FDR - Jean Edward Smith [220]
In 1934 Roosevelt did not worry about defections on the right. What concerned him were the critics on the left. Huey Long had burst the confines of the Bayou State and was barnstorming the nation to make “every man a king.” FDR had worked diligently to keep Long inside the administration tent pissing out, but the Kingfish was now outside pissing in. Long’s Share Our Wealth clubs claimed a mailing list of 7.5 million persons. The program was blindingly simple. Long proposed to confiscate large personal fortunes, levy steeply progressive income taxes, and redistribute the revenue to every American family so they could buy a home, a car, and a radio. In addition, each family would receive a guaranteed annual wage of $2,500—roughly double the median family income at the time. The elderly would receive pensions, the young would be provided college educations, and veterans would receive their bonuses. Long meant trouble, and FDR did not underestimate his appeal.*
Marching almost in lockstep with Long was Father Charles Coughlin, a parish priest in Royal Oak, Michigan, whose weekly radio sermons drew a national audience estimated as high as 40 million.62 Like Long, Coughlin initially supported FDR. But as the New Deal took shape, he became increasingly critical. The Radio Priest, as he was called, railed against the power of “international money,” lauded silver as the “gentile” metal, and was soon accusing Roosevelt of having out-Hoovered Hoover. By the fall of 1934 Coughlin was calling for a political realignment. “The old parties are all but dead,” he told his Sunday audience. They should “relinquish the skeletons of their putrefying carcasses to the halls of a historical museum.”63 Because he had been born in Canada, Coughlin was not a rival for the presidency like Long. But his National Union for Social Justice, formed in November 1934, was another wild card of which Roosevelt had to beware.
The most benign, yet in some ways the most serious, threat was headed by Dr. Francis Everett Townsend, an unemployed physician in Long Beach, California. Townsend proposed to pay a monthly pension of $200 (roughly $2,600 currently) to every citizen over sixty, on the condition that he or she retire and promise to spend the sum within the coming month. Pensions would be financed by a business transaction tax of 2 percent. Advocates argued that this would reduce unemployment because older workers would yield their jobs to younger people who had none. And the mandatory spending of pension checks would produce a demand for goods and services that would create still more jobs.64 The Townsend Plan was far from radical. It appealed to heavily Protestant rural America, proclaimed traditional values, and promised to preserve the profit system free from alien collectivism, socialism, and godless communism. As Townsend put it, the movement embraced people “who believe in the Bible, believe in God, cheer when the flag passes by, the Bible Belt solid Americans.”65 It was a movement FDR dared not ignore.
The congressional elections in November 1934 provided the first political test of Roosevelt’s policies. Cognizant of the midterm tradition, in which the president’s party normally suffers a decline, Vice President Garner predicted the Republicans would pick up only thirty-seven seats in the House, a gain so small it could be regarded as “a complete victory” for the administration.66 Farley thought the party would hold its own and the results would be “about even”—a forecast FDR thought recklessly