This meant that all public offices, schools—and banks—were legally forbidden to open their doors on that Saturday; by Sunday the Federal Reserve authorities had put $20,000,000 at the disposal of the menaced bank and the run which might have spread panic throughout the country died a-borning. However, bank closures on a national scale were thus postponed for only a month. March 4, while Franklin Roosevelt was taking his first oath as president, state after state was ordering its banks to close, as financial consternation (vectored from Detroit, however, and not from New Orleans) stampeded across the land.
One of the newly inaugurated President’s first acts—“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”—was to order all the nation’s banks to close until individually authorized by executive permit to reopen. But the onus of having initiated the disaster had been averted from Louisiana by Huey’s bizarre bank holiday, and this underscored the fact that for some time past, the number and ratio of bank failures in Louisiana had been far, far below the national average. It also strengthened the growing conviction that Louisiana’s Long was something more than another Southern demagogue like Mississippi’s Bilbo or Texas’ Pa Ferguson.
Franklin Roosevelt was probably never under any illusions on that score. He gauged quite correctly the omen of Share-Our-Wealth’s growing strength. It had been blueprinted for all to see when Mrs. Caraway’s candidacy swept the boards in Arkansas, and again when this movement, plus the oratorical spell cast by the Louisianian in stumping the Midwestern prairie states, carried them for Roosevelt later that same autumn. According to Long’s subsequent diatribes, he had campaigned thus for “Roosevelt the Little” on the express understanding that the president-to-be would back the program for limiting individual incomes and bequests by statute.
There is ample ground for the belief that Long was secretly gratified when he realized that the New Dealers would have none of this proposal. The issue which had served him so well in the past could thus be turned against Roosevelt four years later, when Long planned to enter the lists as a rival candidate for the world’s loftiest office. Publicly, to be sure, he professed himself outraged by “this double cross,” bolted the administration ranks once more, repeated an earlier, defiant fulmination to the effect that if the New Dealers wished to withhold control over Louisiana’s federal appointments from him, they could take this patronage and “go slap dab to hell with it.”
Roosevelt and his fidus Achates, Harry Hopkins, took him at his word, and gave the anti-Long faction, headed by Mayor Walmsley of New Orleans, a controlling voice in the distribution of federal patronage. The breach between the two standard bearers—one heading the New Deal and a federal bureaucracy tremendously swollen by a swarm of new alphabetical agencies, the other all but worshiped as archangel of Share-Our-Wealth—widened from month to month.
Roosevelt left the anti-Long philippics to members of his cabinet and other department heads: Hugh Johnson, NRA administrator, for example, or Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. The climax to these interchanges came in the late summer of 1935, when in an address delivered on the Senate floor, Long charged that “Franklin Delano Roosevelt the first, the last, and the littlest” was linked to a plot against his—Huey Long’s—life.
3 —— August 8, 1935: Washington
“I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who killed Long.”