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Politics & the Poor. Senator Long was born poor 39 years ago on a farm in northern Louisiana. When he married Rose McConnell, winner of a baking contest he staged as salesman, he borrowed from her $10 to pay the preacher. For days he has subsisted on bread & water. He knows the sting of poverty and now, for all his loud silk pajamas, $100 suits and jeweled finery, he has politically never allowed himself to forget it. His entire public appeal is as what he once was—a poor hillbilly. For years Louisiana has been familiar with his ranting campaigns against what he calls "entrenched wealth." The State has less than 20 millionaires with only one vote apiece. Most of them suffered in impotent silence but Henry Hardtner, Alexandria lumber and oil man. publicly declared: "I'll never invest another cent in Louisiana while that lying crook is in power."
Not until Huey Long took his Senate seat last winter did the country at large hear his economic program. It was simple: no man is to have an income of more than $1,000,000 per year; no beneficiary is to inherit more than $5,000,000. Incomes and inheritances are to be limited by Federal taxation. For that program in the next Congress Huey Long will control three votes—his own, Senator Overton's and Mrs. Caraway's—which is more than any Wall Streeter claims.
No Fool. "There may be smarter men than me but they ain't in Louisiana." Huey Long likes to brag. His enemies will agree that he is no fool but they will also contend that his smartness is far from admirable. An incredible cross between Iowa's Brookhart, New York City's Jimmy Walker and Chicago's Big Bill Thompson, Democrat Long has developed a political technique in which he is too intelligent to believe himself. Impervious to insult, he knows the trick of playing politics in its rawest, crudest form and he plays it with a vim, dash and audacity that stagger men with public sensibilities.
The night the Legislature passed his drop-a-crop cotton bill, he sent out for a cotton nightshirt. Near midnight he had himself photographed in it signing the bill. ''Now I can take this damned thing off!" he exploded afterwards as he climbed back into his silk pajamas.
When the Coolidges, westbound, visited New Orleans in 1930 the onetime President asked: "What part of Louisiana are you from. Governor?"
"I'm a hillbilly like yourself."
The hills are a good place to come from," opined the Vermonter.
"Are the Hoovers good housekeepers?" asked Governor Long.
"I guess they are," Citizen Coolidge replied.
"Well, when I was elected I found the Governor's Mansion in such rotten shape I had to tear it down and rebuild. It started a hell of a row. When I'm elected President I don't want to have to rebuild the White House."
* The Hearst Cosmopolitan this month printed a drawing of Mrs. Roosevelt with rosebud lips opposite a most unflattering portrait of Lou Henry Hoover, both by able Portraitist James Montgomery Flagg. Macfadden's touching Babies Just Babies, edited by Mrs. Roosevelt, was born last week.
*As Governor, Huey Long, despite a Statewide uproar, allowed a murderess to go to the gallows.