When you have a country where one man owns more than 100,000 people own, you know what the trouble is.
—Huey Long, “Share Our Wealth”
radio address, February 23, 1934
Bernie Sanders wants to tax multimillionaire inheritances. That would not bother Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg with his $57 billion—he didn’t inherit that. And it wouldn’t bother Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. Sanders also plans to tax Wall Street speculators. That wouldn’t bother them either.
Elizabeth Warren wants to tax the wealth of billionaires at 3% a year. That would bother them a little. But how fast does their wealth increase? It must increase by a lot more than 3% a year because if Zuckerberg started at $1 million in college and that increased 3% a year, he wouldn’t even be worth $2 million now. But he’s worth 30,000 times that much. To get to $57 billion from $1 million (or less) in the 15 years since he launched Facebook, his wealth must have grown at more than 103% a year. Knocking off 3% wouldn’t do much harm to his wealth.
There’s a vague sort of myth going around that says Sanders and Warren are giving us radical new ideas, and that no one’s ever realized that inequality was such a problem. But now, having been woke by these charismatic, incorruptible leaders, and armed with these new ideas, we’re almost home free. If we just stand up and wage a political revolution, that will be that.
Is this all so new?
In 1935, Huey Long organized 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” Clubs, and they were not talking about any measly 3%. Huey was proposing that no family needed nor should have more than 100 times the national average wealth or income. And no family should have less than one-third of the average wealth or income. That’s easy to grasp and sounds pretty reasonable. What does that work out to in dollars?
The average family wealth (and remember, averages come in high due to the super-wealthy) is somewhere around $700,000. So 100 times that is $70 million, which is $0.07 billion—less than one-tenth of $1 billion. That’s Huey’s limit. So if Trump were worth $10 billion, as he’s fond of claiming, Huey would take away more than 99% of his wealth. That leaves Bernie and Elizabeth in the dust.
It’s actually pretty easy to come up with these radical ideas. I’m sure you could come up with three of four of them in the time it takes you to read this chapter. But Huey did much more. He thought through the details—not just of the percentages but of the political tactics he would use as president, the type of rebellion he might face and how he would outsmart it. He published these ideas in a short novel. He was a spellbinding speaker, ahead of the curve on technology (radio at the time) and a great organizer. And in his own way, he was incorruptible.
Also, he had street cred. Reread his list of Louisiana accomplishments, then compare Sanders, who gained fame for fixing potholes in the town of Burlington, to Huey micromanaging the paving of basically every road in Louisiana. Warren has written some good books and reports, but none can come close to matching what Huey Long accomplished in his four years as governor.
Long had one more enormous advantage. The country was five years into the Great Depression, and unemployment was around 20% in spite of Roosevelt’s programs. There was no food stamp program, no Social Security, no Medicare. And real incomes, even for the employed, were less than half what they are today. Revolution was in the air.
Share Our Wealth
After one national radio broadcast, Huey received more than half a million letters (yes, written-on-paper letters with envelopes and stamps). By 1935, former Louisiana Governor and now U.S. Senator Huey Long was by far the most famous populist in the country and the most progressive Senator to boot. In early 1934, he launched the Share Our Wealth movement, and by the following year, his Share Our Wealth clubs had over 7.5 million members.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fearing Huey would play the spoiler in the 1936 election, called him one of the two most dangerous men in America (for the record, the other was General Douglas MacArthur). Roosevelt took Long’s federal patronage jobs away and gave them to Long’s opponents in Louisiana. Roosevelt too could play machine politics, and he was out to knock Huey Long off his pedestal of popularity.
One of Roosevelt’s programs, the Federal Theater Project (FTP), opened a fictionalized and highly propagandistic play in 17 cities exactly one week before the 1936 election. The play, It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, which theater critics then and now contend vilifies Huey Long, was the FTP’s most ambitious production.
In the play, demagogue Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip defeats Roosevelt; implements Huey’s income and wealth limits; outlaws dissent; incarcerates political enemies in concentration camps and trains and arms a paramilitary force that attacks demonstrators with bayonets. Long advocated none of Sinclair Lewis’ imagined repressive measures. Ironically, it was Roosevelt who imprisoned tens of thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
Long was assassinated in 1935, prior to the play’s production—as well as the election. But here, in a summary of his posthumously published book, is how Huey imagined his reforms would play out after beating Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election:
‘My First Days in the White House’
Huey P. Long
I. Wherein a New President Takes Office
Huey describes his imagined 1936 election campaign as a “great campaign which was destined to save America from Communism and Fascism.” He appoints Franklin Roosevelt as Secretary of the Navy and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. His other appointments are more populist.
In his first legislative message to the Congress, he recommends the creation of “a giant national organization for a survey of all wealth and poverty” as the first step towards his Share Our Wealth program.
II. Wherein We Arrange To Overhaul And Revive The Nation
Huey proposes a plan that was actually drafted when General Lytle Brown was Chief of Army Engineers. Huey planned to appoint Brown as his new Interior Secretary and put him in charge of a “vast program for the elimination of dust storms, the reclamation of wastelands, the control of floods, and the development of navigation and water power throughout the entire country.”
(Basically, this was like a Green New Deal targeting the devastation of the great Dust Bowl drought.)
III. Wherein We Care For The Soul And Body Of A Great Nation
Soon President Long issues a proclamation stating, “This Government shall extend aid, financial and idealistic, to the several states, so that every worthy boy and girl, every worthy man and woman, may secure an education to the limit of their mental capacity.”
(This is not free tuition for the rich and the poor. It is a guarantee that lack of income will not stop anyone from getting the education that is right for them.)
After noting that “One in every three of our teachers was receiving less than $750 a year,” he recommends that teachers in all schools benefiting from federal funds receive at least $2,000 a year.
Huey also asserts that those who commit a crime to furnish food for their children should not be punished.
Calling upon the Mayo brothers (of the Mayo Clinic), he asks them to prescribe “preventive measures and curative, medicinal treatments for all 130 million Americans” and to help “stamp out a number of diseases that take a terrific toll of human life.” Huey assigns the federal government to “provide the needed facilities and equipment.” (This, of course, is his version of universal health care.)
IV. Wherein The New President Encounters The Masters Of Finance And Destiny
After a week in office, he receives a letter from the powerful banker J. P. Morgan, stating that he would “utilize every protection of the courts and Constitution to protect our properties against the seizures contemplated in your Share Our Wealth program.”
At the same time, he also receives a very different letter from John D. Rockefeller:
I have lived a full and rich life, and soon shall be gathered to my ancestors … I am therefore disposing in orderly process my possessions in excess of five million dollars … The residue I have instructed my attorneys to turn over to the United States Treasury as a gift to the federal government.
After this lucky break, Huey convenes a National Share Our Wealth Committee of bankers and industrialists, chaired by Rockefeller, to help design the wealth cap.
(Notice how pro-capitalist Huey is. He believes that capitalists can best draw up a plan that “shares the wealth,” but he also leaves them in charge of their corporations so they will be well-run.)
V. Wherein The Masters Of Finance Are Ours
In two weeks, the committee reports back with a plan for a Federal Share Our Wealth Corporation. The committee explains that surplus wealth above $5 million per family would be invested in the corporation, and poor families with less than one-third the average wealth would receive stock in this corporation.
“The next afternoon’s newspapers in screaming headlines carried the news to a waiting populace that the barons of Wall Street were content at last to accept democracy in America.”
VI. Wherein Rebellion Brews And Fades
Congress quickly passes the Share Our Wealth legislation. But soon Huey receives a message that “The Governor of the New England State of X has announced today that his state would resist by force.” J. P. Morgan is behind this revolt.
Huey immediately flies to the state capitol. The next morning at breakfast in the governor’s mansion, Huey asked, “How is your rebellion?” “All right,” the governor answers, “but you have all the rebels. Fortunately, I did not leave the Mansion last night.”
They agree that Huey would announce to the crowd that the governor and state would raise the issue of the Share Our Wealth legislation with the U.S. Supreme Court to quickly get the law tested. The Supreme Court soon accepts it as Constitutional, and political revolution transforms America into the Promised Land.
Conclusions
Huey’s plans for fixing America looked completely different than his successes in Louisiana. In Louisiana, he was just helping residents catch up with the rest of America. But his proposals for America proposed leaping more than a century into the future. (Eighty-five years later, we are still nowhere near his complete vision.)
It took Huey 10 years to gain power and master Louisiana. Had he not been shot but won the presidency, his eight years in office (never mind his two-month prognosis) would have looked nothing like his novel’s plot. His revolution was just fantasy.
But Huey certainly deserves credit for bringing important progressive ideas into public focus and putting some pressure on Roosevelt. Many others have put forward similar ideas, but few have been so convincing.
Ripped Apart
