The Louisiana “Kingfish” deployed the National Guard to exert power over his political enemies in New Orleans. It’s not history we want to repeat. The post Trump’s Municipal Takeover? Huey Long Did It First appeared first on Washington Monthly.
While President Donald Trump has the technical power specific to Washington, D.C. to declare an emergency and temporarily commandeer the local police force for 30 days, he has also signaled his intention to blow past that statutory limitation, as well as exert federal police power in other cities despite lacking the same emergency authority.
Is such an authoritarian power grab even possible in America? We’ve seen it before, in Huey Long’s Louisiana.
From 1928 to 1935, Long accumulated unilateral power over the state while serving first as Governor and then as United States Senator. His most audacious power grabs happened after he was sworn in as Senator in 1932 and nominally left the governorship. While he was elected to the Senate in 1930, he left the seat vacant for over a year so he could finish his gubernatorial term, and elect a compliant successor and like-minded state legislators.
You can’t read descriptions of Long today without seeing the parallels to Trump. For example, the final volume of Arthur Schlesinger’s The Age of Roosevelt trilogy, The Politics of Upheaval, focusing on Long, is titled “The Messiah of the Rednecks.” (His word, not mine!)
Long, like Trump, campaigned with populist rhetoric before embracing monarchical labels. “Every man a king, no one wears a crown,” was Long’s mantra. But once in office, he routinely called himself “The Kingfish,” after a character in the minstrel radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy. Soon after Trump was elected for a second term, he proclaimed on social media that New York City’s new congestion pricing system is “dead,” followed by “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
Schlesinger quoted Long’s own brother Julius who concluded, “He politicized everything in the State that could be politicized … There has never been such an administration of ego and pomposity since the days of Nero.” Perhaps that was true, until Trump.
Like Trump, Long knew how clownish behavior could appeal to the public and keep opponents off-balance. “All the world loved a character,” Schlesinger wrote, imagining Long’s inner monologue, “might it not be that the disguise of comedy could make people overlook or forgive much else? ” Thus, Long “began to cultivate a public reputation as a buffoon.”
Long built his political base on working-class white voters, and what he delivered for them was less than advertised. Schlesinger acknowledged that under Long, “schools, hospitals, roads and public services in general were better than ever before,” but in Louisiana, that was a low bar to clear. Schlesinger also observed:
… like an ancient emperor or a modern dictator, he specialized in monuments. He sprinkled the state with roads and buildings. But he did little or nothing to raise wages for the workers, to stop child labor, to reduce the work day, to support trade unions, to provide pensions for the aged, to furnish relief to the unemployed, even to raise teacher’s salaries. He left behind no record of social or labor legislation.
This all sounds very similar to Trump, except for the part about improving public services.
And Trump’s exertion of emergency powers over the D.C. police department with the help of the National Guard, on the specious grounds that the city was awash in crime, is reminiscent of when Long sent the National Guard to New Orleans under an imposition of “limited martial law.” Long claimed he had to “free the city of New Orleans from the ring of grafters now fattening themselves on its vice and gambling,” but he was really trying to settle a score with the New Orleans Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley and extinguish a remaining bastion of political opposition.
Both Long and Walmsley were Democrats—Louisiana was effectively a one-party state—but Walmsley was in the faction of “Old Regulars” that Long was seeking to supplant. Earlier in the year Walmsley, whom Long typically addressed in public as “Turkey Head,” won re-election over a Long-backed candidate, piercing the perception of Long’s statewide invincibility.
Remember, in 1934, Long was not the Governor anymore. He was a Senator. But for all practical purposes he was running a statewide dictatorship and his gubernatorial successor was just a figurehead. On July 30, an initial deployment of 50 National Guardsmen broke the lock on the Office of the Registrar of Voters and took over the building. An incredulous Walmsley demanded that the general on the ground explain who authorized the operation. According to the book Huey Long by historian T. Harry Williams:
The general said merely that he was acting on the governor’s orders. Not until later that night did Walmsley get his answer. It came in the form of a proclamation announcing limited martial law in the city and declaring that the militia had occupied the office only to guarantee that there would be an honest registration for the coming election. Observers noted with interest that although the proclamation was signed by [Governor Oscar] Allen, it had been issued from Senator Long’s suite in the Roosevelt Hotel.
The initial stated justification was election integrity, ahead of a September primary election for several state and federal offices. (Being effectively a one-party state, the primary all but determined the general election winner.) Long claimed city officials were going to illegally purge voters from the rolls and so the Guard needed to protect the books. But Williams noted that Long’s argument was weak because the registrar was a state official and city could not get their hands on the books without a court order.
Long’s calling out of the Guard paralleled his efforts to take control of the New Orleans police. Several weeks earlier Long quarterbacked a legislative blitz that vastly expanded the power of state government. One of the bills took the power of the New Orleans police department away from the municipal government and into the hands of commission made up of representatives from the state’s university and business communities, though a judge quickly declared the law to be unconstitutional. With Long unable to directly take control of the New Orleans police, he quickly brought in the Guard, arguing the move was necessary not just to protect the election, but to clean up the city.
After Walmsley received the proclamation, he publicly lashed out at Long on the radio, calling him a “gangster” and a “madman” for instigating the document. Long, also on the radio, responded in kind. As described by Williams:
He depicted the controversy as one between the forces of reform and vice. “What had been Turkey Head’s first thoughts when he heard of the movement of the troops? Huey asked. Had Walmsley thought of his soul or of his Maker? ‘No, here’s what he did. He sent his police running down into the red-light district to warn the inmates to hide.’”
The Mayor hastily swore in 400 special deputies to the police and sent armed officers outside the registrars office, though the opposing forces just looked at each other for days without spilling bloodshed.
In August, Long engineered a special state legislative session to grab more power, including the power for the governor to summon the Guard for any reason without judicial review, and the power for state election boards to designate as many deputies as needed to maintain order on election days. The session also established a state committee to investigate vice in New Orleans, and fast—before the September 11 election.
Public hearings on vice, broadcast on radio, began on September 1, and achieved their political purpose. “It had brought the trail of corruption close to Walmsley and the city machine,” explained Williams, “It had demonstrated that vice was prevalent and had put Walmsley and his associates in the position of seeming to defend it. And it had thoroughly intimidated the ‘vice vote,’ the people who worked for the vice interests, an estimated seven thousand persons.”
To further intimidate voters ahead of the election, Long poured National Guardsmen into the city. The New York Times reported at the time:
By virtue of the twenty-seven laws passed by the Legislature in special session last month, Senator Huey P. Long became the de facto dictator of this State at noon today and immediately began acting the part. Between 2,000 and 2,500 militiamen—the entire strength of the Louisiana National Guard—were quartered within the city tonight, awaiting the next move of the Senator in his effort to crush the political faction of Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley and win the primary election next Tuesday.
And win the election is what Long’s slate did.
With his power fully consolidated, Long continued to undermine and humiliate Walmsley, ramming more legislation through the state legislature stripping the mayor of his powers. The one thing Long wanted but didn’t live to see was Walmsley’s resignation, and that’s only because Long was assassinated in September 1935. While Walmsley resisted the pressure to resign before Long’s death, he acquiesced the following year, and mayoral powers were thankfully later restored.
Why did Long do this? Williams concluded, “There is only one possible explanation of Huey’s action: he thought that by a crude display of power he could awe his opposition in New Orleans, probably in the coming election and perhaps permanently. Awing his enemies had become a preoccupation with him[.]” Sound familiar?
That Long did this when he was not even in possession of gubernatorial executive powers is an unsettling reminder of what Trump may be able to do after his term is completed. Many of us have anxiety about an unconstitutional third Trump term, but a more realistic, if still unlikely concern, is a Trump who can leverage his hold over Republican base voters to pressure a future Republican president, Republican legislators, and even Republican judicial appointees despite being out of office.
The lengths Long went to exert authoritarian control over New Orleans is an essential reference point. Already we are seeing MAGA-minded politicians as well as myopic pundits rationalize Trump’s actions as technically legal, yet Trump himself has already signaled he wants to go beyond what’s technically legal in D.C. and elsewhere. The Long example shows the danger of giving a budding authoritarian the benefit of the doubt. It may seem like it can’t happen here, but it has.
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