Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU by Robert Mann (review)

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• Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU by Robert Mann
• Jack Carey

Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU. By Robert Mann. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xx, 330. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7952-9.)

Robert Mann’s Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU tells the story of Louisiana’s most famous political figure and the state’s flagship university. Mann, a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU) with an extensive background in journalism and politics in that state, fills the book’s twenty-seven brisk chapters with tales of scandals, portraits of an ambitious political and educational vision, and sketches of a sprawling cast of scheming characters. Throughout the story, Huey P. Long stands at the center.

Long’s “fraught relationship with LSU” dated to his childhood (p. xv). As a teenager, Long’s first extended trips away from his family’s home were to Baton Rouge for competitions in Louisiana’s High School Rally program. Long later claimed that “he fell in love with LSU” on these trips (p. 9). He never attended LSU, though. For students from places like Winnfield, Long’s hometown in “hilly, north-central Louisiana,” Mann writes, attending LSU may have seemed like “an unattainable dream” (pp. 7, 10). In 1923, during his first gubernatorial campaign, Long denounced plans for an expanded LSU as a “temple of vanity erected to Governor [John M.] Parker” (p. 28). Long lost that election—the only one he ever lost. By 1927, during his successful gubernatorial campaign, Long was telling crowds in Baton Rouge, “There is no man in this state that holds dearer sentiments than I toward Louisiana State University” (p. 36).

Mann disputes the idea that Long ignored LSU during the first two years of his governorship (1928 and 1929), but he acknowledges that it was not until “late 1930” that Long’s “active, near daily involvement” with the university began (p. 51). From November 1930, after bringing the LSU Board of Supervisors under his control, Long consistently meddled in the university, often involving himself in the hiring and firing of faculty members and administrators. While Long often denied his role in day-to-day decisions at LSU, he promoted his involvement with the school’s football team and marching band. Long’s belief in his prowess as a play-caller aside, Mann writes that the Kingfish acted as the football “team’s chief booster, motivational speaker, and sidelines cheerleader” (pp. 109–10). [End Page 643]

Mann credits Long, through his own governorship and the terms of his successors Oscar Allen and Richard Leche, with “lasting accomplishments at LSU, including increased enrollment, expansion of the campus, more and better faculty, and new academic departments” (p. 265). The money Long poured into the university came with strings, though. His meddling threatened LSU’s accreditation, and Mann notes that Long “undermined academic freedom and emphasized nonacademic pursuits to a sometimes-damaging degree” (p. 268). Long implemented his ambitious plans for LSU within the state’s Jim Crow system; the Kingfish offered little for the state’s chronically underfunded Black colleges. Mann also notes that prioritizing LSU diminished funding for the state’s smaller white colleges.

Kingfish U is an entertaining book that uses storytelling to make sense of a key political and institutional relationship in the modernization of the South. Readers will laugh, shake their heads, and ask many questions. Kingfish U is a journalistic account, and Mann uses sources and methods differently than historians might. Because the book focuses so closely on Long and LSU, readers may struggle to place these stories in a broader context. For example, where did Long and the university fit into a social and cultural map of Louisiana, both before and after the Kingfish poured millions of dollars into the institution? Beyond Louisiana, what of this story resembles the paths taken at other southern universities in the era of Jim Crow? These, though, are questions for different kinds of books to answer.

Jack Carey University of Alabama Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...