{"product_id":"kingfish-isbn-9780812973839","title":"Kingfish","description":"From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin’s bullet  cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state  of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated  elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his  personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator,  Long did more good for the state’s poor and uneducated than any politician before  or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful biography,  Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial  glory. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhite taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait  of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood  in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power–the problem was how  to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity  unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial  race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him  viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial  oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish  got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhite’s account  of Long’s heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President  Roosevelt as “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” Long organized a  radical movement to redistribute money through his Share Our Wealth Society–and his  gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire.  The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads  and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate  floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption  investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the end,  Long was a tragic hero–a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to  destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. \u003ci\u003eKingfish \u003c\/i\u003eis a balanced, lucid,  and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary  figure in the history of American politics.Richard D. White, Jr., is a professor of public administration at Louisiana State University and the author of Roosevelt the Reformer: Theodore Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner 1889—1895. He lives in Baton Rouge.CHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1927\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A WEDDED MAN WITH A STORM FOR A BRIDE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey Long climbed onto a large bale of fresh-picked cotton and gazed   out at a crowd of farmers attending a country fair. For a few moments   he stood motionless, his shoulders hunched like a boxer waiting for the   first bell to ring. Leaning forward to talk to the men in the front   row, Huey began speaking in a whispery voice so quiet that the crowd   shuffled closer to hear him. After a couple of minutes, he slowly   raised his voice, a little louder each minute, until he roared to the   gathering throng. He threw off his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves,   and slackened the red silk tie hanging around his neck. His voice   booming across the dusty fairgrounds, Huey pummeled his audience with   old-fashioned soapbox oratory and hell-for-leather political bluster.   He whooped and hollered, pounded his fist, and punched in the air at   imaginary enemies. His face turned the color of a ripe tomato. Twirling   his arms above his head in the sweltering Louisiana heat, perspiration   pouring down his cheeks, he quickly captivated the audience with   spellbinding charisma and homespun guile.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was the summer of 1927 and Huey was running full speed for governor   of Louisiana. At every stop on the campaign trail, he treated his   listeners to a boiling mixture of snake-oil salesmanship, burlesque tap   dancing, evangelicism, and blistering billingsgate. He would preach to   the crowd, holding a Bible in his hand in holy uplift and quoting from   memory lengthy passages of the Scriptures. From Galatians he taunted   his adversaries. “Am I therefore become your enemy because I tell you   the truth?” More often though, Huey spewed a torrent of abuse upon his   foes. He branded his political opponents with epithets like “low-down   vile and slanderous men,” “thieves, bugs, and lice,” “grafters and   money boodlers,” “graveyard robbing politicians,” and “blackguards in   full-dress suits.” His audience, mostly rural folk who took their   politics raw like corn whiskey, could not get enough. “You tell ’em,   Huey,” the farmers yelled back. “Go get ’em.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey’s crowd of farmers looked up at a man in his thirties, of medium   height, approaching pudginess with a round face, puffy jowls, and skin   glowing pink like a fresh sunburn. An unruly mop of chestnut-colored   hair topped his head, with a curly forelock that tumbled down. An   oversized nose jutted from his face and his brown eyes were large,   round, and expressive, shifting from jest to rage in a twinkling. When   he walked, he jostled along “like a saddling pony.” As Huey dazzled his   audiences, at times he appeared almost childish, spoiled, and “like an   overgrown small boy with very bad habits indeed.” In an instant,   however, his face could turn exceedingly hard and cruel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A dominating egotist, Huey hungered for the spotlight and could not   bear to share it with another. “The only kind of band in which Huey   Long could play,” one newspaper editor wrote, “was a one-man band.” A   skillful speechmaker, he craved the microphone. “I can’t remember back   to a time when my mouth wasn’t open whenever there was a chance to make   a speech,” he remarked. He could not stand to be ignored by the   newspapers, admitting that “I don’t care what they say about me as long   as they say something.” He knew that Louisiana voters would cast their   votes for a known thief before they would vote for a name they did not   recognize. Desperately wanting to be noticed, he dressed in a dazzling   mix of pastel suits, purple shirts, flaming red flowered ties, and   two-toned wing tips that provoked one onlooker to describe him as an   explosion in a paint factory. “Drama was his natural art,” a supporter   wistfully remembered, “an actor whose stage was his work, whose   scenery, the people about him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Perpetually in motion, Huey wielded his “energy of ten men” as one of   his most effective weapons. If he could not whip his political   opponents with his brilliance or cunning, he simply wore them out by   working harder, traveling more miles, making more speeches, shaking   more hands, and twisting more arms. “He never relaxed,” observed a   campaign worker. “He got along with little or no sleep when he was   under pressure. He awakened associates at all hours of the night to   talk over a new notion which had come to him in bed.” Always   mesmerizing, he cast a spell upon his listeners. While he spoke at the   parish fair that summer, a man who hated him stood to the side of the   crowd, then disappeared. Later, one of Huey’s supporters saw the man   and asked why he left. “I left because I was afraid. That guy was   convincing me. I had to get out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    huey long was born on August 30, 1893, in Winn Parish, Louisiana, amid   the red-clay hill country dotted with longleaf pine and where a dark   and relentless poverty sapped the lives of the straitlaced Baptists who   struggled to survive there. The people there were so poor that,   according to a wry local joke, they made a living by taking in each   other’s wash. Many of them lived in clapboard cabins with dirt floors   and subsisted off small worn-out farms, cut-over timber lands, and   paltry cotton patches. The parish seat, Winnfield, languished as a   mud-pathed village of about two thousand residents, with two hotels, a   lumber mill, seven other buildings, and neither running water nor   electricity. The town was notable only for “large numbers of hogs and   children, and by a scarcity of Negroes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A year before Huey was born, his parents, Hugh and Caledonia Long,   moved from Tunica, Mississippi, to Winnfield. Hugh bought 320 acres of   scrub land, which he cultivated with cotton and corn and where he let   his hogs run wild in the woods. After 1900, Winnfield became a railroad   hub, with four lines passing through the town, and the site of a   roundhouse and repair shops. The railroad built a depot on the Long   farm and within ten years the town grew to about three thousand   inhabitants. Hugh sold part of the farm in lots. On one side of his   farm the business section rose and on the other side residences sprang   up. Although far from wealthy, Hugh became one of largest landowners   and livestock holders in Winnfield. He grew and raised most of what the   family consumed, and when they needed cash, he sold a pig or cow. In   1907, he built a large home in Winnfield, with two stories, ten rooms,   electric lights, indoor plumbing, high ceilings, and large columned   verandas on three sides. Two big white oaks sat in the front yard and   celery and asparagus sprouted in a bed at one end of the front porch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hugh Long turned forty when Huey was born in 1893. By then, Hugh’s hair   was an iron gray and his face brown and wrinkled like a walnut shell. A   gangly six-footer, he glared at people through the same penetrating   brown eyes that all nine of his children would possess. Hugh loved to   talk in a booming voice and could be found sitting in front of   Bernstein’s store in Winnfield under an ancient chinaberry tree,   amusing the townsfolk with his dry wit. Hugh was eccentric, gentle,   even weak, had only an elementary education, and bragged of voting for   the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey’s mother, Caledonia, like his father, came from Pennsylvania Dutch   stock. A slender, hazel-eyed, and raven-haired woman who weighed less   than a hundred pounds, Caledonia was disciplined, self-educated, and   had a photographic memory that Huey would inherit. She insisted her   children read the Bible and attend the First Baptist Church of   Winnfield. She had a preacher baptize Huey in a neighbor’s fishpond but   the boy rebelled against his Baptist upbringing. Caledonia, who refused   to whip her children, tried to manage Huey, the most unruly and   headstrong of her nine offspring, but her efforts proved futile. Even   before he could walk he demanded that he control everything and   everyone around him. Always inquisitive, as a toddler he wandered off   and on one occasion crawled beneath a steam locomotive and delayed a   train departing the Winnfield station. As a rebellious teenager he   smoked, drank, chewed tobacco, and cussed like a field hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Caledonia passed on her charitable spirit to Huey. Known throughout the   parish as a generous and compassionate woman, she frequently sent her   son to deliver food and clothing to less fortunate families. From his   parents, Huey inherited a belief that the wealth of the land should be   shared and that “none should be too poor and none too rich.” Caledonia   insisted that Huey and the other children read avidly. If one of the   youngsters was reading, the mother would not assign the child chores.   The clever Huey learned to always have a book in his hands, whether or   not he read it. At an early age he memorized long passages from the   Bible, pored over Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and The Merchant   of Venice, and once bet a friend $10 that he could recite Bunyan’s   Pilgrim’s Progress. He admired Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, where   the lead character metes out harsh revenge to his enemies. John Clark   Ridpath’s History of the World also made a lasting mark upon young   Huey. In future years while stumping around the state, he quoted   Ridpath, who stressed the crucial role of powerful leaders in world   affairs and deplored the social evil ingrained in concentrated wealth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey was bright, outspoken, aggressively self-confident, and forever   seeking the center of attention. “If he couldn’t pitch, he wouldn’t   play,” a childhood friend remarked. With a hot temper that fit his   rust-colored hair, Huey could rage quickly into a tantrum, his bright,   darting eyes revealing his anger. He quarreled often with his brothers   and sisters, who were all smart and competitive. Of the four Long   brothers and five sisters, three of the boys became attorneys, the   fourth, George, a dentist and later congressman, and the girls received   degrees in education from Louisiana Normal College in Natchitoches, one   becoming a professor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While in high school, Huey learned to set type and wrote short items   for two local newspapers, the Baptist Monthly Guardian and the Southern   Sentinel. When he was a junior, he competed on his high school debate   team that traveled to Louisiana State University for the state rally.   While in Baton Rouge, Huey stayed at the home of T. H. Harris, the   state superintendent of education. “The boy was a perfect portrait of   the man to follow,” Harris later recalled. “He came swaggering into the   house, leaving the baggage for others to bring in, and introduced   himself to Mrs. Harris. . . . He was always late for meals, left his   clothes all over the bathroom floor, and had everybody in the house   awake by five or six in the morning.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey received an early education in Louisiana’s freewheeling politics.   He grew up in a household where the family argued politics each night   at their large and noisy dinner table. When he turned seven, his father   ran as an independent Democrat and finished a distant third in a state   Senate race and ten years later finished sixth in a race for   Winnfield’s five aldermen. As a boy, Huey often walked into Winnfield,   where he listened to the parish’s rabble-rousers standing on the   courthouse steps and sounding off at a political system that   disenfranchised the poor population. In 1908, fourteen-year-old Huey   campaigned at a polling precinct for Theo Wilkinson, who lost the race   for governor to the New Orleans machine candidate, J. Y. Sanders. From   the start, politics surged through Huey’s veins. “All I remember is   that the first time I knew anything about it, I was in it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey never had much patience for school. In 1910, just before his   seventeenth birthday, Winnfield High School expelled him. He was   already showing an obsession to be in charge and to control those   around him. “We had formed a secret society. . . . We wore a red   ribbon,” he recalled later. He belonged to “a sort of circle that was   to run things, laying down certain rules the students would have to   follow.” If the students obeyed faculty rules, then Huey and his   followers kept them off the baseball team or the debating team. The   faculty told Huey that his antics were out of order but he continued to   defy their authority. After he published a circular attacking the   teachers, the principal expelled him. Even after being expelled, he did   not give up. He hand-delivered a petition around Winnfield and   convinced a majority of the citizens to sign it. They fired the   principal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Huey did not try to finish high school. He left Winnfield in July and   took a job as a traveling salesman selling Cottolene, a lard substitute   made from cottonseed oil. His salary was $19 a week. He traveled across   the South, hawking his product and distributing pie plates and   cookbooks and holding baking contests in cities and towns. Selling   Cottolene door-to-door, Huey soon became a persistent and skillful   salesman who combined his wit and outgoing personality with iron-willed   determination to make a sale. He often turned to the Scriptures to   persuade his customers. “I used the Bible on them, showing where the   Lord had forbidden the Israelites to use anything from the flesh of   swine food, and how cottonseed oil, seeing it was a vegetable product,   was just bound to be pure.” When quoting the Scriptures failed to   produce a sale, he was more aggressive. “If I couldn’t convince the   woman no other way I’d go right into the kitchen and bake a cake for   her, or cook supper for the family,” he recalled. “I had to persuade   those womenfolks that you could bake a cake with something else besides   cow butter and fry meat in something else besides hog lard.” Years   later, many housewives remembered young Huey, his red curls tousled,   barging into their farmhouse, rolling up his sleeves, and scattering   flour about the steamy kitchen as he baked a cake or fried some   chicken.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After only a few months, Huey was fired in November 1910 when business   slumped. He next took a job in Memphis selling cured meats, lard, and   canned goods for an Austin, Texas, food wholesaler. He met his quotas   but ran through his expense account by staying in the most expensive   hotels and eating lavishly and, “after being given a few warnings,   which I did not heed, I was summarily discharged.” With no job and less   than a dollar in his pocket, Huey was evicted from his Memphis hotel   room. “I went from park to depot and depot to railroad yards, sleeping   wherever I might be permitted to lay my head.”The astonishing life that inspired the major motion picture All the King's Men","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305507115237,"sku":"NP9780812973839","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812973839.jpg?v=1767730766","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/kingfish-isbn-9780812973839","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}