Huey Long

Wikipedia coverage: Read the full Wikipedia article, including its references. The material below is the existing Deep Politics Wiki article.

"Populist"  Huey Long  link Spartacus Wikiquote (Politician, maverick, Politician/Premature deaths)
Born	Huey Pierce Long Jr. August 30, 1893 Winnfield, Louisiana, United States
Died	September 10, 1935 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States
Victim of	assassination,Internal Revenue Service,FDR
Alma mater	Tulane University
Children	Rose McConnell Long McFarland, Russell B. Long, Palmer Reid Long
Spouse	Rose McConnell Long
Party	Democratic
Relatives	George S. Long, Earl Long, Blanche Long, Gillis Long, Speedy O. Long, Swords Lee
Maverick American politician who was governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and US senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935 just as he was about to run for president A Democrat, he chastised the two parties for being carbon copies of each other.

Huey Pierce Long Jr., nicknamed "The Kingfish", was a maverick American politician who was governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and United States senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935 just as he was about to run for president A Democrat, he chastised the two parties for being carbon copies of each other.

Official narrative

His page on Wikipedia was a featured article on 9 September 2021.

Every Man a King

long unveiled his Share Our Wealth program on February 23, 1934. The plan originally proposed to cap personal fortunes at $50 million (approximately $1.2 billion as of 2026), but would later be dropped to $5 million (around $120 million as of 2026), through a progressive federal tax. Long also proposed to cap all inheritances at $5 million and to limit annual income to $1 million ($24 million), while providing a yearly stipend for families earning less than one-third the average national income. . Long supplemented his plan with proposals for free college and vocational training, veterans' benefits, federal assistance to farmers, public works projects, greater federal economic regulation, a $30 monthly elderly pension, a month's vacation for every worker, and a thirty-hour workweek.

He illustrated this in a speech:

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you will be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain't got no business with. How are you going to feed the balance of the people? What's Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller and Mellon gonna do with all that grub? They can’t eat it. They can’t wear the clothes. They can’t live in the houses. But when they've got everything on the God-slaving earth that they can eat and they can wear and they can live in—and all that their children can live in and wear and eat and all their children’s children can use—then we've got to call Mr. Morgan and Mr. Mellon and Mr. Rockefeller back and say, “Come back here. Put that stuff back on this table that you took away from here that you don't need. Leave something else for the American people to consume.

Foreign policy

While concentrating on domestic economic issues, he on occasion of the Chaco War (1932-35) attested in a Senate speech that Standard Oil had corrupted the Bolivian government and organized the war and that Wall Street orchestrated American foreign policy in Latin America. This speech and others established Long as one of the most ardent isolationists in the Senate. He further argued that American involvement in the Spanish–American War and the First World War had been deadly mistakes conducted on behalf of Wall Street. Consequently, Long demanded the immediate independence of the Philippines, which the United States had occupied since 1898. He also opposed American entry into the World Court.

Punitive IRS investigation

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had Long's finances investigated by the Internal Revenue Service in 1934. Although they failed to link Long to any illegality, some of his lieutenants were charged with income tax evasion.Roosevelt's son, Elliott, would later note that in this instance, his father "may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution".

Assassination

A month after declaring that he would run for US president, Long was shot by a "lone nut" gunman, the young doctor Carl Weiss. He was not killed outright and prompt medical attention might have saved his life.

Donald Jeffries describes how

Much as we would see nearly thirty years later when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the evidence in the Long murder was horribly mishandled. The gun allegedly used to shoot him was not subject to normal chain-of-possession protocol. The bullet that killed him was never produced as evidence. There were no X-rays of Long, and no autopsy was conducted. The closest the authorities came to an investigation was the coroner's inquest, which consisted primarily of handpicked testimony gathered by the district attorney, one of Long's many political opponents. A plan initially introduced into the Louisiana state legislature to independently investigate the assassination was canceled, according to Long's aide Gerald L. K. Smith, due to pressure from Roosevelt.

In 1986, journalist Ed Reed examined the medical procedures performed at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital operating room, and claimed the doctors had removed a second bullet from Long's body and never reported it, while leaving the other inside. Reed tracked down Merle Welsh, the funeral director for both Long and Weiss, who told him one of the surgeons had come to the funeral home that night and taken a bullet out. One of the surgeons was notorious anti-Long Dr. Henry McKowen, who had recently remarked, If I ever give Huey an anesthetic, I will put him to sleep for good [...] Another doctor, Long political appointee Arthur Vidrine, remarked after the surgery that, It was nothing. It was just a perforation of the intestines.

There are several theories about who was really behind the assassination of Huey Long. An increasingly popular one holds that Weiss was a patsy, set up to take a punch at the Kingfish, which his bodyguards used as an excuse to not only fire some thirty bullets into him, but to shoot Long as well. Regardless, the fact is the most outspoken proponent of redistributing the wealth in this nation's history, a man who fought big oil, the Federal Reserve and the big banks, and Wall Street, was murdered at the age of forty-two, a month after announcing his candidacy for the presidency, as well as asserting on the floor of the United States Senate that powerful forces were plotting to assassinate him.