He paved roads, blew up tolls, handed kids free textbooks, and told the oil barons to get lost. Huey “The Kingfish” Long wasn’t just a politician; he was a one-man jailbreak for Louisiana’s poor. In the middle of the Great Depression, he turned the state into a living New Deal before the New Deal: hospitals for the sick, bridges for the forgotten, and a promise bold enough to make millionaires sweat—“Every man a king.” Then he cranked the volume to eleven with Share Our Wealth, a coast-to-coast crusade that said, out loud, what the working class had been thinking for decades: cap the hoards at the top and give ordinary families a fair shot.

But here’s the twist only history can write: the more he fought for the have-nots, the more Huey bulldozed anyone who stood in his way. He browbeat legislators, built a machine, and played constitutional hardball like a modern leader of the populares. To his followers, he was the first guy in a long time who actually delivered; to his enemies, he looked like an American Caesar rehearsing for the crown.

We take you from Winnfield mud to Baton Rouge marble to a late-night gunshot inside the capitol he built—unpacking how a righteous war for the working class made Huey Long a hero to millions, a menace to the elite, and a cautionary tale about the price of power.

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