A Roadmap for Authoritarians: The Rise of Huey Long

The premise of Sinclair Lewis’s classic 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here is focused on Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a charismatic and power-hungry politician who promises to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, and to give each citizen $5,000 per year, portraying himself as a champion of traditional American values. Having won the 1936 election on this populist platform, Windrip immediately outlaws dissent, incarcerates political enemies, and implements a host of other authoritarian policies, all the while maintaining the support of the populace. The novel has long been praised for its realistic portrayal of how democracy can fall with the consent of the people, and many parallels have been drawn between its storyline and the rise of fascism in Europe and Japan. However, Sinclair’s main inspiration for the book was not from across the Atlantic; it came instead from one of the most prominent American politicians of the 1930s: Huey Long.

Huey Long grew up one of nine children in the impoverished Winn Parish, Louisiana—a hotbed of populist and socialist sentiment, and an area that had been a Union stronghold in the Civil War. He excelled in schoolwork, but this excellence was not a reflection of interest. In fact, “Huey never had much patience for school. In 1910... Winnifred High School expelled him.”¹ After his expulsion, Huey became a traveling salesman, sharpening his wit and becoming an effective peddler, often employing scripture and shoddy health advice to sell shortening to housewives. Long then went through a flurry of occupations before finally deciding to go to law school. By the time Long, having graduated early, stepped on the train back to Winn Parish, he had already decided that law would be his stepping stone to a greater ambition: politics. As he told his wife during this time, he “planned to run first for a minor office, then for governor of the state, then-senator, and finally, for president of the United States.”² Faithful to his word, Huey ran for state railroad commissioner, narrowly defeated his opponent, and two years later ran for but failed to win the governor’s office. Finally, after another four years, he won the position in a landslide, much to the chagrin of the Democratic party establishment. Up to this point, one could effectively characterize the story of Huey Long as one of triumph for democracy: an underdog procuring the support of the people and challenging the political establishment through tireless campaigning. However, upon obtaining power, Long—soon to be known as “Kingfish”—would systematically dismantle the very institutions that led him to power. Through his popular and disruptive cult of personality, populist and inflammatory rhetoric, and his control and suppression of the press, Huey Long’s tenure demonstrates how democratic institutions can be torn down with the consent of the people.

One way Huey Long gathered and maintained support among the people was his deliberate establishment of a contagious cult of personality. From a young age, Long exhibited a knack for influencing the people around him. As he once recalled in an interview, he and his friends in school had once created a “secret society,” through which he became “part of a sort of circle that would control things, laying down certain rules the students had to follow. If the students obeyed faculty rules, Huey and his followers would keep them off the baseball or debate teams.”³ This was not just a minor game played between friends; the ‘society’ would often clash with faculty, prompting Huey to be reprimanded. In response to the faculty’s pushback, the 16-year-old Long wrote an open letter insulting the faculty and the principal, which he handed around the school and town, leading to his prompt expulsion. While characterizing this episode of the Kingfish’s life as an example of a cult of personality would be a stretch, the saga does demonstrate his unique ability to bring the people around him into his orbit, a skill he would go on to make great use of throughout his political career.

This situation also exposed another Long’s tendency to use institutions of power to rally people behind him. In the end, a group of teens held together by nothing more than one student’s charisma was no match for the school’s faculty, but even after he was expelled, Huey was not done. He walked around Winn parish with a handwritten petition, calling for the principal’s termination. Through his smooth-talking alone, he was able to convince a majority of townsfolk to sign it, getting the principal fired, and Huey the last laugh. He was able to win the common folk over to his side with only a single interaction, pitting them against a perceived unjust authority, and painting himself as the righteous underdog. Long would go on to use this same strategy to campaign across the Bayou State, demonizing the monopolistic Standard oil, and positioning himself as a “young warrior of and for the plain people, battling the evil giants of Wall Street and their corporations,” a strategy that was crucial to beating out his gubernatorial opponents, and one that defines how his supporters characterize him to this day.⁴

More than just positioning himself as a righteous hero fighting against a common foe, Long often lied to those attending his speeches, making up stories about himself, or telling of fictional exploits. For example, while campaigning across Louisiana’s largely Catholic south, Huey would recount the story of how he brought his Catholic grandparents to Mass every Sunday. However, upon his campaign manager remarking that Long had never mentioned his Catholic grandparents, Huey responded curtly, “Don’t be a damned fool… we didn’t even have a horse.”⁵ Huey was adept at tailoring stories depending on who was in the crowd before him, and using this strategy, forged himself as a locally specialized candidate in almost every part of the state. He built an almost parasocial relationship with a large portion of the rural population, constructing a fiercely loyal base that fervently supported him until and after his death. This personal mythos was so powerful that, following Long’s assasination, more than 200,000 people attended his funeral; 17 years after his death, anthropologists met young boys in rural Louisiana who were convinced that Long was president.⁶ While the Kingfish’s cult of personality cemented his support in his home state, this was not the only tool he used to rally the masses.

With the help of his populist rhetoric, Huey Long was able to anger a large swath of the Louisiana population, one which saw placing power in him as the only way to fight against injustice. He first gained this reputation by appealing to the common people through policy proposals. Louisiana at the time of Huey’s rise was in rough shape. Nationally, the Great Depression had hit export-based Louisiana especially hard, compounding the economic woes the state was already feeling as it was squeezed out of the cotton industry by Egypt and India. On top of this, since the Civil War, the state’s political system had been dominated by the wealthy planter class, which strangled its development and made local elections essentially meaningless for the average voter. All of this left the populace disillusioned with the status quo and destroyed any loyalty they would have had to the political establishment, leaving the door open for a leader like Long.

As historian T. Williams claims, “Long was the first Southern mass leader to abandon race-baiting and appeals to the gold-misted past and address himself to socio-economic ills.”⁷ While his opponents lamented the evils of northern aggression and reconstruction, taking firm pro or anti-KKK stances, Long did something new: he focused almost exclusively on the economic and social issues that affected his base’s everyday life, practically ignoring issues of race or history. He promised new roads to rural towns, free textbooks for school children, modernization of the state’s hospitals, improvements to local universities, and, perhaps most influentially, the repeal of the poll tax. These stances helped make him immensely popular in his native Winn Parish and gave him the momentum to go statewide in his two gubernatorial runs.

Though his social programs were popular, they are not what led the Kingfish to be characterized as a textbook populist; the blame for this falls instead on his habit of laying the responsibility for his state’s, and later country’s, woes squarely on the shoulders of the large corporations and the ultra-rich. In one of his most famous speeches, the 1934 Every Man a King address, Huey talks of this directly:

Is that a right of life, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120 million people?... It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country-and by rich people I mean the super-rich-will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.⁸

Just as nationalists with foreign powers or religious fundamentalists with infidels, the Kingfish created a powerful “us versus them” mentality among his supporters by shifting the blame for everything from bad roads to late veteran payments onto the rich. He was able to condense his rhetoric down to raging against an amorphous boogeyman in the one percent, instead of confronting the actual complex economic and structural issues that plagued the state. On top of this, Long was able to brush off his critics by accusing them of being in the pockets of the wealthy. Using these strategies, Huey was able to mobilize his base in a way not seen in the rest of the south, and rare even in the more urban North, sweeping elections even when he did not have majority support. Furthermore, by insinuating that his opponents were in the pocket of a group set on keeping his supporters poor, Huey destroyed trust in the wider government, instead concentrating confidence in himself alone, making it easier to justify his later dismantling of the said democratic government. While Long managed to rally the support of the Louisiana populace through his populism and cult of personality, he could not always do the same for the state’s prolific press, sparking a bitter rivalry.

Huey Long’s rivalry with, bullying of, and disenfranchisement of the press upon his election demonstrates how democratic institutions are not always infallible in the face of political will. One of Long’s best-remembered features was his long-standing rivalry with the press, but this bitter rivalry only really began once he took the office of governor. What is less well-remembered is how for “nearly a decade … [newspapers] had provided him with a platform to explain his ideas and convince potential supporters he was worthy of their vote.”⁹ The press treated him much as it did for any young and popular upstart politicians, covering his every move, in both a positive and negative light, exaggerating both the good and bad. Long did show signs of at least annoyance with some of the negative coverage of his, joking during his first gubernatorial campaign that “One day you pick up the papers and see where I killed four priests . . . Another day I murdered twelve nuns, and the next day I poisoned four hundred babies,” but in general, he retained a neutral opinion of the papers while they still advanced his goal of an eventual election.¹⁰

However, once he did manage to get elected, Huey did not retain the same mixed press coverage he had as a candidate. Alienated by his authoritarian moves upon taking office, newspapers around the state quickly shifted tones and began lambasting the newly elected governor, earning his ire. This came to a head during Long’s impeachment trial, only a year after his election. Every one of the state’s 21 independent newspapers took firm anti-Long stances, calling for his removal from office. In response, Long took to his personally distributed circulars to “warn the public they could not trust what they read about him in the ‘lying newspapers.’”¹¹ By telling his devoted fanbase that they could no longer trust the media, Long put the press in the same boat as he had opposing politicians and vocal critics: defenders of the entrenched elite who were scared of Huey’s needed reforms, effectively neutralizing any damage the press could have done to his popularity.

In a less-publicized move to stifle the press, Long introduced a bill that would “allow the state to seek an injunction to stop the publication of any newspaper deemed ‘obscene, lewd, or lascivious,’ or malicious, scandalous, or defamatory.’”¹² Because Long had consolidated significant control of the state government by this time, the bill would have effectively allowed Long to dismantle any newspapers that criticized him, a gross violation of the first amendment. Fortunately for the press, and unfortunately for Long, the bill was blocked in committee. However, Huey was not done attempting to suppress criticism of himself. Four years later, after Long and his allies had obtained complete control of the state government, Huey extra-legally engineered legislation designed to punish his opponents in the press, and this time, “the bill passed, creating a state printing board that... gave Long the ability to reward or punish press outlets based on their coverage of him.”¹³ Through this bill, the Kingfish could have achieved the perfect echo chamber for pro-Long sentiment in Louisiana. Although by this time he was more focused on national politics and had to contend with the more entrenched nationwide media, the fact that he not only attempted to but succeeded in dominating dissenting local pressshows how effective his political strategy had been, and how easily he had dismantled the institutions meant to stop him.

The rise of Huey Long stands out among the many authoritarian takeovers of history in that throughout it, Long never lost his popularity. His kidnapping of political enemies, corruption, and takeover of the state senate did not put a dent in the sway he held over the populace, and some even suggest it made him more popular. As he famously stated on the floor of the Louisiana legislature, “I am the constitution ‘round here now,” and by and large, he was right.¹⁴ He managed this using three key tactics, a voracious cult of personality, aggressive populist rhetoric, and his bullying and suppressing of the press. His rise acts as a basic roadmap for leaders the world over who wish to consolidate power in themselves, and dismantle the checks on their authority, and the modern world has seen several follow it to a tee. From Orban and Duda from the right to Chavez and Morales from the left, the Long strategy has been shown to be as effective as ever. All of these examples demonstrate how democracy is not an immovable monolith, put in place by great men who were wiser than us. It shifts and changes with the times, and with enough of a push, can be toppled. It is important to scrutinize the rise of Huey Long and avoid the notion that It Can’t Happen Here, so that it never does.