A Family Business
RORTY, JAMES
A Family Business Dynasty: The Longs of Louisiana. By Thomas Martin. Putnam. 312 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by James Rorty Co-author, "McCarthy and the Communists" THE LONGS WERE a no-good lot,...
...He'd known him as a bawling baby and as a loud-mouthed juvenile delinquent always starting fights and then "running like a turkey...
...Some of the chapters of this dynasty history sound so incredible that one is reminded of the pagan backwoods grandmaw—she could have been one of Huey's forebears— who heard for the first time the tragic story of the life of Jesus from the lips of an itinerant preacher...
...Louisiana, and the nation, can only read it, blush and remember: It could happen here...
...Waal...
...Ole Earl's attempt to restore the dynasty was ultimately defeated by his own inadequacy— he could only repeat Huey's "Share-the-Wealth" formulas and was quite unable to deal with the segregationists —and bythe incorrigible addiction of all the Longs—Huey...
...Brother Earl recently died at the age of 65 and Russell's mediocrity is evidenced by the fact that he still reveres the memory of the scoundrelly demagogue who, but for the intervention of the assassin's bullet, might well have muscled his way into the White House and given the nation an early taste of totalitarianism, without Russian dressing...
...Thomas Martin, who has told the Long story as well and as fully as it will ever need to be told, concludes that the dynasty is now in a deep freeze from which it is unlikely to emerge...
...Let's hope it wasn't so...
...This judgment, he said, applied especially to Huey, founder of the Long "dynasty...
...she said...
...He's got a head like that goddam mule," added the doctor, whom I interviewed in his cornfield, where his mangy-mule had halted in the middle of the row and leered crazily at his master...
...Some of his own relatives nodded agreement and objected mildly when Earl's wife and his nephew Russell had him committed to a mental hospital...
...Unhappily for all attempts to canonize Huey, it was so...
...the heirs of the dictator soon showed themselves to be both greedier and less adept at manipulating the techniques of totalitarian rule...
...No mule with a Roman nose is ever any good...
...Reviewed by James Rorty Co-author, "McCarthy and the Communists" THE LONGS WERE a no-good lot, concluded the grizzled horse-and-buggy doctor, who based his somewhat primitive genetic notions on 50 years of service to the poor white families of Winn Parish...
...After Huey's assassination in 1935...
...In retrospect, one feels that the doctor may well have been right about what ailed Huey—and his brother Earl as well...
...Everything that Martin writes about really happened...
...Look at the bastard...
...It could even happen again...
...Earl, Julius, George and Russell—to quarrelling with each other...
...I'm no crazier than I've ever been," pleaded Earl, the second member of the dynasty, a generation later...
...It's a terrible story...
...Later...
...The subsequent scandals sent many of them to jail...
...That was in 1934, when I was probing the social origins of the Louisiana dictator, then at the peak of his career...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 44
