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, legal and/or career:
“We passed the Children’s Bureau bill calculated to prevent children from being employed too early in factories.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Our rural village life was a purifying, uplifting influence that fortified us against the later impacts of urbanization; Church and State, because they were separated and friendly, had spiritual and ethical standards that were mutually enriching; freedom and discipline, individualism and collectivity, nature and nurture in their interaction promised an ever stronger democracy. I have no illusions that those simpler, happier days can be resurrected.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“In ‘70 he married again, and I having, voluntarily, assumed the legal guilt of breaking my marriage contract, do cheerfully accept the legal penalty—a life of celibacy—bringing no charge against him who was my husband, save that he was not much better than the average man.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)