September 8, 1935, 90 years ago: Senator Huey Long of Louisiana is shot at the State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, which he had gotten built while he was Governor. He died 2 days later. He was 42 years old.
He started out as a lawyer representing poor plaintiffs, and built a "man of the people" image. That got him elected to the Louisiana Public Service Commission. He even got to argue before the highest court in the land. William Howard Taft, former President and by this point Chief Justice, called him "the most brilliant lawyer who ever practiced before the United States Supreme Court."
He ran for Governor in 1924, but lost. He ran again in 1928, and won. He instituted what he called a "Share the Wealth" program, saying, "Every man a king, but no man wears a crown." He also built the tallest State Capitol building in the country, 450 feet tall.
Unlike most major Southern politicians of the 100 years between the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act, he did not make open appeals to racism. He wasn't exactly progressive on race, but, according to historian and Louisiana State University professor T. Harry Williams, he was "the first Southern mass leader to leave aside race baiting and appeals to the Southern tradition and the Southern past and address himself to the social and economic problems of the present."
In 1929, he was impeached for abuse of power by the State House of Representatives, but the State Senate acquitted him. In 1932, the year the new State Capitol opened, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
That year, he supported Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York for President. But, once in office, Long thought that FDR didn't go far enough. He especially didn't like the National Recovery Act. On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court struck it down. So an amendment to it was put before the Senate, and on June 12, Long launched a filibuster to try to stop it. He kept talking and talking, about pretty much anything to get the Senate to kill the bill. He recited poetry. He quoted Shakespeare. He recited recipes from a cookbook he had written. Finally, after 15 hours and 30 minutes -- then the 2nd-longest filibuster in Senate history, and it still ranks 7th -- the bill was killed.
Long was preparing to run challenge FDR for the Democratic nomination in 1936 -- or, failing that, by launching a 3rd-party run. "I can take him," he said. "He's scared of me. I can out-promise him, and he knows it." He even published a book titled My First Days in the White House.
Was FDR worried? He was concerned enough that he asked the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, James A. Farley -- also the Postmaster General, and holding both a party chairmanship and a Cabinet post is now illegal -- to put a poll in the field.
The poll suggested that a 3rd-party Long campaign would win 10 percent of the national vote, not enough to win, but enough to split the liberal vote between himself and Roosevelt, and elect the Republican nominee. The theory was, the Republicans would undo all of FDR's New Deal, thus deepening the Great Depression, and by 1940, things would be so bad, the people would flock to Long, and not only vote for him, but allow him to do whatever he wanted, effectively making him America's dictator.
Long would never get to make a 1940, or even a 1936, campaign. On September 8, he went back to Baton Rouge, going to the State Capitol to lobby for the passage of a bill that would gerrymander the district of an opponent, Judge Benjamin Pavy, who had held his position for 28 years.
At 9:20 PM, just after passage of the bill effectively removing Pavy, Pavy's son-in-law, Dr. Carl Weiss, approached Long, and fired a single shot with a .32-caliber FN Model 1910 semiautomatic pistol from 4 feet away, striking him in the torso. Long's bodyguards pulled their guns and shot Weiss with at least 60 bullets, killing him instantly. He had been hit with more bullets than either Bonnie Parker or Clyde Barrow had in Louisiana the year before.
Long did not die immediately. He ran down a flight of stairs and across the Capitol grounds, hailing a car to take him to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. He was rushed to the operating room, and surgery closed perforations in his intestines, but failed to stop the internal bleeding. He died at 4:10 AM on September 10, 31 hours after being shot. His last words were, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do." He was buried under a huge monument on the Capitol grounds.
His widow, Rose Long, was appointed to serve the remainder of his Senate term. His brother, Earl Long, was Governor 3 separate times: 1939-40, 1948-52 and 1956-60. Another brother, George Long, served in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1953-58. Huey and Rose's son, Russell Long, served in the U.S. Senate, 1948-87.
A cousin, Gillis Long, served in the U.S. House, 1963-65 and 1973-85. His widow, Catherine Long, was elected to his House seat, and served the remainder of his 1985-87 term. Another cousin, Speedy Oteria Long -- that was the name he was born with -- served in the U.S. House, 1965-73.
In 1946, Robert Penn Warren published All the King's Men, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. The character of Governor Willie Stark was based on Long. It has been filmed twice, in 1949 with Broderick Crawford as Long/Stark, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture; and in 2006 with Sean Penn.
Huey Long remains the South's defining populist politician -- or its most famous non-segregationist demagogue.
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