Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (82 page)

Long stuck with Roosevelt only until the latter’s inauguration. He challenged the president on the emergency banking bill, complaining that it did more for bank owners than for bank depositors. He joined the cry against Roosevelt on the budget act. He deplored the industrial codes of the NRA as capitulation to capital. “I want to stay on good terms with the administration,” he declared unpersuasively, “and I am going to do so if it is possible, but I do not have to.”

Roosevelt initially ignored Long’s criticism, even after Long followed the president onto the airwaves with radio chats of his own—although in Long’s case the chats tended to be rants. In June 1933, however, Roosevelt decided to put Long in his place. He invited the senator for a visit. “It was a morning appointment,” James Farley remembered. “The day was hot, and Huey came charging into the White House in his usual breezy and jaunty manner. He was nattily dressed in light summer clothes and wore a sailor straw hat with a bright-colored band.” The conversation commenced innocuously but grew warm when Long claimed credit for Roosevelt’s nomination at Chicago. Farley, who thought
he
had had something to do with the convention’s decision, pointed out that Long’s Louisiana delegation had been seated only with the assistance of then-Governor Roosevelt. The tone sharpened the more. “Huey had come in with a chip on his shoulder, and although his words were courteous enough, it was obvious from his attitude that he was there for the purpose of testing the mettle of the President.” Long conspicuously kept his hat on during the conversation. “At first I thought it was an oversight,” Farley said, “but soon realized it was deliberate.” Farley couldn’t decide whether to call the senator on his discourtesy or keep quiet. The president silently warned him off. “I glanced at Roosevelt and saw that he was perfectly aware of what was taking place and, furthermore, was enjoying it immensely…. He had a broad smile on his face which never changed for a moment, not even when Huey leaned over to tap him on the knee or elbow with the straw hat to emphasize one of his finer points, a trick which Huey pulled not once but several times.” Marvin McIntyre, Roosevelt’s appointment secretary, missed Roosevelt’s cue. “I saw McIntyre standing there with his teeth clenched and I thought for a moment that he was going to walk over and pull the hat off Huey’s head.” Long finally got the message and took the hat off.

Long had arrived hoping to receive assurance that he would be consulted in the awarding of federal patronage in Louisiana. He left with nothing. “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow?” he complained to Farley on the way out. “I can’t win any decision over him.” Nor did he win any appointments. As the jobs went to his rivals in Louisiana, his anger mounted. He tried to block federal funds spent in Louisiana by his enemies, and when he was chastised by Interior Secretary Ickes, he summoned reporters to read them his bill of particulars against the New Deal. He urged the newsmen to wire his message north. “While you are at it, pay them my further respects up there in Washington. Tell them they can go to hell.”

Roosevelt’s opposition wounded Long briefly. The Roosevelt forces in Louisiana mobilized against the Long alliance, while the senator himself spun momentarily out of control. A drunken incident involving a crowded public bathroom and Long’s urine soaking the trousers of another man resulted in a black eye for Long, physically and politically. Northeastern papers tut-tutted the southern bumpkin; some southern papers did, too. Long looked to be down, perhaps for the count.

But he regained his feet with a program—or rather a promise—that threatened to suck the air right out of the New Deal. Long’s Share Our Wealth plan proposed a radical redistribution of American wealth. A draconianly progressive wealth tax, rising to confiscation on fortunes above $8 million, would fund a guaranteed income for every family in America, as well as pensions for the elderly, aid to schools, and additional public works. “God invited us all to come and eat and drink all we wanted,” Long asserted. “He smiled on our land and we grew crops of plenty to eat and wear. He showed us in the earth the iron and other things to make everything we wanted. He unfolded to us the secrets of science so that our work might be easy. God called: ‘Come to my feast.’” But a greedy few had elbowed everyone else aside. “Rockefeller, Morgan, and their crowd stepped up and took enough for 120 million people, and left only enough for 5 million for all the other 125 million to eat. And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back.” By Long’s reckoning, the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans owned 60 percent of the wealth; this imbalance explained much of the country’s current predicament. Equity and efficiency pointed in the same direction: toward a sharing of America’s wealth. The rich hoarded their wealth, causing the current depression. The poor would spend this wealth, reviving the engines of prosperity.

Long’s plan had problems, starting with its arithmetic. There simply weren’t enough rich people to provide the incomes he promised. But this didn’t prevent the concept from catching on. Share Our Wealth clubs sprouted all over the country. By early 1935 Long boasted of some twenty-seven thousand chapters and seven million adherents. No one took these numbers at face value, but even discounted for Kingfish hyperbole, they signified a large and growing demand for measures more radical than anything Roosevelt had contemplated thus far.

H
UEY
L
ONG WAS
better at tapping popular passions than Roosevelt, but he wasn’t as good as Charles Coughlin, in part because Coughlin wasn’t at first so obviously political. In fact Coughlin wasn’t obviously anything, except exceedingly good at radio, better even than Roosevelt. Coughlin was called the “Radio Priest” because, not long after taking charge of a struggling parish in suburban Detroit, he talked a local station manager—like Coughlin, an Irish Catholic—into giving him air time to raise money and combat the noxious preachments of the Ku Klux Klan. Coughlin proved to be a radio prodigy, with “a voice of such mellow richness,” author and fan Wallace Stegner said, “such manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm, that anyone tuning past it on the radio dial almost automatically returned to hear it again…. It was a voice made for promises.”

At first it promised merely heaven: eternal bliss to those who embraced the Gospels and the teachings of the Church and contributed to the Shrine of the Little Flower, as he called his parish church. But not long after the start of the depression Coughlin’s sermons turned political. Radio stations across the industrial Midwest had begun carrying Coughlin’s program; no part of the country suffered more painfully from the collapse of American manufacturing. Catholic theology was broad enough to embrace both defenders of the status quo and advocates of social change; Coughlin sided at first with the latter. He backed Roosevelt for president in 1932, although, as he explained to the candidate, he couldn’t deliver a formal endorsement without violating his clerical neutrality. But after Roosevelt’s election and inauguration he declared, “The New Deal is Christ’s deal,” and he treated the president as the best friend America’s poor had ever had.

He also treated the president as his own best friend, annoying those who truly were close to Roosevelt. Marvin McIntyre got almost as testy at Coughlin as he did at Huey Long, notwithstanding McIntyre’s engrained respect for the Roman collar. But Roosevelt told his people to be nice to Coughlin, and he encouraged the priest to continue to forward helpful suggestions.

In time, though, Coughlin caught on that his suggestions weren’t being taken seriously. The last thing Roosevelt needed was more advice on money, but this was precisely what Coughlin made his primary cause. Coughlin insisted on devaluing the dollar by raising the price of gold, which accorded with Roosevelt’s plans, and by remonetizing silver, which didn’t. Coughlin became to silver in the 1930s what William Jennings Bryan had been in the 1890s, except that Coughlin, while praising silver’s benefits for ordinary people, was speculating in silver futures for himself. In the spring of 1934 the administration published a list of large purchasers of silver futures; the general point of the publication was to demonstrate that the demand for silver money was less than disinterested. Whether anyone in the White House initially realized that the list included Coughlin’s personal secretary is unclear, but the 500,000 forward ounces she bought—on her own account, she unconvincingly claimed—seemed solid evidence that Coughlin had reasons less lofty than the popular welfare for praising the white metal.

Coughlin probably didn’t need the embarrassment of the silver scandal to turn openly against Roosevelt, but the incident added a personal element to his animus. Though his priestly vows presumably prevented a run for office in his own name, he organized what he called the National Union for Social Justice, which advocated policies more advanced, from a vaguely social-justice perspective, than those of the New Deal. Coughlin’s radio program promoted the organization to its millions of listeners; Coughlin complemented his broadcasts with rallies that made the National Union look increasingly like a third party.

P
RECISELY BECAUSE
his ambitions were less patent than Long’s or Coughlin’s, Francis Townsend posed a greater threat to Roosevelt than either the Kingfish or the Radio Priest. Dr. Townsend didn’t start practicing medicine till he was in his mid-thirties; he didn’t leave South Dakota for Southern California till he was past fifty; he didn’t find his true calling—political agitation—till he was pushing retirement. And retirement was precisely what he began pushing in 1934, when he and a Texas promoter named Robert Clements formed Old Age Revolving Pensions, Ltd. Their brainstorm was pensions with a twist: the federal government should pay two hundred dollars per month to every American over sixty, on the strict condition that the recipients retire from work and spend the money as it came in. The spending was what inspired the “revolving” label, and it would, according to the Townsend Plan, underwrite the whole program by forcing the money to recirculate, thereby reviving the economy. A sales tax would provide the direct funding, but in a larger sense the plan would fund itself, through the prosperity it would restore. The jobs released by those sexagenarians currently working would furnish immediate benefits to the younger men and women who moved into them.

The mathematics of the Townsend Plan were as dubious as those of Long’s wealth-sharing scheme; eminent critics noted that more than half the country’s output would be diverted to less than a tenth of the population. “Dr. Townsend’s error lies in forgetting the simple truth that someone must produce the wealth which is consumed by the non-producers, be they infants, old people, sick people, the unemployed, the idle rich, or the criminal classes,” Walter Lippmann explained. “If Dr. Townsend’s medicine were a good remedy, the more people the country could find to support in idleness, the better off it would be.” Townsend was unimpressed by Lippmann’s logic and unfazed by his criticism. “My plan is too simple to be comprehended by great minds like Mr. Lippmann’s,” he said.

Equally unimpressed were the tens of millions of men and women who joined the tens of thousands of Townsend Clubs around the country and who put their signatures to a petition Townsend circulated, calling on Congress to enact his plan. “The zeal of those promoting the plan is evangelical, almost fanatic,” conservative columnist Mark Sullivan observed. “The pressure on Congress is much greater than was ever brought by veterans for the bonus…. Promoters of the bill say it is supported by ten million persons over 60, ten million more who have dependents over 60, and twenty million more who expect to become 60 some time—and to whom the plan looks good. That would be about all the voters there are.” Sullivan exaggerated for effect—but the effect wasn’t lost on members of Congress. Oregon Republican William Ekwall captured the spirit in the House when he declared, “About 120,000 people in my district have signed a Townsend petition. When I first heard of this I laughed at it. Then I got the smile off my face. It’s like a punching bag—you can’t dodge it. If we don’t pass it this session we’ll have to meet it when we get back home.”