In politics as in myth, the would-be hero must always prove himself by facing the most formidable foes — the stronger, the better. Victory or defeat in those reputation-building battles is almost irrelevant, it could be argued. It is true today and in fact, in the downtrodden South at the beginning of the last century, when the wounds left by what was in some quarters still referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression" were still fresh, a noble defeat might even have been considered politically preferable to a routine victory as long as the adversary were formidable enough.

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There is little doubt that Long, as a young lawyer, understood this and he picked his adversaries accordingly. It was during these early years that Long, whose family had prospered thanks to the power of big business in rural America, first targeted Standard Oil, the massive conglomerate run by the very icon of American capitalism, John D. Rockefeller, and one that with its vast holdings in the Louisiana oil fields had suffered a reputation at the time for ransacking the economy and keeping many natives in a kind of impoverished peonage. Though Long lost his first suit against the gigantic corporation, he won a reputation as a kind of homespun David willing and able to challenge the aristocratic Philistines and their frock-coated Goliaths. Victory didn't matter, though Long did in fact win a few cases during those early years. All that mattered was the size of his opponents, and the fact that he could later claim, without much of his usual exaggeration, that as a lawyer "I have never taken a suit against a poor man."

John D. Rockefeller

To some degree, it might be argued, Long may have been influenced by the prevailing sentiments of his home parish. As far back as the Civil War, Winn Parish had been a hotbed of populist iconoclasts. It was one of the few Louisiana districts that opposed secession, and the prevailing sentiment was expressed in starkly populist terms by a delegate from the region who reportedly asked, "Who wants to fight to keep the Negroes for wealthy planters?"  Half a century after the Civil War, Socialists accounted for half the public officials in the parish and in the 1912 presidential election, Winn voted overwhelmingly for labor leader and Socialist Party founder Eugene V. Debs. His own father, according to a 1966 article by Stephen Hess in American Heritage magazine, had whole-heartedly embraced the populist and socialist norms of the region, and was quoted as saying, "There wants to be a revolution, I tell you...I seen the domination of capital, seen it for seventy years. What do these rich folks care for the poor man? They care nothing — not for his pain, nor his sickness, nor his death...Maybe you're surprised to hear talk like that. Well, it was just such talk that my boy was raised under, and that I was raised under."

Eugene V. Debs

To some degree, Huey Long was following the local tradition when through his early legal work he first came to the attention of the state's Democratic dissidents. Activists in the party had long been looking for someone who could light a kind of populist fire that would help them challenge the deeply entrenched cabal of old-line planters, big-money industrialists of course, and the functionaries of Standard Oil who, as the Old Regulars or "Choctaws" as they called themselves, ran Louisiana in those days.

Huey, they thought, was their man.

Years later, it would dawn on many of those who had supported Huey's foray into politics that Huey Long was never anyone's man but his own. By that point, however, Long had amassed a kind of power that has, even today, remained largely unmatched in American political histories.

In fact, Huey's ascent to power seems to have begun almost the moment he first stepped onto the political stage.

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