Women in the background? Ellen Kelly

For some years now historians have been trying to recover the stories of the forgotten groups of history, groups that have been marginalised by law or society and so have had their stories untold. These groups include women, blacks, native groups, gays and other minorities that for one reason or another have gone under the collective societal radar. These new histories have been invaluable in giving a fuller, richer and truer picture of societies.

One of the problems with this however is the question of material. If people are ignored by society, or taken for granted, or treated as hostile or threatening elements, then the evidence for their lives can be much slimmer, better hidden and can take some ferreting out, or in some cases, assumptions must be made. Which is all part of the process.

But it was with some surprise I saw Grantlee Keiza’s book Mrs Kelly: The Astonishing story of Ned Kelly’s mother” was such a thick book, over five hundred pages in hardback. I’ve long thought the women in Ned Kelly’s life needed more attention as both the inspiration for, and great supporters of what is known as the Kelly Outbreak. This was a period of two years from 1878 when a policeman named Fitzpatrick tried to arrest Ned and his brother on his own which went terribly pear-shaped for him, to the Stringybark Creek murders, where Kelly and his gang killed three of the policemen who were now searching for them, to Glenrowan, where three of the gang were killed in a day long clash with police, and through to Kelly’s hanging in November 1880.  The recent Australian musical Ned! gave the women more of their due, and here I thought was a book that would do the same. The thickness of the book was encouraging. Mrs Kelly outlived her most famous child by forty years. What had she done in that time?, I had wondered. Here I thought was the book to tell me.

Nope. Mrs Kelly does give a much fuller  story of the early life of Ellen Quinn, whose family were free immigrants from Ireland. We have her relationship with her father and his family, which has ramifications even after her marriage to Red Kelly, an alcoholic ex-convict.  Despite their hard work, they end up at the bottom of the colonial society, and in Gretta, a small town that is a den of thieves; horse thieves mainly. That she and her children ended up criminals to lesser and greater degrees is hardly surprising. After her husband’s death, she takes up with two men in turn, both of whom get her pregnant, and both of whom abandon her. George King at least married her and  lived with her for some years, something Bill Frost didn’t bother with. In all, she had twelve children and the misfortune to outlive all but four of them. 

But once she goes to prison in 1788, in the aftermath of the ‘Fitzpatrick Incident’,  the bulk of the book tells us the story - again - of the Kelly Outbreak. We hear bits of life inside for a woman with six-month old child, but not much. Seems it would be useful and interesting to hear more of life in a women’s prison in the late 19th Century but no. Kieza goes though the Ned Kelly story again without new useful information or insight. Michael Kennedy, one of the policemen murdered by Kelly, by all accounts a decent man, gets a bigger role here, which is refreshing I admit. Keiza seems to take delight in recounting everyone who made a disparaging remark about the Kelly women, especially Kate, famed in her time both as a beauty and a wonderful horserider, and one of the Kelly Gang’s most loyal supporters in word and action. But Keiza finds someone who found her unattractive and quotes him. That’s putting the women to the forefront.

But the worst is that after Ned’s death, the next four decades are disposed of in a little over fifty pages. And it’s not just Ellen Kelly. Ned’s hangman’s story gets wrapped up. Phew! That was keeping me awake. His sisters, his cousins, policemen and members of the judiciary, all within fifty pages. Like  any other book about Ned Kelly, the writer loses a lot of interest once Ned is dead. Which is fine if you’ve called your book Ned Kelly. If you’ve called it Mrs Kelly, it’s unforgivable.

Staring into the abyss: Looking back on some recent history

I once read a article criticising George Lucas. I know, I’m as shocked at you are. The author took exception to Yoda’s lines, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to anger. Anger leads to suffering.” He summed up his objection to this by saying no-one ever hated Hitler so much they became a Nazi. (Never mind that Yoda never makes the link from fear to the Dark Side complete. Suffering leads to the Dark Side? Or what? Damn you Yoda, I need closure.)

Whoever the writer is, he may now have to concede Yoda was on to something. I did study 20th century German history, including the rise of Hitler to power, as part of my Arts degree. That was some time ago, but when people kept insisting Trump was exactly the same as Hitler, I kept wondering if they knew something I didn’t. To be frank, I was fairly sure they were wrong and engaging in hyperbole (once again, shocked as you are) but I thought I’d better check again, just to be sure.

So I listened to Richard J Evan’s The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany via Audible.  This is the first volume of his Third Reich Trilogy which has been acclaimed as the best general history of the Third Reich extant. To sum up, I was right. The differences between Hitler’s climb to power via multiple election campaigns  and Trump becoming President almost on a whim, and the vastly different histories of Germany and the United States, are too many to go into here. Read the book. One major difference is that Hitler was able to destroy the Weimar Republic in large part because many of the other parties, Right and Left wing, were committed to doing the same thing, and previous administrations had already greatly reduced the role and power of the parliament long before Hitler put it out of its misery. But I digress.

What did strike me as having similarities to today’s politics were some of the Nazi tactics. The SA brownshirts were well-known for beating up opponents in the streets or at their meetings. (As were the Communists.) And if the Nazis weren’t able to prevent speeches other public events  being run by political opponents on the grounds of public safety (mainly fear of the fights that would break out orchestrated by the Nazis) they would attend the event and with shouting and other methods make it impossible for the event to continue.

Let’s see: beating up opponents, preventing speeches on grounds of public safety, and shouting down speakers. Who does this these days?

Mainly it seems to be people who don’t like Trump. The so-called Antifa (Anti-Fascist) movement actually appear in masks and beat up Trump supporters. At least the Brownshirts showed their faces. Students who consider themselves liberals ie those who respect other people’s opinions and beliefs even if they differ to their own, shout and disrupt and in some cases physically threaten speakers they don't like to stop them speaking on their campus. They have built barriers and lit fires to stop people from going in to listen. And that’s if the university administration haven’t already withdrawn the invitation to speak on grounds of public safety. 

So Yoda has been in some way vindicated, and George Lucas revealed as a writer of surprising prescience. There are people who hate Trump so much they have become fascist in order to stop him. To quote Christopher Booker, "Evil men don't get up in the morning saying, 'I'm going to do evil.' They say 'I'm going to make the world a better place.'" Or to quote Terrence Rattigan, "The trouble with being on the side of right, as one sees it, is that one often finds oneself with such questionable allies."

The old sow that eats her young: surviving Ireland

The history of twentieth century Ireland is a complex one, with wars, terrorism, partition, combined with strong social conservatism, religious oppression and economic depression, yet coupled with a strong and vibrant culture and economic revivals, all culminating in a peace process that is still playing out.

Sebastian Barry is fascinated with this history, particularly the turnaround from 1916-1921, when via wars, terrorism and negotiation, a British Colony became a divided country and loyalties were overturned and vilified. Barry’s McNulty brothers of Sligo, Eneas, Jack and Tom, all live through these times and later decades. How they do so, the effects on their lives and the lives of those around them, form the core of three of Barry’s novels, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), The Secret Scripture (2008), and The Temporary Gentleman (2014).

The three novels do not operate as a trilogy in the traditional sense of telling one story in chronological order. Rather we get stories that by their nature overlap, sometimes illuminating each other. It’s more a mesh than a thread. I read them in reverse order of publishing. In reading The Temporary Gentleman, there was a reference to his sister-in-law being confined to an isolated hut and I thought, what’s that story? I was delighted to discover there was a novel that told it: The Secret Scripture. Having read that, I wanted to learn more about the oldest brother Eneas who could only visit his family furtively. So they can be read in any order. And they encourage rereading of each other. We know people remember the same events differently and Barry has captured that very well. 

The narrative style of each book is different.  Eneas’s story is told in third-person. The Temporary Gentlemen is told as a journal, middle brother Jack trying to work out the steps whereby he ends up a remnant of the British Empire living in Africa’s Gold Coast. The Secret Scripture is two journals, one from Tom’s wife, Rosemary, now around a century old and living in an asylum, and that of her doctor, William Grene. 

Both Eneas and Tom suffer from having taken ‘the king’s shilling’. A stint in the British Merchant Marine during the WWI sees Eneas ostracised on his return home. With little other option, he takes a job in the Royal Irish Constabulary and that puts him on an IRA death list. It is his best friend from childhood who is designated to warn him off. For the rest of his life, Eneas is on the run, a wanderer like his namesake. 

Glamorous Jack ends up in the British Navy in WWII, but his main problem is his drinking, which affects not only him and his career but has a devastating affect on his wife Mai and their children. Only in exile, writing his journal, does he start to realise that he may be the bad guy, the person responsible for all that has gone wrong in his life - and his beloved wife's.

Tom also marries a beautiful woman (Barry thinks being beautiful in Ireland is a forerunner of tragedy). Haunted by memories of her childhood, her father, rebels and soldiers of the civil war, Rosemary breaks the social mores of Sligo and ends up rejected by her husband and condemned by the local priest. She is imprisoned first in a lonely shack then the asylum. As she tries to remember events from nearly a century ago, her doctor is trying to do the same, finding old records and piecing together her story. With mental illness in her family, plus decades of confinement, Rosemary is not a reliable narrator, but then, neither is her doctor or priest.

Barry has taken fragments of his family’s history, and turned them into gripping narratives. I would be interested to know how much detail of the other stories Barry had worked out when he wrote the first in 1998, as they work together well. His writing is poetic and lyrical. The endings of all three tend towards the sudden, and I’m not convinced they entirely work, but these are still three excellent novels.

And the mesh is widening. In New Orleans, Eneas wonders if he should stay in the States, perhaps find his great uncle who emigrated there. That uncle's story has now been told in Days without End (2016), a novel set in the US Civil War. Like The Secret Scripture, it has been awarded the Costa Book of the Year. Another visit to the McNulty family beckons.

"Will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?": Lives of the Beach Boys

Did you hear? Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his lyrics, a decision I’m still not convinced by. I’m not sure how comfortable Bob is with it either, given his reluctance to go and collect the thing. I know a trip to Sweden with a dinner, gold medal and a lot of money sounds horrid but it can’t be that bad.

But I suspect part of his reluctance is part of my discomfort; lyrics aren’t poetry, and don’t operate on their own. They aren’t written to be read or recited but rather sung or listened to. Which isn’t to say a good lyricist isn’t as skilful or artistic wordsmith as any other writer. But for a lyricist words and music, as the old Jo Jo Zep song said, go together. There have been a number of books about music or lyricists that have the words printed but the only way you can really read them is to have the tune in your head as you do so. Otherwise they lose a lot of their life. And while there is no Nobel Prize for music, there’s none for mathematics, art, architecture, engineering, and a whole lot of other human endeavours as well, and it doesn't make them less important.

The interplay between lyric and melody is crucial.  Tim Rice in his autobiography quotes the first verse of his lyric for the tune that became “I don’t know how to love him,” which he maintains would have killed that song dead had it ever been released, despite the melody.  All together now: 

I love the Kansas morning

Kansas dawn comes to greet me

Kansas winds

Shift and sigh

I can see you now, we’re flying high

Kansas love of mine

(It’s a prison song, a man in a jail cell in Maine lamenting his girl back home. Really.) On a more worrying note, George Gershwin’s songs are sung less and less, due largely to his brother Ira’s sometimes twee lyrics, despite the beauty of the melodies. Words and music go together.

Which brings me in a very roundabout way to two autobiographies I have read lately from two of the founding Beach Boys, Mike Love and Brian Wilson, both released in 2016 within weeks of each other. Mike Love is the front man of the band, one of their lyricists, and still goes about with a band called ‘The Beach Boys’, although he is only original one there.

Brian Wilson who wrote, arranged and produced the Beach Boys music, also tours but with ‘The Brian Wilson Band’ as Love has the legal rights to the name. It’s a long story.

The two books couldn’t display a greater contrast. Love’s is chronological, detailed, sometimes to the point of tedium, and I have to say, aimed at scoring and settling points. He feels his part of the Beach Boys’ success has been undervalued both financially and artistically. And to be fair to the man, he’s right. His lyrics on surf and girls was one of the features of their early albums and a big part of their appeal to people who had never seen the beach, leading to their worldwide success. As lead vocalist and front man, he was a dynamic performer. His name was kept off many of the singles for which he was lyricist (by Murray Wilson) and he had to sue to get his rightful recognition and money. Despite his practice and championing of transcendental meditation, he clearly has trouble letting go of years of resentment and anger and it seeps throughout the book.

Wilson’s books is more amorphous, drifting from present to past, in no particular order.  He can go from a description of his current family life to a session of Pet Sounds almost in a sentence. The oldest son of an abusive father, he has famously struggled with mental health and substance abuse issues, and these things affect him still. He finds it difficult to talk about his father Murray, the man who gave him music, who was crucial to the band's early years, but who also beat him and belittled him. His therapist Gene Landy saved his life, but also drugged him, abused him and exploited him. Yet here Wilson is, still writing, still performing but also aware of what his survival has cost. The book can be generalised at times, but at others picks up details and stories that may otherwise have been overlooked. He’s not the most reliable narrator, which he is aware of, but the writing is never confusing, and throughout displays a generosity of spirit that is lacking in Love’s work. 

Love is defensive. Although he is open about his own shortcomings as husband and as a father, as a band member he did no wrong. All those stories you heard about his criticisms of Pet Sounds or SMiLE? “Don’t fuck with the formula”? Never happened. Not one of them. Ever. And so much of the Beach Boys music would never have happened without his magic touch. Just a word, a minor suggestion and near disaster turns into commercial magic. I think he is overplaying his hand. He is also trapped in that idea that good work is commercial work, otherwise it's not good. He's not alone there.

Love’s greatest problem is that he is a classic Alpha male in a situation where he must play second fiddle. While his lyrics work in the main part, that is all they do. They don’t get taken out of the song and quoted, they way Dylan’s do. Or The Beatles. He is a workaday lyricist, successful for sure but no more. Nor as he got older did he ever really attempt to move on from his milieu of beaches and girls. Sometimes it worked - “Do it again”, “Kokomo” - other times it was embarrassing, tending towards creepy - “Hey little tomboy”. Love’s attempt at being political , “Student Demonstration Time”, is likewise painful to listen to, and his song about transcendental mediation oddly jarring. I have read some of his solo work is quite good but I haven’t listened to it.

The greater talent in the band was of course Brian Wilson. His melodies, his harmonies, and his arrangements are some of the greatest in the pop era. What still draws people to the Beach Boys is this music, sometimes in spite of the lyrics. “Don’t Worry Baby” is a stunningly beautiful song - about drag racing. They lyrics here are by Roger Christian, who wrote all the car song lyrics. Other lyricists include Tony Asher (Pet Sounds), Van dyke Parks (SMiLE), himself and other band members. Another big hit "Sloop John B" was a cover of a folk song. As he got older, he pushed himself as a musician, which lead to seeking out new collaborators. Some of his most beautiful work was not commercial but was genuine artistic expression.

In short, Brian Wilson’s successes were not limited to his work with Mike Love. But Mike Love’s success is limited to his work with Brian Wilson, and he resents it.  (Another exception here: "Kokomo" was the Beach Boys’ only number one hit for which Brian Wilson neither wrote or produced.) But at their height of commercial success, Wilson and Love were the core of the Beach Boy's writing. The biggest hit for the band, "Good Vibrations", was a Love lyric to Wilson's music and arrangement. Mike Love has been undervalued for his contribution to the band, and unfairly characterised as the Villain to Wilson' Hero. That said, I think the main difference between these two autobiographies is instructive:  Love admits to Wilson’s talents, while Wilson champions Love’s.

"All the live long day" Working the railway

For most people today the train is just a means of getting to work. From our suburban station, we ride in increasingly crowded carriages until we get to the city stations, and shuffle off onto crowded platforms and up uncertain escalators and out of the station and off to wherever we work. We don't think about the trains all day until work is over and we hope it's running on time and we can repeat the procedure and get home as quick as we can. Aluminium, hopefully air-conditioned, rubbish on the floor, graffiti on the windows, rubbish and graffiti on the seats, they are a means to an end and nothing more.

And yet, if from inside a train late at night, you see the yellow light on an empty platform, perhaps a young couple waiting together, you are reminded of the romance the rails once held, and sometimes still do. Watch a busy city station when a steam engine happens to pull through. Voices drop, heads turn, and together we watch this archaic vehicle make its way noisily, belching black smoke, hissing steam, rattling on the rails, and all we see is an elegant survivor from a simpler, more innocent time, and there in the chaos of a modern city, the station becomes a sudden pool of yearning. Then the train goes and modernity floods us in its wake.

Trains were the harbingers of modern life. Now we could travel great distances in reasonable time and reasonable comfort. People who had never travelled more than ten miles from their home could travel across countries, across continents. And many did, a whole world opening to the common person. Crops, livestock, and minerals could now be transported quickly and efficiently from deep inside a landmass and taken to the ports for transportation across the seas. Modern globalisation began with the rails.

Now we needed to know the time in other places. If a train left New York, say, at midday, when would it encounter the train from Chicago, which left at Chicago's midday?  Two metal behemoths driven by engines powered by high pressure steam heading towards each other with no idea of when or where they might meet  and no way to avoid each other if they did was clearly a recipe for disaster.  Time zones were introduced across the United States expressly to make sure everyone knew where trains were going to be at any time.

So the history of trains is not just adventure and romance. Making long distance travel relatively fast and convenient saw small towns, often self-contained communities,  become mere specks on the way to somewhere else, as goods could now come in from the big cities and the young people would go away. The death of many a small country town was heralded by their train station.

They have been the tools of oppression and control. The transcontinental railway of the United States brought the country together and made it easier to drive the Native Americans off their lands. The trains of India, now a backbone of the country, were put in place by British companies to take their produce out of the country and get armed troops to trouble spots as quickly as possible. The train timetables of 1914 made war inevitable as armies were mobilised via rail even before war was declared, with no way to bring them back. And how can we forget the millions shovelled into trains and freighted to the death camps of Nazi Germany, through stations with flowerbeds and painted clocks that no 'passenger' would see twice? Or the long tracks across Russia to take their internal enemies to isolation and death in the gulags? Even now, China has built an "impossible" rail line into Tibet through the natural border of the Himalayas, an act described by the Dalai Lama as 'cultural genocide'.

Tom Zoellner in his book Train: Riding the rails that created the modern world - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief covers well the many facets of railway history, and the train's continuing economic and social impact. There is a good potted history of trains, (the Americans called it the 'railway', the British the 'railroad', then at some point they swapped) then the rest of the book is taken up of his travels on long-distance trains, including going down the length of Britain, crossing Russia and the United States, through India, China, South America and the super fast trains of Japan.  Each chapter considered the purpose and history of these lines, and their future. Rail is still the most efficient and greenest way to transport heavy materials across country, even if governments are reluctant to spend money on the infrastructure. Perhaps one of the impacts of global warming will be a return to the trains on a greater scale. While the book isn't as enthralling as I had hoped, it is good. Perhaps to a more dedicated train man, there would be greater appeal.

As I've mentioned, I work on the trains in Melbourne Australia. Since the 90s, railway patronage has boomed from a long decline as people got tired of putting expensive petrol into cars to drive to difficult-to-find parking and paying through the nose. Government (not only Victoria's but everywhere; the long decline and sudden rise of passenger numbers was common throughout the first world) was slow to react, and tired facilities and other inefficiencies saw long delays and cancelled or overcrowded trains. Since I've been working, however, new trains continue to be bought and put into service, more services are running and are more on time, stations are being redeveloped, or new ones added, and level-crossings are disappearing, leading to a more efficient passenger service. Co-incidence? Perhaps… I'm not going to pretend everything's fine, but it is much better and continues to improve. People are voting with their feet and passenger numbers still rise.

I don't think we'll see another golden age of the railway. The luxury services are more expensive than flying, by quite a margin, and we all seem to have less time than ever. Attempts to put in fast trains between Sydney and Canberra, or other Australian cities, always come up against the barrier of cost versus benefit, perhaps rightly. Europasses and long rail trips are the stuff of holidays and backpacking, not of everyday life. But next time you're in the train, heading to work, wondering if they guy next to you even knows what deodorant is, try to listen to the rhythm of the wheels in their timeless pattern on steel, rock and wood,  and ponder the long history that you are part of, every time you ride.

Let the Trumpfish sound? The history of Huey P Long

It starts with a Democratic Party running a primary where 'the powerful politicos decided the results beforehand and controlled the voting by means both fair and foul", and whose candidate "ignored the rural and impoverished areas." It went into a campaign described "as amusing as it was depressing", and ended up elevating into public office "a man possessing neither culture nor refinement, a man whose every public or private act is offensive to good taste", a man "without a scintilla of respect for worthy womanhood."*

Louisiana state politics from 1928 to 1936 is not exactly a world away.

The man then was Huey P Long, Governor, Senator and Presidential candidate. He called himself the Kingfish, and the nickname stuck. For his admirers, and they ran into the tens of thousands in his home state and through the country, it spoke to his down to earth manner, his humour, his preparedness to get down and dirty if he needed to, and his slogan, Every man a king. To his enemies, who numbered about the same, it suggested a bottom feeder in a swamp, dangerous and difficult to catch.

He took Louisiana out of the dark ages in many ways. He built thousands of miles of roads, bridges over the Mississippi, gave free textbooks to all school children, expanded and improved the state university, and instituted literacy classes for adults. He did so through coercion, a wide system of patronage, extortion, bullying, kidnapping, nepotism (which didn't always work - his brother was one of his greatest opponents), almost bankrupting the state and making himself very rich indeed. He took control of the powerful Democratic Party machine, that tried and tried again to stop him for their preferred candidates, and made it his own. When he died he held operating power in almost every government institution the state of Louisiana had to offer. He was the nearest thing the United States so far has had to a fascist leader.

Huey P Long inspired art, Sinclair Lewis's "It can't happen here," the story of a home-grown American fascist leader, and Robert Penn Warren's "All the king's men" the story of a backwoods politician who turns from idealist to demagogue. Both novels have been turned into plays and Warren's twice into a film, once in 1949 to Academy-Award-winning effect, and again in 2006 to lesser effect. (Some acting is so bad, someone once said, only a great actor is capable of it; hello Sean Penn.) The art, it must be said, had no effect on him. (To be fair, he was mostly dead at the time.)

I first came across the Kingfish when I saw the second half of a Ken Burns documentary. At the time he reminded me of Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen who likewise took an economically backward state into the twentieth century by fair means and foul. But the Kingfish was Joh only more so. Both used the elite branches of the police service for political purposes, but Joh never set them on political opponents, brandishing their machine guns, forcing them out of buildings. Nor did Joh ever get into fistfights on the floor of parliament. Or kidnap anyone.

Long came to mind more recently for obvious reasons. People want to compare Trump to Hitler, largely because Hitler is one of the few people from history who is generally known. If you don't like someone's politics, there's no-one else to compare him to. It's easy, and generally unhelpful. But he reminded me of Long - the vitriolic attacks on opponents, the disdain for the press, the hatred by his enemies, the worship by his admirers, playing to the crowds, and the strong appeal to people who felt forgotten by a complacent government. And the abuse by his opponents of his followers. In Burns's documentary there is footage of a politician dismissing Long's appeal as merely to "the ignorant in distress", as if dismissing them with the former epithet meant you could ignore the latter. And in the end, Long was assassinated. People are already hoping the same will happen with Trump. Too often people opposed to violence and hate find both quite acceptable if aimed at someone they don't like. 

Long also built an enormous tower to his own memory. It's the Louisiana State Capitol and you can see it for miles as you drive towards Baton Rouge. It's ludicrous, 36 stories high, looking as though it's a New York skyscraper that got lost, 48 steps leading to the front door, each engraved with the name of a state in order of admittance to the union (Alaska and Hawaii since added to the top step), and marble sourced from around the world in the foyer. It cost $5 million dollars in Depression dollars. God knows what it would cost today. Facing it across the lawn is Long's grave, topped with a large monument, featuring a statue of Long staring at his Capitol. The guides like to tell you that the concrete monument was paid for by his opponents, to make sure he couldn't get out. (Worth doing the tour if you're in the area) So vanity - there's another common feature to the two men. (Also, as self-given nicknames go, 'The Kingfish' is much better than 'The Donald'. What does that even mean?)

But there are big differences between the two, and they're in Long's favour. Long was a dynamic speaker, both with prepared speeches and off the cuff. An opponent tried to appeal to the poor by talking about his childhood in bare feet. Long responded "I can go one better than that! I was born in bare feet!" Long was also extremely intelligent. He studied law for one year (of a three year course), missed most of his classes and failed his subjects. He insisted on sitting the bar exam however, and due to his own hard work and private study, passed. He later argued in the Supreme Court, where noted jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes praised his legal mind. (He often appointed himself state counsel while Governor, another way to line his own pocket.) This was also a product of his prodigious memory, which meant he remembered clients from his days as a salesman when campaigning, nor never let a slight go or an enemy unpunished. (Pettiness - that's something else they do have in common.) He worked fantastically hard travelling thousands of miles (even before he had improved the roads) into the poor and rural areas of the state and made them his own. James Thurber, the novelist, cartoonist and humorist, remembered his almost constant state of movement, even when 'relaxing' in his hotel room.

But the biggest difference is that Long knew how to run a party machine, government departments, and both houses of a legislature. Yes he did so corruptly, but as more than one enquiry found, that was business as usual in Louisiana, taken to the nth degree. Trump has no experience in this area at all. Even the General presidents, Grant and Eisenhower, who had never held public office, knew how to deal with massive organisations under astonishingly adverse conditions, while dealing with the quirks, varying skill levels and interpersonal squabbles of subordinates. I'm not sure what Trump brings to the table, except enormous self-belief. His own party don't like him and he has no legislative experience. He keeps talking of his business nous, but this seems spotty at best. Imagine a general arguing "I won a number of battles to be fair. Not the war, sure, and some of the other battles were pretty grim if I'm honest, but you know, some." So whatever he may want to do or not to do,  you have to query his ability to do so.

Huey P Long for all his considerable faults was fighting for the poor of his state, and did improve infrastructure and education. He lost sight of his ideals, and confused the means, acquiring all the power he could, for the end.   What is Donald Trump fighting for?  Most of the leading political analysts knew he could never win the election, so they can't tell us. We're getting four years to find out together.

*All quotations are from Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P Long,  by Richard D White Jr