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Huey got a job selling Cottolene, an oil shortening, and he hopped about from farm to farm telling stories, baking cakes, quoting the Bible, and proclaiming: "I can sell anybody anything." Earl followed, selling shoe polish, stove polish, patent medicine. When Huey moved on to study law, so did Earl; when Huey entered state politics, so did Earl.
Amid growing storm and scandal throughout the nation, Huey served three years as governor, building 8,500 miles of roads, distributing 600,000 free schoolbooks, teaching 100,000 illiterate adults how to read and write so that they could qualify as kings. Huey dispensed thousands of jobs to consolidate his power, converted the state police into a semiprivate army, and ran up the state debt from $11 million to more than $100 million. Huey called the state legislature "the finest collection of lawmakers money can buy." Earl's contribution was often to placate or scare the lawmakers, and he once did it in a clumsy way that displeased Huey. When the legislature tried to impeach Governor Huey, Earl hurled himself upon one hostile lawmaker and bit his throat. Huey thought that impolitic.
"Liar Earl Long!" In 1931 Huey moved on to serve four gaudy years in the U.S. Senate. Back home in Louisiana, however, Huey's slights and snubs, his withholding of the choicest of the plums, were beginning to pique Earl Long. One dramatic day Earl walked out on Huey, letting it be known that he, Earl, had fought Huey's childhood fistfights for him. Earl screeched, "Big-bellied coward!" Earl later confronted Huey, face distorted and arms flailing, during a U.S. Senate hearing on election fraud. When Earl intimated that Huey was susceptible to graft, Huey raged at Earl: "Listen to that! Liar Earl Long!" But Earl shouted back: "I stood with you as long as I could, but you run wild!"
In September 1935 Huey was assassinated in the corridor of the State Capitol by Dr. Carl A. Weiss, on account of a family grudge. Needing a Long, however unpalatable, Huey's machine put Earl on the ticket for lieutenant governor. In 1939 Earl won promotion when Governor Leche resigned shortly before the discovery of a state mail-fraud scandal. There followed a raucous conflict be tween the Long forces and a group of reformers, out of which Earl Long emerged once more, in 1948, for the second time governor of Louisiana.
Earl ran the state on a straight Huey program of veterans' bonuses, old-age pensions, roads—things people would be "able to see and feel." Earl seemed pathetically determined to prove himself a better man than Huey, once proclaiming, "Huey couldn't have been elected dogcatcher without my help." But Earl could never develop the splendor of Alexander the Great and Huey. Once Earl, entertaining friends at his home, spread out a copy of the hostile New Orleans Item, and spent the afternoon spitting on it.
"Poor Man's Friend." Earl could not succeed himself under the Louisiana state law, and in 1952 the anti-Long reformers came back. In 1955, Earl readied himself for his own comeback by having all his teeth taken out and by preparing monster newspaper advertisements in which he misquoted the Bible:
Better a little with righteousness Than great revenues without right