louisiana and he left 8,000. He also built a state public hospital.
He put his own touch on all policies. He dedicated a lot of money to expanding the state university, but he also liked to direct the university band and compose its songs, while at halftime of football games he would go down to the locker room to give a motivational talk to the players.
And, at the same time, he was accumulating more power and filling the administration with friends, allies and family members who only responded to him. He was preparing an authoritarian turn and a leap into national politics.
He had only been in office for four years, but, in an America immersed in the Great Depression, Huey Long’s Louisiana was something of a miracle. Increasingly better public services and many employment opportunities due to the governor’s great projects. In a country drowned by unemployment, the road construction program that he had promoted alone had 22,000 workers working, 10% of all those who were building roads in the United States. Louisiana was progressing while the country was sinking.
This is how Huey Long began to export his philosophy of “sharing our wealth” to the rest of the country. He had a very clear idea of ??where the problems came from: “I have seen the Depression of 1929 coming. Wealth is trapped in the hands of very few. People don’t buy because they don’t have the money. Big businesses don’t sell because they don’t have anyone. The richest 1% do not eat more than any other 1%. They don’t wear any more clothes. They don’t live in more houses. Our problem is not an insufficiency of capital, it is an insufficiency of its distribution.”
And for that problem, Huey Long had a solution: “How is a recovery going to be possible when 12 men have more wealth than 120 million?” That’s why he wanted to limit a person’s maximum personal wealth to 5 million and their annual income to less than two million. With the confiscation of the rest, an annual income would be paid to each family enough to have a house, a car and a radio. All education would be free until university and there would be pensions for everyone over 60.
The ideas of his plan provoked real enthusiasm among those who had less. 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs were founded with almost 8 million members. Long received about 37,000 letters a day and founded his own newspaper to communicate with his followers. However, he also made enemies. His New Orleans home was the target of a shooting and several arson attempts.
In 1930 he ran for the U.S. Senate, but did not come to be sworn in until two years later. He had previously made sure to oust his lieutenant governor from office to elect someone who would allow himself to be mentored: in all respects, Long continued to run Louisiana from Washington while preparing his presidential ambitions. As he had also taken away all powers from the local authorities, he had reorganized public employment and purged the judges, he had all the power.
President Roosevelt was worried. He said Long was “one of the two most dangerous people in the country” (the other was MacArthur). He had had his support at the beginning, but the Louisianan had quickly become disenchanted with policies that did not seem ambitious enough to him: “The only difference between Hoover and Roosevelt is that one is an owl and the other is an owl. The owl bursts into the chicken coop, knocks over the chicken, and catches it as it falls. The owl sneaks into the chicken coop and talks softly to him until he falls in love and, before you know it, he is gone.”
He was clear about what he wanted. She even wrote a book called My First Days in the White House in which she fictionalized what they would be like. In a poll commissioned by the Democratic Party, they estimated that some six million Americans could vote for Huey Long in the presidential election if he ran as an independent, jeopardizing Roosevelt’s reelection.
The president tried to favor his rivals in Louisiana and launched an investigation against him for tax fraud, but only the bullet of a young man who defended the honor of his father-in-law could defeat him.
His murderer was killed on the spot by his bodyguards; He, however, took two more days. One of his supporters said that his last words were: “God, don’t let me die, I have a lot of things to do.”
His wife replaced him in the Senate and her son. Several of his followers were imprisoned for corruption, but in the end the position of governor ended up in the hands of his brother. It will never be known if the phrase he had uttered by his right-hand man was prophetic or just coincidental: “The only way to prevent Huey Long from reaching the White House is to kill him.”
