All the king's men

To Justine and David Mitchell Clay

Introduction to the 1974 English Edition

In August 1946, one of my novels, _All the King's Men__, was published, and since I had lived in Louisiana during the last phase of the regime of Huey P. Long, and since the hero of my novel is a politician who, like Long, gests himself gu

After all these years I have little inclination to reopen old controversies about _All the King's Men__ – controversies which, certainly, could be of little interest to an English reader. But Long and the world he dominated provided the original stimulus for the writing of the novel, and did suggest some of the issues that emerge there. Furthermore, since Long and his world are so indigenously American, I should, perhaps, say something on that topic to the prospective English reader.

The life of Huey P. Long does not quite represent the classic American success story, but it is close enough to that to lend plausibility to the fiction he sedulously fostered. For example, though no born in the log in the log cabin mandatory for the myth, he was born in a log house – which, though commodious, could be conveniently for his political purposes. But Long was, indeed, reared in a thin-soiled back-country parish (as counties are called in Louisiana) where, even though by local standards his family was prosperous, he knew the sights and small of poverty; and he was clear-headed enough to sense early that, for all the respect the Long family might command in the parish of Wi

But middling was not for Huey P. Long. From the begi

At the age of twenty-one, Huey entered upon his mission. He had, he was later to say, come down the steps of the courthouse where he had stood before the Supreme Court of Louisiana to be formally to the bar, "ru

Now, as a man, he was brash to a high degree, boiling with energy and boundless ambition, with his sights already set on noting else that the White House. He knew law, enough at least to make him rich at an early age, not merely what he had gleaned from the scattering of courses at Tulane, but all that his steel-trap mind seized in a year of ferociously self-disciplined cramming with time out for little beyond eating and sleeping. He was a wit, a deliberate vulgarian, a crusader and a redeemer, an orator capable of high style or low, a philosopher of politics, and an amoral schemer. He was, in short, a creature of contradictions, but every item fell into its logical place in his manic drive toward power. He was the perfect political animal.

The world of Louisiana was the perfect place for the perfect political animal. Here, in the "banana republic of the United States," as it has been termed, political maneuvering was regarded as a sporting event, and even the politician steeped in corruption might be regarded, he had humor and style, as more of a folk hero than a public menace. At the same time, in the upper reaches of society, politics presented a façade of respectability, for the real power, for many generations, had rested in the hands of a tight oligarchy of rich and sometimes well-born, and even well-meaning, planters, merchants and corporation lawyers. The state was their fief, lock, stock and barrel, and by divine dispensation. Roads were foul, schools farcical, illiteracy a national scandal, per capita income abysmal and social services nonexistent, but the oligarchs had always been able to buy off or blunt the occasional demagogue or reformer who sought to exploit, or to remedy, the situation.

Huey Pierce Long was not, however, a mere demagogue or a mere reformer. He saw the world of Louisiana steadily and saw it whole, and he saw it in the harsh light of the immediacy. He was without illusion or sentiment. He wasted no time on the standard demagogic appeals to the Lost Cause, the dogma of White Supremacy, or the sanctity of Southern Womanhood. He had even less time for the rhetoric of the reformer who put his trust on the goodness of human nature or the efficacy of unassisted virtue. The role of the prophet unarmed never held any attraction for him.

The oligarchs of Louisiana were the natural prey of the young man who came down the courthouse steps ru

So by 1928, Huey was Governor, and was begi

There were two versions of the dying man's last words. The first version: "What will my poor boys at L. S. U. [the Louisiana State University] do without me?" The second, and more generally accepted version: "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do." One wonders what set of sounds could have reasonably suggested both interpretations. The only thing that the two interpretations have in common has no relation to linguistic and rhythmical questions; it is the implication that the speaker was dying as a martyr to his humanitarian ideals.