Political Career of Huey Long - Essay Example

Student’s Name Instructor’s Name Course name Date of Submission Huey Long At the beginning Huey was accused of being physical coward, indifferent towards people and even openly contemptuous of his family and his lieutenants, lustful of the vengeance, and utterly power mad. Robert Penn Warren has unconvincingly denied that his protagonist in “All king’s Men” by Willie Stark, that was consciously modeled after Huey Long. Yet, they tend to clear implications of that popular accepted analogy which is long, like the Stark, made to achieve noble ends through the means of sordid and was possessed at the end by the evil and hence destroyed by it (Bismark 211). Most history of the short and explosive career of Huey Pierce Long has totally embraced this formula and its attendant in terms of moral indictment. According to the history, preponderance of both conservative and the liberal journalist condemned him as a dangerous radical. Among the six previously published journalist biographies of Huey, two of them were written by the long associates, and the evaluation of the remaining four range from those one that have fearful criticism to those that are vituperation. Bismark (213) asserts that during the politics of Upheaval, Arthur Mss. Schlesinger, Jr., Huey was painted darkly as the “messiah of the rednecks,” that tends to refer an irresponsible demagogue which threatens the New Deal of Roosevelt. According to the southern politics, V. O. Key, Jr., they saw the kingfish as an appropriate way of representing “the seamy side of democracy.” According to the Key’s perspective, he viewed Long’s major political contribution as both ironic and inadvertent: contemptuous because he was of party loyalty and the two party systems, hence Huey’s legacy formed Louisiana’s Democratic Politics with an ambition of enduring bi-factionalism that is functionally approximated into two party systems. Moreover, In Huey Long’s Louisiana, Allan Sindler tries to explain Huey’s as an almost predetermined in terms of product and political reflection of his depressed environment. Lastly, Sindler invoked a plague on both the houses of Longs and Anti-Longs. Huey Long is mostly concern with oral history. This is because Huey left no diary or the customary body of the document evidence. William was inspired by his work with the Columbia oral history project during the early 1950s, hence spent over a decade tape recording interviews with about 295 knowledgeable articles of Huey (Bismark 216). His citations tend to acknowledge these sources where can be found, although there are meant to give understandable reasons that are replete with the reference to the “confidential communication” despite the fact that we are assured these transcripts will be available at the LSU library when there time seals expired. At the end, Earl K. Long was unwilling to be interviewed, but thanks to Williams who was grateful to acknowledge the assistance of the Russell B. Long in providing access to many associates and relatives who might otherwise have remained silent. The author was unfortunate after the recent discovery in the old LSU library building that consist of several additional file cabinets of long papers after a dozen of years of research during the time when the biography was written and the rolling of the press. Apparently, the new evidence tends to support in a minor way and was not crucial, but such become the origin of professorial coronaries (Bismark 221). A minor technical complaint is that no map of Louisiana was provided, but instead the twenty pages of illustrations are welcome reminders of how rapidly styles of dress come in full circle and how rapidly style of life change. According to Graham (205), William is capable to puncture a few myths so that some are deliberately natured by Huey, while others are spun by his enemies with relative certitude. According to William, Huey was not raised in poverty; his dissembling pretentions to the rural simplicity and even buffoonery tend to disguised an electrical mind that is capable of all most total to recall; hence he did not complete Tulane’s three year law course in a period of one year; the rain did not doom his first gubernatorial race in the year 1924; there were two Rounds Robins, not one, in his fight against the impeachment; he neither bankrupted Louisiana nor richly tend to lined his own pockets from the spoils; he was not shot by any of his bodyguards; and no conspiracy dispatched Dr. Carl A. Weiss, Jr ., so that to gun Huey down. Other obstinate myths do not yield so conclusively to the empirical analysis simply because the evidence predominantly testimony tends to be contradictory and often highly personal. However, this include the ideas that Huey absorbed his Populistic ideology from the maverick state senator S.J. Harper, that is accusation fundamentally soured his idealism, and that Alice Lee Grosjean was his mistress. Similarly, it has been alleged that Huey did not compile the “Constitutions of the state of Louisiana,” a book which earned him an honorary doctor of laws degree from Loyola University, hence he was not primarily responsible for writing “My first Days in the White House”, an impish campaign that was published posthumously in 1935 (Graham 206). However, academic critics have been particularly attuned to the allegations that Long’s theory of the administration, as reflected in his dealings with the Louisiana state university and charity hospital, was excessively personal destructive of the academic freedom. At the broadest level of the damaging generalization, Huey has being accused of being physical coward, indifferent towards and even openly contemptuous of his family and his lieutenants, lustful of the vengeance, and utterly power mad. By weighing such indictments, Williams reconstructs first the anti-Long case, then pro- Long defense, and hence concludes with a logical assessment of how Huey was likely to have thought and behave in light of his dominant inner drives (Graham 207). According to William interpretations, he regards Huey’s neo-populist sympathy for those individuals who are poor as both plausible and genuine, and he has sprinkled the narrative with the redeeming evidence of Huey’s impassive generosity. But, Williams acknowledges a “curious duality” within long that realistically that is linked with a desire for power to his unrealistic goals. It was believed that invited confusion of the ends and means and erosion or the obscurement of the former in pursuit of the latter. He wanted to do well, but instead he had to have power (Graham 208). Finally, the means and the end become so entwined in his mind that he could not distinguish them, hence he could not decide whether he wanted power as a method or for its own sake. His attention increases so that to build his power structure, and as he built, he did strange, ruthless, and cynical things. Graham (209) asserts that it has become a tribute to William that he left the warts intact, because there were abundant. As a child, even as an infant, Huey is viewed by his contemporaries as being brash, ornery, audacious, arrogant, egocentric, and arrogant; however, young Huey is recalled as a showoff, a smart aleck, a pest although, so that to be sure, he was admittedly bright and bursting with the energy and curiosity. Without systematic psychoanalytical assessment of Huey, Williams tries to give an attempt even though he observes that later, especially during crisis in his political career, Huey’s mood occasionally partook of “ something that is savage and frenzied; it was almost,” and still later that he “alternated between moods of abnormal ecstasy and depression.” Later in his life, he was increasingly haunted by the irrational fear that time was running out, that assassins lurked all over the place. Americans of all political persuasions have historically demanded the liberty and equality, but the equality and the liberty are often contradictory goals. However, by opting for equality, Huey long inevitably enmeshed himself during the ancient of American and Human dilemmas. Therefore, he did not emerge from the fight unblemished or even, during the long run, triumphant did not say that he should not have tried. In Louisiana’s case, the state electoral votes were awarded to the republican candidate Hayes in the disputed 1876 election, then the democratic presidential candidates during the next seventeen presidential elections from 1880 through 1944. Huey Long began his political career as a democrat even though he grew up in Winn Parish, which was one of the centres of Populism during the late 19th century Louisiana, and hence technically remained as a member of the democratic party throughout his life. In the year 1935, the year of his assassination, he was challenge the Democratic Party. Though Huey Long was a Democrat, it worth nothing to his political career (Graham 210). His political career reshaped the party of Louisiana to his political personality. His proposal and his personality so polarized the electorate that the party tends to split into two factions including creating a rivalry which dominated Louisiana politics from 1928 until 1960. However, Longites thought that Huey could do no wrong, and Anti-Longites thought that he could do nothing right. Historian Edward Haas has noted that Burton K. Wheeler and William E. Borah are two of the Long’s closest associates in the senate, were rank among the leading isolationists. He goes ahead and speculates about what might happen during a Long presidency term from 1937 until 1941 (Haas 126). Those years were recognize as crucial when FDR assisted his associates as much as possible, hence prepare the country for possible participation during the second world war 11, hence he maneuvered through a very complex foreign policy issues, subject which Huey Long has clearly stated. Whether people viewed him as fascist or not, communist, demagogue, dictator or political boss, Huey Long goes ahead and expand political horizons in Louisiana. He manage to convince the ordinary citizen that the power of the state government have been misuse for the wealthy few when, in fact, those ordinary people should be beneficiaries of the programs which are bounty provided by the administration state activist (Haas 130). He was less sure footed by his ambition of the art of the possible during the national political agenda. Huey Long made people to believe that he was their protector and the guardian of their well being. At the end, he expanded his political horizons of the state so far that they could never be fully contract. He grasped his dreams and aspiration of generation of the poor Louisianans, who was adopted as his own and hence made them not really attainable, but common place. In the end, Huey long made people to believe that the government was their friend, protector and the guardian of their well being. He expanded his political horizons of the state so far that they could never fully contract (Graham 211). Huey long succession in Louisiana could not be ignored the changes which he had made in the relationship between the government and the people. Works Cited Bismark V. Otto. “What he did and what he promised to do…” Huey Long and the Horizons of Louisiana Politics. The Journal Of Southern History, Vol. xlvii, No., 3, 2006, 211-276. Graham D. Hugh. “Louisiana History.” The Enigma of Huey Long: An Essay Review. The Journal Of Southern History, Vol. xlvii, No., 3, 2006, 205-211. Haas Edward. Huey Pierce Long Historical Speculation. The History Teacher Vol. 27, No. 2, 1994, 125-131. Read More