Remembering the Kingfish
Gold, Vic
Vic Gold REMEMBERING THE KINGFISH Why weep or slumber, America? Who built the highway to Baton Rouge? Who put up the hospital and built your schools? Who looks after shit-kickers like you? The...
...He provided employment to tens of thousands on his public works...
...It would hurt attendance at Tiger Stadium...
...The former President would become Huey's Secretary of the Navy...
...House, putting Congress through its paces...
...And added, "Only sometimes they overlap...
...That was the way Huey had run the state when he was governor, and so long as the trains traveled from Washington to Louisiana and back, it was the way he would run it as United States Senator...
...To the Louisiana political and economic establishment he took on and whipped, the Kingfish is remembered as a radical leftist...
...Or so the theory goes...
...The Kingfish was nothing if not an astute judge of the frailties of human nature...
...The seat left vacant by Earl was filled by a distant cousin, Gillis Long, then by another distant cousin, Speedy, then by Gillis again...
...We now live in purportedly free-spirited times, but can one imagine even a tenured senator with known presidential ambitions-say, a Gary Hart or a Bill Bradley-publishing that sort of scenario...
...Now this bill here," he would explain, urging passage of a particular piece of legislation, "is just good government...
...If I'm nuts now," Earl argued with relentless logic, "then I've always been nuts...
...I remember the song blaring through the family Philco as a prelude to his radio talks...
...A man of simple tastes, he enjoyed politics for politics' sake, and despite numerous grand jury investigations into his conduct of the lieutenant governor's office under Leche, Earl survived the grand jury purge untouched...
...The prime example of that credulity can be found in the ongoing speculation about what happened to "the box" Huey allegedly kept, the one containing millions in cash set aside for his presidential campaign...
...Slaves down at the legislature, and the sons-of-bitches up here," he said...
...As for the sitting governor-a hand-picked surrogate aptly named O.K...
...Times had changed...
...The proof...
...I know damn well I'm the smartest in Loozyana...
...Other politicians had promised to re-make America...
...Every man a King, every man a King, For you can be a millionaire . . . Oh yeah, as Huey's younger brother Earl used to say, the Kingfish knew how to work a crowd, in person or by radio...
...Only two months before his death he had taken the Senate floor to announce he had uncovered a plot to kill him...
...What the state needed was a bank holiday...
...He really knew how to cut the high-and-mighty down to size...
...If the banks opened Saturday, on schedule, a wipe-out would occur...
...The Boss regarded the fine paneling of the closed door for a couple of minutes...
...Russell won by 10,000 votes, a slim margin said by his opponent to be tainted with fraud...
...Now before I get into my speech tonight, do your neighbors a favor...
...A leaf flew in the window of O.K.'s office," a critic of good government once commented...
...Robert Penn Warren All the King's Men In this age of docudrama, in which art and life are scripted to overlap in prime-time network mini-series, it would figure that when the name Huey Long is mentioned to some member of the under-40 generation the usual response is, "Right, I've read the book (or seen the movie...
...Earl's first officialact as governor-elect was to name Huey's son Russell his executive assistant in Baton Rouge...
...One school has it that Huey was eliminated by his longtime enemies, the old state political ring...
...Then, in 1940, he would run for the presidency and win, just as he had done in Louisiana in 1928...
...In the event, Huey's assassin was riddled beyond hope of any presidential pardon, real or imagined...
...In 1948 it proved irresistible to Louisianians, bored with nearly a decade of reformism...
...Governor Richard Leche resigned and was sent to jail after contributing to American political folklore the unique defense that "when I took the oath as governor, I didn't take any vow of poverty...
...Carl Austin Weiss...
...And when the commander of a visiting German cruiser dropped by his Roosevelt Hotel suite to "pay respects, the Kingfish greeted him in green pajamas covered with a red and blue lounging robe...
...I asked...
...Yeah," the Boss said, "for this government is sure half slave and half son-of-a-bitch, and it is standing...
...Was there a disastrous run on Louisiana banks...
...Louisiana, by god, was Huey Long's domain, his fiefdom, his base of operations for the Great Campaign to come, the one to save this land...
...Hadn't he said, "If it weren't for being part of the United States, Louisiana would never have known a Depression...
...Bring me a steak...
...Even as this is written, the governor of Louisiana awaits trial for alleged misuse of his office for personal gain...
...Then the Kingfish would pass time telling a story-maybe the one about LeJeune the Cajun and the drowning drummer-before launching into one of his hell-raising spiels against Wall Street...
...Yet standing there on the flag-draped platform erected above the East Portico of the Capitol, delivering my inaugural address, it all seemed unreal...
...Keep in mind, those were the words of a first-term senator, a mere backbench Democrat from a backwater state...
...It showed him perched, arms akimbo, against the Speaker's rostrum in the Louisiana House...
...Populism and the news media, history bears out, have never seen eye-to-eye...
...But such was Huey Long's style: cornpone and chutzpah...
...He fancied silk pajamas and gave lessons in the proper mixing of a Ramos Gin Fizz, but two drinks and he was just another coarse redneck come to the big city...
...senator, John Overton, Russell, though not yet 30 years old, ran for the seat in 1950, with Uncle Earl's support...
...What more proof of the box's existence is needed than the fact that it has never been found...
...Because-for all his lumpen socialist "Share Our Wealth" babble-the Kingfish was to this conservative what FDR was to the conservative who now spends his days in the White House: He was my political coryphaeus, the distant mentor of my younger days...
...Not that there wouldn't be a proper place in a Long Administration for an ex-President of Franklin Roosevelt's stature...
...Well, he was wrong...
...He saw 1936 as his first time around, just as he had run for governor in 1924 and lost...
...For years he had constantly talked about threats to his life and compulsively carried with him a retinue of bulky, gun-toting bodyguards for protection...
...The German consul was outraged...
...Surely, thought Huey, such a momentous event must have had a one-day overlap...
...Other Democrats could scorn Herbert Hoover, but the Kingfish would make room for him in the Cabinet-as Secretary of Commerce...
...ion in 1940...
...Not a chance, said the circus...
...Populism, for anyone who remembers the original article, was as much a matter of political style as substance...
...But the money couldn't be cleared until Monday...
...which is why, let me confess, I am less than impressed with contemporary politicians and would-be movement leaders who would claim the label for themselves...
...He did not ply the politics of race...
...One day you got friends, the next day you don't...
...I asked...
...But My First Days (published, as history would have it, after the author's death) wasn't written simply as an exercise in political whimsy...
...There is no denying it...
...But the tradition continues, metaphysically if not genealogically...
...When Gillis died in January of this year, he was succeeded by his wife, Cathy...
...Where Huey had fought the "moneyed interests" and disdained the Senate Club, Russell became one of the oil & gas establishment's most powerful congressional spokesmen, and rose through the ranks as a certified Club member...
...Not on your high-tech, button-down life...
...He was open-coated in his white double-breasted summer suit, with a Kingfish-cocky grin on his face as he put the legislature through its paces in a special session...
...He made possible a broad expansion of the schools, of daytime facilities for the children, night classes for the adults...
...to uphold the Constitution and to defend my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic...
...END OF THE LINE Huey Long ran baleful eyes over a roomful of his political cronies one day and concluded that they were a venal lot and that if anything ever happened to him they would all end up in prison...
...He knew the words and music that folks wanted to hear those Depression years, not only in populist Louisiana but in populist Peoria...
...Yet, half-a-century after Huey's death and forty years removed from his fiefdom, I, too, still find myself engaged by his possibilities as a leader destined to "save this land...
...What...
...Could He help it if one of 'em was a son-of-a-bitch...
...Vic Gold, a native of New Orleans, is national correspondent for the Washingtonian magazine...
...Meaning not T. Harry Williams's definitive biography of the Kingfish, but Robert Penn Warren's novel...
...then recall the answer a fellow Louisianian gave to the same question in 1940...
...Records, 1974) Speaking of memorable dates-as who isn't in this year of commemorative excess?-September 10 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the most dynamic American politician of the twentieth century...
...What destiny awaited him...
...He'd have been assassinated...
...Yeah...
...Huey was nonplussed...
...So Weiss took matters into his own hands...
...I had just sworn upon the Bible...
...an anti-Establishmentarian who had nothing but contempt for the Senate Club and who, at age 42, envisaged an American future that would one day find him perched against the Speaker's rostrum in the U.S...
...As Harnett Kane put it, February 4 proved to be the most uneventful day in human history...
...So ends the Long dynasty...
...But the prevailing liberal Zeitgeist of the 1930s-and this is the view taken by contemporary historians, the late Professor Williams excepted- held that Huey Long was a would-be American Hitler, the fascist model for Sinclair Lewis's novel, It Can't Happen Here...
...Oh, yeah, that Huey, he knew how to get things done...
...The people had endorsed my plan for the redistribution of the wealth and I was President of the United States...
...He threaded her flat lands and her hill country with magnificent, if expensive, roads...
...Fortunately for the Long machine, however, Huey's brother Earl- immortalized by A.J...
...Then, after the death of Louisiana's senior U.S...
...He granted tax exemption on part of their property to rural and urban small-home owners...
...The effort cost him a much-publicized black eye, but his populist constituency was understanding...
...And the House would pass it, no further explanation needed...
...But first came the song: Why weep or slumber, America, Land of brave and true...
...In their frenzy, Huey's bodyguards thus silenced the only voice that might have answered, with certainty, Huey's last question...
...On being served a gourmet dish at haute cuisine An-toine's in New Orleans, Huey forked a bay leaf, held it up, and asked the waiter, "What's this wood...
...Running for a congressional seat-he could not succeed himself as governor-Earl told voters how he had escaped the sanitarium, foiled the nefarious plot of his wife and nephew, and stood ready to go to Washington to carry on the real Long tradition...
...James Monroe Smith, president of Huey's beloved state university, had to be extradited from Canada after using official bonds as collateral on the commodities market...
...Folks," he would begin, "this is the Kingfish...
...He eliminated the poll tax...
...Then he said, "You know what Lincoln said...
...Earl Long died in 1962, vindicated at the polls after his eccentric conduct as governor had led his wife and nephew Russell to commit him to a Texas sanitarium...
...Huey would get a $20 million loan from the RFC...
...I felt I was dreaming...
...It was reported-and T. Harry Williams confirms this in his biography-that the Kingfish's closest friends pressed him as to the whereabouts of the box even as he lay dying...
...Rather, it was the calculated ploy of an outlander who had come to Washington both unawed and certain of his mission...
...if not a card-carrying Communist, the next worst thing...
...Nothing...
...And more: For the Kingfish was a man of direct action, the sort of action that would exact the attention of his constituents and excite the imagination of at least one pre-teen political animalcule growing up on the streets of New Orleans...
...If anybody knew how to dry those tears and wake the sleeping giant, it was the Kingfish: CHAPTER 1 It has happened...
...So it was that Louisianians woke up the morning of Saturday, February 4, 1933, to learn that their banks would be closed because of a legal holiday, never before (or since) celebrated...
...A secret poll taken by the Roosevelt White House showed that the Kingfish, running as a third party candidate in 1936, could siphon off enough Democratic votes to elect a Republican President...
...Let's see now, what happened on February 4, any year...
...Open a window or go next door and tell 'em Huey Long is on the air and he has something to say they ought to hear...
...Under his influence the concept of a state's services to its citizens underwent a sharp change for Louisiana and for some of the other Southern commonwealths...
...Indeed, the fictional voice of Warren's protagonist, Willie Stark-the Boss-resonates with that of the real Kingfish, and his rise and fall closely parallel Huey's, right down to being assassinated in the state Capitol by an idealistic doctor...
...Huey told them nothing...
...The wonder, really, is that Huey should have wondered...
...So I wonder...
...but though the son shared a remarkable physical resemblance to the father, he set out early to prove that he was no Little Kingfish...
...It was incidents like that-crude, yes, but audacious-that set Huey Long apart from other politicians, and forever defined, for me, the term "populist...
...Thus, thirteen years after Huey, the dynasty was revived...
...I had promised to sustain it...
...Intended as a dig at Huey's iron-fisted control of state politics, the remark was taken as a side-splitter, because most folks in Louisiana wanted things run that way in those days...
...But Earl Long, though he lacked his brother's genius, had a populist flair of his own...
...virtually the same words that Williams attributes to the Kingfish as he was being rushed to the hospital in Baton Rouge: "I wonder why he shot me...
...Impatient to get to the men's urinal in a Long Island night club, he tried to finesse the matter through the legs of the man in front of him...
...On a higher plateau of expediency, however, the Kingfish could not be charged with the meaner crudity associated with Southern populists like Mississippi's Theo Bilbo and Georgia's Gene Talmadge...
...Why did he do it to me...
...Russell Long came to Washington with his father's reputation still fresh in the minds of some of his Senate colleagues...
...The Kingfish called the circus owners to ask them to delay their show until the game was over...
...That's politics for you," replied Earl...
...Just leave everything to the Kingfish...
...The New Orleans writer Harnett Kane, a Long critic who leaned toward the latter view, concluded in his book, Louisiana Hayride, that Huey was neither Communist nor fascist, because he had no "central philosophy...
...It's the Kingfish, Kingfish, Friend of the working man, Kingfish, Kingfish, The Kingfish gonna save this land...
...In the spring of 1935, Huey wrote a book titled My First Days in the White House...
...He could claim that he had increased enrollment more than 25 percent by his free textbooks, and had taught 100,000 of the state's 238,000 illiterates to 'read, write and cipher.' He improved hospitals and set up new ones...
...Did such a treasure actually exist...
...Does anyone doubt," he asked his fellow Senators, with rhetorical flourish, "that President Roosevelt would pardon the man who rid the country of Huey Long...
...But now, alternative history: What would have happened had Huey Long lived...
...Russell won't say...
...Ah, but what about February 3? On that date in 1917, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany...
...And that style embraced a willingness (if not eagerness) to be less than "respectable" in the eyes of a critical press, to risk giving offense to Establishment sensibilities...
...Wrote it himself, no ghosts needed...
...Oh, really...
...I may be the smartest politician in the country," the Kingfish told a Washington reporter...
...He'd have been assassinated...
...Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana-had no style whatsoever...
...Crude, crude, crude...
...Brother, we got health laws in Loozyana, and the way I interpret 'em, every one of your animals will have to get dipped in sheep dip before they cross the line...
...A reform candidate, Sam Jones-"High Hat Sam," as Earl saw him-was swept into office, followed four years later by another anti-Long governor, country singer Jimmie ("You Are My Sunshine") Davis...
...Rumors about "the box" surfaced shortly after Huey's death...
...After eight years out of power, it appeared that the Long machine was finished...
...He was brash, pushy, disdainful of the Establishment...
...crossed her bayous and rivers with towering high-cost bridges...
...That's easy," replied Harnett Kane...
...an unbelievable postulation, unless one has spent enough time in the state to appreciate what Louisianians, then and now, are capable of ingesting as truth...
...He was simply, wrote Kane, "pure dictator...
...In reply, Earl's opponents argued that although he was unindicted, as lieutenant governor in a corrupt regime he was either (1) guilty of graft and didn't deserve election, or (2) too stupid to know what was going on...
...Noting that he received only 75 votes in one parish, the opponent told reporters that he had more than 75 personal friends there...
...I was only six years old at the time, but well remember the last news photo taken of Huey, which appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune the morning after the shooting...
...No fewer than fifty-nine bullet holes were found in the body of Dr...
...Elected governor that year, Earl celebrated his victory on election night by drinking beer and spitting on an outspread copy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of "them lyin' newspapers...
...And according to the poll, Huey's "Share Our Wealth" program had as many prospective voters in the industrial cities of the East as it did in the rural South and Midwest...
...And yet: "He took Louisiana out of the mud," continued Kane...
...The great campaign which was destined to save America from Communism and Fascism was history...
...and Dr...
...Fifty years after his assassination, the larger historical questions asked about Huey Long have to do more with the how and why of his life than the how and why of his death...
...He was elected- but, regrettably, passed on before he had the chance to enliven the Washington social scene...
...he would take on, and whip, the Washington crowd...
...Did Barnum & Bailey insist on bringing a circus to Baton Rouge on a Saturday afternoon the LSU Tigers were scheduled to play football...
...By 1935-only two years after arriving in Washington-he was more than a regional phenomenon, he was a national figure...
...Barnum & Bailey's decided a night show would be dandy, and the LSU Tigers played their game before a capacity crowd...
...With castles and clothing and food for all, All belongs to you...
...Folks still ask that question in Louisiana, despite the fact that the issues he dealt in during his years of power and prominence have long since been forgotten, save by terminal Depressionacs who deliver keynote speeches at Democratic conventions...
...Four years after his death a dozen top members of the Long organization were indicted and convicted on charges ranging from misappropriation of state funds to mail fraud...
...None of the so-called "neo-populists" on today's political scene-given their propensity for button-down shirts and furrow-browed lectures on macroeconomics-even comes close...
...only his father's shrewd talent for political manipulation...
...The most reasonable theory advanced for Weiss's action at the time, and fifty years later, holds that the Baton Rouge doctor shot the Kingfish for personal, if idealistic reasons...
...He ran for governor in 1940, defending Huey's choice of cronies by appealing to the voters' Christian spirit: "Jesus himself picked twelve men," Earl pointed out...
...The difference between Louisiana corruption and corruption elsewhere, T. Harry Williams observed, is that in Louisiana it is done with style...
...That was about the way the Kingfish had it figured, too...
...If the Wizard did venture into the land of the Kingfish, warned Huey, he would leave it with "his toes turned up...
...Which is which...
...I wonder...
...Oh yeah...
...He said a house divided against itself cannot stand...
...He signed it...
...which meant not just the established structure, but the established way of doing things...
...They reopened, with deposits secure, on Monday...
...The Kingfish do...
...but more to the point, Russell, who had been brought up as a privileged child of affluence, did not share his father's dirt farm hunger...
...On the contrary, considering the standards of his time and region, he was a moderate on the issue...
...However, there are several schools of thought on the subject in Louisiana, a state whose Byzantine politics lends itself to conspiracy theories...
...To be sure, venality-at least in such brazen, clumsy form-was never a Long political characteristic...
...Weiss's father-in-law was Judge Benjamin Pavy, an independent state jurist who had given the Long machine problems over the years...
...My country," he said afterward, "has been insulted...
...And then . . . My First Days in the White House was Huey's projection of how, as President, he would bring to Washington the same principles of governance he had brought to Baton Rouge...
...Shortly after Gillis's death, Russell, who has no offspring, announced that he would not run for re-election next year...
...Alternative historians, take note: It was on that day in 1935 that the Kingfish- Senator Huey Pierce Long of Louisiana-died, thirty hours after having been shot while leaving the marbled state Capitol he built, and which still stands, in Baton Rouge...
...To the Louisiana political mind, there can be no doubt...
...And there would be a place for Roosevelt's predecessor as well...
...Randy Newman (Warner Bros...
...Asked by a newsman how he would treat Negroes if elected President, he replied, "Treat them the same as anybody else, give them an opportunity to make a living...
...A few years before, he had written the lyrics to his political anthem, "Every Man a King...
...Huey was crude...
...He despised the Ku Klux Klan, and when informed that the Imperial Wizard planned to come to Louisiana for a speaking engagement, the Kingfish called a special press conference to tell reporters that "that Imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana, and . . . when I call him a son-of-a-bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth...
...He had taken on, and whipped, the Baton Rouge crowd...
...Whose conspiracy...
...What would have happened, I ask myself, if the Kingfish hadn't been assassinated...
...said Huey...
...Were there hard times in weeping, slumbering America...
...A more ambitious theory holds that the orders to kill Huey came from Franklin D. Roosevelt himself...
...asks Willie...
...But Governor Edwin Edwards has nevertheless studied Huey's book: He blames all his troubles on Washington, rich folks, and the lyin' media.-V.G...
...It makes as much sense as any assassination theory, yet to this day Huey's son Russell believes that Weiss did not act alone, motivated by a personal grievance, but as part of a larger conspiracy...
...Out in the fields, when you gotta go, you gotta go...
...Allen-whatever the Kingfish wanted, the Kingfish got...
...Oh, that Huey...
...It looks like war between Germany and Loozyana...
...That's easy," replied Harnett Kane...
...Hell of a note," he was reported as replying...
...Pavy was up for re-appointment to the bench, and the machine, which preferred pliant judges who owed their tenure to Huey's patronage, had marked him for early retirement...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
