Two Roads to Prosperity: Huey Long Versus Bobby Jindal
The heady excitement of the fracking boom hides some deeply important—and little discussed—political choices, of course. In the last Louisiana oil boom, from 1928 to 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Louisiana governor Huey Long, the progressive demagogue—the Kingfish, as he was called—declared “every man a king,” taxed oil companies, using that money to put a “chicken in every pot,” give out free textbooks to schoolchildren, create evening literacy courses for adults, and build roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. Long curbed homelessness and poverty. Before succumbing to the lure of oil money himself, Long embraced the ideal of an activist government that lifted the poor and added to the common good.
By contrast, from 2007 to 2015, as mentioned, Governor Bobby Jindal drew $1.6 billion from schools and hospitals to give to companies as “incentives.” This strategy put some chickens in some pots, of course, and indirectly took them away from others. Like nearly everyone I talk to, Mayor Hardey twice voted for Governor Jindal, as did his family. And were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long.
From Strangers In Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild
