Populist Tradition Still Runs Deep in Home of ‘The Kingfish’

Huey P. Long was the most accomplished, loved, hated, feared and fearsome populist politician of the American century.

Who would argue with that? A caravan of commas is required just to begin to take his measure. Ruthless, brilliant, inspiring, reckless and more, his “Share the Wealth” society and his slogan “Every man a King!” electrified the poor and panicked the prosperous.

Here in this green, pine-swamp town, Long was born 99 years ago. An assassin’s bullet cut short his political rise, his rampage, in 1935, when he was 42.

The ghost of this Depression-era Louisiana governor and U.S. senator comes to mind in this 1992 political season because of the late Lee Atwater, a fellow Southerner and a man, like Long, regarded in his time as a genius in understanding politics, which is to say a genius in understanding people.

I was not alive in Long’s era, but during the last presidential campaign, I was an acquaintance of Atwater. George Bush’s campaign introduced us; Atwater was in his prime as GOP strategist, me as reporter. After hours we spent time together; we were closer than most on the campaign. We both liked to read. At first chance, I asked Atwater what his favorite political book was.

“ ‘Huey Long,’ by T. H. Williams,” he said.

Ordinarily, political pros are inspired by stories of heroes. But an uncommon thinker like Atwater was drawn to the definitive biography of the enemy. Long and his legacy stand as the antithesis of practically everything held dear by Republicans like Atwater and Bush: runaway multitudes from the underclass, exercising their might in numbers behind a charismatic demagogue out to dispossess those with power and money and high position.

The Long biography won the Pulitzer Prize for its author. It weighs as much as a small phone book, a hard matter to collapse into this account. Suffice to say, Long’s coalition--the union that fascinated Atwater--brought together poor and middle-class voters in a belief that the rich were robbing America of its prosperity. This can be contrasted with the modern GOP coalition of upper and middle classes with their shared view that the poor are dragging the country down.

As small, friendly, quiet, struggling Winnfield prepares for the 100th anniversary of its most famous son, the time seems right to make a visit. What do these Americans think? Not about Long and the past. What do they think, here in the wellspring of Long’s populism, about America now, just weeks before the election of a President?

There are a lot of poor folks here. Max Kelley sees them, and the well-off too. He is an open, good-natured fellow who runs the O’Kelley hardware store. He has served as mayor and civic promoter. He is too young to have known Long, but he understands the chords struck by that short-lived, quicksilver man of the 1920s and 1930s who liked to be called “The Kingfish.”

Kelley on government and business: “I believe government doesn’t care enough today. The chain of the economy is as important as the food chain. And we ask ourselves, why should American companies have to go somewhere besides America to make something to sell to Americans?”

On the wealthy: “The rich in a community, they put hardly anything back. . . . Every year, they buy one little ad in the high school yearbook. They get richer every year, but the ad never gets bigger. Their support for the community never gets bigger.”

On foreign investors who have bought and sold local timberland: “They take our natural resources and leave. They don’t pave a road. They don’t buy a schoolbook. It’s like it was in 1900. With our economy, we’ve regressed.”

On the poor: “We spend billions abroad but begrudge patching up people at home. And I don’t mean handing them a welfare check--it’s gone too far that way. I don’t think Huey would have wanted it . . . like it is. I mean jobs, the creation and retention of jobs and the help to get people working; that’s our lifeblood.”

Next, it is an honor to wander into Winnfield’s past to meet two who knew Long, who felt his thunder--and everything since. Through their long lenses of time, what do they see for America now?

First is Ech Bozeman, whose big brother, Harley, was one of Long’s closest friends. They all grew up in the same neighborhood. Ech (pronounced Eck) Bozeman resides in the same house where he was born 84 years ago, which means he can recall days when men rode into town on stallions, carrying revolvers and carrying on and gunning each other down. Ride-by shootings.

Bozeman gives the impression he maintains himself simply, though he is not poor.

“I have lived in every decade of the 20th Century, and I’m worried about my country,” Bozeman said. “My century was perhaps the most exciting in the history of mankind. The 21st Century? I’m afraid it’s going to be a century of turmoil.”

The trouble, Bozeman says, is “we’re over-educated, and we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t do the right things.”

Last stop is Sadye Hahn--Miss Sadye to those here--a grand wisp of a lady with a smile as big and shiny as that old Hudson horseless carriage her family once owned, the first anyone brought into central Louisiana. She is almost certainly older than Bozeman, although no one is so impolite to ask.

She sees turmoil too. But she is well-off and always has been, and that perhaps accounts for her rosy nature about it.

Aiming an elegant, bony finger at her target, she says: “Let me tell you this, chaos makes us honest. Some people are facing realities for the first time in their lives. You have to have chaos to get better. I have the greatest hope I’ve ever had. There is something in America that nobody can kill. Americans don’t know anything else but to rise to the occasion.”