The Biggest Mouth in the U.S. Senate

Huey Long holds forth in 1935.

(Library of Congress)

“I can’t remember back to a time,” Huey Long once said, “when my mouth wasn’t open whenever there was a chance to make a speech.” In June 1935 the Kingfish, as he was called, performed one of the most spectacular feats of speechifying by anyone ever, holding forth in the U.S. Senate from just after noon on the 12th until almost four the following morning about everything from the United States Constitution to how to make salad dressing. The New York Times, in awe of the “apparently inexhaustible speaking powers of the man from the Louisiana canebrakes,” called his performance “one of the greatest feats of physical endurance the [Senate] chamber had ever seen.”

Huey Long was an outsize character of a sort no longer around in our era of cautious, poll-watching politics. A Democrat, he was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928, when he was only 34. In 1930 he was voted into the Senate, although he didn’t take his seat until 1932, after overseeing the election of a faithful gubernatorial successor. He was a radical populist who championed the common man and fought big corporations; at the same time he was addicted to power and came to impose one-man rule on Louisiana. His frequent buffoonery disguised a serious agenda: a redistribution of wealth to erase, or at least reduce, of the gap between rich and poor. He had presidential ambitions, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he at first championed but came to despise, handled him carefully, once confiding that he found him “one of the two most dangerous men in America.” (The other was General Douglas MacArthur.)

In the Senate a speaker is not subject to any time limit; nor, in Long’s day, was a speaker obliged to stick to the question under debate. Since the earliest days of the republic, this lack of regulation has been exploited by senators wishing to block, delay, or reshape pending legislation. To engage in such an activity is known as filibustering. Either a group or an individual can filibuster. The former method may be more effective, with senators relieving tired co-filibusterers, but the latter is more spectacular, particularly when the speaker is Huey Long.

Before the Senate on June 12 was a bill to extend the National Recovery Act, which was about to expire. Long had opposed the original NRA but was more or less resigned to its extension. What he wanted was to force the Senate to retain a rider to the new bill, the so-called Gore amendment, that would require Senate confirmation of presidentially appointed NRA officials (he hoped to prevent his political enemies from getting NRA jobs in Louisiana). The Senate’s pro-Roosevelt leadership wanted to remove the Gore amendment, but unless they agreed to retain it, Huey vowed to talk the Senate to death.

Taking the floor at 12:17 on the afternoon of the June 12, he “was feeling well and showed it,” the Times reported. For the first two hours he topic-hopped energetically, attacking the NRA and Roosevelt (“What is the NRA? Nuts Running America! NRA—Never Roosevelt Again!”), plugging his “Share the Wealth” program, castigating Postmaster General James Farley, a close Roosevelt aide, and reminiscing about his battles with oil companies in Louisiana.

At 2:30 he noticed a Senate manual lying on his desk; knowing that it contained a copy of the Constitution, he announced that he would lecture on that document, reduced by FDR to a volume of “ancient and forgotten lore.” For four hours he held forth on the United States Constitution, reading and then analyzing each section. The columnist Will Rogers wrote that this portion of Long’s speech was “the biggest and most educational novelty ever introduced in the Senate.”

At 3:30 p.m., surveying the chamber’s many nodding heads, Long said, “The intense interest which is being manifested in my speech here causes me to proceed with almost undue caution, and I feel almost impelled to request Senators to restrain themselves lest they applaud me as I proceed with my lecture. . . . I will read a little further.”

He had hoped that other Senators would join him in the filibuster, but it was apparent that no such support was forthcoming; he’d have to go it alone. He got a bit of help here and there, however. At 5:17 p.m. Sen. Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, a Long ally, made a quorum call. During these roll calls a speaker is permitted to leave the floor for ten minutes, and Huey made straight for the men’s room.

Back on the floor, he read from Victor Hugo’s By Order of the King for half an hour. His energy flagging momentarily, he offered the Senate leadership a deal: He would quit speaking if they agreed to a vote on the Gore amendment the next day. His opponents objected, killing the motion. “Plainly sick and tired of the Kingfish’s tactics,” Time reported, Long’s enemies were ready to “hold his feet to the fire,” forcing him to talk until he dropped.

Still hoping for an adjournment, he next tried to tempt the senators’ appetites—dinnertime was at hand—with some down-home Louisiana recipes. “I have spent a number of evenings,” he began, “acquainting people with how to prepare oysters,” and he launched into a lengthy discourse on the topic. “You fry those oysters in boiling grease until they turn a gold-copper color and rise to the top. . . . There is no telling how many lives have been lost by not knowing how to fry oysters. . . . Many times we hear of some man who was supposed to have had an acute attack of indigestion or cerebral hemorrhage or heart failure, and the chances are the only thing that was the matter with him was that he had swallowed some improperly cooked oysters.”

At 7 p.m. another quorum call gave him a brief respite, after which he returned to his discussion of the Constitution. Unless FDR’s performance improved, he said, he would be obliged to run for President. “If the President we’ve got doesn’t do any better, I may have to take it. If he doesn’t improve and some candidate doesn’t rise up from the other party, I’ll be chosen practically unanimously by both. It’s the stumbles and the blunders and the mistakes of my enemies that have made the man Huey Long.”

And on he rolled. In hour eight Sen. Henry Ashurst of Arizona declared Long’s popularity in the Senate “about as great as that of a cuckoo clock in a boys’ dormitory at three o’clock in the morning.” As the clock passed 10, Long felt a surge of energy. “I seem to have new inspiration. I seem to hear a voice that says, ‘Speak ten hours more.’” He told the senators to go home and catch some sleep, that he’d be there at least another 24 hours, “a-teaching the Senate how to act.” He declared himself “at the service of my colleagues here tonight. I’ll be glad to give them advice on any subject on which they are in doubt. I offer them gratis the advice and counsel of a good lawyer.”

Just before midnight he sent out for chocolate caramels, which he munched on while he spoke, washing them down with milk and pitching several at nearby senators. His secretary appeared with a sandwich; Long broke it into pieces and rolled them into balls so he could eat and talk at the same time. His thoughts turning back to food, he killed half an hour giving his recipe for Roquefort-cheese salad dressing, spending much time advising his colleagues on how to stir it and admonishing them never to use it on anything but head lettuce. Earlier in the evening he had recommended that the Senate print his recipes and send out several million copies.

As the clock passed midnight, “nerves became more and more irritable,” according to the Times. “This is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world,” declared Lewis Schwellenbach, a young senator from Washington, “but the Senator from Louisiana has turned it into a cheap circus.” Schwellenbach, the leader of an impromptu coalition of anti-Long senators (“the young Turks,” Huey called them), made the first of several declarations that he and his colleagues were ready to go the distance, staying in the chamber until an exhausted Long quit his filibuster.

To get rest, Long several times asked that the Senate clerk be permitted to read various documents—the 1932 Democratic platform, the Lord’s Prayer—but each time the Young Turks objected, and he had to stay on his feet. Newsweek provided a description of the Kingfish as hour 14 neared: “At two a.m. Huey Pierce Long’s eyelids drooped. He clung to his desk for support. With difficulty he kept on his feet. . . . From his exhausted throat the words came rasping and hollow.” By 3 a.m. he was jumping up and down to keep himself awake. “Men are yawning,” he said; “men’s eyes are bleary; men’s souls are tired; their feet are sore; their heads are heavy; they are needing rest; they are needing sleep. . . .” Again he asked for adjournment so that the Gore amendment could be voted on after everyone had gotten some rest; again the young Turks objected. Was there no chance of agreement, Long plaintively asked.

“None whatever,” said Sen. Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, a Long foe.

“That is the toughest thing I ever ran into,” said Huey. Schwellenbach piped up that the young Turks had each drunk three cups of coffee, which would enable them to outlast their foe. They only thought they’d drunk coffee, railed Long. “That stuff is nothing but slop. If ‘Senators’ had ever had a cup of coffee down in Louisiana they would realize that there was no one in Washington who knew how to make coffee.” It was one of Long’s last rants of the night, or morning. By 3:30 a.m. his fire had clearly gone; what’s more, he hadn’t been to the men’s room since 8 p.m. He relinquished the floor just before 4 a.m., staggering to the john. The senators still present voted to extend the NRA, minus the Gore amendment, a victory for Roosevelt and a defeat for Long.

Long had spoken almost nonstop for 15 and a half hours, filling 89 pages of the Congressional Record. Four U.S. senators—Robert La Follette, Sr., Wayne Morse, Strom Thurmond, and William Proxmire—have spoken longer, but none of them with Long’s rambunctious flair. Tragically, the June filibuster would be something of a swan song for the Kingfish. Less than two months later, on September 8, 1935, he was assassinated while on a trip back home to Louisiana. His last words were reportedly “Don’t let me die, I’ve got so much to do.” And so much to say.

—Tony Scherman is a writer who lives in Nyack, New York.