“That’s easy; he would have been assassinated.” — Hartnett T. Kane when asked what would have happened had Huey Long not been assassinated.
Why weep or slumber America
Land of brave and true?
There’s castles and clothing and food for all
All belongs to you
[Chorus]
Every man a king, every man a king
For you can be a millionaire
If there’s something belonging to others
There’s enough for all people to share
When it’s sunny June and December too
Or in the winter time or spring
There’ll be peace without end
Every neighbor a friend
And every man a king
— Lyrics to “Every Man a King,” written by Huey P. Long and Castro Carazo (sung before his radio broadcast)
Vice President J. D. Vance recently invoked the memory of Huey P. Long—the governor and later US Senator from Louisiana in the 1930s. Vance was trying to capture some of Long’s populistic message for himself and the Donald Trump administration. Adam Row writes:
“The great Southern populist,” Vance said, made “‘every man a king’ the goal of his political program.” The Trump Administration shares that goal, Vance implied. “But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals,” the vice president continued. “No man is a king if they can’t take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their car jacked.”
Rowe adds:
Physical safety for all citizens was not quite the limit of Long’s ambitions. The Southern demagogue railed against the rich as the sole cause of poverty and championed a massive wealth distribution program. On economic policy, he was much closer to the DSA than to Trump’s GOP.
Indeed, it is doubtful that Donald Trump’s economic programs (if one can call them that) and his regime of tariffs and destructive wars are going to make anyone a king—except for himself—but since his Veep has invoked Long, we should investigate to see if the man they called the “Kingfish” really did make “every man a king,” or if his programs had other, darker effects. We ask what point Vance is trying to pursue, with Rowe answering part of that question:
But in American politics, substance runs a distant second to style. Among the overeducated, underemployed professionals calling themselves Democratic Socialists, Long’s cornpone act would have as much appeal as a can of cheese whiz. Trump’s warmest admirers and worst enemies, on the other hand, will recognize the president’s resemblance to Huey Long.
The Kingfish
In today’s political world, Huey P. Long would be seen as part clown and certainly part demagogue and probably would be laughed out of a campaign, but in the 1930s, when the world was much different and Americans languished in the middle of the Great Depression, they were willing to listen to just about anyone. It was a time, according to economic historian Robert Higgs, when the country was gripped by “regime uncertainty,” when no one knew for sure what form of government would emerge from the political turbulence.
We know the Franklin Roosevelt regime from its famous (or infamous) New Deal—a mishmash of government intervention wrongly credited with ending the depression when, in fact, it extended it. Roosevelt’s first term was dominated by his attempt to reorganize the entire US economy into a series of government-sponsored cartels (the First New Deal), but, however radical the programs might have been, FDR was being attacked from the right (Father Charles Coughlin, a populist broadcaster) and Long, who came in from the left.
Of the two, Long was seen as the greater political threat, but (at least for Roosevelt) he was “conveniently” assassinated in 1935 in the Louisiana capitol where the bullet holes from the guns of the assassin, Carl Weiss, and Long’s bodyguards are still marked on the walls. (Guy Rexford Tugwell, one of FDR’s advisers, called the assassination “providential”).
Why was Long—who, by all accounts, governed Louisiana like a dictator—considered a political threat? One should remember the poverty that was endemic in Louisiana at the time and the class resentment that Long stirred in his speeches was real. Furthermore, his program included free textbooks for students and numerous public works programs, all financed either by wealth taxes on individuals, taxes on large businesses like oil companies and the railroads, and by massive borrowing through the same bonds. But it was his rhetoric that fueled his support—and his opposition:
When Long has been mentioned in the last 10 years or so, it has been to suggest similarities between his “Share Our Wealth” program — he wanted confiscatory taxes on the rich — and socialist/progressive icon Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Take this NPR report from the 2020 Democratic primary race. It featured a recording from the 1930s in which Long said, “Four percent of the American people own 85% of the wealth of America, and over 70% of the people of America don’t own enough to pay the debts that they owe.” Long compared the American economy to a big barbecue in which one man takes 90% of the food and the rest have to take their share back from him.
“This is basically the Bernie Sanders agenda, but for the Great Depression,” said NPR’s Laine Kaplan-Levenson. “[Long] wanted a limit on how much wealth an individual could hold — $5 million, about $60 million in today’s money. Anything made beyond that, you’ve got to give away.”
After serving a term as governor, Long was elected to the US Senate, and, while in Washington, he formed a Share the Wealth Society and proposed the following things:
- Cap overall individual wealth at $100 million;
- Limit annual incomes at $1 million;
- Limit inheritances to $5 million;
- Old age pensions of $30 a month
He also went on to propose free education, a four-day workweek, four weeks of paid vacation, and (of course) free medical care. Long reasoned that they could continue to tax individuals and corporations at these rates without any negative effects.
None of this is unusual in today’s political atmosphere, as Bernie Sanders and others have been calling for similar tax-and-spend programs for years. Moreover, Sanders has claimed that the biggest problem in this country is billionaires having too much money and hoarding their wealth, with the “solution” being higher taxes and other confiscatory policies.
If there is a difference between Sanders and Long, it is that Long never claimed to be a socialist, and he publicly denounced communism, declaring: “Communism? Hell no! This plan is the only defense this country’s got against communism.” Long also accused Roosevelt of being a communist and even joked that the Democrats and the Communist Party should hold their conventions together “to save money.”
Long was in many ways a product of his times and of Louisiana, where political corruption had long been tolerated. Certainly, he surrounded himself with characters who used state power—and especially New Deal funds sent to the state—to enrich themselves, something that concerned Long himself. In a 1941 review of Hartnett T. Kane’s book on Long, Huey Long’s Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship 1928-1940, Herschel Brickell wrote:
Long, who, as Gertrude Stein once said, “had a sense of human beings,” actually foresaw the end, and made this prophecy: “If them fellows ever try to use the powers I’ve given ‘em without me to hold ‘em down, they’ll all land in the penitentiary.”
And that is where many of his underlings were sent.
Rothbard as a Populist Alternative to People like Sanders and Long
As noted earlier, Donald Trump would like to be able to be identified as a populist like Long but has neither the charisma nor any real vision for the country. While much of his political opposition calls him a dictator, he never would be able to seize the kind of power to govern America that Huey Long had in Louisiana during his relatively short political career.
Furthermore, while Trump has managed to engage some of the regulatory state, nonetheless his wars, inflation, and tariffs have canceled many of the savings his other policies have created for Americans. Long, on the other hand, wanted to create a regime based upon fear and confiscation of property, as does Bernie Sanders and others. So, are we left with a populism that creates havoc, fear, and ultimately makes people poorer, as it destroys the capital needed to create new wealth, or are there other choices?
In 1993, Murray Rothbard proposed populism in a more libertarian form, what he called “Right-Wing Populism.” Rothbard wrote:
The basic right-wing populist insight is that we live in a statist country and a statist world dominated by a ruling elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and various influential special interest groups. More specifically, the old America of individual liberty, private property, and minimal government has been replaced by a coalition of politicians and bureaucrats allied with, and even dominated by, powerful corporate and Old Money financial elites (e.g. the Rockefellers, the Trilateralists); and the New Class of technocrats and intellectuals, including Ivy League academics and media elites, who constitute the opinionmolding class in society. In short, we are ruled by an updated, twentieth-century coalition of Throne and Altar, except that this Throne is various big business groups, and the Altar is secular, statist intellectuals, although mixed in with the secularists is a judicious infusion of Social Gospel, mainstream Christians.
These are people who do not give up power easily, and Rothbard noted that the typical libertarian strategy had been to try to “convert” the intellectuals to libertarianism and free markets and hope that their changed viewpoints would “trickle down” to everyone else. However, he noted, there is a flaw in this plan:
But the real error is not so much the emphasis on the long run, but on ignoring the fundamental fact that the problem is not just intellectual error. The problem is that the intellectual elites benefit from the current system; in a crucial sense, they are part of the ruling class. The process of Hayekian conversion assumes that everyone, or at least all intellectuals, are interested solely in the truth, and that economic self-interest never gets in the way. Anyone at all acquainted with intellectuals or academics should be disabused of this notion, and fast. Any libertarian strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion molders are part of the fundamental problem, not just because of error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling system. (emphasis in original)
He proposed addressing the problem in the following way:
This two-pronged strategy is (a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion molders, based on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people against the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both socially and economically. But this strategy must fuse the abstract and the concrete; it must not simply attack elites in the abstract, but must focus specifically on the existing statist system, on those who right now constitute the ruling classes.
He went on to call for cuts in taxes and spending, cutting back on the welfare state, ending group privileges based on race or other social characteristics, fighting street crime, removing people living in the streets and ending the subsidies to them, end the Federal Reserve System, ending foreign aid and other “globalist” programs, and preserving families and “family values.” For Rothbard, a true populism could not be built upon coercion and confiscation, but rather freedom and private property.
Conclusion
While J. D. Vance might have raised some eyebrows by invoking Huey Long, one doubts that the Trump-Vance administration has a clue as to what populism might be, especially with Donald Trump himself engaged in policies and personal behavior that is alienating the voters. On the other side, we have Bernie Sanders and other socialists running on programs of higher taxes, ruinous spending on public works projects like the disastrous California “train to nowhere,” and confiscation of wealth and capital. In other words, the so-called populists really are calling for platforms of wealth destruction and lower living standards for all. People would live under the thumb of elites in a state of what just as well could be called slavery.
Murray Rothbard called for another kind of populism, one based upon common sense and permitting people to live their own lives without state interference. Interestingly, Rothbard’s vision—which, by far, is the most practical and easiest to implement—is called unworkable and “too radical.” That is the greatest irony of all.
