"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve." -H.L. Mencken

Proposition

Given the movement to remove offensive statues in New Orleans and other parts of the Southern United States, I propose that the statues and monuments (particularly the large monument and tombstone at the Louisiana State Capital) dedicated to tyrant, demagogue and closet racist Huey P. Long seated on public property and maintained at the expense of the Louisiana tax payer be removed; bridges, buildings and streets dedicated to him should be renamed. 

Solution

The removal of the monument at the Louisiana State Capital (and all other Long monuments) should be funded by private means, similar to how the removal of the monuments in New Orleans are being funded; however, instead of the removal being anonymous and known to only a few who are politically connected, as is the case in New Orleans, the donor should make his or her presence known to Louisianians out of respect for those who may disagree with the removal.

After removal, the monuments should be donated to an appropriate museum, the Long family or the City of Winnfield, Louisiana.

The monuments should be replaced by either nothing at all or artwork by a local that is inclusive to all Louisianians in their support of liberty and opposition to tyrannical politicians.

Both the removal and replacement of the monuments and the renaming of bridges, buildings and streets should come at as little cost to the Louisiana tax payer as necessary. 

Justification

Huey P. Long was known during his time as a man who cared neither about law, democracy nor liberty but about punishing his adversaries and, most importantly, his personal political advancement and the eventual achievement of his main goal: the Presidency of the United States. As you can see from the article excerpts below in the History section, Long was not a man of character or intellect but of great charisma and bombast who consolidated unprecedented tyrannical power in the State of Louisiana. He claimed to be a man of the downtrodden and black community; he was not. For votes and power, he misled and tantalized the poor with his unattainable utopian proposals of "a chicken in every pot" and "every man a king." His public speeches were made to tickle the ears of the misfortunate, while in private he disparaged blacks and schemed to expand his own fortune at the expense of the common Louisianian.

If monuments to the Confederacy are seen as offensive because they represent the opposition to the United States, the monuments to Long represent the opposition to the common Louisianian. Long's monuments represent the glorification of a man who abused his power at nearly all costs to achieve is own personal goals. Despite his reforms, Long's lasting legacy are monuments to a tyrant and the often-abused expanse of executive power by the governors who followed him. 

Monuments to corrupt tyrants are antithetical to American principles. 

History

Video: American Dictators: Huey P. Long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTWcZJJFQ04

Article: Huey Long was the most entertaining tyrant in American history. From 1928, when he became governor of Louisiana, to 1935, when he was assassinated, Long's flamboyant style and brazen deeds provided journalists and their readers with more good stories than most politicians pile up in a lifetime.

The Kingfish (a nickname he borrowed from a character on the "Amos 'n' Andy" radio show) cursed and bullied state lawmakers until they voted his way or were hounded out of office, sometimes in rigged elections. Vowing to help farmers and laborers of all races, Long forced the legislature to finance free textbooks for schoolchildren, build thousands of miles of new roads and slap a hefty tax on Standard Oil, whose Baton Rouge refinery was the largest in the world.

Meanwhile, Long, who sometimes wore green silk pajamas while greeting official visitors, treated himself to the bounty of his realm. He ordered convicts from the state penitentiary to tear down the antebellum governor's mansion and had a near-replica of the White House built in its place. He acted as virtual coach of the Louisiana State University football team and sometimes threw tantrums on the field when they lost. And he often gave his best speeches while drunk.

In 1930, Long won a seat in the U.S. Senate. Back in Baton Rouge, he installed as governor a smiling toady, felicitously named O.K. Allen. In Washington, Long demanded that Congress confiscate all earnings over $1 million a year and use the funds for medical care, college tuitions and other programs. When his fellow senators refused to endorse his "Share Our Wealth" plan, he called them "damned scoundrels" fit for hanging.

To serve his ends, Long could switch from color-blind altruism to smarmy bigotry. In 1935, the Kingfish unleashed a racist smear against a local judge in Louisiana, accusing him of having "coffee" or mulatto blood. In response, the judge's son-in-law, a young doctor, shot Long down in the halls of the state capitol. At his death, the Kingfish was only 42 years old. He had been planning to run for president as a populist, third-party candidate; if he'd lived, he might have been able to keep Franklin D. Roosevelt from winning reelection in 1936. (Read more: The Man Who Would Be King)

Article: Just after he was married, in 1913, a 19-year-old Huey P. Long told his wife about his plan: He was going to run for and be elected to a minor state office, then win the governorship, become a United States senator, and finally be elected president of the United States. It's a common career plan for aspiring politicians, and Long set about achieving it with astonishing single-mindedness and, it must be said, disregard for the law. His flamboyant populism and willingness to make outlandish promises inspired worship among voters, and disgust mixed with ridicule from critics. "It's all very well for us to laugh over Huey," President Franklin Roosevelt once said, but "he really is one of the two most dangerous men in the country" (the other being Gen. Douglas MacArthur).

Before Long could mount a challenge to Roosevelt, whom he saw as a weakling and a phony, he was assassinated, in a hallway of the very capitol building he had ordered constructed as a monument to his own grandiosity. (Read more: Huey Long's Life and Legacy)

Article: Elected governor in 1928, he announced he was the "Kingfish," and said he'd be president one day. Anyone in his way was fair game for dirty tricks -- from stuffing ballot boxes to revealing that opponents had relatives in the state mental institution or black blood in their past. When a distraught legislator waved a copy of the state constitution in his face, Long snarled, "I'm the constitution around here now."

When angry legislators, themselves guilty of many of Long's shenanigans, failed to bring the Kingfish down through impeachment, Baltimore's bemused sage, H. L. Mencken, caught the mood of many onlookers: "It was a fight to the death between gorillas and baboons. The whole combat was typical political science in the Hookworm Belt."

In 1932, Louisiana's citizens -- dazzled, amused, inspired or cowed -- elected Long to the U.S. Senate.

The Kingfish was consolidating his dictatorship. He had a puppet successor as governor, a muzzled press, a secret police and a lucrative policy of financial kickbacks from state employees. When told that he had coerced an anti-Long city into accepting his free school textbook program, Long snorted, "I stomped them into distributing the books."

In Dr. Hair's pages, Long gets little praise for his moderate (by his era's standards) approach to the race issue. Dr. Hair carefully documents Long's penchant for racist language, his callous treatment of individual blacks, and his willingness to play the race card when needed in elections.

In general, Dr. Hair argues, the Kingfish did little to help blacks. Since Long "never specifically helped any of the underclass who were unable to help him -- that is, non-voters such as blacks and state prisoners -- the conclusion is inescapable that everything he did in politics was for the purpose of augmenting his own power." (Read more: The Kingfish as a scheming, ambitious tyrant)

"No man has ever been President of the United States more than two terms. You know that; everyone knows that. But when I get in, I'm going to abolish the Electoral College, have universal suffrage, and I defy any son of a bitch to get me out under four terms." -Huey P. Long