During the early 1930s no two names were better known in the United States than those of Roosevelt and Long. The former was the product of a patrician heritage plus the gloss of Groton and Harvard. The latter had received no formal education beyond that afforded by the Winnfield high school. An intermittent career as a book auctioneer, Cottolene salesman, and door-to-door canvasser in the rural South did nothing to soften the rough edges of his early environment. No two modes of address could have differed more radically than the polished modulation of F.D.R.’s fireside chats and the bucolic idiom of one of Huey Long’s campaign rodomontades: “Glory be, we brought ’em up to the lick-log that time”--“He thinks he’s running for the Senate but watch us clean his plow for him come November”--“Every time I think of how I was suckered in on that proposition I feel like I’d ought to be bored for the hollow horn.” It was once stated that before Seymour Weiss, the New Orleans hotel man who was perhaps his closest friend, took him in hand, he dressed like a misprint in a tailored-by-mail catalogue. The description was apt. Early photographs prove it, if proof be needed. Even when he was oil-rich from his expanding law practice in Shreveport, he wore a ring in which a huge diamond gleamed, and a tie-pin in which another, equally large, was set. “Stop talkin’ po’-mouth to me, son,” an elderly legislator at Baton Rouge once advised him. “You got di’monds all over you. Bet you even got di’mond buttons on yo’ draw’s.” None the less he was superbly endowed with what, for want of a better term, might be called personal magnetism, a quality that drew crowds as sheep are drawn to a salt trough. Nowhere was this manifested more strikingly than in Washington, where throngs packed the Senate galleries the moment it was known that he was about to deliver a speech. He was a superb actor, too. Telling the same anecdote seven or eight times a day, day after day in campaign after campaign, he would none the less deliver it with the same chuckling verve at the thousandth repetition with which he had told it initially. Little bubbles of laughter escaped him as though involuntarily when he built up to the nub of a jest. The effect of such tricks of stagecraft was heightened by the unhurried but uninterrupted flow of words, the affectation of homely idiom, the Southerner’s easy slurring of consonants.