John Flynn, an America First leader, wrote a book on FDR. In it he recounts contemporaneous players whose plans are similar to what we see today. Flynn writes:
Perhaps the most dangerous of these was Huey Long, that mighty madcap Kingfish from Louisiana, “the Bonaparte of the Bayous,” whose brief but fiery career was to give Roosevelt no end of headaches. After a tempestuous career as governor of Louisiana, he was elected to the Senate and, before he took his seat, played a decisive role at a critical moment in the nomination of Roosevelt.
Fearing neither God nor man nor the devil, he was not intimidated by the White House or the Senate. At his first meeting with Roosevelt in the White House, he stood over the President with his hat on and emphasized his points with an occasional finger poked into the executive chest. He found very quickly that he could move as brusquely around the Senate floor as he had the lobbies of the state legislature. He strode about the Capitol followed by his bodyguards. He ranted on the Senate floor. He made a 15-hour one-man filibustering speech.
He made up his mind very soon that the New Deal was a lot of claptrap and proceeded to preach his own gospel of the abundant life.
He cried out: “Distribute our wealth—it’s all there in God’s hook. Follow the Lord.” This was the prelude to his Share-the Wealth crusade. Huey proclaimed “Every man a King” with Huey as the Kingfish.
He made it plain he was no Communist despoiler. He assured Rockefeller he was not going to take all his millions. He would not take a single luxury from the economic royalists. They would retain their “fish ponds, their estates and their horses for riding to the hounds.” When he began, he had no plan at all. He just had a slogan and worked up from there. But by 1934 he was ready to launch the movement with Gerald L. K. Smith, a former Shreveport preacher, at its head. The program was simple.
No income would exceed a million dollars. Everybody would have a minimum income of $2500. The money would be provided by a capital levy which would remove the surplus millions from the rich—which revealed that Huey really did not know any more about economics than the President did. There would, of course, be old-age pensions for all, free education right through college for all, an electric refrigerator and an automobile for every family.
The government would buy up all the agricultural surpluses against the day of shortages. As a matter of course there would be short working hours for everyone, and bonuses for veterans.
All surplus property would be turned over to the government so that a fellow who needed a bed would get one from the fellow who owned more than one. ... It is not clear why Huey broke with Roosevelt. It is probably because it was impossible for him to endure the role of second fiddle to any man and he had come to see wider horizons for his own strange talents.
Visitors to the Capitol were more eager to have the guides point out Huey Long than any other exhibit in the building. He was aware of the immense notoriety he had achieved and he believed he saw a condition approaching in which he could repeat upon the national scene the amazing performance he had given in Louisiana. Certainly he set out to ruin Roosevelt.
He declared war on Joe Robinson, Roosevelt’s leader in the Senate and on Pat Harrison of Mississippi, for he had set out in a sense to annex the neighboring states of Arkansas and Mississippi to his Southern earldom. He declared war on Roosevelt and he denounced him in terms Roosevelt’s beloved “Common Man” could understand. …
The patronage they once lived on and the local money they once had to disburse to help the poor was trivial compared to the vast floods of money Roosevelt controlled. And no political boss could compete with him in any county in America in the distribution of money and jobs. Roosevelt went to work in Louisiana on the rebel Kingfish. He poured money into the hands of Huey’s enemies to disburse to Huey’s loyal Cajans. And there came a moment when Huey seemed to be on his way to the doghouse. But he was an incorrigible figure of unconquerable energy. When Roosevelt sought to buy with federal funds the Louisiana electorate and ring,
Huey struck back with a series of breathtaking blows that brought the state under his thumb almost as completely as Hitler’s Reich under the heel of the Fuehrer. First of all, he stopped federal funds from entering Louisiana. He forced the legislature to pass a law forbidding any state or local board or official from incurring any debt or receiving any federal funds without consent of a central state board. And this board Huey set up and dominated. He cut short an estimated flood of $30,000,000 in PWA projects. Then he provided, through state operations and borrowing, a succession of public works, roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, farm projects and relief measures.
The money was spent to boost Huey instead of Roosevelt. The people were taught to thank and extol Huey rather than Roosevelt for all these goods.
He gave the people tax exemptions, ended the poll tax, cut automobile taxes, put heavier taxes on utilities and corporations. He took over the police department of New Orleans from the City Ring, threw out their police commissioners. He was followed around by troops. He gathered into his hands through his personally owned governor absolute control over every state and parish office. He got control of education and the teachers.
He took over the State University and added its football team and its hundred-piece hand to the noisy and glittering hippodrome in which he exploited himself. He possessed the entire apparatus of government in Louisiana—the schools, the treasury, the public buildings and the men and women in the buildings. He owned most of the courts, and had a secret police of his own. He ran the elections, counted the votes and held in his hands the power of life and death over most of the enterprise in the state. …
There was another who was infringing on Roosevelt’s territory. An aged physician in Long Beach, California, was looking out his window one day when he saw three old women rooting in a garbage can for food. The vision set the doctor’s soul on fire. Physical torture shook his body. He burst into a violent spasm of invective against a system in which this was possible. Thus inspired, he sat down to invent a plan to end it and came up quickly with the famous Townsend Old Age Revolving Pension Plan.
This old gentleman was Dr. Francis E. Townsend. He was an honest man of generous impulses. But his anger led him into the mazes of modern economics which he understood as little as the poor old women whose plight had detonated his wrath. The plan was simplicity itself. Every person reaching the age of 60 would receive $200 a month. There were four conditions: (1) that he or she retire; (2 ) have no criminal record; (3 ) have no income over the $2400 a year; and (4 ) spend the entire $200 each month. A man and wife over 60 would get $400 a month. There were 10,384,000 persons over 60. But the doctor estimated that only about 8,000,000 would qualify. This would cost the country $1,600,000,000 a month or about $19,000,000,000 a year.
The money would be provided by a transactions tax of 2 per cent on every commercial transaction. A crazier idea never entered the brain of man. But this was a day of crackpot philosophers. It was not much crazier than Henry Wallace’s hog-killing and crop-burning schemes or Roosevelt’s NRA. But the minds of the people had gotten off the tracks of reality. And this alluring promise lighted up the imaginations and appetites of the aged. It spread like a prairie fire among the oldsters until millions were marching behind the good doctor as in a holy crusade. In the three months at the end of 1935 the organization collected $350,000 and it grew from there.
The commentators laughed at this pathetic host of old people trooping behind their challenging Quixote. One said it was bad enough to tell Junior there is a Santa Claus, but to lead Grandpa to believe in him was unpardonable. And another commented that the Longs and Townsends and Sinclairs and Roosevelts had set up professionally as my brother’s keeper, but it was time for someone to set up as my brother’s bookkeeper. It was not possible, however, to laugh off the vast horde of registered voters who took the old doctor seriously.
Like Huey, he was very much on Roosevelt’s mind and in his talks. For the doctor was hog-calling millions of natural New Dealers off into his Revolving Old Age Plan. The old folks were crowding the railroad stations getting estimates on voyages hither and yon. The passion for travel seized upon their imaginations as they beheld an old age of leisure and more money than the vast majority of them had ever made by work in their life times.
Nor was this all. W hile Huey and the doctor clamored to make every man a king or a tourist, the inflationists never relaxed their pressure for their various money plans. It began to look as if the printing presses would have to go to work. And this very wellfounded apprehension exercised a profound influence upon the minds of business men who were being exhorted to expand and expose themselves to the dangerous gamble of inflation.
This sounds familiar to some of our current politicos.
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