It was an artless bit of oversimplified future history, written in the past tense to describe the inauguration of President Huey Long, his appointment of a cabinet (Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alfred E. Smith were among its members), and the adoption of national Share-Our-Wealth legislation under the supervision of a committee headed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew W. Mellon! But it was gauged for an audience which already believed that it was possible to redistribute all large fortunes among the nation’s have-nots. It was never meant to convert economists, financiers, and magnates. On the contrary, its principal purpose was to notify all and sundry, especially “all,” that Huey Long was a candidate for president and was confident of victory.
During that early autumn of 1935 the United States stood at a windy corner of world history. In Europe totalitarians had taken over Italy’s tottering liberal monarchy in 1922, and in 1933 the “republic” of Germany. In Louisiana a home-grown fascist with complete dominance over his own state was challenging the national leadership. Long had already put into operation at the local level an authoritarian principle of governmental sovereignty. Legislative and judicial functions were almost wholly concentrated in the hands of an executive who was in reality a “ruler.” The architect of that change was setting himself to expand it to national dimensions.
The seriousness of this situation was recognized by observers of the national scene. Raymond Gram Swing listed five public figures in a volume entitled _Forerunners of American Fascism_ and named Huey Long as the one of potentially greatest national danger. The others were Fr. Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, Sr., Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, and Dr. Townsend. George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor of the _Saturday Evening Post_, ordered a three-part serial profile of the senator from Louisiana. Most of this was published posthumously, as was all of what was to have been Long’s _Mein Kampf_: _My First Days in the White House_.
_Kingfish_ was thus tapped for a vaulting effort to become America’s _Duce_ or _Führer_ when violence put an abrupt end to the design and to the life of its protagonist. Official records in the coroner’s office at Baton Rouge give no details beyond those embodied on a printed form, whose blank spaces were filled in to note the name, age, bodily measurements, color, and sex of the decedent, together with a curt notation ascribing death to a “gunshot wound (homicidal).”