Huey Long
by Thomas Harry Williams
Summary
T. Harry Williams's biography follows Huey Long from his 1893 birth near Winnfield in the poor, populist minded hill country of north central Louisiana, through a childhood Long later exaggerated into log cabin poverty, a scholarship to Louisiana State University he could not afford to actually attend, and a brief, restless run through several colleges before he passed the Louisiana bar in 1915 after successfully petitioning to sit for the exam early. The book follows his early legal work representing poor plaintiffs in workers' compensation cases, and his formative grievance against Standard Oil, which cost him an oil investment in 1918 by refusing to carry his crude through its pipelines, a slight the book treats as the origin of a hostility toward the company that shaped the rest of Long's career.
Williams follows Long's rapid rise through the Railroad Commission into the governorship, won in 1928 with the largest margin in the state's history, and through the aggressive, often lawless methods, firing opponents en masse, bullying legislators, and packing state boards with loyalists, that Long used to push through free textbooks, adult literacy night schools that taught 100,000 people to read, the still standing state capitol in Baton Rouge, and a road program that took Louisiana from 331 miles of paved highway to 2,301 in his four years as governor. The book gives real weight to Long's 1929 impeachment, survived through a signed pledge from enough senators to block conviction, and to his move to the United States Senate in 1932, where his Share Our Wealth program, promising every family a guaranteed income funded by capping the largest American fortunes, built a movement that, by 1935, its own Share Our Wealth Society claimed numbered several million members, even though not one of Long's own bills passed the Senate during his three years there. It closes with the September 1935 shooting at the Louisiana Capitol, where Carl Weiss, the son in law of a judge Long was working to gerrymander out of a district, fired a single shot before Long's bodyguards killed Weiss on the spot, and with Long's death from his wound two days later, at forty two, before the presidential run several Democratic strategists had genuinely feared.
Williams treats Long neither as a simple demagogue nor as a martyred reformer, arguing that his economic populism, unusual for a white Southern politician of his era, deliberately set aside racial appeals in favor of a program built around who had money and who did not.
Historical Context & Significance
Alfred A. Knopf published Huey Long in 1969, and it won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography as well as the 1970 National Book Award in History and Biography. Williams, a historian at Louisiana State University who had spent years interviewing people who had known Long personally, many of them still alive when he began the research, built the book on oral testimony that would not have survived for a later biographer to gather.
The biography reshaped how historians treated Long, moving his reputation away from the simple demagogue portrayed in Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men, itself widely understood as loosely based on Long, and toward a more complicated reading of him as a genuine, if authoritarian, economic reformer whose methods and ambitions Franklin Roosevelt privately regarded as one of the two most dangerous forces in American politics.