Baton Rouge, some 80 miles (110 km) northwest of New Orleans is Louisiana’s state capital. Now perhaps best known in the US as the home of LSU (Louisiana State University) with some 80,000 students and a massive college sports programme, the city is still dominated by the ghost of Louisiana’s one-time governor & US Senator, the notorious Kingfisher himself, Huey Long

Huey Long was a left-wing populist whose perceived mantra was “Make Louisiana Great Again”! As Governor, he made extravagant promises with little plan as to how feasible many of them were or how he was going to pay for them. However, he did create a public works program that was unprecedented in the South, constructing roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and state buildings, including an extravagant new State Capitol Building.

In doing this, Long created hundreds of thousands of Depression-era jobs.

But Long also built a powerful political machine in Louisiana and in one way or another, steam-rollered anyone who stood in his way. In 1930, Huey Long was elected to the US Senate, but didn’t take up his seat until 1932, doing his best to stop his Lt Governor from assuming the Governorship. Long was a supporter of President Rosevelt but ultimately decided that Rosevelt’s New Deal wasn’t radical enough and fell out with him. Long’s ambition was to run for the US presidency but his corrupt past caught up with him in 1935 when he was assassinated. The son-in-law of a political opponent whose district Long was attempting to “gerrymander” fired a single shot at him. In the melee that followed, Long’s bodyguard of thugs fired at least 60 shots killing the purported assassin and according to some theories it was random bullets that finished off The Kingfisher.

So left-wing populist or corrupt neo-Fascist wannabe dictator? General historical consensus seems to come down more on the side of the latter than the former. But there’;s little doubt that even 90 years on, the Ghost of The Kingfish still haunts Baton Rouge and Louisiana State politics