Oscar O.K. Allen

Huey's first political post was what in the hands of an ordinary man might have been considered a minor one. In 1918, at the age of 24, Long mounted a successful campaign for a seat on the state's Railroad Commission. The election in many respects was a kind of preview of Long's future campaigns, and in it he employed not just his own rhetorical skills but the organizational abilities that would later help him build one of the most resilient political machines in American history. Among those he enlisted to help him was Oscar O.K. Allen, the man who would later become known as one of Huey's most reliably malleable puppets. And as he would do for the rest of his life, Huey capitalized on the contacts he had made and the skills he had developed hawking snake oil in his teens. It was a trick of the trade in those days, as Williams puts it in his book, for traveling hucksters to develop close ties with what were then known as the "courthouse rings," local DAs and judges, and sheriffs and the like, all of whom might someday come in handy if a traveling salesman got in trouble with a disgruntled customer, or worse, a farmer's daughter's father. In his first bid for public office, Huey turned to those men, small politicos in their own right, and they turned out the vote for him, helping him to trounce his incumbent opponent.

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While other men might have languished in the undistinguished post, Long turned it into a platform from which he launched an almost incessant attack on not just the railroads but on his most favored nemesis, Standard Oil.

As would always be the case, Long's attacks on big oil and on the Choctaw Club and their supporters were full of sound and fury, displays of political pyrotechnics. And as always, Huey portrayed himself as a kind of homespun hero of the everyman.

With each attack, Long's credibility with the poor and those just above them on the social ladder increased. But, of course, not everyone bought the emerging popular image of Long as a bumpkin moved by the spirit.

William Howard Taft

It is telling that when Long's pursuit of Standard Oil landed him in the United States Supreme Court, where he argued the case, then Chief Justice and former U.S. President William Howard Taft reportedly described the wily young lawyer as among the most gifted legal minds ever to argue before the court, high praise from the man who decades earlier had won the White House by defeating William Jennings Bryan, the great populist from whom Long drew some of his rhetoric, if not his inspiration.

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