On September 8, 1935, Senator Huey Long was shot dead in the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge. The perpetrator was likely one Carl Weiss, son-in-law of a state judge that Long sought to oust from his position (History.com Editors 2009). As a left-wing former governor and senator from a conservative state, Long made a number of enemies, feuding not only with judges, but also with establishment politicians, newspapers, and the Standard Oil Company (Jeansonne 1994). However, one enemy stands out from the rest: organised labour. Throughout his time in office, Long passed a series of leftist reforms, raising taxes on the wealthy to fund free textbooks and infrastructure programs, and limiting the power of influential corporations (History.com Editors 2009). Despite this, on the issue of labour, a traditional ally of left-wing movements, his position was decidedly conservative (Long 1930; Randsell 1930; Labor 1930). Long devoted a large portion of his years in office to the empowerment of the “working man,” yet throughout this period his relationship with union forces was at best disinterested, and at worst outright hostile. In this essay, I explore the complex relationship between Louisiana’s most famous left-wing demagogue and the power of labour. I argue that organised labour’s weakness in the state informed Long’s choice to eschew the working class as a campaign partner and instead develop his own private political machine. Following his arrival in gubernatorial office in 1928, Long’s unconventional rejection of pro-union policies along with his support for robust public works programs and powerful state-owned enterprises represents a uniquely Louisianan take on left-wing populism and not a betrayal of the progressive cause.

The Louisiana political economy of the early 1900s was characterised by the centralisation of authority in the hands of a conservative political elite and the development of divisions between the state’s wealthy urban and poor rural inhabitants. In 1877, following the Reconstruction Era, in which the federal government intervened in Southern states to forcibly provide African Americans with civil rights, the general trend in the South was that of kneecapping state governments in order to weaken the enforcement of these rights in the future. Louisiana, however, rejected this trend, instead strengthening gubernatorial power so much that governors could directly appoint individuals to positions as local as county commissioners (Powell 2012). Historian Lawrence Powell notes two significant reasons that the state was uniquely positioned to support such centralised authority. One was the effect of French and Spanish colonial rule of Louisiana as a plantation colony, under which the state experienced a more prolonged and active enforcement of direct monarchical authority than other Southern states. The other was the powerful influence of New Orleans on the rest of the state (Powell 2012). As Powell asserts, “unlike the Chesapeake, where scattered slave estates dominated social and political life, plantation life [in Louisiana] orbited around a town,” and that town was New Orleans (Powell 2012, p.390). This proclivity for centralising power in the hands of the governor gave Long the ability to exert unprecedented control over the entire state. Instead of focusing on maintaining authority over his “empire,” Long’s main priority became keeping a winning coalition together for election years. This coalition was to be found in part thanks to the unequal distribution of economic power in the state. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, growth stagnated in rural regions of Louisiana due to a lack of industry diversification. Rural Louisiana’s economy was primarily based in cash crops, a set of industries whose potential had been nearly maximised. In the same time period in urban areas of southern Louisiana, however, industrial production began to grow (Jeansonne 1994). This created a stark economic divide between the rich and expanding, but still relatively small (roughly 40 per cent) urban population and the large, poor, contracting rural population. Long used this divide to build a base among the state’s numerous rural poor inhabitants strong enough to keep him in power.

Organised labour in Louisiana, as in most of the South, was much less prevalent than in the industrial North. As a result, Southern labour organisers had substantially less of the influence necessary to push forward their agenda in state politics. In 1939, state union members per every 100 non-agricultural workers averaged 10.8 in the South, and 22.3 in all other U.S. regions (Friedman 2000). This reflects a general trend in Southern labour history of weaker unions as compared to non-Southern states throughout the post-Reconstruction Era (Friedman 2000). Were agricultural workers to be factored in, this discrepancy would likely be much larger. The lack of union participation among the Southern populace had important, tangible effects on labour’s ability to engage in political advocacy. For example, look to a report from the U.S. Department of Labor in 1932 containing a section on laws passed protecting workers’ wages on public works projects. It found that during that year, Southern states, such as Alabama and Tennessee, implemented just a single wage protection statute each, while Northern states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan implemented 5 or more that year (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1932). On average, more laws protecting workers’ wages were passed in non-Southern states with powerful unions than in Southern states, which tended to have weak unions. The reason for this is that in order to get elected in the North, politicians had to court the influential labour vote by giving unions the laws they wanted, but in the South, the labour vote was simply not important enough to court. Because of this, Southern unions rarely received the laws that they wanted. For Huey Long, the weakness of labour created both a problem and an opportunity. It created a problem in that he had to campaign without the organisational strength of labour unions, but also created an opportunity in that he was not forcibly beholden to their interests.

Instead of attempting to earn the endorsement of the conservative Old Regulars of the Louisiana political establishment or the marginally relevant union forces, Huey Long campaigned directly to the agrarian and industrial workers of Louisiana, with an emphasis on large-scale speaking events and propaganda. Because Long could not rely on unions to organise sufficient working class support for him to win any significant election, he did such organising work himself. Campaigning for governor, both unsuccessfully in 1924 and successfully in 1928, Long made stump speeches throughout rural Louisiana. For candidates associated with the Regular Democratic Organisation, or the Old Regulars, the New Orleans political machine that dominated Louisiana politics, campaigning in the rural north of the state was rarely even considered due to the region’s comparatively low rates of participation relative to the more urban south of the state (Vaughn 1979). By simply showing up and campaigning to them directly, Long made himself immensely popular with a group of Louisianans who felt alienated, both from their own labour in the Marxist sense and from the elitist environment of state government in the political sense. To capitalise on this sense of alienation, Huey Long created his own weekly newspaper in 1930, titled The Louisiana Progress, to keep his supporters updated and involved in advocating for his political goals (The Louisiana Progress 27 March 1930). Having been in office for two years once he began publishing his paper, Long already possessed a large number of political appointees who served at his discretion. He forced these appointees to contribute a portion of their salaries to support both the operation of Long’s newspaper and his campaign (The Times-Picayune 1 April 1930). This generated a feedback loop in which the financial support of Long’s government loyalists allowed him to expand his popular support through the paper, and this expanded popular backing allowed Long to fill even more government positions with people who would contribute to his campaign and paper. While Long’s campaign tactics were generally focused on the empowerment of the poor and the working class, these strategies rarely applied to the disenfranchised African American community, who Long’s campaign regularly used as a wedge when politically beneficial. In late August and early September of 1930, Long’s Louisiana Progress began ramping up attacks against Senator Joseph E. Ransdell in anticipation of the Democratic primary election on September 8 for one of the state’s two senate seats. Long, Randsell’s main opponent in the primary, had generally avoided race-baiting tactics in his previous campaigns. However, anticipating a tight race and with the resources to widely disseminate attacks through his newspaper, Long began permitting the use of openly racist language in his propagandised assault against his opponent. In one article of the Louisiana Progress titled “Randsell’s Political Love Letter to the Negro Walter Cohen,” Long claimed that Ransdell “use[d] his time getting fat jobs for other negroes that white men are trying to get” (The Louisiana Progress 4 September 1930, p.1). This was in reference to a letter Randsell sent to state politician Walter Cohen requesting that he provide a job for one of the senator’s black associates. Interestingly, the paper finds a way to mix racist rhetoric with Long’s own personal support for the working class. Though obviously a racist attack, Long’s campaign couched it as an appeal to “the right of labor” for white Louisianans (The Louisiana Progress 4 September 1930, p.1). In another article published that same day, Long used similarly racist rhetoric to attack New Orleans newspapers who were highly critical of his campaign, and once again justified his racism as an ostensible defence of the working class. In this article, the Progress attacked the “ring papers,” the term Long’s campaign gave to the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans Item-Tribune, and the Daily States newspapers, for providing legal defence to the African American perpetrators of a prison mutiny in a state penitentiary (The Louisiana Progress 4 September 1930). In concluding the article, the Progress wrote, “So there you have it: The newspapers… and the widow of the ni–er hi-jacker have all now a common cause in furthering the design and purpose of the Ringster who doesn’t want anybody to work at the penitentiary” (The Louisiana Progress 4 September 1930, p.1) Here, Long again took advantage of the racial biases of his voting base while centring his critique on the consequences it would have for his working class supporters in the prison industry. Despite what some historians have claimed, Long did not in any way avoid using racism and other social wedges to motivate voters. Instead, he found ways to tie racial biases to real economic issues in ways that made his left wing economic policies seem more reasonable.

Once Long entered office, he rarely endorsed pro-labour legislation, instead focusing on public works programs that would indirectly empower workers due to these programs’ broader base of support and less targeted benefits. In an article from the New Orleans States editorial board, republished by The Shreveport Times, the paper attacked Long as a hypocrite for claiming to support the working class while maintaining and promoting anti-labour policies in Louisiana. It claimed that Long’s support for prison labour, his backing of an anti-union judge against one promoted by the American Federation of Labor, and his decision to call in troops to break a transit union’s strike were all evidence that Long was in fact hostile to the interests of labour (The Shreveport Times 4 September 1930, p.4). Though the States, like most Louisiana newspapers at the time, was often biased against Long, these actions show a strong opposition to labour in his decisions as governor. On the other hand, many of Long’s larger initiatives show a powerful, albeit less direct, support for the working class. Long promised to build 3,000 miles of paved highways in Louisiana, connecting underserved rural communities to larger towns and cities. His paper claimed this would “Plac[e] a hard-surfaced road within one mile of the door of seventy-five per cent of the people in the state” (The Louisiana Progress 27 March 1930, p.1). By the end of his term, Long’s government built over 9,700 miles of roads, as well as 111 bridges (Rosen 2020). These programs were instrumental in connecting rural communities to each other and to major centres of industry, setting the stage for more effective union organisation efforts in the future. In addition to this, Long pushed for legislation providing free textbooks for schoolchildren, and adult literacy courses that drastically reduced illiteracy in the state (Rosen 2020). Increased rates of literacy allowed the people of Louisiana to educate themselves politically, creating a populace more willing and able to advocate for their own interests in the future.

Huey Long and his allies recognised that the weakness of organised labour in Louisiana meant that though much of their support would be derived from the working class, it was not politically beneficial to take explicit action to show support for the labour movement. Instead, Long advocated for workers by defending state owned companies and public works projects. In response to accusations that The Louisiana Progress used labour in Mississippi instead of Louisiana to print newspapers and that this made Long anti-labour, an article in the Progress mounted a defence of their use of the Mississippi factory. Instead of arguing outright in favour of using Mississippi labour, Long’s campaign claimed that none of the workplaces in Louisiana capable of handling the volume of newspapers they produced were union shops, and that providing good wages to workers was more important than doing so in Long’s home state. The article claimed that “The printing industry of Louisiana has been so stifled and stomped upon by the capitalistic methods of the New Orleans newspapers… that fair prices and good work is almost impossible to obtain.” Thus, “Louisiana organisations having printing work to do on a large scale where big presses and giant modern machinery are needed are forced to go out of the state” (The Louisiana Progress 17 April 1930). Long recognised that though he might have wanted to support the union effort, it was too weak in Louisiana at the time for such actions to be politically or fiscally wise. Instead, he found other ways to empower the working class. One of these was through his defence of the public ownership of the Port of New Orleans. In an article for The Progress, Long’s campaign showed opposition to the privatisation of some of the port’s functions (The Louisiana Progress 10 April 1930). By supporting public ownership without mentioning the negative consequences that unions would suffer under privatisation or the port’s complex race relations, Long is able to show implicit support for unions without making any statements that might be politically controversial. Here, Long shows support for unionisation not directly, but as a result of his allegiance to state operated enterprise.

Long’s stated support for labour on a larger scale as demonstrated through his paper, The Louisiana Progress, shows his anti-union actions to be a political tool and not a representation of his ideological position. In an article titled “Reds Protest Prayers Said by Christians,” Long’s Progress is highly critical of the anti-religious aims of the Soviet Union (The Louisiana Progress 27 March 1930, p.3). However, following this article on the same page is a much more positive piece reporting on a peaceful day- long strike in Cuba (The Louisiana Progress 27 March 1930, p.3). The juxtaposition of these two readings shows Long’s support for labour movements abroad, but also his willingness to capitalise on the interests of the deeply Christian population of Louisiana whose votes he needs. In The Progress’ articles on the Soviet Union, the paper avoids mentioning their economic policies, instead critiquing their social position on religion. This is crucial to understanding Long’s ideological stance. He ties together left wing economic policies which appeal to poor Louisianans and the religious social conservatism of his voters to create a leftist message that can appeal to a populace unaccustomed to such radical ideas. Long encapsulates this subtle appeal in his paper’s mission statement, in which he claims, “It believes in a square deal for business. But it believes that the business of the farmer is as important as the business of the merchant, the manufacturer and the banker.” The paper announces that “it believes that cities and towns should be prosperous, but it knows they cannot prosper unless the country is prosperous first” (The Louisiana Progress 27 March 1930, p.4). Here, Long mixed the collectively accepted priorities of Louisianan society with those of his own agrarian allies without threatening those living in urban areas. Long believed that labour should be prioritised, but only as much as was politically realistic.

The power of labour has a substantial impact on how ideology is expressed within a given state. Without a strong presence of organised labour, any left-wing movement benefits from centralisation and top-down control over its organisation, as Long’s actions in Louisiana demonstrate. Without any powerful local organisations in place to help with his efforts, the only way that Huey Long was able to make a substantial difference in the level of education and financial power of ordinary Louisianans was by eschewing labour as a potential ally and instead developing an independent political machine to support programs aimed at empowering the working class of Louisiana through state sponsored programs in the fields of education and infrastructure, and reigning in the power of corporations such as the Standard Oil Company. In order to be successful with these tactics, Long relied on a number of factors relatively unique to the Louisiana government and economy. Among these were the centralisation of power in the hands of the governor, the white population’s antagonism towards Louisiana’s black and anti-religious communities, and most importantly the weakness of organised labour. Long used the centralisation of power to appoint loyal officers throughout the state and county governments, increasing his control throughout the state. He took advantage of the religious and racial biases of the white Christian population through articles in his newspaper, adding enough social conservatism to his left-wing economic positions to make them tolerable to traditionally conservative Louisianans. Finally, Long depended on the weakness of organised labour at every point from his campaign for governor to his exertion of control over every level of Louisiana state government. Labour’s inability to provide him the votes he needed to win election to the governorship allowed him to create the independent campaign body that he needed to keep winning elections in the state. It also allowed him the personal discretion necessary to force political patrons to contribute to the running of his campaign and newspaper. Finally, labour’s inability to advocate for laws in the political sphere was an important reason that Long, as friendly to organised labour as he claimed to be, was unwilling to pass legislation or executive orders assisting labour organisation.

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