Remembering Huey P. Long, American Agitator
by Tedd Siegel
Carry on my wayward son, for there’ll be peace when you are done. –Kansas
We are told that from a very young age, the future politician sought to dominate all around him; much later in life, he also never stopped appearing childish and spoiled, like some overgrown toddler lacking self-discipline. In his personal habits, the politician was unconventional in his appearance, his lack of manners, and his speaking style. From the start, the politician made direct, populist appeals, circumventing the entrenched political apparatus. He used mass media in ways no politician had done before him, and despite his extreme attraction to the spotlight, he also constantly attacked and bullied the press.
He was a master of personal attacks and name-calling, and went out of his way to humiliate and destroy his rivals and enemies at every opportunity. He never stopped talking, lied constantly, made promises he couldn’t keep, and continually offered up a vision for the future of the country that never got very far beyond mere hand waving. He demanded total loyalty, and rewarded his friends by creating a system of total patronage that included public roles for members of his family. He encouraged voter suppression. In general, he had no appreciation for democratic checks and balances and political traditions, running roughshod over both in his incessant bid to increase his power. Early in his term as an executive, the politician faced calls for impeachment. He was also under constant investigation by both FBI and Internal Revenue Service.
If you have assumed that I am referring to Donald J. Trump, you would be wrong — the politician just described was Huey P. Long, Governor of Louisiana from 1928–1932, and Louisiana Senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935.
It has occurred to me, however, that it does not suffice to merely study the audience–as Max Horkheimer writes in the foreword to Leo Lowenthal’s False Prophets, “the nature of the stimuli must also be studied.”
We tend to think of Trump as a new phenomenon in American politics, a figure at once both self-conjured, and conjured by the character of the times, since they are replete with anxiety, fear, resentment and cynicism. But it’s not true, because what we are experiencing today happened — or almost happened — once before.
Leo Lowenthal and The Constants of Agitation
Over the course of these first six months of the Trump administration, I have sought to characterize Trump as a political phenomenon in a number of different, but related, ways. I have considered his personal behavior and political style by means of a series of reflections about pathological narcissism; I have considered him in relation to the rise of a new sort of North American populism; and I have considered his appeal by way of a review of literature concerning authoritarian personality and the manner in which a predisposition to intolerance becomes a major force in determining our politics despite our liberal democratic system.
The variety found in these different ruminations notwithstanding, I have felt that there was something remaining, a residue of something, something stuck to the bottom of my shoe, something I keep trying to rub off by dragging my foot in the wet grass. We all know that Trump is no movement conservative; and we know that he functions (if one can call it that) almost completely in the absence of moral commitments, ideals, or values. We also know that he has no attachment to the truth, delights in arousing dark, primitive emotions, and thrills his supporters with his relentless attacks upon his enemies and targets. But there is something about the way all of this coheres and operates that I have failed to capture in any of the prior figures — the narcissist, the populist, the authoritarian.
In my recent post on authoritarian personality, the focus was on authoritarian predisposition as receptivity to anti-democratic propaganda. It has occurred to me, however, that since reactivity is stoked (if not manufactured), it does not suffice to merely study the audience–as Max Horkheimer writes in the foreword to Leo Lowenthal’s False Prophets, “the nature of the stimuli must also be studied.”
Lowenthal’s book sets out to review the texts and tracts of what he calls “the American agitator” in order to discern what is common to the various agitational texts, ignoring the differences. Calling himself an “agitational analyst,” Lowenthal finds a set of recurrent motifs that together form a unifying pattern, what he calls “the constants of agitation.” In the second installment of this post I will return to Leo Lowenthal’s findings in False Prophets.
There are three major moments to the Huey Long story: his pre-1928 rise to political prominence; his time as Governor from 1928–1932; and the period where he served in the US Senate and as uncontested political boss of Louisiana until his death in 1935.
For the moment, however, all of this brings me back to Huey P. Long. Thinking about Huey, reading about him, watching grainy black and white film of his bizarre speech-making, I am convinced that there is this striking kinship between the demagoguery of the Kingfish and that of the Donald. What binds them is not their stated aspects of political ideology; in this domain, they are basically polar opposites. There is Long, preaching out of the great depression, rising to power on proposals and promises related to redistribution of wealth and soaking the rich. While Trump, despite his populism, has always been a scion of the one percent crowd. What they have in common is not so much what they stood for, but rather for what they did not stand for, the way in which they don’t really stand for anything other than their own will to power. That is, they are similar in the sense in which, as Lowenthal says about the agitator in general, the content of their demagogy is empty, accidental, and entirely subordinate to manipulative considerations.
Every Man a King, but No One Wears a Crown
Louisiana politics before Huey Long were always corrupt and undemocratic, a locked-in patronage system going back to reconstruction. Getting elected in Louisiana was all about winning the support of the local parish bosses, and none more so than the Tammany Hall-type group running New Orleans. Long’s thundering speeches against the political machine found willing ears among the small farm and merchant class as well as the poor, who had never had a seat at the table. But Long’s intent and accomplishment was to replace one machine with another of his own devising. Huey Long’s great biographer T. Harry Williams wrote, “He was the first Southern leader, and very possibly the first American leader, to set out not to contain the opposition or to impose certain conditions upon it, but to force it out of existence.”
There are three major moments to the Huey Long story: his pre-1928 rise to political prominence; his time as Governor from 1928–1932, and the period where he served in the US Senate and also as uncontested political boss of Louisiana until his death in 1935. Before attempting to paint this picture, it’s important to recognize that the Huey Long phenomenon was more than just the sum of the parts, because at its core it’s the story of the total domination of a singular personality, one which had toxic effects on everyone and everything (especially institutions) that it touched.
Huey constantly defied norms of acceptable behavior in both his personal and public conduct. He mostly lived and worked out of hotels. He ate off other people’s plates. He grabbed and fondled women during his legendary drinking binges. He dressed unconventionally. He got into fistfights (one time for urinating on another man’s suit in the toilet). He held meetings in his pajamas. But most importantly, he continually expressed his contempt for the norms of democratic institutions.
With respect to the populist message, Long promised “education for every white child in Louisiana,” as well as free school books, free bridges, and better highways.
This post came about because I happened to watch a film clip of Huey Long’s December, 1934 speech before the United States Senate. The speech is riveting, in that “train wreck, can’t look away,” sense that I have become all too familiar with since the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s not that there is a stylistic comparison to be made, or a shared vision or message. It’s the aspect of watching someone emotionally disordered, part showman, part zealot, an intemperate man-boy, lacking in self-reflection, lacking in self-doubt, demonstrating his bottomless passion for excoriating “the enemies of the people.” Of course, it’s also the bizarre contortions, the exaggerated gestures, the wind-milling of the arms, the darting eyes, and the sudden whooping and hollering, etc., all reflecting a highly unsettling mixture of insecurity and bravado.
Reflecting on Long’s vague populist message, his gospels-based demand for a redistribution of wealth, where following Clarence Darrow, “every man is a king, but none wears a crown,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. comments: “It’s a mistake to regard Huey long as an ideological figure, as someone committed to a program and so on…I think Huey Long’s great passion was for power…and for money…and he stole a lot of money and accumulated a lot of power, and destroyed all who got in the way of these two ambitions.”
High Popalorum & Low Popahirum
Huey Long grew up middle class in what was undeniably a poor Louisiana parish. This distinction was regularly effaced throughout his career, only becoming a permanent correction to the record long after his death, by affronted family members who wanted to set the record straight about the circumstances of the Long family. Huey’s father was a sometime political candidate himself, a socialist who voted for Eugene Debs. Huey’s first distinction was getting himself expelled from high school at 17. Even more notably, he mounted a campaign to get the school principal fired, a campaign that, if you can believe it, actually proved successful.
Huey hit the road, becoming a traveling salesman. He sold a lard substitute made of cottonseed oil called Cottolene. Despite his talent for door-to-door, he was repeatedly fired. Seeking guidance from his older brother who was an attorney, Long entered Tulane University Law School, dropping out after one year. Huey nonetheless convinced authorities to allow him to take the bar exam, which amazingly, he passed. He set up a law practice in his home parish; but Huey had already decided, at age 21, that he would enter politics. By 1918, Huey had gotten himself elected to the state railroad commission, where he fought against rate hikes and corporate monopolies. He also used this appointment as a vehicle for gaining statewide notoriety.
By 1924, Huey was running for Governor of Louisiana for the first time, this time falling just short. Emboldened and undeterred, Long campaigned continuously in advance of the election of 1927, crisscrossing the state making speeches, attacking his rivals, blanketing parishes with printed circulars, etc. Where previously candidates for governor pursued the local sheriffs and other political bosses in the parishes, Long’s default was to assume that these types were vulnerable, with parishes split between supporters and foes and with about twenty percent on the fence. Explaining his approach, Long said, “I’m going into every parish and cuss out the boss. That gives me forty percent of the votes to begin with, and I will horse trade them out of the in-betweens…I always hit the big man first.”
With respect to the populist message, Long promised “education for every white child in Louisiana,” as well as free school books, free bridges, and better highways. While the promise of large infrastructure projects in the late 20s made good sense, particularly in a state like Louisiana where such infrastructure was among the very worst nationally, it also created a potent alliance among uneducated rural voters and developers, the latter group willing to underwrite the Huey Long campaign.
The real message, of course, was Huey himself. When his opponent in the Democratic primary of ’27 told audiences that he had to walk around barefoot as a child, Long retorted that he could top that, since he was “born barefoot.” Also, Huey never missed an opportunity to tell the story of “High Popalorum and Low Popahirum” when describing his attitude to the two political parties. “A medicine man used to come around, he said, selling two bottles of medicine, one called High Popalorum, and one called Low Popahirum. Finally, someone round there asked, is there any difference between in these medicines? Oh, he said, considerable. They’re both good, but they’re different. That High Popalorum is made from the bark off the tree, that we take from the top down; and that Low Popahirum is from the bark that we take from the root up…and the only difference that I have found between the democratic leadership and the republican leadership was that one of them was skinning us from the ankle up, and the other from the ear down.”
The Whines and Moans of Pie Eaters
Huey Long was swept into the Governor’s mansion having lost the cities, but with an unprecedented rural turnout. Once in office, he immediately set to work dismantling anything and everything that was under the immediate authority of the state executive. He took over state boards and commissions, dismantled agencies, firing most previous appointees, and selecting Long loyalists for these jobs, literally in the thousands. He directed state contracts only to friendlies, going out of his way to do whatever he could to harm the businesses of political opponents. He also appointed a total of twenty-three of his extended relations onto the state payroll. As one biographer wrote, “None of his enemies were too weak, and no political job too unimportant to receive attention” — everyone from college presidents down to drawbridge tenders were sent packing. Even distant relatives of political opponents lost their jobs.
He also struck fast to take control of the legislature. He re-wrote the rules so that he could personally pick all the committee chairmen, once again, replacing each one with a Long loyalist. Once this was accomplished, Long immediately began fast-tracking legislation authored directly out of the Governor’s office, demanding immediate votes on everything he put forward, ignoring legislative procedure and protocol. He also vetoed any and all legislation that he did not sponsor, as a matter of course (bills in the dozens were vetoed in order to clear the docket for Huey’s bills).
By 1929, Huey’s building projects were in play. He created a raft of new taxes to fund his projects, and sold bonds at an alarming rate to pay for a new Governor’s mansion, paved roads for rural areas, and a new state capitol complex. As the work proceeded, replete with graft, substandard construction, no money set aside for maintenance, etc., Long called for a constitutional convention to change rules so that he could bond finance at a more exorbitant level than had previously been allowable. When these efforts stalled, along with some of his other taxes and spite bills, he redoubled his efforts to replace, intimidate, and seek revenge upon opponents, including use of the state police as his personal police force. He also created his own wholly owned newspaper, and required state workers to subscribe, and he used it to attack the large dailies, and proposed gross revenue advertising taxes upon Louisiana media companies. Huey openly admitted how much he enjoyed taking revenge upon his enemies. “No music ever sounded one half so refreshing, he admitted, as the whines and moans of pie-eaters when shoved away from the pie.”
By 1929, Huey Long was facing 19 impeachment charges, including bribery, unlawful use of militia, improper use of state funds, and a charge of temperamental unfitness to serve. The state house voted yes, but he narrowly avoided impeachment in the state senate. Following this, Long soon announced his plans to run for US Senate in 31/32, and also made it clear that if elected, he still intended to serve out his term as governor while serving in the US Senate.
The Doom of America’s Dream
Once in the Senate, Long moved to consolidate his power even more, calling a special session of the legislature to pass still more new taxes and spite bills and rules changes. He intervened in state senate races, hand picking eight candidates, so he could at last achieve the two thirds majority that he needed to call a constitutional convention. He also began heavily intervening in the affairs of LSU, telling the incoming President not to bother to show up, and telling the board that he would be selecting the next President. Huey spent significant sums to modernize LSU, but here too, the efforts were always marked with patronage and graft. Also, he nearly drove the football coach out of his mind, insisting on calling all the plays himself.
Amazingly, at this point in the narrative, we’ve only made it to 1932. For the rest of it, in the interest of space, something more impressionistic. Huey Long in the US Senate, upsetting people with wild antics, and loud outbursts. As biographer Richard D. White, Jr. wrote, “When not speaking, he meandered around, sitting down in any convenient seat. If he was interested in the debate, he moved to a desk near the speaker, and started intently up at him. If bored…he roamed the back of the chamber…grabbing senators who passed by and lecturing [them] on the latest controversy…Huey exhausted his colleagues.” Since he was constantly returning to Baton Rouge, his attendance was abysmal (absent 81 of 137 days). He attempted to get the Republican minority leader removed for not backing one of his amendments. He resigned all his committee assignments in a fit of pique, and he filibustered whenever it suited him to do so.
On April 4th, 1932, he took to the Senate floor and gave a speech entitled “The Doom of America’s Dream” where he attacked Hoover’s economic policies, and once again proposed a broad-based scheme for redistribution of national wealth. Even for those with some sympathy to his proposals, they remained vague and the math never penciled out, in part because he continued to rely on questionable data and statistics that he had been citing since 1918. He also appeared to have no answers for questions like how to divide capital assets like railroads and factories, and how to run them once they had been confiscated from their owners. Finally, there were no incentives to industrialists to continue to produce, and he seemed unconcerned that the wealth confiscation and redistribution scheme would have required an effective police state.
By 1933, an outcast in the Senate, Huey said that he was done with state politics, and was now going to focus on national campaigns. He visited Roosevelt, and soon fell out with him, and apparently resolved to challenge him for the presidency in the next cycle. Nationally, despite his many critics, and the interest of the feds in Louisiana justice, his popularity soared after 1934. Back home, Huey tightened his control over state election machinery. He stripped local school boards of the power to hire and fire teachers. He declared martial law in Baton Rouge, when local politicians and activists resisted him. He submitted bills by the dozens, in one case, getting 22 of 80 approved in one hour. Following Richard White, Jr., “by 1935 the Louisiana legislature no longer looked and acted like a body of democratic government.”
In 1933, Huey Long was asked in a press interview whether he saw any resemblance between himself and Hitler.
With his building projects and his vast patronage machine, Huey had pretty much drained the state dry. Per White, during 1931 alone, he spent $79 million, just two million less than the previous governor had spent in four years. Even with his raft of new taxes, he pushed the debt from 11 million to 100 million. Louisiana’s credit rating eventually fell so low, that bonds could no longer be sold. Irrespective of this, spending on real improvements had dropped drastically after 1931, and in 1934, he called seven special sessions of the state legislature, in which over four hundred bills were passed, most of them, per Richard White, “unread and undebated” and creating some of the most repressive legislation in American political history.
Don’t Liken Me to that Sonofabitch
I would like to close this quick ride through the Huey Long story, not with the assassin’s bullet (or bodyguard bullet depending on which version you want to believe) but rather with a final rumination on Huey Long and democracy. In 1933, Huey Long was asked in a press interview whether he saw any resemblance between himself and Hitler. Don’t liken me to that sonofabitch, he snapped back, saying that there had never been a country that put its heel down on the Jews that ever lived afterwards. But the charge that he was nonetheless a dictator of native stamp required a more nuanced reply, since he acknowledged that his grip upon Louisiana was unprecedented, to say the least. “A perfect democracy, Huey explained, can come close to looking like a dictatorship, a democracy in which the people are so satisfied they have no complaint.”
This remark goes a long way toward capturing the fundamental problem posed by Huey Long. Most remembrances and commentary on Long, particularly in the deep south, are replete with attempts at balance. He did a lot of good things, people say. He was Louisiana’s best and worst Governor, says another. Most critics of Long are much more approving than I have been (I really hate the guy). They point out that Louisiana politics pre-Huey was an equally corrupt patronage system, with the difference being that average people had no champion at all in the halls of power.
According to Richard White, even an LSU faculty member, when interviewed about Huey Long said, “If I had to choose between him without democracy, and getting back the old crowd without the good he has done, I should choose Huey. After all, democracy isn’t any good if it doesn’t work. Do you really think freedom is so important?”
It’s precisely this status quo ante conviction that “democracy is no good if it doesn’t work” that (understandably) prepares the soil for demagoguery to grow. It’s clear from Long’s remarks that direct democracy is the only sort that he understands, despite being a governor and a senator in a constitutional republic where the framers took such great pains to protect against precisely this sort of convergence between democracy and dictatorship–because they really did think freedom was that important.
Leo Lowenthal and the American Agitator
Near the beginning of this post, I introduced Leo Lowenthal’s treatment of the generalized political figure he called the American agitator. I did so, because I thought that Lowenthal’s analysis in False Prophets went a long way toward capturing what I wanted to describe as the peculiar kinship between Huey P. Long and Donald J. Trump. In the second half of this post, which I call “Leo Lowenthal and the American Agitator,” I go on to take a detailed look at Lowenthal’s exploration of the constants of American agitation.
