EVERY MAN A KING

I don’t have any problem with Hollywood production values, but I believe it would be more refreshing to get ugly actors with big personalities (like me) to portray historical occurrences. Instead of casting Sean Penn as Huey Long, whom he resembles not in the least, it would have been vastly more entertaining to cast a pudgy, jowly used car salesman from Pomona – somebody who really understands what stealing is all about. Sean Penn might have punched out some paparazzi, but he never stole anything of significance.


That is not my only problem with the current remake of “All The King’s Men.” I read the actual novel by Robert Penn Warren, who apparently had covered Huey Long as a journalist. He managed to get a sense of the venality of the situation, the grafting, the base manipulation of an illiterate agricultural electorate. But he covered Long like an elitist, scandalized by the base opportunism of a lumpenproletarian hustler who rose above his station until he was hoist on his own petard, assassinated by a scion of the local aristocracy.


Warren pays scant attention to Long’s broader achievements, getting to the Louisiana bar at a young age, getting elected Railroad Commissioner, who was responsible not only for transport but for resource extraction (oil) and whose duties put him in contact with big oil, railroad and banking interests. Long got elected governor at a young age (like Bill Clinton), consolidated his political power throughout the state, built roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, gave free textbooks to poor schoolchildren, built hospitals and universities and generally improved life for all his citizens. Sure he stole. He lived in luxurious hotel suites, kept mistresses, dressed in silk suits. These parts I’m sure Sean Penn can project convincingly, but I seriously doubt whether he has the depth of intellect to portray more than a cardboard façade of the actual Huey Long, or that the story will let him.

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Warren’s novel doesn’t come anywhere close to conveying an understanding Huey Long’s deeper motivations. For that you have to go to a superb biography of the man written by Robert Shelton more than 30 years ago. A thick book of 700 pages, it meticulously paints a portrait of the man, his times and his enemies among the landowning aristocracy and urban bourgeoisie, who certainly never suffered materially under Long (he was astute enough to cut them in for their share, just as he made sure that the blacks shared the wealth as well) but were nevertheless outraged that they were no longer in the driver’s seat.


The same shit fit Long induced in the Louisiana aristocracy, he brought to the national ruling class, as he engineered his election as U.S. Senator from Louisiana while still retaining the state’s governorship. When Long tried to impose a 5 cents a barrel tax on oil extraction to help pay for social services, Standard Oil of New Jersey pressured the Louisiana Republicans to engineer his impeachment. Instead of timidly hiding in the governor’s mansion, he dared to go right into the state legislature and, in full view of his opponents, brazenly directed the strategy that defeated the impeachment motion. Upon achieving complete victory and reducing the Republicans to rubble (like Bill Clinton), Long retired to the grandest restaurant in Baton Rouge and broadly instructed the waitress to, "Fry me a steak."


Like so many other thrilling aspects of Long’s career that don’t conform to Warren’s portrayal of him as a hick snake oil salesman, Warren’s novel doesn’t even attempt to relate this episode.


Long started a national grassroots campaign called “Every Man A King” that the country’s impoverished dispossessed could join by sending in ten cents. Using mass-marketing techniques he had perfected in Louisiana, he coined the motto “A Chicken in Every Pot and a Car in Every Garage.” His national campaign was effective enough to scare the dickens out of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert Penn Warren and the rest of the American élite. He promised to wrest power from their grip, centralize it in himself and form the core of an American cult of personality more closely resembling the other nationalist strongmen of his time than anything experienced in the Anglo Saxon world. In this, Louisiana, with its Creole and French Napoleonic dynamic, had less in common with other American regions than with the spooky voodoo regions of the Caribbean.


It was the promise of this nasty regional mélange that he intended to impose on society until he was stopped short by a bullet fired from the gun of a rich man’s son, who was insulted that his father, a respected society doctor, had been coarsely sacked by Long from his health care administrator’s job for incompetence. The assassin himself was promptly dispatched in a volley of gunshots by Long’s security detail.


This high drama was beyond the writing talents of Robert Penn Warren, whose book portrays Huey Long as more than a vaguely interesting regional curiosity instead of the deeply compelling political force of American history that he deserves to be. Someday (but not soon) this country may have a Shakespeare to give Long the historical and cultural significance he so richly deserves, more akin to Richard III than the scheming country bumpkin he is currently portrayed to be.


Without the pressure he felt from Huey Long breathing down his neck from the left, Roosevelt might never have felt compelled to push through social programs like Social Security that have continuing impact on our lives today.


For this writer personally, Huey Long was living proof that you can rise to prominence in this country without the overt or tacit approval of the country’s entrenched interests. He proved that you can go out on a limb and beat the odds. Whether one agrees with his world view or not, Huey Long was a great American who deserves to be studied in depth and emulated, not subjected to the mind-numbing interpretation assigned to him by the current brain dead crop of Hollywood auteurs.


Like so many fantastically talented Americans who have been written out of history by the ongoing “Ministry of Truth” arbiters of culture, who dictate our taste according to their whims, Huey Long will someday be recognized for his genius and audacity.

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Posted on 9/24/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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