There is little question that Huey Long managed to amass his power in Louisiana at least in part because the traditional power brokers there had underestimated him, dismissing him as a backwoods buffoon, and "a redneck Messiah," and there is ample evidence that the establishment in Washington and in the opinion capitals of the north were about to make the same mistake.
The New York Times, for example, once famously and incorrectly editorialized that Long was nothing more than a "worthy competitor in the field of political light farce."
But there were others who saw through Long's deep-fried antics, and recognized that he was a political force to be reckoned with. As he had in Louisiana, Long championed the poor and the working class, and painted his opponents as craven toadies of big business.
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| Raymond Moley |
He was, as Raymond Moley, a political envoy from President Franklin Roosevelt once described him during the early days of the New Deal, a man gifted with "a remarkable capacity for hard intellectual labor, an extraordinarily powerful, resourceful, clear and retentive mind."
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| President Franklin Roosevelt |
He was also able to dance a two-step around parliamentary procedure, and do it in a way that the people gleefully enjoyed. He once gave copies of the Bible to official reporters of Senate debates according to a U.S. Senate biography of Long because, he claimed his wife wanted the reporters to "take those supposed quotations you are making from the Bible and fit them into your speeches exactly as they are in the Scripture."
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