Huey Long's Louisiana

Before you can understand what Huey Long built, you have to understand what Louisiana was before he arrived. In nineteen twenty-eight, when Long was elected governor, the state had three hundred thirty-one miles of paved roads. It had no bridges across the major river crossings. Its public school system was threadbare; its adult illiteracy rate was among the highest in the country. The planter aristocracy and the Standard Oil company had long controlled the legislature, the courts, and the governor's mansion, and they had managed things in a way that was good for them and not particularly good for anyone else.

Long's methods were not gentle. He built a political machine that functioned through loyalty, patronage, and the occasional application of fear. He collected power systematically, removing hostile officeholders, packing boards with allies, and operating the state government as something close to a personal fief. His enemies called him a dictator and meant it as a factual description, not an insult.

But what the machine built is also real. By the time Long went to Washington as a United States senator in nineteen thirty-two, Louisiana had two thousand three hundred one miles of paved road and one hundred eleven new bridges. The state had built a charity hospital system that provided free medical care to people who had no access to it before. A night school program had taught one hundred thousand adults to read. Textbooks were free in public schools for the first time. The Louisiana State Capitol stood four hundred fifty feet tall, the tallest in the nation, built on schedule during the Depression.

His Share Our Wealth program, proposed in nineteen thirty-four, called for taxing fortunes above one hundred million dollars, limiting annual incomes to one million dollars, and guaranteeing every American family a minimum household grant of five thousand dollars. He had seven and a half million members in twenty-seven thousand local clubs by the time he died. Franklin Roosevelt considered him the most dangerous man in America.

What he was, exactly, is a question historians have not finished arguing. He was not a simple figure. The road he paved to get here was real. So were the costs.