Huey Pierce Long Jr.

Huey Pierce Long Jr., the Louisiana governor and United States senator nicknamed the Kingfish, died in Baton Rouge on September 10, 1935. He was forty-two. Thirty-one hours earlier he had been shot in a corridor of the new State Capitol he had forced into being; surgery closed wounds in the intestine but could not stop the bleeding that finished him before dawn. Born near Winnfield on August 30, 1893, he skipped the usual apprenticeships of Southern politics. He sold books, passed a hurried bar exam, and built a machine that delivered roads, free textbooks, and a towering capitol while concentrating power in ways that frightened rivals and fascinated the poor. As governor he treated patronage as a weapon and the press as an enemy; as senator he turned national radio into a pulpit for Share Our Wealth, promising confiscatory taxes and homestead guarantees that made Franklin Roosevelt treat him as a threat rather than a colleague. He married Rose McConnell and raised three children who would inherit both the name and the faction. Admirers remembered bridges and night schools; enemies remembered troopers, gerrymanders, and a politics that blurred reform with rule by one man. The debate never settled into a single verdict. He was buried in the capitol gardens in Baton Rouge, under the shadow of the building that still carries his ambition in stone. The bullet that killed him also froze a career that had already remade Louisiana and was aiming at the White House.