Huey Long's feud with Standard Oil began with one lost oil investment
In 1918 a young Louisiana lawyer put $1,050 into an oil well that struck. Standard Oil refused to carry his crude in its pipelines, and the money was gone. Huey Long never forgave the company. Within a decade he ran Louisiana, and by 1935 millions had joined his clubs to share the nation's wealth.
Long was born on August 30, 1893, near Winnfield in poor north-central Louisiana, a parish that had opposed secession, backed the Populists in the 1890s and gave the Socialist Eugene Debs 35% in 1912. He liked to claim a log-cabin childhood, but his family's farmhouse was comfortable by local standards. A sharp student with a remarkable memory, he was expelled from high school in 1910 after circulating a flyer attacking his teachers. He drifted through a semester of seminary, lost money borrowed from his brother at a roulette table, then crammed law at Tulane and talked the state supreme court into letting him sit the bar exam early in 1915.
Railroad commission work gave him a platform. He won his seat by just 636 votes, forced utilities to lower rates and argued a telephone rate case all the way to the US Supreme Court, winning refunds for thousands of customers. His message never changed: a few corporations held too much wealth, and the poor were locked out, even of schooling. Louisiana, run by an old political machine favouring planters, had only 300 miles of paved road and the lowest literacy in the country. Long lost the 1924 governor's race but won in 1928.
As governor he expanded social programmes and built highways and the tallest state capitol in the nation, while taking control of the state's political machinery. He was impeached in 1929 for abuse of power, but the case collapsed in the State Senate, and critics called his methods authoritarian. Elected to the US Senate, he helped secure Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 nomination, then broke with him in 1933, attacking the New Deal as too timid.
His 1934 Share Our Wealth plan called for heavy federal spending, a wealth tax and redistribution, and millions signed up. Poised to run for president in 1936, he was shot dead by Carl Weiss in the Louisiana State Capitol on September 10, 1935. Roosevelt absorbed many of his ideas into the Second New Deal. Admirers still see a champion of the poor, detractors a fascistic demagogue.
Source: Huey Long
