Lessons in Southern Populism: The Kingfish
“Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”
A great article from John Slaughter at the Old South Repository - DD
“Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”
With that slogan Huey Pierce Long Jr. promised to dynamite America’s caste system and pave the rubble with schools, hospitals, and paved highways. To his enemies he was a bayou Mussolini; to his followers he was the first man in living memory who kept the lights on in forgotten parishes. Strip away the legends, good and bad, and you find the father of Southern populism: brilliant, ruthless, and proof that a single determined man can make Wall Street sweat and the White House lose sleep.
Winnfield, Louisiana, produced lumber, Baptist preachers, and every few decades somebody too stubborn to stay. Huey Long, seventh of nine children, was no barefoot redneck; the Longs were respectable, well‑heeled, and politically wired. Poverty never pinched touched him, but the sight of railroad barons squeezing tenant farmers angered his pride. As a teenager he memorized entire textbooks, skipped a grade, and organized a red‑ribbon secret society that dictated playground politics. When the faculty pushed back, he printed flyers denouncing the school’s fourth‑year requirement, plastered it on town fences, and forced the…