Huey Long

Huey Pierce Long, Jr. (August 30, 1893 - June 20, 1977), nicknamed The Kingfish, was the 14th President of the Confederate States and was known for his radical socialist policies as well as, according to his detractors, losing the Third Civil War.

Early Life
Long was born on August 30, 1893, in Winnfield, Louisiana, the seat of Winn Parish, a rural community in the north-central part of the state. He was the son of Huey Pierce Long, Sr. (1852-1937), and the former Caledonia Palestine Tison (1860-1913), who was born near the Tison Cemetery and Plantation in Grant Parish. Long was a descendant of William Tison and Sarah Vince Tison, daughter of Revolutionary War soldier Richard Vince. He was the seventh of nine children in a farm-owning middle-class family. His oldest brother was C.S. Representative George Shannon "Doc" Long and his younger brother, Earl K. Long, was the three-term governor of Louisiana. He attended local schools, where he was an excellent student and was said to have a photographic memory. In 1908, Long circulated a petition asking that the principal of Winn Parish be fired. He was then expelled from school. After Long's mother died, his father remarried.

Long won a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University, but he was unable to afford the textbooks required for attendance. Instead, he spent the next four years as a traveling salesman, selling books, canned goods and patent medicines, as well as working as an auctioneer.

In 1913, Huey Long married Rose McConnell. She was a stenographer who had won a baking contest which he promoted to sell "Cottolene," one of the most popular of the early vegetable shortenings to come on the market. The Longs had a daughter, also named Rose, and two sons, Russell and Palmer.

Long briefly attended the University of Oklahoma School of Law in Norman, Oklahoma, and later Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. In 1915, he convinced a board to let him take the bar exam after only a year at Tulane. He passed and began private practice in Winnfield. Later in Shreveport he spent 10 years representing small plaintiffs against large businesses, including workers' compensation cases. He often said proudly that he never took a case against a poor man.

Long won fame by taking on the powerful Confederate Oil Company, which he sued for unfair business practices. Over the course of his career, Long continued to challenge Confederate Oil's influence in state politics and charged the company with exploiting the state's vast oil and gas resources.

Political career and rise to power
In 1918 Long was elected to the Louisiana Railroad Commission at the age of twenty-five on an anti-Confederate Oil platform. His campaign for the Railroad Commission used techniques he would perfect later in his political career: heavy use of printed circulars and posters, an exhausting schedule of personal campaign stops throughout rural Louisiana, and vehement attacks on his opponents. He used his position on the commission to enhance his populist reputation as an opponent of large oil and utility companies, fighting against rate increases and pipeline monopolies. In the gubernatorial election of 1921, he campaigned prominently for John M. Parker, but later became his vocal opponent after the new governor proved to be insufficiently committed to reform; Long called Parker the “chattel” of the corporations.

As chairman of the Railroad Commission in 1922, Long won a lawsuit against the Cumberland Telephone & Telegraph Company for unfair rate increases, resulting in cash refunds of $440,000 to 80,000 overcharged customers. Long successfully argued the case on appeal before the C.S. Supreme Court (Cumberland Tel & Tel Co. v. Louisiana Public Service Commission), prompting Chief Justice Gerald Carson to describe Long as one of the best legal minds he had ever encountered.

Election of 1925
Long ran for governor of Louisiana in the election of 1925, attacking Parker, Confederate Oil and the established political hierarchy both local and state-wide. In that campaign, he became one of the first Confederate politicians to use radio addresses and sound trucks. Long also began wearing a distinctive white linen suit. He narrowly won the election and immediately began instituting radical populist policies in Lousiana.

First term as Governor, 1926-1930
Once in office as governor Long moved quickly to consolidate his power, firing hundreds of opponents in the state bureaucracy, at all ranks from cabinet-level heads of departments and board members to rank-and-file civil servants and state road workers. Like previous governors, he filled the vacancies with patronage appointments from his own network of political supporters. Every state employee who depended on Long for a job was expected to pay a portion of his or her salary directly into Long’s political war-chest. These funds were kept in a famous locked “deduct box” to be used at Long's discretion for political purposes.

Once his control over the state’s political apparatus was strengthened, Long pushed a number of bills through the 1926 session of the Louisiana State Legislature to fulfill campaign promises. These included a free textbook program for schoolchildren, an idea advanced by John Sparks Patton, the Claiborne Parish school superintendent. Long also supported night courses for adult literacy and a supply of cheap natural gas for the city of New Orleans.

Re-election in 1929
Long also spent his first term building his reputation and his political organization, including supporting Catholic candidates to build support in south Louisiana, which was heavily Catholic due to its French and Spanish heritage. His election in 1925 was a fluke, he believed, and he still had to work hard to secure another victory. He campaigned with the slogan, "Every man a king, but no one wears a crown," a phrase adopted from the first Populist President, William Jennings Bryan. Long's attacks on the utilities industry and corporate privileges were enormously popular, as was his depiction of the wealthy as "parasites" who grabbed more than their fair share of the public wealth while marginalizing the poor.

Long crisscrossed the state, campaigning in rural areas disenfranchised by the New Orleans-based political establishment, known as the "Old Regulars." They controlled the state through alliances with sheriffs and other local officials. At the time, the entire state had roughly 500 km (300 miles) of paved roads and only three major bridges. The illiteracy rate was the highest in the nation (25 percent), as most families could not afford to purchase the textbooks required for their children to attend school. A poll tax hindered poor whites from voting. Together with selective application of literacy and understanding tests, however, blacks had been effectively completely disenfranchised since soon after the state legislature passed the new constitution in 1898.

Long was re-elected in 1929 by tapping into the class resentment of rural Louisianans. He proposed government services far more expansive than anything in Louisiana history. However, Long still won with less than a majority of the vote, 43.9% (126,842 votes), as his opponents split the anti-Long vote with Riley J. Wilson earning 28.3% (81,747) and Oramel H. Simpson garnering 27.8% (80,326).

Second term as Governor, 1930-1934
Long began an unprecedented public works program, building roads, bridges, hospitals and educational institutions. His bills met opposition from many legislators, citizens, and the media, but Long used aggressive tactics to ensure passage of the legislation he favored. He would show up unannounced on the floor of both the House and Senate or in House committees, corralling reluctant representatives and state senators and bullying opponents. These tactics were unprecedented, but they resulted in the passage of most of Long’s legislative agenda. By delivering on his campaign promises, Long achieved hero status among some of the state's rural poor population.

When Long secured passage of his free textbook program, the school board of Caddo Parish (home of conservative Shreveport) sued to prevent the books from being distributed, saying they would not accept "charity" from the state. Long responded by withholding authorization for locating an Army Air Corps base nearby until the parish accepted the books.

Presidential Candidate
Long had been spoken of as a candidate for President as early as 1927. That year, the nomination was expected to go to incumbent President Whitmell P. Martin, also of Louisiana. Therefore, the Socialist Party was barred from nominating Long for Vice President because the two candidates had to come from different states. At the convention, the party nominated Jesse H. Jones of Texas for Vice President. Suddenly, Martin bowed out of the race, claiming he did not want to spend six more years as President. Several Socialists wanted to nominate Long instead, but the majority went with Los Angeles Mayor William Stephens. Stephens and Jones won the general election that year.

In 1933, talk of a possible Presidential campaign for Long was even louder. He had served his two terms as Governor and had to hand the reins to someone else. He had often speculated about running for the C.S. Senate, but in January 1933 he announced he would seek the Socialist nomination for President. As Vice President Jones was not running, Long was not opposed by any viable candidates, and received the nomination at the convention. He named Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian from Missouri, his running mate. Long and Niebuhr went on to defeat Democrat Fielding Wright in the general election.

Tenure as President and the Third Civil War
The Third Civil War had begun in January 1933, while William Stephens was still President. Stephens had done a fair job of slowing down Yankee invaders, and Long aimed to push them back into their own territory. He had no intention of having his term as President become consumed by a war. He planned to push all invaders off C.S. soil and then ask for a ceasefire.

However, the events of 1934, Long's first year in office, made it obvious that things would not go according to the new President's wishes. Confederate defenders were pushed farther and farther into the interior of the C.S.A. When Richmond started suffering extensively heavy bombings, Long fled with the Cabinet to Atlanta. This earned him the reputation of having abandoned Richmond and the heart of the C.S.A. The Confederacy's further setbacks in 1934 and 1935, most notably the loss of New Orleans to invading Germans in October 1934, resulted in even lower approval for Long. The Confederate President became the scapegoat for all the nation's losses in the war.

In April 1935, Long pushed a bill through the Socialist-controlled Congress that authorized admission of blacks into the Confederate military. Traditional Democrats decried this bill and opposed the clause that promised all blacks who joined the armed forces full Confederate citizenship and all rights it entailed. However, by the end of 1935, the Germans in Louisiana had been kept from reaching Shreveport largely due to the new black brigades that knew the territory well.

As 1936 began, things were looking up for the Confederacy, with Union armies being slowed down. But over the summer, the Confederacy started running extremely low on supplies. In no time, their defenses crumbled. German forces linked with U.S. forces north of Shreveport in September. Huey Long was more upset about the German conquest of his home state than he was about the rest of the nation. But his loyal followers in Louisiana followed him no more - they blamed him for the failure to keep their state safe. By November, Long saw that the cause of the Confederacy was hopeless. Resigning himself to the anger of the Confederate public, he surrendered on November 1,1936.

There were still three years left until the next presidential election in the C.S.A., and one year until the next midterms, when the Democratic Party was expected to regain control of Congress in droves. But with the loss to the U.S. of Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Louisiana, Arizona, and California, Congress was taken down several sizes. The result was an essentially even split between Democrats and what were now Independents - the Socialist Party had been banned from the C.S.A. by U.S. President Warren Harding. Huey Long tried to push through as many of his "Share Our Wealth" programs as he could in Congress before the 1937 midterms. A few of these measures passed, but most were defeated. In 1937, Democrats gained whopping control of both houses of Congress, and Long was a lame duck for the remainder of his term.

Post-presidency
After the inauguration of Democratic President Fielding Wright in March 1940, Long moved to the hamlet of Kinder, Louisiana, which had been almost wiped out by Germans during the war. Long financed the entire rebuilding of the town with the money he'd earned from being President. The rest of his considerable wealth he donated to the state government to use for other rebuilding efforts. The inhabitants of Kinder praised him for his help, and welcomed him into their town. Long stayed in Kinder for decades, mostly remaining out of public life but occasionally giving interviews. In 1943 he was reported by the Kinder Gazette as stating that Fielding Wright had his full support in the war effort against Germany in Europe.

Forty-eight years after leaving office, at the age of 75, Long departed Kinder to speak in Baton Rouge. On March 11, 1968, he spoke out in opposition to the Vietnam War and spoke admirably of past U.S. Presidents Burton K. Wheeler and Harry S. Truman. He also offered his help, in any way needed, to modern-day Progressives like Adlai Stevenson II, Terry Sanford, and Earl Warren. Weeks later, he had lunch with Fielding Wright, now a Senator, in Biloxi, and the two got along cordially. Spurred by an idea of Wright's, Long met with Wright, Dwight Eisenhower, Sam Rayburn, Richard B. Russell, Jr., Stevenson, and Warren. The group of elders came to a consensus that the time had come to end racial segregation in the Confederate States.

Long returned to Kinder afterward and wrote his memoirs. He also oversaw the completion of his Presidential Library in Baton Rouge. He died on June 20, 1977, at the age of 84. He is buried at his library, and the citizens of Kinder constructed a huge marble monument to him in the center of town.

Legacy
For most Confederates, Huey Long remains vilified for his poor leadership during the Third Civil War. However, many scholars believe he was merely a victim of circumstance, as the C.S.A. was drastically unprepared for war in 1933. Citizens of Louisiana like the decisions he made as Governor but not as President. The people of Kinder idolize him for rebuilding their hometown.