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Short Essay On Huey Long

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It was hard to find a Communist in Louisiana in the 1930s. In 1935, merely eighty of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) members lived in the bayous of Louisiana. However, an interesting man with some intriguing leftist views was a Louisiana Senator. His name was Huey Long. A man beloved by the common folk and despised by the wealthy and politically affluent. A former traveling salesman Huey Long knew how to energize the people with lofty promises of “making every man a king”, pension reform, and occasionally racial tolerance. However, Long was greatly admonished by members of the CPUSA like Sender Garlin, who viewed him as a racist authoritarian or worse an American Mussolini. Ultimately, Long is a man ripe with contradictions, …show more content…

In 1935, Long led the fight for Louisiana to abolish the poll tax. The expensive poll tax required voters to pay a fee of 2 dollars (equivalent to 24 dollars today) to vote. Long’s success allowed for 250,000 new voters, including many poor African-Americans. Likewise, the CPUSA also campaigned for the abolishment of the poll tax. Further, Long was not afraid to attack the Ku Klux Klan, a Southern terrorist group that targeted African-Americans. In 1934, Long declared that Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, “that Imperial Bastard will never set foot in Louisiana.” Some like Dr. Glenn Jeansonne only denounced the Klan because it was weak in the 1930s. This is hardly the case. The Klan maintained some form of power in Southern society through the 1990s. Ardent racist and Alabama governor George Wallace originally entered politics as a racial moderate. The young Wallace refused to support Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948 and was known as a fair judge on racial issues. However, Wallace moved to an ardent racist after he lost Klan support in the 1958 Alabama gubernatorial election. Further, in Long’s Louisiana, former Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was the Republican nominee for both Senator and Governor in 1990 and 1991

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In 1924, Congress approved a payment to World War 1 veterans that they would receive a $1,000 bonus for their victory in the war by the year 1945. But in 1932, those veterans decided that they wanted their bonuses early because of the financial pressures they were under. Congress declined, so they marched to Washington, build camps around the city, and vowed to remain there until Congress approved legislation to pay the bonus. The very fact that the veterans, after fighting in the Great War, were willing to go through all this to get compensation from the government truly shows how much Americans at the time needed the money; if they were willing to march up to the Federal Government to demand money, the possibility of them demanding money through Huey Long’s economic plan was certainly applicable. The need for money that existed amongst the poor people, which was essentially the majority of the country at the time, was so intense that all these factors played a role in the rising tensions between the rich and the poor.

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Long had no filter in nearly every setting. He wanted the people to see him as one of them which he was not. He was a different person with good and bad intentions like his brother, Earl Long. Earl enjoyed buying things he had no use for such as chickens, goats, ropes, seed, and hams to give away to the people. Huey Long used childish tactics to win over the voters by saying things like his opponents hair wasn’t real or saying one pumped perfume under his arms.

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