Louisiana Political Museum, Cradle of Louisiana Politics
Louisiana
Winnfield, Louisiana has produced three governors: Huey P. Long, his brother Earl K. Long, and Oscar K. Allen, who served simultaneously as Long's loyal surrogate when Huey moved to the Senate. No other town of similar size in American history has come close to that concentration of political power. The Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame, housed in the old Winnfield railroad depot, exists to make sense of how that happened.
Huey Long was born on a farm near Winnfield on August thirtieth, eighteen ninety-three, the eighth of nine children. Winn Parish was unusual territory, a stronghold of Populism in the eighteen nineties and Socialist sympathies in the early twentieth century, a county of small farmers who had never owned slaves and distrusted the New Orleans elites who ran Louisiana politics like a private club. Long absorbed that culture. He became a traveling salesman, then a lawyer specializing in workmen's compensation cases, then a Public Service Commissioner who made a name attacking Standard Oil. By nineteen twenty-eight he was governor, and by nineteen thirty-five he had built a national machine so powerful that Franklin Roosevelt considered him a serious threat to his presidency.
Long's program, "Every Man a King," the Share Our Wealth Society, free textbooks for schoolchildren, paved roads across Louisiana, a new state capitol, combined genuine populism with authoritarian methods. He was shot in the corridors of that new capitol on September eighth, nineteen thirty-five, and died two days later. He was forty-two.
His brother Earl served three separate terms as governor, famous for his theatrical personality and his public breakdown in nineteen fifty-nine. Together the Long brothers defined Louisiana politics for a generation.
The museum opened on August thirtieth, nineteen ninety-three, the hundredth anniversary of Huey's birth. It holds more than one hundred thousand items of political memorabilia and has honored over two hundred figures who shaped the state.
