Huey Long
From Metapedia
Huey Pierce Long (August 30, 1893 – September 10, 1935), was an American politician. He was governor of Louisiana and later a United States Senator.
"Every man a king, but no one wears the crown..."
The closest the United States has ever gotten to a genuine Folkish revolutionary leader in was Huey Pierce Long. Long is a problematic but fascinating figure to all who study his life and career.
Known as "The Kingfish", Long was unquestionably an egotist and a power-hungry personality who ruthlessly trampled over everyone who got in his way. He was one of the most skillful machine politicians in American history, a master manipulator who became one of the greatest practitioners of the corrupt democratic system of patronage, bribery,corruption, extortion, and deception. On several occasions he called out the Louisiana National Guard to intimidate his political opponents, (who were rather in need of intimidating, if the truth be known.) When he left for the Senate in 1932, Huey hand-picked his own successor as governor, a flunky named 0. K. Allen who was so feckless that a legend arose that he once signed a leaf which blew in through the window and landed on his desk in the State House.
But even Huey Long's worst enemies have never denied that the Kingfish manifested throughout his whole life a profound love, respect and concern for the White Southern working class, the factory workers and sharecroppers and manual laborers who in that day as in this bore the brunt of taxation, conscription in time of war, cynical political exploitation, and arrogant patronizing discrimination by the wealthier classes in the South who from the time of slavery had used the black presence as a source of cheap abor to keep the White workers' wages low, and as a potential threat to keep the poor Whites in line. For the poor Whites to rock the boat, to break with the Bourbons of the planter class, always risked weakening or damaging the social and legal mechanisms of control, with the ever-present danger that the blacks might be turned loose to rob and rape and kill, (as indeed occurred in the 1950s, and which situation prevails to this day in the South and throughout the rest of the country.)
But in Huey Long, the White workers no longer had a boss, but a true friend in a position of power. The wealthy liberal elite, the New World Order of the era never forgave Long for it, and eventually they killed him. Long began his battle for White rights in the 1920s when he was elected to the relatively minor position of state Railroad Commissioner. By raising carriage rates for large corporations, notably the all-powerful Standard Oil, and by improving pay, benefits and conditions for the railroad workers Long incurred the anger of the power structure. Twice they tried unsuccessfully to indict Long and remove him from office, but being a skilled attorney as well as a politician, Huey beat them back.
Elected governor in 1928, Long provided widespread employment through road-building and swamp drainage projects. He further enraged the rich and powerful by providing free textbooks and lunches for all Louisiana school children, in those days a positively revolutionary concept, since many White working class children could not go to school because their parents could not afford to buy books. In the little bayou town of St. Martinsville, Long made one of the most famous addresses in American political history, the "Evangeline Speech", one of the most searing indictments of liberal democracy ever delivered by an American political leader. Long was speaking to a crowd of French Cajuns, the despised White minority of Louisiana whom the liberal journalists of that day (as well as this) patronized, mocked, and abused, and whom the wealthy upper class of that day (as well as this) generally considered to be "lower than niggers":
"...Here beneath this oak; Evangeline waited for her lover, who never came. It is a spot made immortal by Longfellow 's poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools you have waited for your children to have, which have never come? Where are the roads and highways that you send your money to build, which are now no nearer than before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and the disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but they lasted only through a single lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak; have lasted for generations. Give me the chance at last to dry the tears of those who still weep here1" (Long won the election by a landslide.)
As a U. S. Senator Long began to widen his appeal onto a nationwide level in preparation for a presidential bid against Franidin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. Huey built his own national organization through his books Every Man A King and My First 100 Days In The White House, and also through his "Share The Wealth Clubs", whose slogan was "Every man a king, but no one wears the crown."
Long advocated a highly revolutionary and populist program involving not just the restriction of capitalist excesses and better individual conditions for working people, but the actual redistribution of existing wealth, something only Adolf Hitler has ever been able to achieve without mass slaughter. Long's breathtakingly simple plan was to place a legal limit of one million dollars on annual income for individuals, and as well as a cap of ten million dollars on the individual net worth of any one American citizen. By 1930s standards,and even today, this is more than enough money to maintain an individual and his family in the most magnificent luxury, nor is there really any valid reason why any one person needs more income or wealth than this. But by advocating this idea, Long signed his own death warrant.
On the night of Sunday, September 8th, 1935, Huey Long was shot dead in the corridors of the Louisiana State House by a Jewish doctor named Carl Austin Weiss. The assassin was immediately himself gunned down by a Louisiana state police detective assigned to guard the Senator. Despite several half-hearted attempts by subsequent politically correct authors to prove that Weiss was innocent, a recent exhumation and autopsy on Long's body (1993) proved that the fatal bullet which killed Long did indeed come from Weiss's .32 automatic and not, as has been alleged, from the weapon of one of Long's bodyguards.
No credible motive has ever been unearthed as to why Weiss sat down and ate his Sunday dinner, played with the family dog, and then stuck a pistol in his pocket and went over the the state capital to kill a United States Senator. Born a Jew, Weiss converted to Catholicism and married into an upper-crust French Roman Catholic family. It has been lamely suggested that Weiss was upset at a insult to his father-in-law, a prominent judge, on the part of Senator Long, i.e. that the judge and hence Weiss's wife had Negroid blood in them, but no one has been able to come up with any documentary proof that any such allegation was ever made by Long or anyone else.
The most likely explanation is that the established power structure had decided that Huey Long must die, and Carl Weiss drew the short straw. It was common knowledge in Louisiana's elite circles that Standard Oil was plotting to kill Long and had allocated a large sum of money for that purpose. In Huey Long, White working people lost a leader who was arguably the only real friend they have had in any position of power during the past eighty years. To this day, the Whites of Louisiana have exhibited a stubborn rebellious streak, such as when they cast huge vote totals for David Duke in recent years. And to this day, any mention of Huey Long's name will bring thunderous cheers from any gathering of Louisiana working people.
The Robert Penn Warren novel "All The King's Men", and several later movie versions, the latest one starring Sean Penn, is based very loosely on the life and career of Huey P. Long.
