Meet Tom
Thomas E. (Tom) Patterson and American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana
My career as an author of a political biography is a second act, albeit foreshadowed by majoring in History as an undergraduate and serving two terms there as Student Senate President. It’s a second act because I became a lawyer and have spent over 40 years preparing and trying business lawsuits.
As a lawyer, I have always held other lawyers to account. Early in my career, I challenged a fee charged by a lawyer to his client, a case covered by the Chicago Tribune on May 7, 1985. Our most prominent victory over a law firm resulted in a $32.3 million verdict against Dentons, then self-described as the largest law firm in the world, and it was defended by the first-rate firm of Jones Day. We might be the largest law firm that represents victims of lawyer malpractice in Chicago, and maybe the Midwest or nation. Other than that, we have achieved several notable settlements for which the defendants negotiated confidentiality agreements, sued former House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert on behalf of one of his underage sex abuse victims, and successfully defended the late David L. Paul in a lawsuit brought against him by Chemical Bank of New York, saving him over $8 million. You can read more about our firm here.
Our firm has always given back to the public and the profession by speeches, participation in bar association activities, and writing books and articles. From our experience representing shareholders, LLC-members, and partners in business lawsuits that often arose in an emergency, I wrote a 600-page book, Handling the Business Emergency: Temporary Restraining Orders and Preliminary Injunctions, that was peer reviewed and then published by the American Bar Association in 2009. The ABA published a second edition (coauthored with Michael D. Haeberle) in 2021.
Before that, I had served on the Law Review, published an article in the Law Review about ex parte contacts in informal rulemaking proceedings, and clerked for the late Justice William G. Clark on the Illinois Supreme Court, probably the best job I ever had.
I was interested in Huey Long, nicknamed the Kingfish, from the great biography by T. Harry Williams, published in 1969. Later books criticized his biography as unduly favorable to Huey. I wondered who was right. Ken Burns directed a terrific documentary about him in the mid-1980s. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-09 and books by economists who worried about wealth inequality in the United States, I also realized that they had knowingly or accidently resurrected Huey’s primary contention: that economic inequality threatened to transform America into a modern feudalism, in which there were a few lords of finance at the top, with everyone else being peasants and serfs.
One advantage I had over prior biographers was the digitization of information. I read every issue of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times that mentioned Huey from 1928 to 1935. And Huey’s personal papers were discovered after the Williams biography was published, and not used much by later chroniclers of the Kingfish. These papers provided priceless information missing from all prior biographies.
Huey was a fascinating character. He had energy, talent, and brains. He wanted to help people previously ignored by the government. He had faults, too, and I explain them. He presents a rollicking story of victories, defeats, comebacks, and conflicts: within his family, with the largest bank in his hometown, with the New Orleans political machine, with the Louisiana aristocracy that had ruled Louisiana since 1876, with Franklin Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s cabinet members, and the establishment members of the Democratic Party, and, interestingly, with himself. He rose from birth in a log cabin in a poor, rural area of Louisiana in 1893 to become the second most influential politician in the United States by 1935, when an assassin ended his life. He was 42.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
