While reading Huey Long itÕs easy to understand how the brash young farmerÕs boy from poor Winn parish, where Òyoung bloods of HueyÕs age thought it was the height of urban elegance to saunter into one of the eateries and order Ôa chili,ÕÓ might have offended the sensibilities of the established order. Quite apart from his politics, his campaigning style, with its innovative use of mailed circulars, automobile stumping, radio speeches, sound trucks, and cruel personal invective was designed precisely to appeal to that part of the populace that wasnÕt sitting in the halls and offices of power. Long knew what appealed to them in part because he was one of them, and though blessed with a phenomenal memory, razor-sharp wit, and a personality that drove him to work twenty hours a day, he was nonetheless the product of his upbringing in Winnfield, a town where some of the stores and shops were located in tents, where there were no sidewalks, no paved streets, and farm stock roamed the town.
Little of LongÕs early life is well-documented, perhaps because no one thought heÕd amount to much. Long himself gave a variety of answers about some episodes in his life, depending on the audience and time of day. Almost necessarily, the portrait of Long that Williams paints, drawing on over a decade of research and interviews with hundreds of Long family members, friends, associates, and enemies, contains a plethora of contradictory stories. When given the option between positive and negative views of his subject, Williams predominantly chooses the former. His decisions are naturally backed up with volumes of supporting evidenceÑnot the least of which are the actual accomplishments of LongÕs tenure as governor and senator.
Long did more than just talk about the things he campaigned for. When he won the gubernatorial election on second try in 1928, he embarked upon a series of changes that went beyond reform to outright rebellion against the ruling class. He raised severance taxes on natural resource industries to pay for schoolbooks for every child, regardless of whether they went to public or private school. During his term as governor, the state built over 2,300 miles of paved roads, 111 bridges, and in 1931 employed ten percent of the men involved in road-building nationally. He moved to abolish the practices of strait-jacketing and chaining and to introduce dental care at mental institutions (at one, he claimed, dentists extracted seventeen hundred diseased teeth from inmates). LongÕs appointee as head of Angola, still considered one of the toughest prisons in the country, instituted the stateÕs first prisoner-rehabilitation program. Long implemented an adult literacy program in Louisiana that largely served African-Americans, despite the racism of the overwhelming white majority. The list is extensive and surprisingly progressive for the time, the place, and most particularly the man he has been portrayed as. Many of his progressive policies were unthinkable to large sectors of his electorate, but the breadth of his programs drew in people who supported him in some areas and not others.
Williams details the political career of Huey Long exhaustively. Many of the chapters chronicle a blinding array of events condensed into a period of time that seems far too short to contain them. What is more incredible is that chapter after chapter covers a parallel set of events occurring within the same time frame.