Huey Long and the Kingfish

He called himself the Kingfish, after a character on the Amos and Andy radio program, a blustering, scheming, always-talking man who somehow always came out on top. Huey Pierce Long was born in Winn Parish in eighteen ninety-three, the son of a farmer in one of the poorest corners of a poor state, a parish that had sent delegates against secession in eighteen sixty-one and had flirted with socialism in the early twentieth century. Winn Parish produced a man with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Mississippi River.

Long passed the Louisiana bar exam after just one year of law school, became a railroad commissioner at twenty-four, and governor of Louisiana in nineteen twenty-eight on a platform of taxing the oil companies and using the money to build roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. He delivered. Paved highways in Louisiana grew from about three hundred miles to more than two thousand three hundred during his time in power, along with nearly three thousand miles of new gravel road.

He built the new Louisiana State University campus. He distributed free textbooks to every schoolchild in the state, regardless of race, a program that survived a legal challenge all the way to the United States Supreme Court. He also ran Louisiana as something close to a personal fiefdom, controlling the legislature, the judiciary, and the patronage system with a thoroughness that had few parallels in American politics.

He was elected to the United States Senate in nineteen thirty while still serving as governor, and by nineteen thirty-five he was running for president under the slogan Every Man a King. On September eighth, nineteen thirty-five, he was shot in the corridor of the Louisiana State Capitol he had built. He died two days later.

He was forty-two years old. Louisiana has not had a politician like him since, and the state has not entirely decided whether that is a tragedy or a relief.