Life with the Kingfish
SHORTER, KiNCSLEY
&Writing LIFE WITH THE KINGFISH BY KINGSLEY SHORTER L f ike a sidewalk spectator gazing through one of those strategically placed holes in the fence around a construction site, an alien...
...the clank and grind of giant machines striving for mastery of the scarred earth...
...As crusading chairman of the Public Service Commission, and later Governor of the state, Long repeatedly laid aside his office and went to court to defend what he considered to be the public interest against the legal stratagems of his opponents...
...Long seems to have been physically unappealing ("Many who knew him have said he had the limpest handshake they ever felt...
...With the publication of T. Harry Williams' biography (Huey Long, Knopf, 884 pp., $12.50) we now have for the first time an exhaustive account of the Kingfish of Louisiana's brief but tumultuous life...
...The picture of the adolescent who barged into people's houses to sell them "Cottolene" (a lard substitute) and other unnecessaries with the aid of the Bible is not an ingratiating one...
...Williams writes of his "feverish and almost abnormal energy, united with an encompassing curiosity...
...the whirling dance of creation and destruction locked in their indissoluble embrace...
...The war continued even though the impeachment failed, growing more virulent as Long's appetite for power increased...
...Huey's images of gallantry were drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo, and his exemplar of courage was the indomitable hero of W. E. Henley's poem Invictus: "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul...
...As Williams describes it, "Louisiana politics was speculative, devious, personal, exuberant, and highly professional...
...Williams' book left me with a sense of violently destructive, centrifugal energies just barely contained by the democratic process and the rule of law...
...Gone is the muffled homogeneity of, say, my fellow countrymen, the British, on their tight little island, all the corners rubbed smooth after a thousand years of jostling coexistence...
...Add to this his complete lack of social inhibition, and the picture that emerges is of a clever, ruthless, prepubescent schoolboy, the sort of spiteful kid who surrounds himself with a protective wall of cronies, cows his classmates into submission, and plays hell with the teachers...
...There is instead the brute clamor of chthonic energies...
...Every phase of the war between Long and the power structure is reconstructed, from border skirmish to pitched battle to peace treaty and back again...
...The Kingfish's lack of compunction, his clear-eyed realism, may have been very frightening at the time...
...As one associate put it, "Huey had no time for women, no time for sleep...
...Because Long was a virtuoso performer in all three branches of government, his rise to power illustrates as no textbook ever could how the American system of checks and balances actually works...
...Williams is sympathetic throughout, but his research clearly indicates that Huey was a thoroughly obnoxious child ("He would do anything to attract even unfavorable attention") who quickly bloomed into an intolerably precocious youth ("He advised his elders even on what political opinions to adopt, and drove them to sputtering rage by instructing them on what moves to make in checker games...
...And as the story of one man's day-by-day engagement with the machinery of his society, Williams' biography is marvelously absorbing...
...To them, Long was quite simply Public Enemy Number One, a naked threat to their very existence who had to be destroyed at any price...
...You're a captured province...
...We've got some of them now...
...And he had some vile personal habits, not the least of which was grabbing the food off other people's plates...
...He was a lousy driver...
...Singularly lacking in family feeling, he obviously had little use for his wife...
...later, he surrounded himself with gun-toting bodyguards...
...For isn't it better served by the Huey Longs, the fundamentalists who take it all literally and test it to the limits, than by politicians who pay lip-service to the American Way while seeking to undermine it...
...About two-thirds of the book is devoted to Long's state career...
...Long began his professional life as a lawyer, and this early experience stood him in good stead when he entered politics...
...His conception of the public interest was so revolutionary that even now, 40 years later, some of his ideas are still considered dangerously innovative...
...There was in fact something childlike, even animal, about Huey Long...
...Not surprisingly, much of Williams' book has the excitement of old-fashioned courtroom drama...
...The objective was to win...
...Perhaps if he had lived, he would have pushed it out of shape permanently...
...On the whole, though, both he and his opponents stuck to the rules...
...He liked people to keep their distance, and in youth he relied on his younger brother Earl to fight his battles...
...Yet this is not strictly a historical biography...
...True, in later years Long's judgment began to falter, and under the pressure of national politics he occasionally did things in his home state for which there was no shadow of legal justification...
...Since Long usually won, they also tried to stop him in the courts, testing the constitutionality of his every proposal and pressing for injunctions...
...It is a spectacle both fearful and exhilarating, one that will keep your eye glued to that hole indefinitely...
...It is generally agreed that the nationwide popularity of his "Share Our Wealth" campaign was instrumental in moving Roosevelt to the Left at a time when fascism was displacing Communism as the national bogey, and that the massive public works programs he launched while Governor anticipated the economics of the New Deal...
...Few men in recent history have exemplified the naked clash of elemental forces in American society better than Huey P. Long...
...His enemies in Louisiana, however, were not concerned with ideology...
...XJ JL...
...By ignoring the spirit of the law and manipulating the letter with a ruthlessness beyond the reach of men concerned for the proprieties, Long stretched that process in ways never envisaged by its creators...
...His opponents fought back as best they could—and in much the same way...
...Because in America, it's all out front...
...Williams does not situate Huey in the larger context of his times, or attempt to account for the phenomenon of Longism in other than the vaguest and most question-begging terms...
...The forthright rejection of Tolstoyan historicity is presented almost as an article of faith: "I believe that some men, men of power, can influence the course of history...
...He was childish, too, if somewhat endearing, in his insistence on having every whim gratified immediately, his urge to epater le bourgeois (for example, by receiving visiting dignitaries in his pajamas), and his fanatical espousal of the lsu football team...
...These maneuvers culminated (disastrously for them) in impeachment proceedings—one of the great set pieces of the story— brought against the Governor when he moved to tax state corporations, especially Standard Oil...
...You've got no rights," the Kingfish told his enemies after one successful engagement...
...Writing LIFE WITH THE KINGFISH BY KINGSLEY SHORTER L f ike a sidewalk spectator gazing through one of those strategically placed holes in the fence around a construction site, an alien observer of the American scene is confronted with Process in the raw...
...On the Governor's side the weapons were patronage, denial of funds to recalcitrant agencies, intimidation by state police, door-to-door distribution of pro-Long circulars, character assassination, probable bribery, and noisy public meetings...
...His very idealism was of the schoolboy variety, the vaguely expansive generosity that occasionally moves the meanest of youths to take time out from pulling wings off flies and Do Something to Help Mankind...
...Largely on the basis of "oral history" —tape-recorded interviews with no fewer than 295 people who knew him in every conceivable capacity— Williams traces Long's story from his early years as traveling salesman and two-bit lawyer, through his meteoric rise to the virtual dictatorship of his state, to his spell in the U.S...
...His fight to break the stranglehold of the planters and businessmen who controlled Louisiana sounds like junta politics in a banana republic or something out of Machiavelli, but with this crucial difference: No matter how vicious the struggle became, it was almost always carried on within the constitutional framework...
...But an author should not be criticized for not doing what, on the whole, he did not set out to do...
...De Tocqueville noted, "Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question...
...But there are worse things...
...JLuey Long the man emerges vividly from the often confidential reminiscences of his contemporaries...
...Senate and death by assassination in 1935...
...The epithets he hurled at his enemies—Squirt, Turkey-Head, Feather-Duster and the like—are pure third-grade invective, and his political infighting had the gleeful intensity of a classroom vendetta...
...Yet, enfant terrible or not, I believe his genius was peculiarly suited to the American system...
Vol. 52 • December 1969 • No. 24
