Huey Long Shot Dead: Louisiana Populist Silenced

A young man in a white linen suit stepped from behind a marble pillar in the Louisiana State Capitol building on the night of September 8, 1935, and shot Senator Huey Long at point-blank range. Long, the most powerful and polarizing political figure in Depression-era America, was struck by a single bullet that passed through his abdomen. He died two days later at the age of 42. His alleged assassin, Dr. Carl Weiss, a 29-year-old Baton Rouge ophthalmologist, was immediately gunned down by Long's bodyguards, who fired at least 61 bullets into his body. Long had built the most complete political machine in American history, controlling virtually every lever of government in Louisiana from the governor's mansion to the smallest parish school board. Elected governor in 1928 and then U.S. senator in 1932, he used taxation of Standard Oil and other corporations to fund an ambitious program of public works that built roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools across one of the poorest states in the nation. His "Share Our Wealth" program, which proposed capping personal fortunes and guaranteeing every family a minimum income, attracted millions of followers nationwide and made him a potential challenger to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. The circumstances of Long's assassination remain contested. The official account holds that Dr. Weiss shot Long because of a political grievance involving Weiss's father-in-law, Judge Benjamin Pavy, whom Long was working to gerrymander out of his judgeship. But some investigators have argued that Weiss may have only punched Long and that the fatal bullet actually came from one of Long's own bodyguards in the chaotic fusillade that followed. The bodyguards' destruction of evidence and the 61 bullets in Weiss's body made a definitive forensic reconstruction impossible. Long's death removed from American politics a figure who defied conventional categorization. He was simultaneously a champion of the poor, a corrupt authoritarian, a genuine reformer, and a demagogue, and the programs he built in Louisiana, including the free textbooks, improved hospitals, and expanded Louisiana State University, outlasted the machine that created them. Roosevelt privately called Long one of the two most dangerous men in America, alongside General Douglas MacArthur.