Huey Long

Long grew up in Winnfield, in a hill-country parish that had voted against secession and stayed suspicious of banks and railroads ever after, and though his own family ate better than most of the neighbors, he told the story otherwise for the rest of his life. He left home at seventeen to sell books, patent medicine and Cottolene shortening door to door across four states, and it was at a Cottolene cooking demonstration that he met Rose McConnell, whom he married in 1913. He crammed a three-year law program at Tulane into less than one, talked the state bar board into an early exam, and passed it in 1915 at twenty-one. His practice took the workers' compensation cases other lawyers turned down.

Long rode a seat on the Railroad Commission into the governorship in 1928 on a promise to make Standard Oil and the utilities pay, and once in office he built roads, bridges, free schoolbooks and a rebuilt LSU on borrowed money and a tax on the oil companies he had campaigned against. He survived an impeachment vote in 1929, moved to the Senate in 1932 while still running the state through a handpicked successor, and broke publicly with Franklin Roosevelt over how far the New Deal should go. His Share Our Wealth plan promised every family a homestead grant and capped personal fortunes, and by 1935 its clubs claimed millions of members and a Democratic Party strategist's private poll had him drawing enough votes to hand the next election to a Republican.

By 1934 Long controlled the legislature so completely that laws passed in minutes without members reading them, including a special tax aimed at the New Orleans newspapers that criticized him. He appointed the state police, packed the courts, and moved through the Capitol with armed bodyguards the local press called the Cossacks. The historian David Kennedy later called the machine he built the closest thing to a dictatorship America has produced. None of that erased what the roads, the free schoolbooks and the expanded LSU meant to Louisiana families who had never had any of it before him, which is why the same years that historians read as authoritarian are remembered in parts of the state as the only time the government worked for them.

Carl Weiss, a doctor whose father-in-law Long had just gerrymandered out of a judgeship, shot him in a Capitol hallway on September 8, 1935, and Long's own bodyguards shot Weiss more than 60 times in return. Ballistics work since suggests some of the bullets that hit Long came from his own men's guns, not Weiss's pistol. He died two days later, and 200,000 people came to the funeral in Baton Rouge, where a statue of him now stands over his grave on the Capitol lawn he built. Historians still split over whether to call him a populist or a demagogue, and Share Our Wealth outlived him as an argument — Bernie Sanders was still invoking its logic 80 years later.

Huey Long's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Louisiana free textbook law law
  Provided free schoolbooks to every child in the state, Black and white alike 1929
• Louisiana State Capitol building
  A 34-story capitol pushed through in about 14 months 1932
• Charity Hospital and LSU Medical Center expansion building
  Free health care his machine built alongside the roads 1932
• Share Our Wealth mission
  A national movement promising a homestead grant and a capped personal fortune 1934
• My First Days in the White House book
  A speculative account of a presidency he did not live to seek, published after his death 1935

• 1913 aged ~20 Marries Rose McConnell They met at a Cottolene shortening cooking demonstration.
• 1915 aged ~22 Admitted to the Louisiana bar at 21
• 1918 aged ~25 Elected to the Louisiana Railroad Commission
• 1928 aged ~35 Elected governor of Louisiana
• 1929 aged ~36 Survives an impeachment vote in the legislature
• 1934 aged ~41 Launches the Share Our Wealth movement
• September 8, 1935 aged 42 Shot in a hallway of the Louisiana State Capitol Carl Weiss was killed on the spot by Long's bodyguards.
• September 10, 1935 aged 42 Dies at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, Baton Rouge

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. rival who feared him
• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. fellow Depression-era redistributionist
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. predecessor in American populism
• Bernie Sanders b. 1941
  Vermont senator whose presidential campaigns moved single-payer health care into mainstream debate. later invoked his program