 |
| Huey Long, age 17 |
To fully appreciate the power of Huey Long's political machine, one must understand the power of the man himself, and even the bare facts of his life help shed some light on him. Though he would later try to cast himself as a rough-hewn rube with a golden tongue and a gift for common sense, the truth is, Huey Long, the seventh of 10 children, was not born into rural poverty. He was a son of a landowning, middle-class family in Winn Parish. In fact, the family was by local standards quite prosperous, and became more so when Long's father sold off a significant parcel of land to developers after the Arkansas Southern Railroad extended its line into the area. And though Long often liked to portray himself as a good old boy who grew up with patched pants and a patchier education, in reality, he was an accomplished student with a photographic memory.
But he also was cursed, it has been said, with a vaunted sense of his own value and an overwhelming impatience, which is, perhaps, one of the reasons he quit school at age 13 to become a traveling salesman hawking first a lard substitute, and later a bizarre concoction that promised to relieve menstrual cramps. It was on the road, with a valise full of nothing much, that Long truly perfected the two things that would serve him for the rest of his life: a talent for reading an audience and a penchant for telling them just what they wanted to hear.
 |
| Book Cover: Huey Long |
It may be an apocryphal story, but in his 1969 biography of Long, T. Harry Williams recounts an incident from early in Long's political career that shows his nascent skills for on-the-stump hokum. It was, according to Williams' account, during one of Long's first political forays into largely Roman Catholic southern Louisiana and a local politician had warned the young Protestant pol to weigh his words.
He did.
email
print
default
increase
decrease
