"If you think historians are dull . . . you need to read Boulard. . . . A brilliant history written with the verve and style most authors can only envy, Huey Long Invades New Orleans is a treat."-Dr. Michael Thomason, managing editorGulf Coast Historical Review By 1934, the senator from Louisiana stood on the precipice of national power. His Share the Wealth club had made him a national figure, and he set his sights on the presidency. One thing stood in his way-New Orleans. If Huey P. Long wanted to be considered a legitimate candidate for the presidency, he needed the support of the entire state. Or did he? The emotional, volatile Long despised the prim and proper politicians in New Orleans. They, in turn, regarded him as a thug. Their mutual animosity was palpable, and the powder keg finally exploded when Long ordered 3,000 militiamen into New Orleans. Was his decision a sound political strategy or a reckless personal vendetta? In his meticulous search for the answer, Garry Boulard interviewed more than two dozen people involved with Long and the conflict. He also unearthed never-before-published photos that complement his dramatic narrative. The result is an in-depth examination of the Kingfish and his attack on the city that dared oppose him.

From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin’s bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state’s poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful new biography, Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial glory. White taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power–the problem was how to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him. White’s account of Long’s heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President Roosevelt as “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” Long organized a radical movement to redistribute money through his Share Our Wealth Society–and his gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire. The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president. In the end, Long was a tragic hero–a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. Kingfish is a balanced, lucid, and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary figure in the history of American politics.

Few politicians, other than presidents, have enjoyed as much extensive public attention as did Huey Pierce Long. So great was his persona that even now, generations after his death, he is well remembered, not only for his work, but also for the personality that reshaped ouisiana's political history. Images from Huey Long's early life show a serious, well-groomed young man setting off to earn a living from among the state�s poorer constituents. His political fortunes continued to grow, beginning with completing a three-year law-school program at Tulane in only two years, eventually culminating in his embrace of the entire state with his policies that gave him the public support to win a seat in the United States Senate. Long became a national celebrity before he was a national political figure. Images from the time of his rise to power show him engaged in all kinds of activities, including, of course, stump speeches, but also singing, demonstrating the best way to consume potlikker, and smiling in the company of politicians and constituents. Editorial cartoonists from the beginning of Long's career to the end, had a field day with Long�s flamboyance and his "every man a king" policies. Huey Long: His Life in Photos, Drawings, and Cartoons is the scrapbook of an all-American man from rags to riches and of his sudden, sad end.

Robert D. Leighninger Jr. believes there may be a model for municipal building projects everywhere in the ambitious and artful structures erected in Louisiana by the Public Works Administration. In the 1930s, the PWA built a tremendous amount of infrastructure in a very short time. Most of the edifices are still in use, yet few people recognize how these schools, courthouses, and other great structures came about. Building Louisiana documents the projects one New Deal agency erected in one southern state and places these in social and political context. Based on extensive research in the National Archives and substantial field work within the state, Leighninger has gathered the story of the establishment of the PWA and the feverish building activity that ensued. He also recounts early tussles with Huey Long and the scandals involving public works discovered during the late New Deal. The book includes looks at individual projects of particular interest—“Big Charity” hospital, the Carville leprosy center, the Shreveport incinerator, and the LSU sugar plant. A concluding chapter draws lessons from the PWA's history that might be applied to current political concerns. Also included is an annotated inventory of every PWA project in the state. Finally, this composite picture honors those workers and policymakers who, in a time of despair, expressed hope for the future with this enduring investment.

No political leader is more closely identified with Louisiana State University than the flamboyant governor and U.S. senator Huey P. Long, who devoted his last years to turning a small, undistinguished state school into an academic and football powerhouse. From 1931, when Long declared himself the “official thief” for LSU, to his death in 1935, the school’s budget mushroomed, its physical plant burgeoned, its faculty flourished, and its enrollment tripled. Along with improving LSU’s academic reputation, Long believed the school’s football program and band were crucial to its success. Taking an intense interest in the team, Long delivered pregame and halftime pep talks, devised plays, stalked the sidelines during games, and fired two coaches. He poured money into a larger, flashier band, supervised the hiring of two directors, and, with the second one, wrote a new fight song, “Touchdown for LSU.” While he rarely meddled in academic affairs, Long insisted that no faculty member criticize him publicly. When students or faculty from “his school” opposed him, retribution was swift. Long’s support for LSU did not come without consequences. His unrelenting involvement almost cost the university its accreditation. And after his death, several of his allies—including his handpicked university president—went to prison in a scandal that almost destroyed LSU. Rollicking and revealing, Robert Mann’s Kingfish U is the definitive story of Long’s embrace of LSU.

Celebrated in media and myth, New Orleans's French Quarter (Vieux Carr(r)) was the original settlement of what became the city of New Orleans. In Madame Vieux Carr(r), Scott S. Ellis presents the social and political history of this famous district as it evolved from 1900 through the beginning of the twenty-first century. From the immigrants of the 1910s, to the preservationists of the 1930s, to the nightclub workers and owners of the 1950s and the urban revivalists of the 1990s, Madame Vieux Carr(r) examines the many different people who have called the Quarter home, who have defined its character, and who have fought to keep it from being overwhelmed by tourism's neon and kitsch. The old French village took on different roles--bastion of the French Creoles, Italian immigrant slum, honky-tonk enclave, literary incubator, working-class community, and tourist playground. The Quarter has been a place of refuge for various groups before they became mainstream Americans. Although the Vieux Carr(r) has been marketed as a free-wheeling, boozy tourist concept, it exists on many levels for many groups, some with competing agendas. Madame Vieux Carr(r) looks, with unromanticized frankness, at these groups, their intentions, and the future of the South's most historic and famous neighborhood. The author, a former Quarter resident, combines five years of research, personal experience, and unique interviews to weave an eminently readable history of one of America's favorite neig

Cooperatives have been central to the development of New Orleans. Anne Gessler asserts that local cooperatives have reshaped its built environment by changing where people interact and with whom, helping them collapse social hierarchies and envision new political systems. Gessler tracks many neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, consumer, and social justice activists animated successive generations of regional networks and stimulated urban growth in New Orleans. Studying alternative forms of social organization within the city’s multiple integrated spaces, women, people of color, and laborers blended neighborhood-based African, Caribbean, and European communal activism with international cooperative principles to democratize exploitative systems of consumption, production, and exchange. From utopian socialist workers’ unions and Rochdale grocery stores to black liberationist theater collectives and community gardens, these cooperative entities integrated marginalized residents into democratic governance while equally distributing profits among members. Besides economic development, neighborhood cooperatives participated in heady debates over urban land use, applying egalitarian cooperative principles to modernize New Orleans’s crumbling infrastructure, monopolistic food distribution systems, and spotty welfare programs. As Gessler indicates, cooperative activists deployed street-level subsistence tactics to mobilize continual waves of ordinary people seizing control over mainstream economic and political institutions.