Huey Long, Painting

Even now, Huey Long remains among the most hotly debated legends in American history.

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As with all legends, there is an element of mystery and myth in the story of Huey Long's life and of his death. Generations have been raised with the image of him as a firebrand populist, a flamboyant poor boy who in the depths of those dark years of the Depression turned Louisiana's poverty and hunger into a battering ram with which he assaulted the aristocratic bankers and oil magnates who got rich off the work of the poor and with which he drove their protectors in Washington to seek cover.

In a direct assault on what he deemed to be the rotting foundation of market capitalism, Long rallied the poor and the disenfranchised with a battle cry borrowed from William Jennings Bryant, "Every man a King but no one wears a crown!"  In less than a decade in public life, Long, a self-educated lawyer with a circus showman's flair, had amassed a power base that would survive long after his death — farmers, and shopkeepers, crackers and Cajuns and even minorities — at a time when throughout most of the South blacks were virtually without access to the polls, with his pledge to redistribute the nation's wealth, promising every family in the nation up to $5,000 to buy a house and a guaranteed $2,500-a-year income at a time when $2,500 was worth something.

And as with every legendary character, Long was afflicted with hubris, a stunning pride and arrogance, which, as the legend goes, was what ultimately led to his assassination in 1935.

As with many legends, there is much historical truth in the tales of Huey Long. But there also is much that remains in dispute.

Not the least of which is the story of how Huey Long died.

For more than 70 years now, the conventional belief has been that it was Huey's hubris that led to his downfall. According to that version of events, Huey had threatened to disgrace one of his political enemies, Judge Benjamin Pavy, a man who the very day he was shot, Long had planned to have gerrymandered out of his seat on the bench. But Long, the story goes, was not content to strip his adversary of power. He wanted to strip him also of standing, and in the stark, racially proscribed South of the time, all he had to do to accomplish that was plant a rumor — demonstrably false as it turned out — that Pavy's family had what in the parlance of the provincial South was then called "coffee blood," a hint of African ancestry.

It was in response to that intended attack, the story has always gone, that Dr. Carl Weiss, a well-educated and mild-mannered kinsman of Pavy, attacked Huey Long in the corridors of the statehouse. Dr. Weiss, it has always been said, fired a single round at Huey Long from a gun that he had kept in the glove compartment of his car, and he was, in return, felled in a hail of bullets fired by Long's coterie of bodyguards.

Dr. Carl Weiss

In recent years, however, another scenario has emerged, one in which both Long and Weiss were, in a way, victims, killed, the new version of events goes, by a ravenous machine of boundless power and limitless paranoia that Huey Long set in motion but that all of his political savvy and personal charm could never truly master.

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