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
