A couple of weeks ago, in response to Bill O'Reilly's scurrilous attack on we Kossacks, I historioranted on Demagogues, then last week on Rome's Gracchi brothers in Of Grackles and Kingfish, Part I. Unfortunately, since O'Reilly and his ilk (Michelle Malkin, for our purposes, should be considered an "ilk") don't pay much attention to anything on the site not posted by one of their own plants, they never did bother to mention the kind of earnest legal and academic scholarship that goes on here. It's likely this is because they're unfamiliar with the concepts of freedom of thought or open-source knowledge – things that are pretty much anathema to the kind of goose-stepping, overlord-fearing Amerika they envision.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight your resident historiorantologist will resurrect a name that puts fear in the hearts of "greed is good" types everywhere. We'll also attempt to answer that age-old question: What would happen if Gaius Gracchus had risen to power in Depression-era Louisiana.
An American Gracchus?
Populism, wealth redistribution, ambitious young tribunes using their positions as rabble-rousers to enhance political careers? Such things could never transpire in the land of free market competition, could they?
They could, and they did, in the person of Huey Pierce Long, one of the more remarkable populists produced by the socioeconomic conditions of the early 20th century United States. Born in Winnfield, Louisiana, in 1893 (7th of 9 surviving children), Huey's family was better off than most in town, but that didn't necessarily add up to much on, say, a nationwide scale – especially when one considers that Winn parish was one of the poorest areas in a very poor state. An innately gifted student, Huey quickly outstripped his mother's ability to homeschool him, then proceeded rapidly through the grades of a "subscription school" (a one-room, multi-grade level private school in which a teacher is hired and imported by a small group of wealthy parents) his mother had helped set up.
He never did finish high school – the year he finished 11th grade was the year the state decreed that a 12th year would be required to graduate, and Huey's assemblage of a petition against the injustice got him expelled. He bounced around for a little while – a semester at preacher school, a couple of sales gigs, a few hours of law school here and there – until, at the tender age of 21, he arranged for and passed a special oral Bar Exam, and so became a Louisiana lawyer without any diploma of any kind. The memory of the haphazard and underprivileged nature of his education always stayed with Huey, and education reform (i.e. free public schooling for all) was a centerpiece of his social vision. It also sold real well in a state in which a quarter of the adult population in 1928 could not read or write.
Huey returned to Winnfield with his new bride, Rose, whom he'd met at a Shreveport baking contest during his traveling salesman days. He spent a few years there, representing the poor against the town's monied interests (he even sued a bank run by one of his uncles – the same guy who let Huey first set up his law practice in a room above the bank), then used the windfall from a big defamation/wrongful termination suit to build his family a home in Shreveport. There he made himself unpopular among the aristocracy by continuing to represent the poor against the rich, eventually taking on even giant corporations like Standard Oil.
He was able to do this because of his increasing notoriety on the political stage. In 1918, at the age of 25 (dunno why he wasn't in France, fighting the Kaiser over there so we wouldn't end up fighting the Hun over here), Huey won a seat on the Louisiana Railroad Commission, which later became the Public Service Commission. By 1922, he was head of the PSC, and used his post to successfully sue the Cumberland Telephone Company for overcharging its customers – and after Long won the appeal arguments at the Supreme Court (Chief Justice/Ex-President William Howard Taft called Long one of the best legal minds to appear before the court), the company was forced to send refund checks to 80,000 customers who were now very familiar with Huey Long's name.
In 1924, the 30-year-old ran unsuccessfully for governor, coming in a close third in what would be the last campaign defeat of his life. Though the Ku Klux Klan and racial issues were a major factor in the election, Huey didn't go there, concentrating instead on economic issues and rallying his rural base. Regrettably for that dirt-road-traveling bloc of supporters (Louisiana had only 300 miles of paved roads and 3 major bridges in 1924), heavy rains throughout the state the day before the elections kept rural voters from the polls, and Huey was forced to bide his time until his next shot, in 1928.
By then, Huey was chomping at the bit. He wallpapered the state in flyers printed at his own expense to counter the universal opposition of the state's newspapers, which were wholly-owned subsidiaries of the state-controlling gang of New Orleans politicos known as "the Old Regulars." He covered 15,000 miles of those bouncy, muddy roads, giving upwards of 5 or 6 speeches per day, talking and lobbing barbs for hours on end, never using notes as he connected with small knots of subsistence farmers, who were themselves flattered that a candidate would take the time to speak with them. Via hueylong.com:
"Louisiana was stirring ... The trappers and fishermen of the bayous, the Cajun farmers of the south and the redneck farmers of the hill parishes, the sharecroppers and tenants everywhere, and the laborers in the towns and the small businessmen in the villages ... Now suddenly a champion had appeared to them, one who promised to lead them to a better life ..."
— T. Harry Williams, Huey Long
Sounds pretty Gracchi to me. So was his ability to orate and to reach out to the peasantry: When, during a politically-motivated impeachment sponsored by Standard Oil, Louisiana's newspapers treated him like a Dem guest on Fox News, Huey sidestepped them by creating his own newspaper, Louisiana Progress, which later expanded into a nationwide paper called American Progress, and by using radio (this was before FDR's "innovative" fireside chats) to broadcast his message straight to the Plebian Assembly, as it were. The scope of his reforms were positively Graachian, too:
- 9000 miles of new roads; 111 new bridges
- free schools and textbooks (books paid for by a special oil tax that so enraged the guys at Standard Oil that the unsuccessfully tried to have Long impeached)
- abolished the poll tax and reduced property tax rates
- expanded Louisiana State University, established its medical school, and wrote "Touchdown for LSU," which is still played before every home football game
There's more, but the point is that all this capital construction (oh, yeah, he built a new capitol and governor's mansion, too) began before the Stock Market Crash of October, 1929, so Louisianans were busily at work on their infrastructure when the Great Depression inflicted itself upon the rest of the country. As a result, quality of life in Louisiana was rising, even as large numbers of Americans in other states were moving into Hoovervilles and standing in soup lines.
That didn't stop The Man from trying to run Huey down, though. In 1929, in response to the odious 5-cent-per-barrel book tax, Standard Oil instigated its Louisiana cronies to impeach Long. They dutifully did so, with the House sending 8 of the original 19 charges (one of the rejected ones pertained to Long's use of "abusive language") on to the Senate, where Long was able to pull together just over a third of the body in support of the "Round Robin" – their signatures promising a vote for acquittal on the grounds that the whole trial was an unconstitutional sham. Embarrassed and (as always) enraged by their setback, the anti-Long forces could do little but fume and block spending proposals wherever they could, even as their relatives were fired from state jobs, it became difficult for contractors to win bids if they didn't advertise in Louisiana Progress, and Huey passed out favors to those who'd supported the Round Robin document.
Was he dirty? Did he make backroom deals, hand out government jobs to cronies, and leave the door open to, shall we say, different perspectives on some of the events I just described? Yes, according to Michael Kazin, reviewing KINGFISH: The Reign of Huey P. Long by Richard D. White Jr. for the Washington Post:
Meanwhile, Long, who sometimes wore green silk pajamas while greeting official visitors, treated himself to the bounty of his realm. He ordered convicts from the state penitentiary to tear down the antebellum governor's mansion and had a near-replica of the White House built in its place. He acted as virtual coach of the Louisiana State University football team and sometimes threw tantrums on the field when they lost. And he often gave his best speeches while drunk.
The Man Who Would Be King, washingtonpost.com, Sunday, June 11, 2006; Page BW03
At the risk of sounding equivocating, this is one of those historical places in which we have to be extra-careful to remember the context of the times before we cast judgment based on contemporary morality. In the late 20s and early 30s, the global scene was favorable to dictators and demagogues in general – think Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and a militaristic Japanese government – and on the United States' national level, the most listened-to guy in the media was a rightwing Catholic priest who made his money complaining about the only President we've ever elected to more than two terms. Most of the country had emerged from the machine politics and avarice-based excesses of the Gilded Age, but in places like Louisiana, the third decade of the twentieth century looked and felt like the last half of the nineteenth – corruption was simply part and parcel of the political process.
So yeah, Long played hardball, not only because it was the way he understood the game was supposed to be played, but also because it was the only way he could direct his accumulated, people-based political power at his enemies. He was, after all, implementing a highly socialist agenda in a state ruled by essentially feudal barons – trying to take a moral high road by playing fair would likely have led to his being laughed out of the state by people who really didn't have a problem with being assholes. If he treated himself to the fruits of his victories, it would seem the people of his time did not begrudge him to nearly the extent that the aristocrats did. Those same folks – the ones for whom Stalinist communism is an ever-present boogeyman, surpassed only recently by the danger posed by a few thousand really pissed off Muslims – still feel the same way. Indeed, Kazin's review of White's biography indicates that anti-Long scholarship is alive and well:
White, who teaches at LSU, adopts a tone of zestful disapproval toward his crude, headline-grabbing subject. He understands that millions of ordinary people in the state loved Long for humbling the old elite and making himself a national celebrity in the process. "During his first couple of years as governor," White allows, "Huey Long made significant improvements to the lives of many Louisianans." But the net effect of White's "have you heard this one" approach is to make Long seem more a buffoon than a reformer or a dictator.
Note that "White allows," bit. Kazin does call out Long's biographer, though, after giving a brief rundown of earlier books by LSU profs that included such things as interviews with people who actually knew Huey Long:
Unfortunately, White adds nothing significant to these memorable works. Nor does he make much of an effort to explain why Long, toward the end of his life, was able to build a national following with broadcast speeches and a mushrooming network of Share Our Wealth Clubs that boasted a membership of millions.
ibid.
Governor Long – who by now had taken to calling himself the "Kingfish," after a character on the Amos n' Andy radio program (he later elaborated, saying that in Washington he might be a "small fish," but down in Louisiana, he was a "king fish" – decided to make the Senate elections of 1930 a referendum on his programs, and so announced his candidacy even though he was only halfway through his term as governor. He promised to resign if he lost, but that wasn't necessary – he soundly defeated the incumbent. Having won the election, however, Long didn't rush off to Washington; fearing the machinations of his Lieutenant Governor, Paul Cyr, Huey left one of Louisiana's seats vacant until Cyr made a ham-handed attempt at a coup and left himself vulnerable to the Kingfish's legal skills. Only after ensconcing an ally, Alvin O. King, did Long head for the federal capital, where he promptly pissed everyone off.
"I do not believe you could get the Lord’s Prayer endorsed in this body."
- to Senator Long, in debate
Huey Long believed that the Great Depression was rooted in the disparity between rich and poor, and he had the temerity to say so on the floor of the US Senate, a patrician forum if ever there was one. He had the nerve to point out that 85% of the nation's wealth was held by only 5% of its people (though of course, that 5% was pretty well represented by his audience). Folks were shocked (shocked!) that he publicly said stuff like this:
All the people in America cannot eat up the food that is produced in America; all the people in America cannot wear out the clothes that can be made in America; nor can all of the people in America occupy the houses that stand in this country, if all are allowed to share in homes afforded by the nation. But when one man must have more houses to live in than ninety-nine other people; when one man decides he must own more foodstuff than any other ninety-nine people own; when one man decides he must have more goods to w ear for himself and family than any other ninety-nine people, then the condition results that instead of one hundred people sharing the things that are on earth for one hundred people, that one man, through his gluttonous greed, takes over ninety-nine parts for himself and leaves one part for the ninety-nine.
Now what can this one man do with what is intended for ninety-nine? He cannot eat the food that is intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot wear the clothes that are intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot live in ninety-nine houses at the same time; but like the dog in the manger, he can put himself on the load of hay and he can say:
'This food and these clothes and these houses are mine, and while I cannot use them, my greed can only be satisfied by keeping anybody else from having them.'
Excerpts From Huey Long's Autobiography Huey Long on the radio
Long gave crucial support to the candidacy of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential race, believing – as did fellow radio personality Father Charles Coughlin – that FDR was going to apply some honest-to-goodness socialism in order to fix the nation's ills. Both were disappointed with at what they considered the President's watered-down New Deal proposals, and wound up sharply breaking with him. Coughlin headed to the right, Long to the left.
Historiorant: Excerpts from Huey's "Share Our Wealth" speech, a recording of his campaign song "Every Man a King," and more primary-source, Kingfish-related material are available at faculty.uml.edu
Weird Historical Sidenote: Long also supported the candidacy for Senator of Hattie Caraway in Arkansas, barnstorming around the state with her in a 7-day speaking tour. As a result, she became the first woman elected to the US Senate. Long's wife would become the second, winning a Louisiana seat in her own right after serving out the remainder of her husband's term following his assassination.
By 1934, when the Kingfish rolled out his "Share Our Wealth" program – a package of proposals that included a ceiling on personal fortunes and a major redistribution of tax proceeds to fund public works and antipoverty projects – he had long since worn out his welcome among the DC establishment. The press labeled him a communist, a radical, and (probably most accurately) a demagogue. He was the first politician to employ national radio addresses in order to explain his positions and sway public opinion (Roosevelt was a copycat), and, in concert with his American Progress paper, his popularity soared: by 1935, 7.5 million Americans belonged to 27,000 "Share Our Wealth" clubs.
He was the third most photographed person in the land (after FDR and Charles Lindberg), and his Senate office had to hire 32 typists to keep up with mail coming in at a rate of 60,000 pieces per week. The President became increasingly concerned when it became apparent that Long was gearing up for a run at the White House in 1936. FDR called him "one of the two most dangerous men in America" (along with Douglas MacArthur), and moved to co-opt him the way the Senate had co-opted Gaius Gracchus so many centuries before: FDR's "Second New Deal," which was much more ambitiously liberal than the First, is reflective (if not downright derivative) of "Share Our Wealth." Long's proposals for old-age pensions can be seen in Social Security, Louisiana-style public works projects in the WPA, and student financial aid in the establishment of the National Youth Administration. Even more insidious was the fact the FDR's re-election chances versus Long were the subject of the first-ever nationwide political polling (and it wasn't Long that was doing the polling)
Long was so confident in the victory to come that he went ahead and wrote a book looking back at his first 100 days in the White House after winning the following year's election. It's written as an autobiographical memoir of the type that no living politician has near the chutzpah to publish, though as fate would have it, Huey's was published posthumously, in 1936. An excerpt:
PROCLAMATION TO MY FELLOW CITIZENS, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
One hundred and forty-eight years ago, the people of the United States began a new form of government on this continent, "in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
Today extreme inequalities in the distribution of wealth have closed the doors of opportunity to millions of our children.
Education is a function which the states can handle adequately only if helped by the federal government, and the government ought to see that such benefits of education are extended to all classes of citizens; but here in our beloved America we find inequalities in the benefits of the public schools. Some children are given excellent educational facilities in great, sanitary buildings with ample equipment, with well-fed, well-trained teachers. Other children have poor educational facilities, unsanitary buildings, meager equipment, untrained, poorly-paid teachers. The bitter fruits of these inequalities of opportunity, which endure for generations, must and shall be corrected.
Therefore we, the Government of the United States, do hereby proclaim a policy to the people of the United States, that this Government shall extend aid, financial and idealistic, to the several states, so that every worthy boy and girl, every worthy man and woman, may secure an education to the limit of their mental capacity, so that teachers and instructors may receive an adequate income, thereby gaining their God-given right to an equal enjoyment of the blessings of American liberty.
Given this Fourth day of February, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred Thirty-Seven, and in the year of our Independence, the One Hundred Sixty-first.
HUEY PIERCE LONG, President of the United States.
Chapter 3- Wherein We Care For The Soul And Body Of A Great Nation
More excerpts are available at www.ssa.gov
Death of a Salesman
Back in Louisiana, things were tense and getting tenser. Long had arranged for his friend (and ultimate "yes-man": the guy's name was O.K. Allen) to win the governorship in 1932, but it was the Kingfish who still ran the state, and he made frequent visits there to ram through legislation or to re-invent state government by fiat. Some of Long's actions during this period are positively Bushian in their hubris, especially after a shaky alliance with the Old Regulars crumbled when one of them ran for reelection as mayor of New Orleans in 1934, and Long became enmeshed in some really messy local politics.
First, he arranged for financing by engaging in a shady oil deal based on public lands leases with a state Senator. Next, he began a reorganization of state government that cut off funding for New Orleans and stripped the municipal government of virtually all its powers. After a drive-by shooting of his New Orleans home, he had taken to surrounding himself with uniformed state policemen, and beefed up security around his family to prevent kidnappings, and now more and more of Louisiana was feeling the results of his not-unjustified paranoia. On the federal level, FDR was having Long investigated by every agency he could think of, including the IRS and the FBI. J. Edgar's boys wound up collecting 1818 pages of dirt on Long, but none of it was actionable enough to take to court – though it does make some fascinating reading. Check out foia.fbi.gov for a lot more.
Violence between Long's faction and those loyal to T. Semmes Walmsley, the Old Regular who'd betrayed Long, was only narrowly averted in the 1934 election, but the animosity kept building as the year wore on (the election had been held on January 23). As Long promoted more and more egregiously wing-clipping bills in the legislature, Walmsley and his boys started talking about violently dethroning the Kingfish, invoking the memory of the White League, a group of racists who'd risen up in arms against the Reconstruction government in 1874. Things nearly got out of control when a lynch mob formed out of a anti-"despotism" rally and prepared to string Huey from a tree – only last-minute mollifying by Walmsley kept the governor's mansion from being stormed.
Angry at the near-lynching, Long got O.K. Allen to dispatch the National Guard units to the Registrar of Voters Office just across the street from New Orleans City Hall, where they set up machine guns and imposed martial law. Walmsley responded by increasing the police presence to about 400; Allen upped the ante to the tune of about 3000 teargas-armed Guardsmen. In September an election again intervened to prevent violence, as both sides agreed to vacate the streets for the Congressional elections in September.
By early 1935, an anit-Long paramilitary group called the "Square Deal Association" had formed; its membership included two former governors and the mayor of New Orleans. On January 25, 200 of them descended upon the courthouse of East Baton Rouge Parish, and again the Long/Allen team responded with martial law, a ban on public gatherings of more than two people, and laws akin to the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Square Dealers wound up leaving the courthouse, though the two sides did exchange teargas and gunfire in the vicinity of the Baton Rouge Airport (none killed; 1 wounded) as the insurgents made their way out.
Long continued to consolidate power by stripping it from others, especially the mayor of New Orleans – even to the point of having municipal hirings and firings being reviewed by the governor's office, among other salt-in the-wound insults. In July, Long claimed to have uncovered a high-level assassination plot against him, but two months later, it was someone that he hadn't implicated who shot him: On September 8, 1935, as Long was in the state capitol to plan for a third special session of the legislature that year, a medical doctor named Carl Austin Weiss walked up to him in a hallway and (allegedly) shot him once or twice. We'll never know the whole story, because Weiss died a few seconds later of more than 30 (perhaps as many as 50) bullet wounds
There is some controversy about this – a few accounts hold that Weiss swung a fist at Long, and that the Senator was killed in the hail of friendly fire that his bodyguards unleashed on the would-be assassin – but the reasons for his being in the Kingfish's path were as old as organized politics: Weiss was the son-in-law of a judge whose opposition to Long had seen the old man gerrymandered out of a job. Doctors tried valiantly to keep Long alive, but on September 10, he succumbed to his wounds. His last words, spoken in vain, as it turns out, were reportedly
"God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do."
hueylong.com
Historiorant:
More than 4 times the population of Baton Rouge – about 100,000 mourners – turned out for Huey Long's funeral. His chief lieutenant in the Share Our Wealth organization, the Rev. Gerald Smith, delivered the eulogy, but I have to think that Huey Long's vision couldn't have been better summed up than by a campaign speech he himself gave in 1928, beneath the famed Evangeline Oak that had been immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
"...It is here under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came. This oak is an immortal spot, made so by Longfellow's poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment.
Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come?
Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before?
Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled?
Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted only through one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here."
It's 80 years later, and we're still weeping for all those things. Makes one wonder what a Huey – or a Gracchi – might want to do about it.
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Progressive Historians, and Never In Our Names, and Bits of News.