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Two Roads to Prosperity: Huey Long Versus Bobby Jindal

The heady excitement of the fracking boom hides some deeply


important and little discussed political choices, of course. In the
last Louisiana oil boom, from 1928 to 1932, in the midst of the Great
Depression, Louisiana governor Huey Long, the progressive
demagogue the Kingfish, as he was called taxed oil companies,
using that money to put a chicken in every pot, give out free
textbooks to schoolchildren, create evening literacy courses for adults,
and build roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. Long curbed
homelessness and poverty. Before succumbing to the lure of oil money
himself, Long embraced the ideal of an activist government that lifted
the poor and added to the common good.
By contrast, from 2007 to 2015, as mentioned, Governor Bobby Jindal
drew $1.6 billion from schools and hospitals to give to companies as
incentives. This strategy put some chickens in some pots, of course,
and indirectly took them away from others. Like nearly everyone I talk
to, Mayor Hardey twice voted for Governor Jindal, as did his family. And
were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long.
When I ask Hardey about his political orientation he was a moderate
Republican he immediately answers, Ive had enough of poor me.
As he explains, I dont like the government paying unwed mothers to
have a lot of kids, and I dont go for affirmative action. I met this one
black guy who complained he couldnt get a job. Come to find out hed
been to private school. I went to a local public school like everyone
else I know. No one should be getting a job to fill some mandated racial
quota or getting state money not to work. Jindal had reduced state
money for poor mes. With the jobs coming in now, we ought to
close the unemployment office, Hardey declares. You can get a $15
to $18 job flagging (i.e., holding traffic flags around construction
sites).
The second of five children, Hardey had learned to stand his ground
among friendly competitors for parental attention. And it was rare that
he pleaded poor me. He had become a beloved and effective
defender of his community. But it was industry itself, he felt, that had
permitted him to access his own potential, and to become the man he
was.
In grade school and high school, he tells me solemnly, I wasnt
anything. I couldnt comprehend things. Might he have had an
undiagnosed learning disability? I ask. No, he replies simply. I just
couldnt comprehend. And I wasnt an athlete, either. There was
nothing I was good at. But he continues, When I got to the plant,

starting in the maintenance department, I discovered I could do things.


They promoted me from there. When I retired I was an instrumentation
foreman overseeing a lot of operators, and had a salary of $180,000.
Phillips 66 had done for Hardey what college or the army did for others:
helped him discover his native intelligence, feel honored, provide
handsomely for his family without leaving his ancestral home
achieve the American Dream.
Why couldnt blacks and legal immigrants do the same? he thought. As
a young man in the 1970s, seeking work in the plants, Hardey had
been told, We had to fill our quotas for blacks. Was this truly the
case, I wondered, or was this what company recruiters told white job
seekers they turned down? He was not a racist, Hardey told me, but he
favored no special breaks for blacks or foreigners. In a racially
separated world, its possible to have racial disadvantage without
racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good
connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them.
Maybe, Hardey thought. But that seemed a problem you could fix
without the federal government horning in. Hardey had worked his own
way up despite federal intervention, as he saw it.
Others I talked to felt the same, only more strongly. Government
sponsored redistribution? No! Hardeys family members had all
prospered. But in other families, some struck it rich, others got drunk
and divorced and ended up poor. The family was a chancy
redistribution system all its own, it seemed. After the 2008 crash, too,
some got rich, others got poor. And you didnt want the government
playing favorites on top of that. It felt better to stick to the free market,
to industry, to a company like Phillips 66 or Sasol.
And Governor Jindals $1.6 billion incentive to lure industry to the
state? Good idea, Hardey says. Sure, these were the richest
companies in the world, and Louisiana was a poor state. But you
needed to sweeten the deal to get companies to come to Louisiana
instead of Texas, he explains. Now my grandson will have a good job
here! Maybe from a national point of view, it didnt matter if Sasol
located in Houston or Lake Charles, but for Bob Hardey and his son and
his grandson, it mattered greatly.
As for pollution, the mayor thought it was a problem from the past.
We used to vent bad stuff, he says, but the EPA restricts flares now.
As for cancer, he thinks it is mainly genetic. My dads worked in and
lived near the plants all his life, and I have too, and so have my
brothers and son, and none of us have had cancer. But the best man at
my wedding worked in and lived around the plants just like we did. And
he got cancer. His brother died of it. His cousin got it. Its genes. But
he adds, Ill tell you where they do have a problem, thats east of

here, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. There, its the
chemicals.
Copyright 2016 by Arlie Russell Hochschild . This excerpt originally
appeared in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the
American Right, published by The New Press Reprinted here with
permission.

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