Enemy of the elites

A curious footnote appears in the middle of the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s sprawling 1,500-page study of US race relations, An American Dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy (1944). On his travels across the South, Myrdal had encountered a group of white pupils at a poor school in rural Louisiana in 1938. These kids believed that Huey Long, the state’s former governor and senator, who had been dead for three years, was still alive. They also thought he was the sitting president of the United States. Myrdal wrote off their ignorance as the product of the abysmal state of education in the South. But there was something more to it.

Long was perhaps the most powerful populist voice in America in the 1930s. Brash and outspoken, he rivalled only President Roosevelt in his ability to voice the concerns of downtrodden Americans during the Depression. Contemporaries, depending on their political priorities, found him exhilarating or terrifying. A similar dynamic has shaped the views of historians. For some, Long signified an incipient form of American fascism, the “closest thing to a dictatorship that America has ever known”, as the historian David Kennedy put it in Freedom from Fear (1999). For others, Long was a genuine mass leader and modernizer devoted to improving the lot of ordinary people.

Thomas E. Patterson’s huge new biography, American Populist, adheres firmly to the latter view. It is the most sympathetic treatment of Long to date. The author, a practising lawyer, insists that it is “time to retire the historical caricature of Huey as a menace”. Instead, he should be remembered for his “humor, enthusiasm, perseverance, resilience, intelligence, originality, and dedication to a worthy cause of helping 99 percent of the people”.

The author does not deny that Long could be ruthless. But in remarkably passive phrasing, he insists that this “ruthlessness was caused or necessitated in part by the unreasonable behavior of his opponents and in part was ingrained by [political] heredity or environment ”. Thus, the author comes perilously close to parroting Long’s own view of his importance, sincerity and achievement. This affinity registers on every page. Against prevailing practice, Patterson refers to Long almost exclusively by his first name.

Hailing from a modestly prosperous farming family in north central Louisiana, Long always maintained he was one of a kind – “sui generis”, as he liked to say. But his ideals were rooted in the agrarian populism that swept much of the nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with political and economic elites denounced as enemies of the people. From an early age, Long developed both an intellectual and a rhetorical connection with struggling people. After a brief stint as a travelling salesman, he became a lawyer, representing labourers and small businessmen against mighty and often merciless corporations, efforts that stoked his aspirations for office.

His entry into politics came in 1918, with his election to the Louisiana Railroad Commission, a regulatory body whose mandate soon expanded to deal with most major public utilities in the state. Chairman of the commission by 1922, he positioned himself as a representative of the poor and called for the state to declare oil wells and pipelines public utilities. This brought him growing adulation.

Long then set his sights on the governorship of Louisiana and, after a failed campaign in 1924, won election in 1928. To do so, he built his own formidable political machine, upending the established patronage networks that had dominated the state’s politics since the American Civil War. Most importantly, he won the votes of poor people in the state’s rustic southern parishes, carrying his message to them through radio broadcasts and a flurry of campaign stops.

Once in office, Long was convinced that if there was to be any progress, he would have to build a state bureaucracy entirely independent of the traditional power holders. Louisiana politicians had always used patronage as a tool, but for Long it was everything. He fired thousands of state employees and replaced them with workers loyal only to him. Twenty-three of his relatives were on the state payroll, and his brother was in charge of doling out jobs and rustling kickbacks from businessmen. Long set up a newspaper and forced state employees to subscribe, automatically deducting the cost from their paychecks. New Orleans was a particular source of challenge, so Long dissolved its Levee Board, which controlled the vast system of dams and dykes along the Mississippi, and replaced it with one of his own composition. In 1929, his opponents impeached him on a number of charges, including the misuse of state funds and illegal influence of the judiciary, but Long cajoled his way to vindication.

Still, he managed some real successes. His administration passed new taxes and issued bonds to fund public works, including thousands of miles of roads and bridges, negotiated reduced rates with utility companies and distributed free textbooks across the state. An advocate of cheap public education, Long secured robust funding for the beleaguered Louisiana State University and delighted in its architectural and academic advancement. He also built a new governor’s mansion. It looked very much like the White House, which Long was certain he would reach before too long.

Indeed, he had little desire to finish his four-year gubernatorial term. In 1930, he earned election to the US Senate, though he nevertheless remained the dominant force in Louisiana state politics. He refused to give up the governorship, holding it for two years as he simultaneously served in the Senate. When he returned to the capital in Baton Rouge – and he returned often – the sitting governor, a Long devotee, relinquished his desk so that Long could work there.

To all intents and purposes, Long was the real governor of Louisiana until 1935. But he was much more than that, critics charged. He pilloried his opponents, smashed rival sources of political power, took bribes from corporations, deployed the National Guard unlawfully and dictated legislation. When one opposing legislator objected that Long was trampling on the state constitution, he responded: “I’m the constitution around here”.

His power might have been felt only in Louisiana but for the Great Depression, which he took as his chance dramatically to reform the nation’s economic system and thus boost his appeal. He became a fierce critic of Roosevelt, attacking the New Deal for doing too little to help ordinary people and too much to prop up big business. This brought him national fame. Half of all the mail sent to Congress went to him. Roosevelt described him as one of “the two most dangerous men in the country”. (The other was General Douglas MacArthur.)

Patterson portrays Long as the most principled and responsive leader on the national stage to the plight of the poor. He was certainly bold. He opposed the labyrinthine National Recovery Administration for its onerous codes and helped to amend the Glass-Steagall Act so the law would extend federal protection to state and local banks. He was among the first to advocate paying farmers not to farm so that they could regain the value of their crop surpluses. Most notably, he set up the Share Our Wealth programme, an audacious set of proposals that sought to redistribute the nation’s riches by confiscating large fortunes, levying steep income taxes and remitting the proceeds, $5,000 to every American family. Hundreds of thousands joined Share Our Wealth clubs across the country. Yet the scheme was, according to most economists then and now, impossible. Patterson crunches the numbers and notes that Share Our Wealth might have been made workable with some significant overhauls. But Long never bothered to make such calculations. In the end, it doesn’t much matter whether the programme could have succeeded. What did matter was Long’s call for governmental relief and wealth distribution, which helped to press Roosevelt into much more sweeping reform.

By 1935, Long’s opponents in Louisiana had had enough. In January, an armed group that included two former governors seized the courthouse in the state capital, Baton Rouge. The abortive coup lasted only a few days and emboldened Long to claim yet more power. In a special session he called that summer, the legislature passed more than forty bills in fewer than two hours, many of which Long had written himself. Someone asked when lawmakers would be able to read them. “When they’re passed”, he sneered. The bills created a raft of Long-controlled state agencies. One authorized the governor to deploy the state militia at his own unfettered discretion.

Long never got the chance to utilize these powers. An assassin, at once motivated by political and personal grudges, shot him on September 8, 1935, and he died on September 10. But his legacy lived on. In 1936, Patterson notes, “Long’s political heirs won a smashing triumph”. Given all that he had done to stack the cards, how could they not? The next five governors were all Long stalwarts, and one was his brother.

These complex dynamics suggest why Long has become such an enduring figure of scholarly interest. He did much to advance the economic development of Louisiana and, to a lesser extent, improve the lives of its citizens. But his influence in state politics was cancerous. Of course, politics in Louisiana was corrupt well before he took power. But he made them even more so.

One can detect the echoes of Long in our own era, when a new breed of American populist claims to speak for the people against a cabal of evil elites. Of course, the substance of Donald Trump’s policies bear no resemblance to the redistributionist schemes trumpeted by Long. But in terms of political style and habit, and in their utter disregard for democracy, they have much in common. Thomas E. Patterson is correct in thinking that Long’s story presents a lesson for Americans in the age of Trump. I’m just not sure his book offers the right one.

Kyle Burke is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida and the author of Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist internationalism and paramilitary warfare in the Cold War, 2018

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