Huey Long
 Huey Long      ( politician, maverick, Politician/Premature deaths) | |
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| Born | Huey Pierce Long Jr. August 30, 1893 Winnfield, Louisiana, United States |
| Died | September 10, 1935 (Age 42) Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States |
| Victim of | •  assassination•  Internal Revenue Service•  FDR |
| Alma mater | Tulane University |
| Children | • Rose McConnell Long McFarland •  Russell B. Long• Palmer Reid Long |
| Spouse | Rose McConnell Long |
| Party | Democratic |
| Relatives | • George S. Long • Earl Long • Blanche Long • Gillis Long • Speedy O. Long • Swords Lee |
Huey Pierce Long Jr., nicknamed "The Kingfish", was a maverick American politician who was governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and United States senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935 just as he was about to run for president A Democrat, he chastised the two parties for being carbon copies of each other.
Contents
Official narrative
His page on Wikipedia was a featured article on 9 September 2021.
Foreign policy
While concentrating on domestic economic issues, he on occasion of the Chaco War (1932-35) attested in a Senate speech that Standard Oil had corrupted the Bolivian government and organized the war and that Wall Street orchestrated American foreign policy in Latin America.[1] This speech and others established Long as one of the most ardent isolationists in the Senate. He further argued that American involvement in the Spanish–American War and the First World War had been deadly mistakes conducted on behalf of Wall Street.[2][3] Consequently, Long demanded the immediate independence of the Philippines, which the United States had occupied since 1898.[4] He also opposed American entry into the World Court.[5]
Punitive tax investigation
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had Long's finances investigated by the Internal Revenue Service in 1934.[6] Although they failed to link Long to any illegality, some of his lieutenants were charged with income tax evasion.[7]Roosevelt's son, Elliott, would later note that in this instance, his father "may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution".[8]
Assassination
A month after declaring that he would run for US president, Long was shot by a "lone nut" gunman, the young doctor Carl Weiss. He was not killed outright and prompt medical attention might have saved his life.[9]
Donald Jeffries describes how
Much as we would see nearly thirty years later when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the evidence in the Long murder was horribly mishandled. The gun allegedly used to shoot him was not subject to normal chain-of-possession protocol. The bullet that killed him was never produced as evidence. There were no X-rays of Long, and no autopsy was conducted. The closest the authorities came to an investigation was the coroner's inquest, which consisted primarily of handpicked testimony gathered by the district attorney, one of Long's many political opponents. A plan initially introduced into the Louisiana state legislature to independently investigate the assassination was canceled, according to Long's aide Gerald L. K. Smith, due to pressure from Roosevelt.
In 1986, journalist Ed Reed examined the medical procedures performed at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital operating room, and claimed the doctors had removed a second bullet from Long's body and never reported it, while leaving the other inside. Reed tracked down Merle Welsh, the funeral director for both Long and Weiss, who told him one of the surgeons had come to the funeral home that night and taken a bullet out. One of the surgeons was notorious anti-Long Dr. Henry McKowen, who had recently remarked, If I ever give Huey an anesthetic, I will put him to sleep for good [...] Another doctor, Long political appointee Arthur Vidrine, remarked after the surgery that, It was nothing. It was just a perforation of the intestines.
There are several theories about who was really behind the assassination of Huey Long. An increasingly popular one holds that Weiss was a patsy, set up to take a punch at the Kingfish, which his bodyguards used as an excuse to not only fire some thirty bullets into him, but to shoot Long as well. Regardless, the fact is the most outspoken proponent of redistributing the wealth in this nation's history, a man who fought big oil, the Federal Reserve and the big banks, and Wall Street, was murdered at the age of forty-two, a month after announcing his candidacy for the presidency, as well as asserting on the floor of the United States Senate that powerful forces were plotting to assassinate him.[10]
References
- ↑ Gillette (1970), pp. 297–98.
- ↑ Brinkley (1983) [1982], pp. 150–52.
- ↑ Sanson (2006), p. 275.
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20201224200247/https://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/APA/Historical-Essays/Exclusion-and-Empire/The-Philippines/
- ↑ Brinkley (1983), Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: p. 152.
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000535/https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-irs-scandals/factbox-irss-rich-history-of-scandals-political-abuse-idUSBRE94F16V20130516
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20200626100221/https://www.americanheritage.com/fdr-and-kingfish
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000538/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/irs-witch-hunts-tea-party-history-mother-jones/
- ↑ http://www.greanvillepost.com/2016/10/03/encyclopedia-of-domestic-assassinations/#Long
- ↑ Donald Jeffries Survival of the Richest page 81
