September Eight, Nineteen Thirty-Five

On the evening of September eighth, nineteen thirty-five, Huey Long was walking through the first-floor corridor of the Louisiana State Capitol, the building he had built in the state he essentially ran, when a young doctor named Carl Weiss stepped out from behind a pillar and fired a single shot. Long's bodyguards, a large contingent of armed men his enemies called the Cossacks, opened fire immediately, killing Weiss. No autopsy was performed at the time; when his body was exhumed decades later, examiners found at least two dozen bullet wounds, though some witnesses that night described a much higher number.

Long was taken to a hospital. He was forty-two years old and at that moment one of the most powerful politicians in the United States. His Share Our Wealth program had accumulated over seven and a half million members in twenty-seven thousand clubs. Many in Washington believed he intended to run for president and could win.

He died thirty-one hours after being shot, on September tenth, from internal bleeding that surgeons could not stop. An estimated two hundred thousand people came to pay their respects as his body lay in state in the rotunda of the capitol. He was buried on the grounds outside, beneath a bronze statue that still stands there.

The question of exactly what happened that night has never been fully resolved. The official account held that Weiss was motivated by Long's efforts to gerrymander Weiss's father-in-law, a judge named Benjamin Pavy, out of office. Some historians and forensic investigators have later suggested the possibility that Long was accidentally struck by a ricochet from his own bodyguards in the chaos of the corridor, rather than by Weiss's bullet directly. The medical evidence, examined decades later, is inconclusive. What is not disputed is the date, the building, and the result.

His grave is in the garden in front of the tower. The marker on the floor inside the capitol shows where he fell.