It has been said that Long was forced to seek higher office because he was barred by law from succeeding himself as governor, though most who had studied Long doubt that legal niceties would have been an impediment had Huey Long really sought to keep his lamplight under Louisiana's bushel basket.
It is far more likely that Long understood long before anyone else that he could have been a viable player on the national stage and, in 1930, he took his first steps in that direction, mounting a campaign for the U.S. Senate. It was a generally unsurprising campaign, but for one incident. A man named Sam Irby, who happened to be an uncle by marriage to Huey's secretary of state, and according to some, the Kingfish's consort, Alice Lee Grosjean, was apparently beginning to lose faith in Long when he suddenly disappeared. He had been kidnapped, it was alleged, by the Kingfish. But in a masterstroke of showmanship, Irby showed up right before Election Day, claiming, incredibly, that he had engineered his own kidnapping. No student of Huey Long doubts that the Kingfish had a hand in the bizarre event, though whether he arranged the whole debacle, or simply choreographed the grand finale remains an open question.
This much is clear, the episode generated publicity just in time for Election Day.
Naturally, given the scope of his power in Louisiana, he glided easily to victory, and in typical Long fashion, he decreed that he would remain both governor and senator until his term in the state house expired.
In fact, Long spent the first two years of his Senate term in Baton Rouge refusing, again in grand Long fashion, to take his seat in the august upper house until he could be certain that each of his hand-picked successors, Oscar K. L. Allen among them, were in place in state government. It was of course, an act of supreme arrogance and an affront to his fellow senators, many of whom recognized the slight for what it was. But most of all it was another step in Long's march to absolute power. The men he chose to take over in Louisiana after all weren't chosen for their wisdom or experience, or even for the extent to which they shared Long's vision. They were chosen, most historians agree, because of their willingness to follow Huey Long's orders. Like the 34-story state capital he had ordered built in Baton Rouge, Huey Long was building a vertical empire.
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