Work was made for the man, not the man for work.
Huey Long, while a socialist at heart, was probably exposing his southern roots with that comment. The distinction you made regarding a rural European lifestlye vs the US lifestyle used to be a distinction between the US south and the Yankee north. In the antebellum South, leisure time was highly valued and not seen as laziness as long as it was productive/edifying in other ways (literature, music, poetry, social graces, ect).
That ideal, that work is for man and not man for work died, in large part, with the South's defeat with the Civil War. And while I strongly believe in the Southern ideal of constructive leaisure time, the South based that ideal on slave labor to maintain it. And in that form, the ideal needed to die. But I still think, that with the stain of slavery removed, the idea of constructive leaisure time is a worthy one....but nearly non-existent due to a consumer driven society (which is a Northern ideal.)