Every Man a King.
Required
- Huey Long. Every Man a King.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast, Huey Long Discussion, Part 1.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast, Huey
Long Discussion, Part 2.
This is a primary source on Huey Long's life, as told
from his own perspective. His presentation is frequently
self-serving, although a lightning rod like Huey leads to
accounts that are pretty much all self-serving,
reflecting the judgment of their writers.
The book is beautifully laid out and is rhetorically
straightforward — a vote for Huey Long is a vote to improve your
life materially. He's paved dirt road, replaced fords and
ferries with bridges build clinics and hospitals, expanded
colleges, built schools and given students free books. He fills
the book with beautiful before and after pictures to show what
can happen when the government works for the people and not just
the state and corporate elites. And of course the elites fought
back every step of the way. For example, when the state sent out
the free textbooks to children, Shreveport refused to pass them
along to the children. "Shreveport doesn't need the charity of
the state of Louisiana," was essentially what they said. Soon
after the U. S. Army wanted to put an airfield near Shreveport.
However, they'd need land owned by the state to complete the
deal. Visions of sugar plumbs danced in the town fathers' eyes
as they told the governor about the wonderful opportunity.
"Shreveport doesn't need the charity of the state of Louisiana,"
Long replied. And so Shreveport got free textbooks and
Barksdale Air Force Base. Everybody loves their own socialism;
they only hate the socialism of other people.
Long was a genius both in the traditional sense and in the
political sense. He had a photographic memory of everything he
read. That's how he was able to attend LSU Law School briefly,
read the law, and pass the bar so quickly. But unlike many
people whose talents are purely scholastic, Long was a political
genius as well. For instance, his first year as governor, he
only had money for 60 miles of new roads. Where would you put
that road? My most frequent answer is that they'd put it between
Baton Rouge and New Orleans. That's smart, but it isn't genius.
Long put short stretches of road all over the state, whetting
peoples' appetite for more roads.
Huey Long wanted to put Louisiana on the map when it came to
great public universities, so he oversaw the expansion of LSU,
and to a lesser extent, the other colleges around the state. He
added buildings, brought in excellent faculty, and worked to
build a great football team. I've heard he even called plays
from the sidelines. One thing a great football team needs is a
great stadium. But when he approached the legislature, they
refused to fund it. He then asked what they would fund, and they
said dorms. So he built some dorms in a horseshoe, and put
bleachers (which are pretty cheap) on top of them. My first
office as a grad student was in one of those old dorms, which
were very creepy by the 1980's. A sub-plot of All the King's
Men that didn't make it into the movie we watch focuses on
Willy Stark and the football team. The football shenanigans
bothered Penn Warren, who never quite forgave Huey for giving
him a job.
As for the constant charges of corruption against Huey Long,
that's the constant refraim against reformers. Because it's so
politically noxious to oppose healthcare and schools, they must
attack the people providing them. I'm not saying there was no
corruption in the Huey Long administration, but corruption has
been endemic to our state from the founding of the colony until
today. Was Huey Long so extraordinarily corrupt against the
background of corruption that it should be the first word
associated with his name? Similar charges were leveled against
Lula da Silva in Brazil after he lifted millions of people out
of poverty. His fascist replacement Bolsonaro is not only much
more corrupt, but has also busied himself burning the lungs of
the planet, the Amazon. Moreover, we should examine the
different definitions of corruption that are floating around in
people's heads.
- The Aristotlean definition. Corruption is when the governing people stop ruling on behalf of the common good and start ruling on behalf of their own self-interest. With this definition, would Long be the most corrupt or least corrupt governor in our history?
- The Roman defintion. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton may had coined the quote, but the sentiment was behind the development of the Roman Republic. Corruption inevitably follows the accrual of too much power in too few hands for too long. No matter how much good they did the masses, dictators like Caesar and Huey amassed too much power in their hands, and had to be struck down to save the Republic. One of my students had this insight, and this seems the most damning to Huey.
- The White Supremacist definition. The first thing I ever
learned about Reconstruction was that it was corrupt. It's
also something I hear constantly about the Obama
administration, which went for 8 years without a major
scandal. In the white supremacist mind, government programs
for rich white people are great, a well-deserved reward for
super-awesome behavior. Within their system, it's totally
fitting the recent Corona bailout that gave millionaires $1.7
million in relief, while the average taxpayer gets $1,200. The
only problem with that bailout is that some of it made it into
the hands of the poors. Any money that makes its way to the
hands of those people, be they any race but white, or
sometimes even poor whites, is corrupt. That's why Social
Security was originally designed to leave out jobs usually
taken by black people. This definition was suggested to me by
Charles Lane when we interviewed him about the Colfax
Massacre, where white people rioted, killed, and deposed the
legally elected officials because they were "corrupt," i.e.,
black. White supremacists are outraged when the government
falls into the hands of anyone who is not white or helps
anybody who isn't white, and they see it as by definition
corrupt.