Early Life and Legal Career
Long was born on August 30, 1893, in Winnfield, the seat of Winn Parish, a small town in the north-central part of the state. He was the son of Huey Pierce Long, Sr. (1852–1937) and the former Caledonia Palestine Tison (1860–1913). Long was a descendant of William Tison and Sarah Vince Tison, daughter of American Revolutionary War soldier Richard Vince. He was the seventh of nine surviving children in a farm-owning middle-class family. He was home-schooled as a young child and later attended local schools, where he was an excellent student and was said to have a photographic memory. In 1908, upon completing the eleventh grade, Long circulated a petition protesting the addition of a 12th-grade graduation requirement, which resulted in his expulsion.
Long won a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University, but he was unable to afford the textbooks required for attendance. Instead, he spent the next five years as a traveling salesman, selling books, canned goods and patent medicines, as well as working as an auctioneer.
In 1913, Long married Rose McConnell. She was a stenographer who had won a baking contest which he promoted to sell "Cottolene", one of the most popular of the early vegetable shortenings to come on the market. The Longs had a daughter, also named Rose, and two sons, Russell (1918–2003) (later a seven-term U.S. Senator) and Palmer (1921–2010) (a Shreveport oilman).
When sales jobs grew scarce during World War I, Long attended seminary classes at Oklahoma Baptist University at the urging of his mother, a devout Baptist. However, he concluded he was not suited to preaching.
Long briefly attended the University of Oklahoma College of Law in Norman, Oklahoma, and later Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. In 1915 after only a year at Tulane, he convinced a board to let him take the state bar exam. He passed and began private practice in Winnfield. Later, in Shreveport, he spent ten years representing small plaintiffs against large businesses, including workers' compensation cases. He often said proudly that he never took a case against a poor man.
Long won fame by taking on the powerful Standard Oil Company, which he sued for unfair business practices. Over the course of his career, Long continued to challenge Standard Oil's influence in state politics and charged the company with exploiting the state's vast oil and gas resources.
Read more about this topic: Huey Long
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life, legal and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at an early age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)