Podcast Episode 49 - The Most Dangerous Man In America, Conclusion

I’m trying to figure out who REALLY killed Huey Long.

Don’t worry. Your favorite history podcast hasn’t suddenly turned into a true crime show. Neither has this one.

We know who actually pulled the trigger: Carl Weiss, aged thirty. He was a quiet fellow who loved art and music and math and had gotten his medical degree in Paris. His wife Yvonne had recently had a baby. She was the daughter of Benjamin Pavy, a judge that Huey Long was forcing out of office. Huey claimed that the Pavy family had “coffee blood,” which is just the kind of racial slur you think it is. Huey had also fired Yvonne’s uncle, a school principal, and her sister, a third-grade teacher.

It could very well be that Carl Weiss, a student of art and history, saw himself as a modern-day Hamlet avenging his in-laws’ honor, knowing that when it comes to getting rid of dictators, there are very few options. Mostly one option.

But if this was a true crime podcast, which I hear are super-popular (just wait till I get to the trainwreck that is the Kennedy assassination) I would have to speculate that Carl Weiss might just have been the patsy, the tip of someone else’s spear.

Because there were lots of people who wanted to kill Huey Long.

Huey was killed by an assassin's bullet. His last words were "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do."

He died on September 10, 1935, but his political machine controlled Louisiana politics until the 1960's. His son served in his father's Senate seat from 1948 to 1987. 

His legacy in Louisiana lives on. 

Sources

White, Richard D. “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long.” Random House, 2009.

 

Wikipedia, “Huey Long.” Retrieved September 17, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long

 

Podcast Episode 48 - The Most Dangerous Man In America, Part V

“Imagine ninety-five Senators trying to outtalk Huey Long,” Will Rogers wrote in 1933.

Huey had lost patience with the United States Senate. Which was okay – they were fed up with his antics, too, and he had only been a Senator for a year or so. They wanted no part of his wealth redistribution plan, loud suits, cigars, and complete lack of personal boundaries. Huey could talk the sun down every day, but his ideas were never going to be made into law.

“A mob is coming to hang the other ninety-five of you scoundrels,” he warned his Senate colleagues. “And I’m undecided whether to stick here with you or go out and lead them.”

It turns out that Huey wasn’t really THAT undecided.

Huey Long was losing political control of Louisiana, thanks to the Depression-era policies of the new President. Federal jobs, which were literal lifesavers, were given to Huey's opponents.

Huey's own dictatorial behavior was costing him support among the people of the state, so he took his show on the road, appealing to masses of poor Americans and fueling the fire for a 1936 presidential run.

FDR's Justice Department started investigating Huey's financial shenanigans, a trick that had worked on Al Capone, but that was taking too long.

Something permanent was going to have to be done about Louisiana's Senator, and his enemies started making assassination plans.

Podcast Episode 47 - Top Ten Trainwrecks, Part II

We're counting down to number one - the biggest historical trainwreck of all time.

Can you guess who it is?

Check out the Beyond The Big Screen Podcast at the link below.

https://www.atozhistorypage.com/beyond-the-big-screen/

George McClellan
Aaron Burr
Marcus Crassus

Douglas MacArthur

Podcast Episode 46 - Top Ten Trainwrecks, Part I

I love a good trainwreck. I mean, who doesn’t?

One day, historian and podcaster Steve Guerra, host of the Beyond the Big Screen Podcast, asked me what I call The Big Question: of all the trainwrecks you’ve studied so far, who is on your top ten list of all time?

It gave us the opportunity to better define a historical trainwreck, and it got us thinking about who wasn’t on the list and who should be.

Long time listeners of this show may not be surprised at the list, but then again…maybe you will.

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Podcast Episode 45 - The Most Dangerous Man In America, Part IV

Huey Long was the bull in the United States Senate’s china shop.

He stormed into the world’s greatest deliberative body in 1932 after it had already been in session for two months. In a room full of men in dour blue suits, Huey wore “flashy brown tweeds, beautiful white shirts of the finest fabric with his monogram embroidered on one sleeve, a bright red silk necktie, and, according to one chastising reporter, ‘a handkerchief regrettably on the pink side.”

It wasn’t long, pun intended, before the Senate figured out that they had a real problem on their hands.

But soon enough there was another fellow in the capital who was even more worried about the storm from the bayou.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

No one seemed to take Huey very seriously in the Roosevelt camp except for FDR himself. “The people are jumpy and ready to run after strange gods,” he wrote. “It’s all very well for us to laugh over Huey, but actually we have to remember all the time that he really is one of the two most dangerous men in the country. We shall have to do something about him.”

Franklin Roosevelt was certainly a visionary. He knew things for sure long before others came around to his point of view. He saw Huey Long as a self-obsessed man with huge ambitions who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, even if it meant damaging the country. Like challenging Roosevelt for the nomination in 1936 or running as an independent, splitting the Democratic vote, and throwing the country to the Republicans for four years so that Huey could win the White House in 1940.

Which, as it turns out, was exactly what Huey Long was planning to do.

Sources

Long, Huey P. “My First Days In The White House.” Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016.

U.S. House Archives. “Hattie Wyatt Caraway.” Retrieved from https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/C/CARAWAY,-Hattie-Wyatt-(C000138)/ on July 29, 2022.

White, Richard D. “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long.” Random House, 2009.

 

Podcast Episode 44 - Ben Franklin In The Cockpit, Part II

The most famous American in the world was about to have one of the worst days of his life, and everyone who was anyone in London wanted to be there to see it.

Benjamin Franklin had been summoned to the Cockpit, a room King Henry VIII had once used for cockfighting, to appear before the King’s Privy Council in late January 1774. His ostensible purpose for being there was to deal with a petition sent by the Massachusetts colony to have their governor removed, but with the colonists getting all uppity and turning Boston Harbor into the world’s biggest teapot, the Council was going to take out all of its pent-up frustration with their cranky subjects on America’s best-known representative.

There’s no way to overstate the effect one hour in the Cockpit had on Benjamin Franklin. Up to that point he had been a strong advocate for peace between England and America, and his fame and reputation for wisdom was helpful in cooling tensions. His innovative way of thinking constantly came up with ways to smooth things over. He believed that the colonists’ notion that England was run by men who wanted to deprive them of liberty was “unduly paranoid.”

But after an hour in the Cockpit, Franklin believed that the King and his ministers could no longer be trusted. Had he not gone through the ordeal, he might have remained in London, working behind the scenes to forestall war and independence. After his trial he had little choice but to go back home. If the powerful Englishmen he had known and got along with could delight in the vicious attacks against Franklin, one of the most esteemed Americans alive, how would they ever see their colonists as equals and partners?

Always a smart fellow, Ben knew the answer to that one. Before the Cockpit, he had been working for both sides in the conflict between England and America. After, he was only working for one.

Sources

Isaacson, Walter. “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.” Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Skemp, Sheila L. “The Making of Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit.” Oxford University Press, 2013.

Podcast Episode 43 - I'm Not Allowed To Watch The News

As you surely know by now, I love history. I always have. If you do too, you know that studying history invariably leads to learning about politics.

It’s inescapable. The Greek city-states, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, monarchies and religious wars, the Enlightenment that led to the establishment of constitutional democracies, the growth of superpowers.

Regionalism and factionalism and schisms and wars. If you study history, you’ve seen all this before.

This is one of the 257 reasons I’m not allowed to watch the news. I tend to rant, drawing historical parallels between today’s America and yesterday’s. It scares the dogs.

My wife said no more watching the news.

So the dogs and I started a new podcast, where I get to rant about all the things that bother me about 21st century politics. That’ll teach her.

For all you History’s Trainwrecks listeners, I’m putting out the first episode here. The rest will be available wherever you get your podcasts.

I hope you like it. And I hope we can find a way forward, politically-speaking.

Because if we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that situations like the ones we keep finding ourselves in do not end well.

Check out the first ever episode of I’m Not Allowed To Watch The News, and thanks for listening.