On the night of September 3, 1930, a group of law-enforcement officials—members of the newly formed Louisiana Bureau of Criminal Identification—stormed into a room at Shreveport’s Gardner Hotel, where a man named Sam Irby was sleeping. Irby was the uncle of a young woman, Alice Lee Grosjean, who served as secretary to the governor, Huey P. Long, and also, almost certainly, as Long’s mistress. For a time, Irby had worked for the state’s Highway Department and as business manager for theLouisiana Progress, a newspaper Long had founded, but he had been fired from both posts. Recently, he had approached members of the large (and increasingly anxious) anti-Long camp, offering to testify about Highway Commission corruption. Irby was not arrested, or formally taken into custody; nevertheless, by the next day he had vanished. It was rumored that he had been carried off to Angola, the state prison; or that he had been locked in the Jefferson Parish jail; or—the theory favored by many—that he was buried in the muck at the bottom of some bayou. Mayor T. Semmes Walmsley, of New Orleans, called Irby’s disappearance “the most heinous public crime in Louisiana history.” No one had any doubt about who had engineered it.

Many politicians dream of kidnapping their enemies. But what kind actually does it? At the time of Irby’s disappearance, Long was running for the United States Senate, even though he had been elected governor just two years earlier. He was financing his campaign through his infamous system of deducts: state employees, as one Long appointee later explained, were required to “voluntarily” contribute ten per cent of their salaries. Long’s opponent for the Democratic nomination—in nineteen-twenties Louisiana, the only thing that mattered—was the seventy-two-year-old incumbent, Joseph Ransdell, a gaunt man with an antebellum-style goatee. Long liked to refer to Ransdell as Old Feather Duster, or, in an apparent allusion to the Senator’s facial hair, as Old Trashy Mouth. Ransdell’s supporters condemned Long as, among other things, a “little snivelling demagogue,” a “blasphemer, a ruffian, and a cad,” a “liar, a briber, an embezzler of the people’s money,” and a “counterfeit Mussolini.” The kidnapping occurred less than a week before the primary, and the anti-Long forces might have been able to capitalize on it had the incident not ended, as so many Longian adventures did, with an outrageous twist. Irby resurfaced on September 7th, claiming—against all evidence—to have staged the kidnapping himself. On primary day, Long won by a wide margin and immediately took to signing his correspondence “Governor and Senator-elect.”

While Long was alive, many writers were drawn to his startling excesses; A. J. Liebling interviewed him twice, and both times Long wore pajamas. (Liebling described Long as a “chubby man” with ginger hair and skin “the color of a sunburn coming on.”) Dead, he became, if anything, even more fascinating. In 1935, the year of Long’s assassination, four biographies appeared. The same year, Sinclair Lewis created Buzz Windrip, the Long-like protagonist of “It Can’t Happen Here,” and a decade after that Robert Penn Warren produced Willie Stark (to be played onscreen later this year by, of all unlikely people, Sean Penn). T. Harry Williams’s “Huey Long,” published in 1969, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; it runs to almost nine hundred pages.

The latest contribution to this field, “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long” (Random House; $26.95), by Richard D. White, Jr., is modest, almost to a fault, in its ambitions. It provides little new information about Long’s career and doesn’t even claim to offer a new assessment of his significance. But, in a way, that hardly matters. People continue to publish books about Long not because of what he represents (populism gone awry or fascism barely averted) or how he influenced American politics (“More bunkum has been written about Huey Long and his place in history than any man in this region I know of,” Sam Jones, a three-term Louisiana governor, once observed) but because his story remains irresistible.

Born in 1893, the seventh of ten children, Huey Pierce Long grew up in the hill country of Winn Parish, in the northern part of the state. His father raised cattle and hogs, and when the Arkansas Southern Railroad extended its line into the nearby town of Winnfield, Old Hu sold off large parcels of land to developers. The proceeds made the Long family one of the wealthiest in the parish, but Huey, later in life, liked to tell things differently. He made much of having been born in a log cabin (actually, it was a sizable log house), a story that his followers took up and embellished. “Every time I hear of that cabin, it gets smaller and smaller,” one of his sisters complained.

Long’s mother, Caledonia, tried to steer him toward a career in the ministry, and at one point he went so far as to accept money from her to attend a Baptist college in Oklahoma. There is no evidence, however, that he enrolled. For several years, he worked as a travelling salesman, first for a company that made a lard substitute called Cottolene, and later for a company that sold a concoction for relieving menstrual cramps known as the Wine of Cardui. Along the way, he met his future wife, Rose, a young stenographer who was participating in a Cottolene-sponsored bake-off.

When Long was growing up, the most important political organization in Louisiana was the New Orleans Democratic machine, known as the Old Regulars. The Old Regulars were expert at all the usual forms of graft—doling out patronage, padding registration rolls, harassing unaffiliated voters—and, by aligning themselves with the state’s business interests, most notably Standard Oil, they were often able to extend their control far beyond the city limits. As the name suggests, the Old Regulars were clannish and conservative, and their primary goal was self-perpetuation. In this go-along-to-get-along culture, Louisiana’s poverty and general backwardness rarely featured as an election theme.

From the start of his political career, Long operated according to a different set of principles. At twenty-five, he ran for and won a seat on the state Railroad Commission, turning practically the first meeting he attended into a denunciation of Standard Oil. At the following meeting, he demanded that the oil company be declared a public utility, a move that would have given the commission regulatory control over its pipelines. In the next several years, he also took on the railroads, the telegraph companies, and the administration of the governor at the time, John M. Parker. (At one point, Parker sued Long for libel; Long lost and was fined a dollar.) In almost all of his battles, Long took the side of ratepayers and small businesses against large (and, to a great extent, predatory) corporations. In 1923, he forced one of the state’s major phone companies to give up a twenty-per-cent rate increase that it had been granted. Thousands of customers received refund checks, and Long made sure that they knew whom they had to thank.

Long was not naturally a gifted speaker; he tended toward shrillness and sawed the air with his arms as he talked. But, after peddling Cottolene and the Wine of Cardui, he knew how to move a product. His fights generated headlines, often because he wrote them himself. One veteran reporter recalled that during the phone-rebate case Long would drop off articles in praise of his actions along with a half-gallon jar of moonshine.

When Long decided to run for governor, in 1924, he realized that the Old Regulars—and just about every other Party organization in the state with any influence—would be working against him. In this hopeless situation, he discerned an advantage. “In every parish there is a boss, usually the sheriff,” Long explained. “He has forty percent of the votes. Forty percent are opposed to him, and twenty percent are in-betweens. I’m going into every parish and cuss out the boss. That gives me forty percent of the votes to begin with, and I will hoss trade them out of the in-betweens.” Long’s campaign was a tour de force of aggression; rarely, the New OrleansPicayune opined, had there been a candidate whose utterances were “so shot through with gross error” and “so careless of truth generally.” Long ran well for a candidate who had no organizational support, but he still lost, at which point he immediately began looking toward the next election.

In 1927, record heavy rains caused massive flooding along the Mississippi. To save New Orleans, the city’s leaders decided—probably hysterically—to blow up the levee downriver. The decision cost thousands of trappers and fishermen in the parishes south and east of New Orleans their homes. In “Kingfish,” White argues that their resentment was key to Long’s victory the following year. Although he was a Baptist from the northern part of the state, Long swept the predominantly Catholic, Cajun parishes of Acadiana.

Long was inaugurated on May 21, 1928. On May 22nd, he fired seventy-three employees of the New Orleans Dock Board. He proceeded to work his way through the state Highway Commission, the state Board of Health, the state Hospital Board, and the state Conservation Commission, replacing all employees who owed their jobs to the Old Regulars with workers loyal only to him. The Orleans Parish Levee Board, which oversaw the city’s elaborate system of flood control, was a particularly rich trove of patronage, but its directors served fixed terms and could not be removed by the governor. Long had the state legislature dissolve the nine-member board, and replace it with a five-member body. To the new body, he appointed the head of the old board and four of his own men.

During his gubernatorial campaign, Long had made two major promises. The first was to provide free textbooks for schoolchildren, the second to build more roads. The chronically underfinanced Louisiana state government had no money for either. To pay for the textbooks, Long first proposed increasing the severance tax on oil, timber, and sulfur. The increase was challenged on technical grounds, and was ultimately rejected by the United States Supreme Court. Long’s response to this setback was to raise the stakes. (“Always take the offensive,” he once advised. “The defensive ain’t worth a damn.”) He proposed a new oil-processing tax, most of the proceeds of which would come from Standard Oil, whose refinery in Baton Rouge was one of the largest in the world. Standard Oil fought back the best way it knew how: according to one state representative, the company offered as much as twenty thousand dollars per vote. After the oil-processing tax was defeated in the legislature, Long—not unreasonably—accused lawmakers of having been “bought.” By this point, even many representatives who had been inclined to support him had grown weary of his tactics. And so, just eleven months after taking office, Long found himself facing impeachment.

The charges brought against Long ranged from illegally influencing the judiciary and misusing state funds to engaging in immoral conduct and using foul language. (Witnesses at the impeachment hearings included a hula dancer who testified that one night she saw the Governor acting “very frisky” and a prominent Caddo Parish merchant who recalled Long’s referring to one newspaper editor as a “shitass.”) Long portrayed the battle as being between him and his old nemesis; one flyer he had printed—and delivered at state expense—was titled “The Cross of Gold: Standard Oil Company vs. Huey P. Long.” The Louisiana House voted to impeach on eight counts, but Long was able to win over just enough senators to avoid conviction. Most of those senators were soon rewarded with lucrative state jobs.

There are two schools of thought on how the hearings affected Long. One has it that he was unmoored by the ordeal, the other that the experience only aggravated his native ruthlessness. In either case, whatever constraints he might once have felt dissolved. Long took to demanding kickbacks of twenty per cent from all businesses that won state contracts; the proceeds went toward financing his political operation and publishing his newspaper, which was largely dedicated to attacking the state’s other broadsheets. The Depression hit, and government jobs became increasingly valuable. Long kept adding positions—bridge tenders, game wardens, highway workers—and these, of course, went only to loyalists. In June, 1930, three hundred of his most committed foes formed the Constitutional League, devoted to preventing “Governor Huey P. Long from treating the organic law of the state as a scrap of paper.” The league soon published a list of twenty-three of the Governor’s relatives who were on the state payroll. Long mockingly referred to the group as “the Constipational League.”

When Long won the U.S. Senate race, in the fall of 1930, it was clear that further resistance would be futile. The Old Regulars sued for peace; Long granted it to them on the condition that they turn over most of their apparatus to him. (“It has been my good fortune to have blind men like these in politics,” he wrote of the Old Regulars. “They cannot see something after it has passed over them, and they have been knocked down by it a half-dozen times.”) The national press saw Long as comical but also, increasingly, as threatening. Katherine Anne Porter called him “the worst sort of fascist demagogue.” H. L. Mencken described him as a “backwoods demagogue of the oldest and most familiar model—impudent, blackguardly, and infinitely prehensile.”

It was around this time that Long acquired the nickname the Kingfish, after the smooth-talking schemer on the radio show “Amos ’n Andy.” Long was so taken by the name that he began to use it himself, answering the telephone, “This is the Kingfish!”

Long waited for more than a year after winning his Senate seat before showing up in Washington to claim it. (He had had a bitter falling-out with his lieutenant governor, and so was reluctant to leave Louisiana until he had installed his successor, the aptly named O. K. Allen.) He arrived in the capital in January, 1932, and, following much the same script he had when he joined the Railroad Commission, immediately proceeded to challenge the established order. He proposed a sixty-five-per-cent tax rate on incomes of more than two million dollars, then, to emphasize the point, held up Senate debates with solo filibusters. “I am beginning to be convinced by the logic of my own argument,” he declared during one three-hour tirade. He was—or claimed to be—particularly incensed with the Senate’s Democratic leader, Joe Robinson, of Arkansas, whom he labelled a corporate stooge. Long demanded Robinson’s ouster as minority leader, and when this demand was ignored he resigned his committee assignments in protest. Robinson dismissed Long’s theatrics as “comic opera,” but they produced what was clearly the desired effect. Word of Long’s performances began to spread, and by May the WashingtonPost was calling for him to resign. Among those who came to listen to Long soliloquize was a young congressional aide named Lyndon Johnson. “I was simply entranced,” Johnson later recalled.

In June, 1932, the Democrats met in Chicago to choose their Presidential candidate. Long backed Franklin Roosevelt, and he worked hard to deliver not only Louisiana’s delegation but also Mississippi’s and Arkansas’s to the New York governor. F.D.R. elaborately courted Long; the Kingfish was a guest at Hyde Park, where his plaid suit and pink tie made a big impression. (“Who is thatawful man?” Roosevelt’s mother, Sarah, asked in horror.) But F.D.R., however much he relied on Long, never trusted him. “We have to remember all the time that he really is one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” Roosevelt told one of his advisers shortly after the convention. (The other was Douglas MacArthur.)

The following spring, Long introduced what he called “the Long Plan” for “Redistribution of Wealth.” To push the plan, he formed a group, the Share Our Wealth Society, which took as its slogan “Every Man a King.” Long claimed that he had come up with a way to provide each family in the United States with five thousand dollars, or enough money “for a home, an automobile, a radio, and the ordinary conveniences.” In reality, Long’s plan—to the extent that it existed at all—was made up of a series of tax proposals, with no provision to distribute the proceeds, and the numbers never came close to adding up. (One economist calculated that, in order to provide just fourteen hundred dollars to every needy family, the government would have to impose a tax rate of a hundred per cent on all income above four thousand dollars.) Critics condemned Share Our Wealth as false hope for the poor—“This is not water for the thirsty, but a mirage,” Walter Lippmann wrote—but the poor apparently were not dissuaded. Share Our Wealth clubs began to spring up in other states, mostly in the South, but also in New York and California. In late 1934, the society boasted more than three million members. To manage Share Our Wealth, Long hired a charismatic young clergyman named Gerald L. K. Smith, whom Mencken described as “the champion boob-bumper of all epochs.” Smith was a virulent anti-Semite and an avowed Roosevelt-hater. “We’re going to get that cripple out of the White House,” he promised.

By this point, Roosevelt and Long were openly at war. Long accused F.D.R. of caring only about the rich: “So it has been that while people have begged for meat and bread, Mr. Roosevelt’s administration has sailed merrily along, plowing under and destroying the things to eat and wear.” Out of spite, it seems, Long blocked a hundred-million-dollar appropriations bill that the Administration was pushing to finance benefits for crippled children and pensioners. Looking to 1936, Long expected the President to lose to a Republican. Then, in 1940, the nation would be ready to turn to the Kingfish.

Roosevelt, for his part, seems to have decided that the only way to deal with Long was to destroy him. First, he denied him a say over federal patronage in Louisiana. When this failed to have much impact, the F.B.I., at the Administration’s behest, sent thirty-two agents to Louisiana.

All the while, Long maintained his grip on politics back home. Whenever he returned to Baton Rouge, O. K. Allen would, quite literally, vacate the governor’s office. On more than one occasion, when things threatened to go against him, Long had Allen impose martial law. A novel strategy Long devised for pushing his agenda through the state legislature involved attaching amendments to pending measures on unrelated subjects. In this way, a reorganization of the New Orleans Police Department was slipped into a measure regulating the construction of boathouses on Bayou St. John, and the oil-processing tax that had led to Long’s impeachment was tacked on to a measure to codify licensing laws. Long took a cheerfully indulgent view of his unorthodox methods. “I’d much rather get up before the legislature and say, ‘Now this is a good law; it’s for the benefit of the people, and I’d like for you to vote for it in the interest of the public welfare,’ ” he asserted. “Only, I know that laws ain’t made that way.”

The end of any democratic pretense came around the same time that the anti-Long forces openly began to entertain the idea of armed resistance. In July, 1934, Long proposed (and, of course, got passed) a tax on advertising sales by newspapers with a circulation exceeding twenty thousand. The tax affected primarily the large dailies in New Orleans, which had always opposed him. (Long called the levy a “tax on lying.”) The following month, he summoned the legislature into special session and presented lawmakers with thirty bills, many of which he had drafted himself. One authorized the Governor to call out the state militia at his own discretion and prohibited the courts from issuing writs to block the Governor from using this new authority. All the measures were approved within three days. Three months later, Long called another special session; as the bills sailed through, one disgruntled lawmaker demanded to know when legislators would have a chance to read them. “When they are passed,” Long replied. The special sessions kept coming, and executive—which is to say Long’s—power kept increasing. At one point, Long went so far as to stand in for an absent legislator and cast his vote, and none of the lawmaker’s colleagues even bothered to object.

On September 8, 1935, Long drove to Baton Rouge from New Orleans to preside over yet another special session. Just the day before, White says, federal authorities had decided to seek an indictment against him on charges of tax evasion, but Long was unaware of this. Although it was a Sunday, he kept the legislature working well into the evening. At around nine-thirty that night, as he was walking toward the governor’s office, a man wearing a white linen suit stepped out from behind a pillar. According to the most widely accepted version of events, the man in the linen suit—a doctor named Carl Weiss—shot Long in order to defend his wife’s honor. (Long had been spreading a rumor that the woman’s family, which included a prominent judge, wasn’t white but had “coffee blood.”) According to an alternative version of events, Weiss merely confronted Long, and it was the Senator’s trigger-happy bodyguards who actually shot him. (Weiss was killed instantly in a shower of bullets.) Long was rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, where a physician he had installed a few years earlier was in charge. The physician botched the surgery, and two days later Long was dead. Such was the power of the Kingfish legend that even the assassination couldn’t put an end to it. In 1938, the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal found that some schoolchildren in the poorer districts of northern Louisiana believed that Long was still alive and, what’s more, residing in the White House.

In the decades since, Louisiana politics have alternated between periods of anti-Long reformism and much longer periods of neo-Longian high jinks. Richard Leche, who was elected governor the year after Long’s death, once reportedly said, “When I took the oath of office, I didn’t take any vow of poverty”; he was convicted on federal mail-fraud charges and spent five years in prison. Long’s younger brother, Earl, was elected governor in 1948 and again in 1956; at one point, after Earl delivered an obscenity-laced speech on statewide TV, his wife, Blanche, had him committed to a state hospital for the insane. (Earl managed to get himself released by firing the hospital’s superintendent.) Between 1972 and 1996, Edwin Edwards served an unprecedented four full terms as Louisiana’s governor, in the process perfecting a style that the political scientist Wayne Parent has dubbed “made-for-TV Longism.” Edwards favored pretty women, fast living, and high-stakes gambling. He also seems to have been fond of extortion, and three times was tried on federal racketeering charges. During his final gubernatorial campaign, against the former Klansman David Duke, pro-Edwards campaign stickers exhorted, “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”

Such slackness has many well-documented costs; Louisiana routinely ranks at or near the bottom on measures like high-school graduation rates, and near the top when it comes to measures like infant-mortality and murder rates. Hurricane Katrina, certainly, has turned out to be almost as much a political as a natural disaster. One of the first things that Louisiana’s U.S. senators did afterward was to squander their colleagues’ sympathy: the proposed Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act, a two-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar relief package written largely by lobbyists, was crammed with pork-barrel projects that, if completed, would haveincreased the state’s vulnerability to future storms. Under the headline “IN LOUISIANA, GRAFT INQUIRIES ARE INCREASING,” theTimes recently reported that new investigations into post-Katrina fraud are being opened almost daily. In an unrelated scandal that prompted an extraordinary F.B.I. raid on his congressional offices last month, one of New Orleans’s congressmen, William Jefferson, has been at the center of a bribery investigation involving telecommunications contracts in Africa. Perhaps out of this wreckage the state will reinvent its political culture, but at this point it’s hard to see how. “Someday Louisiana is going to get ‘good government,’ ” Earl Long once declared. “And when they do, they ain’t going to like it.” ♦