In that same year Huey Long entered Arkansas politics. Mrs. Hattie Caraway, widow of Senator Thad Caraway, had been appointed to serve the few remaining months of her husband’s term, then announced as a candidate for re-election. Huey had two reasons for espousing her candidacy. First, she had voted with him for a resolution favoring the limitation of individual incomes by law to a maximum of a million dollars a year. Secondly, the senior senator from Arkansas, Majority Leader Joe T. Robinson, who had turned thumbs down on this resolution, had endorsed one of the candidates opposing Mrs. Caraway’s election. Thirdly, he felt it was time to put the country on notice that Kingfishing could be carried successfully beyond the borders of its home state.
Mrs. Caraway was accorded no chance to win. Every organized political group in the state had endorsed one or another of her six opponents, among whom were included a national commander of the American Legion, two former governors, a Supreme Court justice, and other bigwigs. The opening address of the nine-day campaign Huey Long waged with Mrs. Caraway was delivered at Magnolia, just north of the Louisiana border. At its close, a dazed local political Pooh-Bah wired a major campaign headquarters in Little Rock: “A tornado just passed through here. Very few trees left standing, and even those are badly scarred up.”
It was here that Long first formulated what later became the Share-Our-Wealth clubs’ credo.
“In this country,” he proclaimed, “we raise so much food there’d be plenty for all if we never slaughtered another hog or harvested another bushel of grain for the next two years, and yet people are going hungry. We’ve got enough material for clothes if in the next two years we never tanned another hide or raised another lock of cotton, and yet people are going barefoot and naked. Enough houses in this land are standing empty to put a roof over every head at night, and yet people are wandering the highways for lack of shelter.”
The remedy he proposed was simple: share our wealth instead of leaving almost all of it in the hands of a greedy few.
“All in this living world you’ve got to do,” he insisted, “is to limit individual incomes to one million dollars a year, and fix it so nobody when he dies can leave to any one child more than five million dollars. And let me tell you something: holding one of those birds down to a measly million dollars a year’s no sort of hardship on him. At that rate of income, if he stopped to bathe and shave, he’d be just about five hundred dollars the richer by the time he got his clothes back on.
“What we got to do is break up those enormous fortunes like the billion-dollar Mellon estate. By allowing them a million dollars a year for spending-money you’ll agree we wouldn’t be hurting ’em any to speak of. We’d have the balance to distribute amongst all the people, and that would fix things so everybody’d be able to live like he could right now if he made five thousand a year. Yes sir, like he was having five thousand a year and a team of mules to work with, once we share the wealth!”
Today it is almost impossible to visualize the effect of so alluring a prospect on a countryside forced at that time to rely on the Red Cross for seed corn and sweet-potato slips to assure a winter’s food supply. The rural Negroes in particular, their “furnish” sadly shrunken as a result of the depression, accepted it almost as gospel that Huey Long was promising them five thousand dollars a year and a team of mules.
The impact of Long’s oratory was so clearly obvious that a special committee waited on him at Texarkana, where he planned to close the campaign on Saturday night, to ask that he remain in Arkansas over the weekend to address meetings in the tier of counties along the Mississippi River on Monday, the day before the election. He agreed to do this, canceled plans to drive to Shreveport from Texarkana, and drove back to Little Rock instead. Since this left the accompanying newsmen with no grist for the early Monday editions, and since he had been quoting the Bible right and left in his speeches, not to mention the fact that in the glove compartment of his Cadillac a well-thumbed Bible reposed beside a loaded revolver and an atomizer of throat spray, he was asked where he expected to attend church the next morning.
“Me go to church?” he inquired incredulously. “Why I haven’t been to a church in so many years I don’t know when.”