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LONG, HUEY P. 1893-1935

GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA (1928-1931)

U.S. SENATOR (1932-1935)

"The Kingfish."

During the first two years of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency, Sen. Huey P. Long, nicknamed 4<The Kingfish," was a demagogic opponent of the New Deal, offering his own popular solution for poverty and unemployment.

Background

Huey Pierce Long Jr. was born and grew up on his family's farm in northern Louisiana. He attended the University of Oklahoma School of Law for a semester and passed the Louisiana bar examination in 1915 after further study at the Tulane University Law School. In 1918 Long was elected to the state railroad commission, which became the public-service commission in 1921. Long became its chairman in 1924, the year in which he narrowly lost his first bid for the governorship. He ran again in 1928, campaigning with a banner that read "EVERY MAN A KING, BUT NO ONE WEARS A CROWN" and won. He achieved nearly absolute power as governor and was often called the "dictator of Louisiana." Once, when an opponent tried to show him that he was violating the state constitution, Long brushed the document aside and said, "I'm the Constitution around here now." While he built roads, bridges, and government buildings and improved the state's schools, there was an undercurrent of corruption in his methods. In 1929 he was impeached, but not convicted, on charges of bribery and misconduct. Though elected to the U.S. Senate in 1930, the ever-colorful Long refused to take the office until 1932. If he had gone to Washington in 1930, he would have been succeeded by the lieutenant governor, who was a political opponent. By waiting until his term as governor expired in 1932, he was able to engineer the election of a hand-picked successor. Long continued to control the state from Washington.

Senator Long

By 1934, with Roosevelt's New Deal policies having only partial success in improving the economy, a spirit of radicalism was catching fire in parts of the nation. Frustrated and disillusioned by the severity and length of the Depression, some Americans enthusiastically embraced Long's agenda for redistributing the nation's wealth. His Share-Our-Wealth Society offered a plan to divide the nation's wealth equally among all Americans, guaranteeing everyone a middle-class income of twenty-five hundred dollars and a five-thousand-dollar "homestead allowance." By the end of 1934 millions of supporters were singing the society song, which included the lines "Ev'ry man a king, ev'ry man a king, / … / There's enough for all people to share."

Assassination

Long traveled with a contingent of bodyguards, but they were unable to protect him on 8 September 1935, when Dr. Carl Weiss assassinated the forty-two-year-old demagogue in the Louisiana State Capitol building. In response Long's bodyguards riddled Weiss's body with sixty-one bullets. The story of Long's rise and fall is the basis for Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men (1946).