Man of the Left
Graham, Otis L. Jr.
BOOKS Man of the Left Huey Long, by T. Harry Williams. Alfred A. Knopf. 884 pp. $10. Reviewed by Otis L. Graham, Jr. This definitive biography of a Southern politician was more than ten years...
...Was Huey an unprincipled dictator, an incipient Fascist, whose sympathies for the common man were only rhetorical and whose real love was power...
...Williams' biography is thus about something more important than Huey —it is about the game of politics at a time when it was literally a phase of the class struggle...
...Huey's career sheds a bright light on American (not just Southern) Left populist politics...
...In fact and until the end, he was a man of the Left, raising economic issues to disrupt the meaningless politics of a machine-ridden state, rousing the apathetic lower classes, threatening to implement a program of property confiscation and redistribution of the most naked sort...
...Blind conservatism created Huey Long, and deserved him...
...By 1933, when he left for Washington as a U.S...
...Always he raised class issues: lower utility rates, higher taxes on corporations, an expansion of public services from free schoolbooks to roads and bridges...
...Long was a colorful and brilliant politician in an age of frightened mediocrities, and some will read this book for the same reason that crowds gathered in the Senate gallery or at the Louisiana crossroads where he spoke—to watch Huey the clown, Huey the electric orator of class discontent...
...Senator, his accomplishments were considerable: He had brought Louisiana 5,000 miles of hard-surface roads and 111 bridges, doubled the capacity of the New Orleans charity hospital, improved indigent institutions, and provided strong support to education in the form of free school-books to children and a stunning expansion of Louisiana State University (including, Caesar-like, its football team and band...
...Huey founded his own newspaper and perfected a delivery system capable of distributing it statewide overnight...
...But Huey might just as easily have built a base to the Left of the President in the Democratic Party or even a progressive third party...
...Too much time is wasted on these speculations...
...We will never know for certain, since he was assassinated in 1935 just as he was reaching for that supreme power which he claimed he had wanted only as an instrument...
...Conservative media...
...Huey financed his machine out of forced contributions from the civil servants...
...Campaign costs...
...Huey reduced it to subservience with a combination of threats, bribes, energy, legal skill, and an unmistakable popular mandate...
...Its tax system was unusually regressive, its public services skimpy...
...He passed the bar in 1915 at the age of twenty-one, was elected to the Railroad Commission in 1918, ran for governor in 1924 and was elected on his second try, in 1928...
...The amazing thing is that he was solving these problems in his crude, pragmatic, relentless way, when someone finally put a bullet in him...
...This definitive biography of a Southern politician was more than ten years in the writing, and T. Harry Williams, an historian at Louisiana State University, has put so much down that Huey Long will test readers' stamina...
...Huey has been criticized for these modifications, but the criticism largely belongs to the conservatives who ignored injustice for an unconscionable time, and then took refuge behind a political system so byzantine and unresponsive as to make reform politics virtually impossible...
...But there is more here than entertainment...
...He also left behind a state where open, competitive politics had been virtually eliminated, where one man's word was law and all but the most marginal parliamentary procedures had been set aside...
...What sort of politics would he have stimulated as the 1930s went into their feverish second half...
...The revenue had come largely from borrowing (Huey was an unconscious Keynesian) but also from increased taxes on extractive industry...
...There was tinder around for an ugly lower-middle class movement, but this book reminds us that the democratic Left was not entirely satisfied with its leader, the "unbeatable" F.D.R...
...Yet at the end of the book I mourned Huey, a feeling which is partly a product of Williams' sympathetic treatment, and partly a product of the parliamentary mire in which we now await disaster...
...Huey's career was built on this social structure...
...And what a study it is to watch him construct the tactics of movement...
...At the end of Williams' book, do we mourn Huey...
...Williams makes the best case he can that this crude, brilliant, driven man was a genuine democratic mass leader...
...The important thing is that his career allows us to watch American politics in one of its rare moments when class issues were exposed, and everyone knew what the voting was really about...
...But the reader, a man of the 1960s, was prepared for that...
...But Huey fascinates us, as he did his contemporaries, and Williams' book will probably have the large audience it deserves...
...Apathy...
...Huey may have been potentially a man of the Right, but that was all latent in him and his redneck, ill-educated constituency...
...What barred the way to reform...
...A cumbersome, mal-apportioned legislature...
...It is, of course, a more entertaining story because Huey was a bizarre figure, and a more instructive story because Huey was so inventive...
...Huey Long was born into one of America's poorest and most feudal states...
...The process was—and is—shocking to political democrats, but Huey was one of those men of the 1930s who had found that political democracy does not work, or at least not without drastic modifications...
...He was rough, vulgar, and in a terrible hurry, but this merely reflects the long, shameful years when an elite ruled Louisiana and ignored its suffering...
...Perhaps Roosevelt's turn to the Left in 1935 would have extinguished Huey's hopes, turned him to the sour fringe of mass politics (like his follower, Gerald L. K. Smith...
...Williams' partiality to Long is sometimes objectionable, but he succeeds in almost convincing us that Huey would have somehow made the 1930s a more productive decade...
...Louisiana was forty-third among the then forty-four states in literacy, near the bottom in per capita income, ruled by a smug, conservative elite who served the interests of sugar, lumber, and oil...
...Some will object to this guess, in view of Huey's ruthlessness, and I am a bit uneasy with it...
...Huey became a dynamo and a clown, rousing the people with stunts, exciting invective, loud clothes, pajamas on official occasions...
Vol. 34 • March 1970 • No. 3
