Huey​ Long – Louisiana’s legendary governor, senator and would-be presidential candidate – loved the campaign trail. ‘Watch me vaudeville ’em,’ he would say, as he climbed up to the speaker’s platform. He looked, as one reporter put it, like a ‘circus hitched to a tornado’, and his wild gesticulations were accompanied by merciless mockery of his opponents and generous helpings of common sense. His speeches, both prepared and impromptu, were full of quotations from the Bible, folksy aphorisms, jokes at the expense of the rich, crude farmyard analogies, poetry, metaphors, wit and clever phrasing. He could make a campaign issue out of just about anything, including how best to eat potlikker (the broth left from cooking collard greens): he championed dipping biscuits into it rather than crumbling them. Long made sure his political circulars were easy for ordinary citizens to understand, but he also made them useful: they were printed on rough paper so that people could use them ‘on their backsides’ after reading them. ‘Don’t use any of that damn smooth stuff.’

Born in 1893, Long was one of nine children; his father ran a livestock farm. As a young man, he was variously described, Thomas Patterson writes, as ‘disputatious, officious, bossy, ornery, curious, energetic, impudent, eager, smart, a show-off, contemptuous of rules’ and, generally, as a ‘pesterance’. After working as a travelling salesman, Long went to college, obtained a law degree in a single year and was admitted to the bar at the age of 21. As an attorney he represented poor plaintiffs, and then in 1918 he won a seat on the Louisiana Railroad Commission, where he fought corporate monopolies. William Howard Taft, a former president and later chief justice, called him ‘the most brilliant lawyer who ever practised before the United States Supreme Court’. In 1924, he ran for governor of Louisiana and lost, but he won four years later by highlighting the state’s sharp economic divisions and speaking out against entrenched interests. In office, he expanded social programmes and organised large public works projects. He also bullied the state legislature, ran roughshod over the state constitution and turned Louisiana into a personal fiefdom. His authoritarian populism propelled him in 1932 to a seat in the US Senate, a position he used to support, and then attack, Roosevelt. His career exemplifies one of the lost strains in American politics: a populism of the left.

Long thought that working as a salesman had developed his capacity for understanding behaviour, and changing it. ‘I watch faces when I speak,’ he told reporters before he addressed ten thousand farmers. ‘I will study them until I can tell just what every man will do for two hours after he leaves.’ In addition to his plain speaking and corny theatre, Long was capable of surprising erudition. He delivered one speech under the spreading oak tree where Longfellow’s Evangeline waited for her lover. He claimed that Louisiana’s voters felt the same tearful longing. They weren’t waiting for love, but for paved roads, good hospitals and free schoolbooks. ‘Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only one lifetime,’ he said. ‘Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations.’ A vote for Huey Long would dry their tears.

During the 1920s, Long energised the left in the deep South and across the US. In an era with almost no social protections, in which business interests ruled the nation, he regularly attacked his most powerful opponent – Standard Oil – by name. Long argued that the company had bought the Louisiana state legislature for the purpose, in the phrase of the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, of ‘crucifying’ him on a ‘cross of gold’. Faced with impeachment in 1929, Long said: ‘I had rather go down to a thousand impeachments than to admit that I am the governor of the state that does not dare to call the Standard Oil company to account so that we can educate our children and care for the destitute, sick and afflicted.’

He demanded the right to unionise, called for the people of New Orleans to have access to natural gas, sought pensions for the indigent, urged the need for flood control infrastructure, campaigned for literacy programmes and fought to restrict the lobbying of state officials. His most popular campaign with both rural and urban voters was for large-scale road and bridge construction. He also revived a Populist Party demand of the 1890s – public storage facilities for crops so that farmers could hold them until market prices were favourable. One of his most memorable policies had its origins in personal experience: he had been unable to afford books as a child and so he championed, and delivered, free textbooks in schools. He also rebuilt Louisiana State University and created LSU Medical School.

Long believed that his growing authoritarianism served the interests of the people. ‘I am the constitution,’ he once declared. He claimed that he had bought one senator like a ‘sack of potatoes’. His political overreach led to his impeachment, which he outflanked with patronage, promises and procurements for those who supported him. When the former president Calvin Coolidge visited Louisiana while Long was governor, Long said the pictures taken at the event showed a past and a future president. He asked Coolidge about the condition of the White House: he might have to tear it down and build a new one, just as he had the Louisiana governor’s mansion.

For decades, historians have focused on Long’s opportunism and corruption. Patterson, a Chicago attorney who is sympathetic to Long’s project, paints him as a determined class warrior with serious, modernising goals. He was ‘cynically realistic’, Patterson writes, in his pursuit of ‘real ideals’. He may have been ruthless, but in a corrupt world it was better to trample legislative tradition and get bills through than, as Long said, ‘sit back in my office, all nice and proper, and watch ’em die’. Patterson acknowledges Long’s reputation as a demagogue, but points to his powers of leadership: he taught his voters to think about the issues, clarified their problems and brought solutions. He had vision, and, if he could not create a world in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first, then he was at least going to tax the hell out of the first to benefit the last. ‘It is time,’ Patterson writes, ‘to retire the historical caricature of Huey as a menace.’

That said, Long’s charisma and good intentions have hardly been ignored in popular culture. American Populist, thick and exhaustively researched, adds to a 75-year pile-up of biographies, movies, novels and documentaries. Writers including Robert Penn Warren and Sinclair Lewis (All the King’s Men and It Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character on the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy who manipulated and cajoled his associates into various exploits. Randy Newman recorded two songs about him in 1974: ‘Kingfish’ and ‘Every Man a King’. Work on Long has attracted a number of prizes including two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, several Oscars and a notorious big budget flop – the 2006 adaptation of All the King’s Men. Patterson’s book won’t win points for style, and frequently gets lost in the thickets of Louisiana politics, but it offers a robust argument both for Long’s impact on prewar political debate and the relevance of left-wing populism.

It is useful to think of populism in the United States not so much as a set of policies but as a style, a language of resistance, a cultural mode or a political mood. In the populist worldview, the founding national creed has been violated and the sovereign rights of the citizenry stolen. In both the left and right versions, a heroic figure, skilled at identifying the enemy and rallying the people, emerges to fight the aristocrats, the moneyed interests and the cultural elites that threaten the American project. More than a leader, the populist figurehead is the incarnation of the People and their cause – consider such examples as Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace and Donald Trump.

Populism is only rarely about class in a direct way. Its left-wing version does not necessarily entail self-organisation by the working classes but their mobilisation by a populist champion. Patterson honours Long’s work for the people, but he fails to recognise the effectiveness of populism at filling the gaps in periods and places where class representation is weak: in places like the US or periods such as late neoliberalism. It helps fill the void left by class and gives voice, even if in a sinister or comical form, to those feeling victimised by self-serving interests and the system. What people? Which interests? Take your pick. Populism’s power resides in its malleability. But whatever the similarities in style, mode and mood between the left and right varieties of populism, it remains crucial to distinguish between them. As Jan-Werner Müller argues, the left-wing version targets enemies who are above the people: bankers, oligarchs, corporations, corrupt officials. Right-wing populism can also have some enemies above (such as cultural elites), but it focuses on enemies below: immigrants, minorities and ‘others’ of various kinds.

Among the more significant aspects of Long’s career is that, unlike many Southern populists, he did not try to gain political power through vilifying black people. It was hardly possible for a white Southern politician to champion civil rights in the 1920s and 1930s, but Long included black people in his plans for economic equality. He did make the preposterous accusation that Herbert Hoover advocated ‘negro domination’ of the South, but he didn’t disenfranchise black people, champion Jim Crow or make claims to white supremacy. After he became a senator, he argued against the Social Security Act being administered at state level because he knew state control meant white control. ‘Who in the South is the most needful of pension assistance?’ he asked. ‘The coloured man. How many coloured people do you think would get on one of these [pension] lists? Let’s be frank about this business. I am possibly the only Southern senator here who can be frank about it.’

Perhaps the most important question about Long’s populism concerns the extent of its influence on mainstream political parties and in particular on the New Deal. Populism has played a key role in periods of transition in America: during the Andrew Jackson era in the 1830s; as the creed of the pre-Civil War Republican Party and of the Populist Party of the 1890s; in the Great Depression and the New Deal response to it; attending the rise of neoliberalism, as well as its collapse over the last two decades. As Yascha Mounk has written, ‘there are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society and politics remain the same.’ Then things start moving fast, the old paradigm crumbles – as it did during the New Deal era – and a new order is created. At these moments, according to Mounk, ‘political newcomers storm the state. Voters clamour for policies that were unthinkable until yesterday. Social tensions that had long simmered under the surface erupt into terrifying explosions. A system of government that had seemed immutable looks as though it might come apart.’ The party that harnesses the populist uprising, pulls it into the mainstream, is the one that succeeds in the new paradigm.

Roosevelt​ transformed class relations in America, Patterson argues, less out of conviction than as a way of containing Long’s insurgency. This is a bold claim. Perhaps it is more useful to see Roosevelt as brilliantly absorbing populist energies into the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Long was influential in getting Roosevelt the presidential nomination in 1932, but when Roosevelt strayed from his promises to the ‘forgotten man’, he raised hell. From the Senate floor, he pushed the president to the left, demanding increases in income and inheritance taxes, a shortening of the working day, federal control of farm surpluses, and currency inflation that would reduce the burdens on indebted farmers. He ripped into fake corporate concern for the people, asking a manufacturers’ association, ‘Why didn’t all you lovin’, kindly manufacturers, with your hearts bursting with human sympathy, do something to help us feed the hungry and aid the unemployed?’ Long was the recipient of more than half of the mail sent to Congress. Though he was frequently reminded that it was not a junior senator’s place to rock the boat, he paid no attention.

When Roosevelt revealed his centrepiece policy, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which allowed oversight by corporations and offered little to workers, Long went on the attack. He filibustered the bill for a record-breaking fifteen and a half hours, proclaiming with justification that ‘every fault of socialism is found in this bill, without one of its virtues.’ Long knew that the crisis was not going to be solved through corporate-managed price controls or by giving more power to the fat cats in the hope they could engineer their way out of the crisis. The problem was the gross failure of demand: there was an acute need to put spending power in the hands of the people.

Patterson argues that Roosevelt in 1933 didn’t fear Long the petty dictator of Louisiana, but Long the potential rival for the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination. ‘Huey made him feel small,’ Patterson claims. ‘Roosevelt had to cast him off.’ Long hit hard times in the Senate. He earned himself a black eye after accidentally and drunkenly peeing on a man in the urinal next to him. He lost control of Louisiana, in part because increased federal power eroded his capacity for local patronage. The Democrats in the Senate had it in for the wild Southern rube with his tall tales and plans to challenge their patrician leader.

But Long came roaring back. In February 1934 he called his secretary at 3 a.m. to reveal his latest epiphany: an organisation to be called Share our Wealth, which would have chapters across the country under the umbrella slogan, ‘Every Man a King’. Long saw his plans to cap personal fortunes, put a limit on annual incomes and give families a minimum income, not as socialism, but as necessary redistribution within capitalism. While Roosevelt spoke of ‘bold, persistent experimentation’, Long went public with his plan: ‘simple and concrete – not an experiment’. The new organisation placed him once again in front of enormous audiences, this time across America, and gave him a new enemy: the members of his own party who had refused to respond adequately to the Depression. Within a year there were nine million members of Share our Wealth clubs. Roosevelt, Long argued, ‘must go even further to the left – not in theory but in practice’, or the ‘new pace of concentration of riches’ would ‘land us in the mire’. ‘Some of them say it’s Roosevelt or ruin,’ he claimed in 1935. ‘I deny that. It’s Roosevelt’s ruin.’ He began to get more serious about taking a run at the presidency. Roosevelt went on the attack: he purged Long’s supporters from federal agencies and had the IRS audit his taxes. He came to view Long as ‘one of the two most dangerous men in the country’. The other was General Douglas MacArthur.

Without question, Roosevelt moved left in 1935. Patterson argues that his so-called Second New Deal (labour rights, social security, a wealth tax and the Works Progress Administration) was to a large degree the result of pressure exerted by Long, but there were a number of factors pushing Roosevelt to the left. Labour was on the march. The Supreme Court found many of the core policies of the First New Deal unconstitutional, including the NIRA, largely because of the failure to prove the key test of whether or not the policies regulated interstate commerce, one of the few mechanisms of federal authority over the states. It was becoming more obvious that redistributive policies and budget deficits were what the country needed, no matter Roosevelt’s caution. It is an overreach to see the most enduring aspects of the New Deal paradigm as born of country populism, but it was certainly involved.

Long talked about seeking the Democratic nomination in 1936 or running as a third-party candidate, but in September 1935 a man called Carl Weiss shot him at close range in the monstrous Louisiana state capitol building he had constructed. He died in hospital two days later, aged 42. Weiss was the son-in-law of a judge whom Long had just gerrymandered out of his position. Long’s last words were: ‘God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.’

Those with a stake in the political order tend to regard populism with disdain. The political scientist Benjamín Arditi has described it as the obnoxious drunk at the political dinner table. Its disruptive energies are opposed by moralistic liberals, clarity-seeking leftists and ‘true’ conservatives who are frustrated by its feverish promise of restoration-after-the-fall, its belief in a saviour and its tendency to see rules and tradition as barriers to be broken down. Populism is not an exception but the rule in eras of political transition such as our own. Today it has been captured by the radical right. But as neoliberalism comes to an end, and something new is born, American Populist reminds us that populist language can also be used to further the liberation of the many.