Roosevelt’s moderation and the desperation of the poor roused extremists both on the left and on the right. The most formidable was Louisiana’s Senator Huey Long, the “Kingfish.” Raised on a farm in northern Louisiana, Long was successively a traveling salesman, a lawyer, state railroad commissioner, governor, and, after 1930, U. S. senator. By 1933 his rule in Louisiana was absolute. Long was certainly a demagogue—yet the plight of all poor people concerned him deeply. More important, he tried to do something about it.
Long did not question segregation or white supremacy, nor did he suggest that Louisiana blacks should be allowed to vote. He used the word nigger with total unselfconsciousness, even when addressing northern black leaders. But he treated black-baiters with scathing contempt.
As a reformer, Long stood in the populist tradition; he hated bankers and “the interests.” He believed that poor people, regardless of color, should have a chance to earn a decent living and get an education. His arguments were simplistic, patronizing, possibly insincere, but effective. “Don’t say I’m working for niggers,” he told one northern journalist. “I’m for the poor man— all poor men. Black and white, they all gotta have a chance. . . . ‘Every Man a King’—that’s my slogan.”
Raffish, totally unrestrained, yet shrewd—a fellow southern politician called him “the smartest lunatic I ever saw”—Long had supported the New Deal at the start. But partly because he thought Roosevelt too conservative and partly because of his own ambition, he soon broke with the administration. While Roosevelt was probably more hostile to the big financiers than to any other interest, Long denounced him as “a phoney” and a stooge of Wall Street. “I can take him,” he boasted in a typical sally.
Charles E. Coughlin, the "Radio Priest,” was the father of conservative "talk radio.”
“His mother’s watching him, and she won’t let him go too far, but I ain’t got no mother left, and if I had, she’d think anything I said was all right.”
By 1935 Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement had a membership of over 4.6 million. His program called for the confiscation of family fortunes of more than $5 million and a tax of 100 percent on incomes over $1 million a year, the money to be used to buy every family a “homestead” (a house, a car, and other necessities) and provide an annual family income of $2,000 to $3,000, plus old-age pensions, educational benefits, and veterans’ pensions. As the 1936 election approached, he planned to organize a third party to split the liberal vote. He assumed that the Republicans would win the election and so botch the job of fighting the Depression that he could sweep the country in 1940.
Less powerful than Long but more widely influential was Father Charles E. Coughlin, the “Radio Priest.” A genial Canadian of Irish lineage, Coughlin in 1926 began broadcasting a weekly religious message over station WJR in Detroit. His mellifluous voice rhetoric attracted a huge national audience, and the Depression gave him a secular cause. In 1933 he had been an eager New Dealer, but his dislike of New Deal financial policies—he believed that inflating the currency would end the Depression—and his need for ever more sensational ideas to hold his radio audience led him to turn against the New Deal. By 1935 he was calling Roosevelt a “great betrayer and liar.”
Although Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice was especially appealing to Catholics, it attracted people of every faith, particularly in the lower-middle-class districts of the big cities. Some of his talks caused more than a million people to send him messages of congratulation; contributions amounting to $500,000 a year flooded his headquarters. Coughlin attacked bankers, New Deal planners, Roosevelt’s farm program, and the alleged sympathy of the administration for communists and Jews, both of which Coughlin denounced in his weekly talks. His program resembled fascism more than any leftist philosophy, but he posed a threat, especially in combination with Long, to the continuation of Democratic rule.
Another rapidly growing movement alarmed the Democrats in 1934-1935: Dr. Francis E. Townsend’s campaign for “old-age revolving pensions.” Townsend, a retired California physician, colorless and low-keyed, had an oversimplified and therefore appealing “solution” to the nation’s troubles. The pitiful state of thousands of elderly persons, whose job prospects were even dimmer than those of the mass of the unemployed, he found shocking. He advocated paying every person aged sixty years and over a pension of $200 a month, the only conditions being that the pensioners not hold jobs and that they spend the entire sum within thirty days. Their purchases, he argued, would stimulate production, thereby creating new jobs and revitalizing the economy. A stiff transactions tax, collected whenever any commodity changed hands, would pay for the program.
Economists quickly pointed out that with about 10 million persons eligible for the Townsend pensions, the cost would amount to $24 billion a year—roughly half the national income. But among the elderly the scheme proved extremely popular. Townsend Clubs, their proceedings conducted in the spirit of revivalist camp meetings, flourished everywhere, and the Townsend Nutionul Weekly reached a circulation of over 200,000. Although most Townsendites were anything but radical politically, their plan, like Long’s Share Our Wealth scheme, would have revolutionized the distribution of wealth in the country. The movement marked the emergence of a new force in American society. With medical advances lengthening the average life span, the percentage of old people in the population was rising. The breakdown of close family ties in an increasingly mobile society now caused many of these citizens to be cast adrift to live out their last years poor, sick, idle, and alone.
With the possible exception of Long, the extremists had little understanding of practical affairs. (It could be said that Townsend knew what to do with money but not how to get it, and Coughlin knew how to
Monopoly, patented in 1935, was an instant best-seller: Players risk all their assets in an attempt to secure a real estate monopoly—and thus great wealth.
Get money but not what to do with it.) Collectively they represented a threat to Roosevelt; their success helped to make the president see that he must move boldly to restore good times or face serious political trouble in 1936.
Political imperatives had much to do with Roosevelt’s decisions, and the influence of Justice Brandeis and his disciples, notably Felix Frankfurter, was great. They urged Roosevelt to abandon his probusiness programs, especially the NRA, and stress restoring competition and taxing corporations more heavily. The fact that most businessmen were turning away from him encouraged the president to accept this advice; so did the Supreme Court’s decision in Schecter v. United States (May 1935), which declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. (The case involved the provisions of the NRA Live Poultry Code; the Court voided the act on the grounds that Congress had delegated too much legislative power to the code authorities and that the defendants, four brothers engaged in slaughtering chickens in New York City, were not engaged in interstate commerce.)
•••-[Read the Document Coughlin, A Third Party (1936) at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
