Huey Long

Huey Long ran Louisiana as no American state has been run before or since, a governor and then senator who built roads, schools, and hospitals for the poorest state in the union while concentrating power in his own hands so completely that opponents called him a dictator, and T. Harry Williams's biography remains the essential account of him. Williams, the Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University, the university Long himself had lavished money on, wrote the book out of a method then still new to serious history: the tape recorder. He interviewed some 295 people who had known Long, from allies to sworn enemies, and his wife Estelle transcribed the tapes, and the oral testimony gives the book a texture no archive could supply, the sound of Louisiana politics as its players actually talked. The story runs from the hill parish boyhood through the traveling salesman years, the railroad commission fights, the governorship won in 1928 on the slogan every man a king, the impeachment he beat, the Share Our Wealth movement that made him a national threat to Franklin Roosevelt, and the assassination in the marble corridor of his own skyscraper capitol in 1935, dead at 42. Williams refuses both easy verdicts. His Long is a genuine champion of the dispossessed and a genuine menace to constitutional government, a man who delivered more to poor Louisianans than anyone before him and corrupted every institution he touched doing it. The book won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 1970 National Book Award in History and Biography, and half a century on it is still the Long book everything else answers to.