The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long.

• Author: Guillory, Ferrel

The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long. William Ivy Hair. Lousiana State University press, $24.95. For me, born in Louisiana just after the Second World War, the question is at once hypothetical and unavoidable. Ask yourself, as I have many times, would you have voted for Huey Long?

Put yourself in Louisiana just before the Great Depression, a time of minimalist government, concentrated economic power, and rampant poverty, and consider the real-life choices offered to voters when Long ran for governor and for U.S. senator. While struggling with that question helps deepen your understanding of history, it's self-revealing as well.

The question impels you to come to terms with incidents such as the clash between Long and the Shreveport establishment in 1928, the first year of his one-term governorship. The local school board had declined to accept the free textbooks that Long had prodded the legislature to provide--too humiliating to take such charity, the community's leaders said. At the same time, Shreveport wanted the legislature to approve the transfer of 80 acres of land for the Army Air Corps to build a new base just outside the city.

Long used the leverage. He not only informed Shreveport that he wouldn't support the land transfer until the free textbooks were distributed, but he also demanded, among other things, that its representatives support all his bills in a special session of the legislature. In the end, the schoolchildren got their free books and Shreveport got its air base. "I didn't coerce them," Long said. "I stomped them."

Do you vote for the Huey Long who provides free school books, or do you vote against the Huey Long who wants to "stomp" his adversaries into submission? Hair, a professor of history at Georgia College in Milledgeville, accentuates the negative, delivering a case, in effect, for voting against Long. Long emerges as a dictator with nasty nicknames for his many enemies and with little interest in promoting fundamental change in the condition of blacks in a rigidly segregated society. Hair writes that the "conclusion is inescapable that everything he did in politics was for the purpose of augmenting his own power."

In arriving at that judgment, Hair seems to have an implicit goal: to rebut the treatment of Long in T. Harry Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Huey Long, published in 1969. Williams, writes Hair, was "overly sympathetic to Long." To be sure, Williams is more...