September 8, 1935—A 42-year-old U.S. senator, the linchpin of a political dynasty, whom detractors called ruthless and admirers hailed as progressive, was in the midst of challenging an incumbent President from his own party when he was assassinated, setting off endless controversies about his legacy as well as conspiracy theories surrounding his death.
No, I’m not talking about Robert F. Kennedy of New York, but Huey Long of Louisiana.
The circumstances of their lives and deaths, you can tell from the first paragraph of this post, were similar in many ways. But in the years since his death, Kennedy has enjoyed much better press than “the Kingfish.”
It’s been more than 40 years since RFK was murdered in a Los Angeles hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, but the wound of what might have been still stings. Forty years after his death, however, Long did not evoke similarly weepy nostalgia, but instead, in that Watergate era of fears of corrupt, all-controlling executives, a sense of relief that the nation was spared the dictatorial style he honed in Louisiana, first as governor, later as Senator.
It won’t do to dismiss or forget Long that easily. Five years ago, Americans discovered, to their astonishment, that deep divides still exist along racial and class lines in his state. Yet those fissures would undoubtedly have been a thousand times worse without the grand infrastructure—schools, hospitals, roads, etc.—and services he put in place.
Contemporaries never made the mistake of ignoring Long. RFK has been lionized on disc (Black 47’s “Bobby Kennedy”) and the big screen (Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby”), but he has not become fodder for novelists in the same manner that Long did.
From 1934 to 1946, a half-dozen novelists took a crack at rendering The Kingfish’s life and death in fiction, according to Keith Perry’s critical study, The Kingfish in Fiction: Huey P. Long and the Modern American Novel.
Ironically, the most famous, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, All the King’s Men, was the one most loosely based on his life. There were others by Hamilton Basso, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here), and Adria Locke Langley's A Lion is in the Streets (later, like All the King’s Men, adapted for film, this time starring James Cagney as the Long stand-in).
Sixty years after the shooting, Joe Klein (writing as “Anonymous”) used All the King’s Men as a kind of template for his own novelistic study in ambivalence about a compromised Southern progressive, Primary Colors.
Why so much literary interest in Long? For all the overtones of Greek tragedy evoked by the death of Bobby Kennedy, his life didn’t pose in stark terms, the way Long’s did, the elemental questions posed by the political process, such as whether the end justifies the means.
Take a look at the roll call of governors from roughly the 1870s to the Roaring Twenties, when Long came to power. A dispiritingly high percentage of these came from the “Bourbon” set of politicians in the governor’s seat, conservatives intent on spending as little as possible on basic services for the state.
Long broke that pattern, and nearly five decades after his death, many ordinary people who allowed themselves to be filmed for Ken Burns’ documentary on Long spoke highly of how the governor-senator positively affected their lives.
Long’s take-no-prisoners style in assuring passage of his programs, however, along with certain aspects of his populist stances (e.g., “Share the Wealth” clubs that advocated redistribution of the incomes of the most affluent), led many to wonder if a homegrown version of Fascism was appearing in the U.S.
None other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who had received crucial support from Long at the 1932 Democratic Convention—privately believed that the politician was one of the two most dangerous men in America. (The other “dangerous man” was General Douglas MacArthur.)
The fiery opposition to his positions and his leadership style (Long had to fend off an impeachment move while governor), it somehow seems appropriate, ended in equally vociferous reactions to his death.
For years, the accepted version of Long’s death was that it came at the hands of Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a judge being gerrymandered out of office by a set of bills that the Louisiana legislature was then passing. Weiss encountered Long in the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, and to the horror of eyewitnesses a hail of bullets was exchanged. Dr. Weiss was gunned down immediately by Long’s bodyguards, while Long died from his wounds two days later.
Yet, surprisingly enough, as outlined in Robert Travis Scott’s article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on the 75th anniversary of the shooting, the most fundamental forensic evidence from the case—e.g., the bullet, the gun—did not receive what we would think of as standard identification and preservation.
To the annoyance of Long’s band of admirers today, then, questions impossible to dismiss have lingered as to whether a) Long died directly from the crossfire of his own bodyguards rather than from the bullet Weiss was able to fire, or b) whether Weiss merely got into fisticuffs with Long, and that his guards, to cover up their overreaction, arranged the evidence to point in the direction of Weiss rather than themselves.
A quarter century to the day of the assassination, Huey’s only slightly less colorful brother Earl Long was buried, after 18 months in which he a) took up with stripper Blaze Starr, b) his wife committed him to a mental institution, c) he checked out of said institution and ran for Congress, d) he won the race, and e) he died after a second fatal heart attack while in the hospital.
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