All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [277]
At the age of twenty-one, Huey entered upon his mission. He had, he was later to say, come down the steps of the courthouse where he had stood before the Supreme Court of Louisiana to be formally to the bar, “running for office.” He had had a minimal education – bad schooling in the town of Winnfield, one year at the University of Oklahoma, and one year, of the three-year course, in the Law School of Tulane University in New Orleans. But from childhood, like Lincoln, Mark Twain, and other notable American autodidacts, he had read whatever books he could lay hand to in his unbookish world, and he never forgot anything he read and never failed to reflect on it. He knew the Bible well – as the myth requires – Shakespeare. A favorite play was, in fact, Julius Caesar. Along with the novels of Balzac, Scott, Hugo, Dickens and Cooper, he read the autobiography of that perfect egotist Cellini, and biographies of Napoleon and, again, Caesar. Beyond books, he had studied human nature on the streets of the little courthouse town of Winnfield, and in the hard school of door-to-door selling (as a boy he boasted that he could sell anything to anybody).
Now, as a man, he was brash to a high degree, boiling with energy and boundless ambition, with his sights already set on noting else that the White House. He knew law, enough at least to make him rich at an early age, not merely what he had gleaned from the scattering of courses at Tulane, but all that his steel-trap mind seized in a year of ferociously self-disciplined cramming with time out for little beyond eating and sleeping. He was a wit, a deliberate vulgarian, a crusader and a redeemer, an orator capable of high style or low, a philosopher of politics, and an amoral schemer. He was, in short, a creature of contradictions, but every item fell into its logical place in his manic drive toward power. He was the perfect political animal.
The world of Louisiana was the perfect place for the perfect political animal. Here, in the “banana republic of the United States,” as it has been termed, political maneuvering was regarded as a sporting event, and even the politician steeped in corruption might be regarded, he had humor and style, as more of a folk hero than a public menace. At the same time, in the upper reaches of society, politics presented a façade of respectability, for the real power, for many generations, had rested in the hands of a tight oligarchy of rich and sometimes well-born, and even well-meaning, planters, merchants and corporation lawyers. The state was their fief, lock, stock and barrel, and by divine dispensation. Roads were foul, schools farcical, illiteracy a national scandal, per capita income abysmal and social services nonexistent, but the oligarchs had always been able to buy off or blunt the occasional demagogue or reformer who sought to exploit, or to remedy, the situation.
Huey Pierce Long was not, however, a mere demagogue or a mere reformer. He saw the world of Louisiana steadily and saw it whole, and he saw it in the harsh light of the immediacy. He was without illusion or sentiment. He wasted no time on the standard demagogic appeals to the Lost Cause, the dogma of White Supremacy, or the sanctity of Southern Womanhood. He had even less time for the rhetoric of the reformer who put his trust on the goodness of human nature or the efficacy of unassisted virtue. The role of the prophet unarmed never held any attraction for him.
The oligarchs of Louisiana were the natural prey of the young man who came down the courthouse steps running for office. They, for all their experience of power, were the dupes of illusion: they believed in all the big words, old ideas and rituals of their world, and, most fatally of all, believed that their world would never change. They could not see a fact before the face, the main fact not visible to their