Huey Long, Every Man a King

He wasn’t a president, but he may be the most dangerous almost-president in modern American political history. We’re joined by Barbara Sean Beinberg to unravel Huey Long’s rise in Louisiana and the seductive promise behind “Every Man Is A King” and “Share Our Wealth.” Long sells himself as a plainspoken champion, yet operates with a level of tactical brilliance that even his enemies struggle to dismiss.

We talk through the part of the story that still wins people over: roads that finally connect communities, toll-free bridges, expanded schools, free textbooks, and a state that feels like it’s catching up to the modern world. Then we follow the cost of that momentum as Long consolidates power, bends institutions, intimidates opponents, and treats the state like a personal machine. It’s a sharp reminder that populism can deliver real material gains while quietly eroding democracy, constitutionalism, and any meaningful separation of powers.

From there, we zoom out to the national stakes. Long’s redistribution pitch plays like a marketing campaign, his math draws criticism, and his planned 1936 challenge to FDR fuels fears that the US could slide toward authoritarian rule without ever looking like a classic dictatorship. We also cover his killing in the Louisiana Capitol, the lingering ballistics questions, and why the “near miss” still matters when people feel tempted to trade process for results.

If this made you think, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review. What’s the line where “gets things done” becomes too much power?

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Transcript

Meet Huey Long’s Big Pitch

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Welcome back to Civic City Year. Today we're talking about a man who is never president, but is somebody who our guest, Barbara Sean Bienberg, really is fascinated by. Today we're talking about Huey Long and Every Man is a King. So, Professor Beyenberg. Who is Huey Long? And is Every Man a King? Is that a song? Is it a book? Is it a speech? Like what is this?

The Rise From Rural Louisiana

SPEAKER_01 1:16

It's a combination of a sort of a speech and a radio address. It's one of his pamphlets. It's sort of the the Everyman a King and Share Our Wealth are sort of the two sort of pull phrases that are in a lot of his materials. So I've been looking forward to this one for a long, long time. I I love talking about Huey Long. I have a there's a class that I used to teach where I did an entire day on him. And I don't know if I'm going to teach that class anymore. And I have it filed away that whoever ends up teaching that class, I will beg to like guest lecture the Huey Long Day. I think he is by far the most interesting person in American political history. Not my favorite necessarily, but I think he's the most interesting, which is why he is loosely fictionalized in All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, which I think is the best book about American politics ever written. It's fick it's not like a political science piece, but in terms of thinking about like what actually being in politics is like and what it does to people. So highly, highly, highly recommended. I was delighted. I got an email from a former student a couple days ago saying, I finally read All the King's Men. It was just as great as he said. So my my day has been made, so I'm gonna be in like Huey Long, Huey Long nerd mode. So Long is comes out of basically rural Louisiana politics. And he very much has this incredibly folksy persona. And you can read his speeches and you can listen to some of them. I in fact, I wouldn't I would encourage uh people after this, just find out one of the recordings of his one of his speeches. They're like three or four minutes long.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

They're easily, I'm like, I have tons of them up right now.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah, you can listen to them and just like listen to his cadence and how how persuasive he is. You know, he he he is clearly somebody that comes from a sort of really good preaching Protestant tradition where he's just used to like a particular kind of cadence and delivery that is going to be incredibly compelling to his listeners. But he's basically a small-town lawyer that kind of moves up in some ways. And eventually the gets himself elected governor of Louisiana, largely because Louisiana at the time is effectively a feudal state where a few feudalism, like feudalism, not feudal like failing, where a few big industries just utterly dominated. So like oil and sugar and whatnot. And effectively, those kind of almost barren factions fight with each other one time and they tear each other down, and long is able to sneak through and be governed. And long builds this incredibly, incredibly effective regime of particularly, there's almost no bridges in Louisiana at the time. Now, if I don't know how much time you've ever spent driving through it, if you ever go I've never been to Louisiana.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

I I'm sorry, I haven't been to Louisiana yet.

Roads, Schools, And Real Results

The Machine That Crushes Opposition

Share Our Wealth And National Ambitions

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Okay. If you it's and it's it's very striking where like there's lots of little bridges connecting lots of like over swamps and whatnot. And you imagine a universe where you didn't have that. You had to basically get on a ferry to go. Like imagine you had to pay a toll every time you drove from from Tempe across the Salt River, right? Like you to try to like you, of course you're gonna be poor. Um so Long builds this regime of really aggressive taxation, primarily for infrastructure and education spending. So that seems like it's popular and good, and he does a good job in some sense of that. Long is regarded as one of the most like cognitively brilliant people to ever be in politics. And so he combines this just like absolute genius level of command of detail with again this real folksy, like, brothers, who's my you know, tell me about how your problems are, and he knows everybody. And so you can read these accounts. The the journalist, the nation, sends a person to basically come and investigate this. And the the piece is fascinating because he just says, like, long is terrifying because long is so brilliant and he's so effective. And he gets these amazing quotes from people saying, I don't really care about democracy or constitutionalism if the choice is that or Huey Long. I want Huey Long. Wow. And Long is able to build an utterly terrifying political machine of every time you work for him, you give him an undated resignation letter. He turns the police force into basically his own army. He basically dominates all elections and he utterly dominates separation of powers. When he is he becomes senator, so he so he becomes U.S. Senator, and he still is basically de facto governor. He has a guy named Oscar Allen, who they all call okay Allen, because they say that all he does whenever Huey Long tells him something is okay. Literally, when Long comes back to Louisiana, Allen will leave like the governor's rooms and let like long basically have them back. So he's running the state basically as senator and running the state when he becomes U.S. Senator, but running the state is literal, like there is no meaningful separation of powers. If you go and read these old nation articles, they talk about the legislature meeting, and they'll Long, literally the only witness, will just be Governor Long will walk in and sit down and he'll be like, Senate Bill one, I like this one. Senate Bill two, I don't like this one. Senate Bill three, this one could use this change. And like that's like the entirety of the debate. They don't he has them so utterly that he has effectively he leaves like three or four just sort of like nominal opponents almost for his amusement, but he's utter, utter domination over that. There is no meaningful separation of powers. And he has one of my favorite quotes, again, not that I'm endorsing the sentiment. Some point a state legislator picks up the Louisiana Constitution and says, What you're doing is illegal, you can't do this. Have you ever heard of this book? And Long says, I am the constitution now. Like, what a power move! Oh, okay. So, yeah, and so long, yeah, and so he just utterly destroys all of his political opponents. Like, you can't oppose him. And so it's this fascinating case study of, you know, lots of Americans will say, like, look, we don't want communism because you look like North Korea, right? And I I don't think that, you know, but Long is a fascinating case study of he actually does quite a bit of good for the people. Like they have working bridges, they their school system is a lot better. On the other hand, the tax rates are so unsustainable that they basically this the state collapses a couple years afterward, and there's no meaningful political freedom. There's you you cannot oppose him. He will have you destroyed, he will have you slandered, he will have you chased out of your judgeships. Like he governs that state as a monarch to the point where there are people who are begging the Roosevelt administration, right? Article 4 says that every state will have a republican form of government and the United States government will guarantee that. And they say we no longer have a republic in Louisiana, we have a dictatorship of Huey Long. And the Roosevelt administration is actually struggling with what to do about this for a while because Long is becoming so powerful. And so this connects to his speeches. And so he's gives again the variations of it, but it's every man a king or or share the wealth. But he basically goes around creating, and it's he's brilliant too because he makes it a marketing campaign where he says, if you like my speech, get five of your friends and get them to like it's almost like multi-level marketing that he gets them all to buy into this. And he's building these little societies where he's getting and he gets more mail than every other member of the United States Senate combined when he's in the Senate. I mean, he's just dominating the politics. And again, I I want to go back to how brilliant he is, right? There's there's a there are like speeches where he says, like, oh, I don't know what the 10th Amendment is, right? As he does this like sort of cornpone thing. And yet, I think at least three members of the Supreme Court said he was the most brilliant lawyer to ever encounter, like to ever interact with them. Like the best briefs, that like the best command of all precedent. He has a challenge with another senator at some point of who can recite more of the Bible or Shakespeare, and they just get bored. Like Long is just he's just going for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. Like again, just like utterly brilliant, utterly brilliant. Yeah, when there's a bank failure during the depression, he says, All right, I'm gonna go scare up some money from my my friends. Look to sort of back the bank so there's not a bank run. He leaves his bodyguard there, has the bodyguard pull out his gun and point it at the leers of all the banks that he's assembled in the room and says, Anybody moves, you kill him. Like, so Oh, okay. So long is serious business. And so his his his sort of political campaign is effectively that he wants to create really aggressive wealth caps. And so he'll go give the speeches and say, Brothers, how many of you own one, how many of you own like, you know, four suits, and like two of them will raise, you know, a few of them will raise their hand. How many own three suits, two suits, one suit? And most of them raise their hands, like, oh, you don't own any suit. And then he says, Those evil people in Wall Street own a whole bunch of suits, more suits than they ever can have. So, like, we're gonna take it from him. So he and he says effectively, we have three choices in America. We have communism, where it's like an actual military, you know, dictatorship of sorts, feudalism, or my sort of really aggressive redistribution system. And so he says effectively, if we take all the money from all the rich people, we can basically give everybody whatever. And economists at the time, even friendly progressive economists, say like, no, like the math doesn't remotely work. You have to have middle class taxes to subsidize this level of redistribution. You can't just pick it from like the 10 people who have money in America. But long doesn't care because he's not interested in the economics of this. He's interested in basically the sort of political rhetoric and persuadive and sort of rhetorical appeal of it. And he becomes, he's planning in 36 to run a third-party push against Roosevelt, who he thinks is too conservative. So, because Rose, so yeah, Roosevelt's getting Roosevelt views himself as getting hammered from the left by Long and from the right by actually even most of the old Democrats, is what we'll talk about, or as we've talked about with Roosevelt. But Long is going to run in 36 a more or less like splinter campaign to make sure that Roosevelt loses and a conservative gets elected. And then his plan is that he'll take over the Democratic Party in 1940. And so, like Roosevelt and his allies are terrified, this is gonna be basically fascism in America with Long. And so, do you know how Long's regime ends?

SPEAKER_00 12:24

I do know that he is assassinated.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

He is assassinated. Well, he's killed. Assassinated is this is like the one conspiracy theory I believe in. So a son of Saunder son-in-law of uh a judge whose political career Long has ruined comes and confronts him. Basically says, like, this was an honest, faithful public servant, and you destroyed him for crossing you. And the account is that this guy pulls a gun out and shoots Long. And this is in the Louisiana Capitol. You can go, you can stand in the hallway. I I've been you can stand in the hallway where he gets killed. Oh wow. And Long's bodyguards shoot the guy to the death. Now, Long survives for a couple of days, and Long says, Why'd he punch me? Not why did he shoot me, why did he punch me? And you can go down a rabbit hole. This is about the only conspiracy theory I believe in, which is that like the gun doesn't match, the ballistics don't match. It seems like it is as likely or more likely that ricochets from the bodyguards popping the the guy who punched him ricocheted out and killed Long. And then they covered it up. So it's like the one conspiracy theory I believe in that if you go back and read the like some of the ballistics and whatnot on them. This like that they don't match, they match the bodyguard's guns, the bodyguard's guns disappear. Occasionally there's you know, this is one I'm more skeptical of, but there's a couple accounts of like drunk bodyguards later lamenting what they had done. But anyway, Long gets killed, and this sort of stops it. But long is right before that happens. I mean, he's got his he's got Louisiana government passing laws to basically militarily eject federal officials if they come and interfere with him. I mean, he's like really playing around with some. He claims later, he's like, eh, no, I don't mean it. But he literally has the Louisiana government pass an old school 1830s nullification law saying if uh federal officials come, we will arrest them. We will use the force of Louisiana to arrest them. So it is so Roosevelt views this as a basically a great, great fortune that he doesn't have to either move against Long under the Republican clause or fear that Long is going to institute like national fascism. So yeah, Long is I think a really he is the closest we've ever come in the United States to some sort of totalitarian government. And then so there's and so I I tell this is why I teach him, I teach him because he shows you know the appeal of that. I mean, there's quote after quote in these accounts of people saying, like, I don't care if I have democracy, I don't care if I have constitutionalism anymore. He basically made the trade, he doesn't, it's not he made the trades run, it's he built the roads. Um but you know, there there is utter political tyranny, but you know, partly done, and it's not in this sort of like, you know, scary military red armband waving thing. It's him just talking folksy and playing much dumber than he is. So he is, I think, one of a kind in American history in turn and in terms of being just so utterly brilliant, so utterly ruthless, and so utterly vindictive. He famously says he has apologies for he famously says he keeps a son of a bitch book of anybody who's ever crossed him, that he will destroy them later in life. So yeah, I I I I uh yeah, long is just super fun to learn about. And as somebody who likes constitutionalism, I I am glad he did not succeed in nationalizing his regime.

Assassination And A Dark Conspiracy

SPEAKER_00 16:10

It it is interesting because you know, like as you're talking and looking up things, because again, I love going on these deep dives, and this is like a random thing, but he wrote the LSU fight song. Like he wrote that. But when you look at things, like when you look at a list of Huey Long's Louisiana programs, it looks amazing, right? Almost 10,000 miles of new roads, new toll-free bridges, free textbooks, free schools, statewide busing, like just kind of this like really big thing. Do you think that Huey Long was successful because of the time period he was in and the state he was in?

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah, I mean, certainly the state. I mean, Louisiana, I mean it is hard to overstate how economically backward it is at the time. It's really easy pickings for him to be able uh to do that. And you know, and it had the state had been grossly mismanaged. So he's got that. Now, in some sense, him getting killed does him a favor because he doesn't have to pay the tax dues like on this kind of thing, right? And so he gets to go down as like the great martyr who died giving the kid giving the kids books and the roads, even uh even though he's built up basically a more or less a fascist regime that is financially unsustainable. Like and so it's a one, it's in in some sense it's one and done on that front. You mean you mentioned the LSU thing. Uh this goes back to his vengeance thing. So he's very he he gets really mad at one point that one of the school, he that one of the universities there won't give him an honorary doctorate. Even and the honorary doctorate, to be clear, is because he says that he has written an annotated history of the Louisiana Constitution, which is a source that I used in my research. He had one of his staffers write it, and the staffers are writing it, and he's like, Yeah, I'm just taking that. This like actual long, complicated, annotated treatise of Louisiana history. He's like, Yep, that's mine now. And they wouldn't give him whatever the honorary thing was. And so he's spitefully like I think it's he moves like the dental school or something, medical school. But he actually is the Louisiana thing. It gets to the point where he's basically calling plays for well, he's marching up and down the LSU games, where he's like calling plays and giving orders to the coach.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

So you know, I think that there's a lot of people that not just LSU, but just in general, but like reading a little bit about like his obsession with LSU. I don't know if that's the right thing, but he definitely like expanded it and whatever else. But yeah, there is a picture I see from LSU library special collection of Heeley Long with the referees before a game. And I'm going to imagine that it was not a just checking in to see what's going on kind of conversation based on or it might be uh just checking in to see what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Wink wink.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Oh my gosh. It is again, it's so interesting to think about like these sliding doors thing, right? You say that the end of his life was probably a a good thing. But I also wonder, like for American history, what it did. Because again, if you just look at these things in face value, at the time it was like this is really great. However, it is this time period, right? Where like the world is leaning into fascism, it's actually really scary.

Legacy, LSU Lore, And A Novel

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Yeah, that that's that's what the the nation guy, again, the nation's a progressive journal, like a journalist. They're going back there saying, you all say that Hitler can't happen here, Hitler will happen here, it's Huey Long. I mean, that's the very clear undercurrent of their reporting pieces saying, and they go, they get like it's they wander on the college campus. They say, What do you think of democracy? It's like, we don't care, we just want Huey Long. So crazy. So, yeah, I mean, you know, this is when you know, you know, Roosevelt is challenging the courts. So, I mean, the the court packing scheme from Roosevelt is child's play compared to what Huey Long, which again, I'm very, very hostile to the the court packing thing. So I don't mean to be dismissed with that, but it is child's play compared to the kind of things that Huey Long had done in Louisiana and was aiming to do at the federal level if he got his paws on it. So so it's it's it's uh it is like in some sense America's near miss with America's near miss with some or and Louisiana's not near miss. Louisiana got it. Yeah.

unknown 20:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 20:51

See, and that's why Huey Long is interesting. Hopefully you're persuaded of that at least.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

I am very persuaded that he is interesting because now I have like six tabs open because I just again, this is why I love American history, because there's just so much more to the story. And yeah, I'm gonna be doing some deep dives. And then really quickly, the book All the King's Men. Do you know the author? Because I was gonna add it to my good reads.

SPEAKER_01 21:19

Adding this to my good reads. It's long and it has a very slow start.

unknown 21:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Very, very, very slow start because they're trying to basically establish the sort of language, nothing's happening in Louisiana thing. So you gotta just sort of get in that mood because then it contrasts with just like what an absolute dynamo. The character's name is Willie Stark, but it's it's very clearly Huey Long. Yeah, so be patient if you read it, it really is worth it.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Okay, okay, Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much.