Every
Man a King
Huey Long was Governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and was elected
to the U.S. Senate in 1930. A nominal Democrat, Huey Long was a
radical populist, of a sort we are unfamiliar with in our day. As
Governor, he sponsored many reforms that endeared him to the rural
poor. An ardent enemy of corporate interests, he championed the
"little man" against the rich and privileged. A farm boy
from the piney woods of North Louisiana, he was colorful, charismatic,
controversial, and always just skating on the edge. He gave himself
the nickname "Kingfish" because, he said, "I'm a
small fish here in Washington. But I'm the Kingfish to the folks
down in Louisiana."
Huey Long was the determined enemy of Wall Street, bankers and
big business and he was also a determined enemy of the Roosevelt
administration because he saw it as too beholden to these powerful
forces.
Huey Long did not suffer from excessive modesty. A high-school
dropout who taught himself law and got a law degree in only one
year of study, Long was confident he would become President of the
United States in 1936. So confident was he that he wrote a book
entitled My First Days in the White House in which he named
his cabinet (including President Roosevelt as Secretary of the Navy
and President Hoover as Secretary of Commerce) and in which he conducted
long imaginary conversations with FDR and Hoover designed to humiliate
them and show their subservience to the boy from the piney woods
of Louisiana.
The Kingfish wanted the government to confiscate the wealth of
the nation's rich and privileged. He called his program Share Our
Wealth. It called upon the federal government to guarantee every
family in the nation an annual income of $5,000, so they could have
the necessities of life, including a home, a job, a radio and an
automobile. He also proposed limiting private fortunes to $50 million,
legacies to $5 million, and annual incomes to $1 million. Everyone
over age 60 would receive an old-age pension. His slogan was "Every
Man A King." |