Fortunate is the biographer who has Huey Long as a subject. The colorful Kingfish (a nickname Long appropriated from the popular radio show “Amos ‘n’ Andy”) has always been good copy, because his whole life was politics, and thus there is no strain involved in distinguishing the private from the public man. Politics consumed him; as he told his wife, Rose, it was not possible for him to lead a normal life. His son, Russell, remembered his father taking him to the movies only to slip out shortly after the film began in order to attend yet another political meeting.

Often called a demagogue – in American terms, a rabble-rouser – Long had a gift for the homespun analogy and thought of himself as a man of the people. Harry Williams, Long’s 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, quotes his unapologetic subject as pointing out that his Depression-era political program amounted to demagogy “because in the old Greek parlance that meant the language that was acceptable to the majority.”

In “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long” (Random House, 361 pages, $26.95), Richard White Jr. provides many examples of the down-to-earth Kingfish. Responding to those who deplored his destroying of the old mansion that had been good enough for previous Louisiana governors and replacing it with a towering Art Deco edifice, Long memorably said: “I can see where the criticism is sound. It reminds me of the old man who keeps a boarding house. When one guest complains that the towel is dirty, he says, ‘People have been wiping on that towel for a month without complaining. I don’t see what’s the matter with you.'”

No Long biographer is certain about Long’s sex life. Little is known about his marriage or if he had affairs. Williams interviewed nearly 300 family members, friends, associates, and enemies and never could determine whether, for example, Long had an affair with his pretty secretary, Alice Lee Grosjean, whom he later made secretary of state. She was efficient and utterly loyal, but was she also his mistress? To this day, no one seems to know.

But one thing is certain: If Huey had had his way, everyone in Louisiana – and in the country – would have been Longized. His opponents referred to his corruption of the state Legislature by calling it the longislature. A brilliant attorney, despite never having completed law school – or much other formal schooling, for that matter – Long drafted laws by the hundreds. At the height of his power, he compelled lawmakers to pass his bills without even reading them. He even abolished the state bar organization, re-creating it a la Long. He undermined the judiciary, packing courts with his own cronies, and placed, it seemed, every member of his large family on the state payroll, except (he liked to joke) those in the penitentiary. Elected to the Senate in 1930, he installed a puppet governor and continued to run Louisiana, all the while blasting Franklin Roosevelt for not instituting Long’s radical Share the Wealth program, which would make “every man a king” – the catchphrase of Long’s autobiography and the call to action that at one point inspired more than 8 million people to join Share the Wealth clubs.

Long had a Napoleonic restlessness and was often accused of running a dictatorship. But like Bonaparte, Long also had a code – a populist program aimed at annihilating the old guard and the corporations that supported it. Long supplied the state’s children with free textbooks. He built thousands of miles of roads, and he modernized Louisiana.

It is undeniable that Long was unscrupulous in achieving his often laudable ends – as Robert Penn Warren eloquently dramatized in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “All The King’s Men” (1946). Headed for a great fall (he would die by an assassin’s bullet in 1935), Long provided the model for Warren’s Willy Stark, a more self-aware and tragic character who dies lamenting that it could have been different, that he need not have so confused means and ends. The closest Huey Long came to adopting that point of view was expressing regret that no means other than his ruthless ones seemed available to achieve equity for the majority.

Mr. White has produced a taut and riveting narrative that is true to his subtitle. Mr. White is concerned with a reign of power, not with the whole man or with the myth that is greater than the man. For Mr. White, Long’s finest period was his first two years as governor (1928-1930), when he did make good on many of his promises to the people. After that, Long degenerated into a demagogue, pure and simple, one who talked reform but actually did little to change the structure of politics or government. Perhaps the worst crime in Mr. White’s indictment is Long’s exploitation of the state’s natural resources – chiefly oil – which through government leases lined the pockets of a few multimillionaires, thus depriving the state of the means to better the lot of its citizens.

Call Mr. White’s book, then, a political biography of the highest order, but not, certainly, a full-scale biography. Mr. White deems Williams’s 1969 biography, “a landmark in oral history” that “stands alone in size and detail,” though it is also “at times needlessly apologetic regarding Long’s ruthless methods.”

Strike “needlessly” and replace “apologetic” with “empathetic.” Perhaps because Williams spoke with so many of Long’s contemporaries, perhaps because the historian taught at Louisiana State University (which Long built into a first-class institution), and perhaps because he seemed swayed by the myth of the man Warren portrayed, Williams presented a more appealing biographical subject.

Whereas Mr. White zeroes in on Long’s subversion of state laws, Williams focused on the conservative opposition, which used those laws to concentrate power in their hands. After only a year in the governor’s office, Long was impeached, only to be saved by the state Senate. Mr. White emphasizes that Long’s opposition had a good case, and while Williams did not deny the point, he showed that the opposition did not hold the ethical high ground and that, in fact, one of its leaders, Lieutenant Governor Paul Cyr, who would have replaced Long, was detested by many of the impeachers.

Thus the two biographers do not disagree on the facts so much as on where the emphasis should lie. They also divide company when it comes to the rhetoric of biography. Mr. White is all business, deftly laying out Long’s devious politics. Williams, in contrast, might almost be Plutarch, enveloping his central figure in a rich historical context (devoting 10 pages or so, for example, on what it meant to be a Southern demagogue and why Long, who did not play the race card but did actually implement reform, was no typical demagogue):

It is sometimes said, by reputable historians who like to think that the course of history is foreordained, that Huey Long was an inevitable product of conditions in Louisiana. … Sooner or later a reform leader would have appeared. But that leader could have been a very mild reformer who would have satisfied popular desire for change with relatively little change, or he could have been a charlatan who would have propitiated the people with mere rhetoric. He did not have to be a Huey Long. But it was Huey Long who appeared, a man of great power, with the capacity within him to bring about large and even revolutionary change, and to do much good – or evil.

Elsewhere, Williams called Long “an artist in the use of power,” lauding his political imagination, as did W.J. Cash and other profound commentators on Southern politics.

The symbiosis here between Warren’s novel and Williams’s biography is intense. Whereas Mr. White wraps up Huey’s final hours, spent dying from a gunshot wound, in a few paragraphs, Williams brought us to the deathbed:

At times he passed into unconsciousness and then revived and talked wildly, as though he saw visions beyond the hospital walls. He saw the people out there, the poor people of America, a mass of faces, staring at him, needing him, wanting to give him power so that he could help them … the one-gallus farmers of the hill lands of the South … the white and black sharecroppers in the broad cotton fields … the gaunt and debt-ridden farmers of the Great Plains … the unemployed factory workers tramping the streets of the Northeast … the small businessman all over the country pushed to the wall by big business … the pathetic elderly couples in countless towns and villages whose lifesavings had disappeared with the collapse of the banks … the fresh faced boys and girls eager to gain an education … they looked at him and trusted him … and they would give him power.

At other times, Williams reported, Long spoke quite rationally and soberly. Most eyewitnesses to his passing remember Huey, a man of titanic energy, saying, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.”

This Long is glimpsed occasionally in Mr. White’s parsimonious prose – such as when Huey inspects the new LSU grounds and halts the cement mixers, telling the construction crews to wait a year and lay down paths where the students actually walked; when he shows up at a bank threatened with failure brandishing a $265,000 check, telling depositors not to attempt a withdrawal because he will take the state’s money out first, leaving them with nothing (the bank was saved); and when he tells that story about the dirty towel in the boarding house.

For Huey Long, politics was the great leveler, whether we know it or not. Mr. White’s many virtues notwithstanding, that Long is available only in the work of Harry Williams.

crollyson@nysun.com