"Kingfish": A chilling political portrait

"Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long"
by Richard D. White, Jr.
Random House, 361 pp., $26.95

Huey Long has been insufficiently demonized. The teachers in the Edmonds School District told me plenty about right-wing Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but nothing about the villainous Huey, the populist governor, then senator, of Louisiana during the Great Depression. Here is a book that fills in the blanks.

Richard D. White, the author of "Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long," is sympathetic to Long's populism. He allows that Long did some good. But his story of the man overwhelms any sentimentality about his intentions. Yes, Long got free textbooks for the children. He taxed Standard Oil. But the essence of Huey Long was political power, and he amassed more of it than any governor in American history.

Long, a man of relentless energy, was elected in 1928 as champion of the rural folk against the bourgeois politicians of New Orleans. After one year, the legislature's lower house impeached him on charges of blackmail, bribery, using state money for personal purposes and forcing state employees to sign undated resignation letters. By White's account, all the charges were true. Long paid off enough senators to win and immediately set out to get those who had opposed him.

He pumped up Louisiana State University (where the author teaches) and insisted on loyalty from professors and students. As the Depression worsened, he ordered a new governor's mansion and a towering state capitol. He had the state hire thousands of new police, game wardens, road workers and others; to pay for it he increased the state debt tenfold. He had the state sell so many bonds that Wall Street refused to buy any more.

His boldness was extraordinary. When the big newspapers opposed him, he started his own newspaper and ordered all state employees to subscribe to it. They already were required to donate to his political machine.

He noted which business interests supported him and which didn't, including the press, and had their property assessed and taxed accordingly.

He created a new state police force. He used the National Guard as his private auxiliary. At a crucial time, he kidnapped his political opponents.

In 1930, he ran for the U.S. Senate and won. The law prevented him from being governor and senator at the same time, so he stayed in Louisiana until he had placed a yes-man in the governor's chair.

From 1932 to 1935, Long was effectively a senator and dictator of Louisiana at the same time. He would harangue his patrician colleagues in Washington, D.C., with populist rhetoric, then fly home to take matters in hand in Baton Rouge.

From mid-1934 to mid-1935 he called seven special sessions of the Louisiana Legislature and passed 463 bills, including, the author says, "some of the most repressive legislation in American political history."

Most ominously, he lusted to be president of the United States. A Democrat, as all politicians in Louisiana were, he initially supported Franklin Roosevelt. But FDR was not populist enough for him, and anyway Long played second fiddle to no one. By 1935 he was attacking the New Deal for being insufficiently leftist. With the help of anti-Semitic radio preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, he was also creating a national network of Share Our Wealth clubs to build up support for the Democratic nomination in 1936.

In 1935, Long was assassinated by Carl Weiss, a 30-year-old doctor. Long had gerrymandered Weiss' father-in-law, a judge, out of office, and had accused the family of having "coffee blood," which in those days was a vicious insult.

The book offers little more explanation than this. Weiss did not survive the encounter, having been filled with slugs from Long's bodyguards. (Robert Penn Warren would eventually fictionalize Long's life and death in the classic 1946 novel, "All the King's Men.")

There is no deep analysis in this book of Long's rhetoric, his ideas or the kind of country he would have created as president. This is a straightforward account of who he was and what he did. That is chilling enough.

Bruce Ramsey is an editorial writer for The Seattle Times.