Voices of Protest by Alan Brinkley

Author:Alan Brinkley [Brinkley, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80322-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

He was, wrote an amused but impressed H. L Mencken, “the gustiest and goriest, loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damndest orator ever heard on this or any other earth …, the champion boob-bumper of all epochs.”12

Through the last months of 1934 and the winter and spring of 1935, Smith used his talents tirelessly in travel throughout the South, stirring up controversy and winning recruits for the Share Our Wealth Clubs wherever he went. Borrowing Long’s sound trucks, he drove from county to county in rural Georgia and South Carolina, stopping in town squares and speaking to whoever happened to be in the vicinity. In Atlanta, Augusta, Columbia, and Baltimore, he hired hotel ballrooms for meetings of local Share Our Wealth enthusiasts. At every stop, he handed out membership applications to members of the audience and collected them before he left; and by the end of March, when he claimed to have visited twenty-three states, he announced that his proselytizing was bringing in 20,000 new recruits a day, that the Share Our Wealth Society had passed the five-million mark in membership and was growing steadily. No one could either verify or dispute his claims, but few could disagree with his statement that “The popular appeal of our movement can’t be discounted whether its philosophy is accepted or not.”13

To Long, the popular appeal of the movement was the most important thing. From the start, he envisioned the Share Our Wealth Society as a vehicle for his own political advancement. In public, he remained somewhat coy about his objectives, claiming at first that the Share Our Wealth Clubs were simply to be a cluster of pressure groups that would work on behalf of legislation to redistribute wealth. But no one who knew Long really believed that. By March of 1935, in the aftermath of the Hugh Johnson controversy, he was hinting that the Society would support political candidates. And during one of his frequent visits to New York, he remarked casually to one member of the constant stream of reporters flowing through his hotel suite that “there positively will be a ‘share-the-wealth’ ticket in the field in the 1936 campaign. No doubt about that.” Still, he refused to speculate about what his own role would be; and although his increasing political travels suggested otherwise, he generally denied that he would become a Presidential candidate himself.14

Privately, however, he was making plans to play an important and, he hoped, a decisive role in the coming national election. He was quietly studying the possibility of buying a radio station in New Orleans, putting it under the control of LSU (and thus of himself), and giving it the most powerful signal of any station in the country—one that would enable him to beam his message across the entire Deep South almost at will. He was discussing proposals for developing an organized national following among students. He was, according to some reports, communicating secretly with conservative Republican businessmen who wanted to help finance his efforts in the hope that he would undermine Franklin Roosevelt’s chances for re-election.

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