“You got to make it out of Badness...And you know why? Because there isn’t anything else to make it out of”

—Willie Stark, in All the King’s Men.

A LOCAL election, in scorching 32° C summer heat. A depressed and unstable economy, corruption semi-concealed, the anger of the poor semi-endured. This was Louisiana in the 1930s: the depression, the time when radicalism raged, when Willie Stark arrived, shouted, and won—a person with pas