He was a superb actor, too. Telling the same anecdote seven or eight times a day, day after day in campaign after campaign, he would none the less deliver it with the same chuckling verve at the thousandth repetition with which he had told it initially. Little bubbles of laughter escaped him as though involuntarily when he built up to the nub of a jest. The effect of such tricks of stagecraft was heightened by the unhurried but uninterrupted flow of words, the affectation of homely idiom, the Southerner’s easy slurring of consonants.
In Arkansas, at the time of the unparalleled Caraway campaign of 1932, every gathering set a new attendance record for the time and place. The address Long delivered from the band shell at Little Rock drew the largest crowd ever assembled in the history of the state. And when the motorized campaign party whipped from one city to the next to meet the demands of a tightly co-ordinated speaking schedule, crowds lined even the back roads through which the cars passed; crowds of those who, unable for one reason or another to leave their small farmsteads in that depression-harried autumn, waited patiently by the dusty roadsides for a fleeting glimpse of the limousine in which Huey Long whizzed by them.
He was at his best in the rough and tumble of partisan politics, both on the hustings and on the Senate floor. When Harold Ickes said Huey had “halitosis of the intellect,” Long retorted by dubbing him “the chinch bug of Chicago.” To be sure, this was after he had broken with the Roosevelt administration, when, scoffing at the Civilian Conservation Corps, he offered to “eat every pine seedling they’ll ever grow in Louisiana.” At the same time, when arguing fiscal policy with the Senate’s veteran on such matters, Carter Glass, he said bluntly in the course of debate that “I happen to know more about branch banking than the gentleman from Virginia does.”
In these respects, as in matters of politesse, Roosevelt was the very antithesis of the gentleman from Louisiana. Yet neither would brook opposition from within his partisans’ ranks. The breach between Roosevelt and as selfless a supporter as James A. Farley was to all intents and purposes identical with the disagreements that broke the ententes between Long and every campaign manager and newspaper publisher who had ever supported his candidacy. Escaping conviction on impeachment charges, he announced: “I’ll have to grow me a new crop of legislators in Louisiana.” When some of Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation was nullified by the Supreme Court, the President promptly sponsored a bill to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, with himself to name at one swoop six additional members; and he did his best to force what was widely referred to as his “court packing” measure through Congress.
Long campaigned vigorously through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and other northern Midwest states for Roosevelt in 1932. Some of these states went Democratic for the first time in more than a generation. Admittedly this was not all due to Long’s stump speeches. But no one knew better than Franklin Roosevelt that much of his success in the Long-toured regions was due to the gentleman from Winnfield. He was one of the few political leaders who did not underestimate the Long potential, who correctly evaluated the Long influence in overturning the politics of Arkansas to make Hattie Caraway the first woman ever elected to a full term in the United States Senate. He had few illusions, if any, on the score of the national organization of personal followers Long was building through his Share-Our-Wealth clubs.
Under the circumstances it was inevitable that these two, neither of whom would ever admit a potential palace rival into the inner circle of his aides, should become implacable opponents. Long was on the point of announcing his candidacy for president against Roosevelt for the 1936 campaign when a bullet cut short his career. The challenge he proposed to fling at the man who subsequently carried all but two of the Union’s states was neither a forlorn token like that of Governor Landon, nor a visionary crusade like the campaign of Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. No one appraised this more realistically than Roosevelt himself. He never underestimated the sort of monolithic organization Long could create around the hard core of existing Share-Our-Wealth clubs, the amount of whose mail, as delivered to the Senate office building, dwarfed that delivered to any other member of the Congress.
In pursuance of his objective, Earle Christenberry, with Raymond Daniell of the New York Times, had completed, by midsummer of 1935, the manuscript of a short book to be signed by Huey Long, under the title of My First Days in the White House. He had written no part of this rather naïve treatise himself, though he had discussed it in general terms with those who did draft it. An earlier book “by Huey P. Long”—Every Man a King—was actually a collaboration in which the prophet of Share-Our-Wealth had dictated sections to the late John Klorer, then editor of Long’s weekly American Progress (née Louisiana Progress), who later became a successful scenarist in Hollywood. But the helter-skelter discussions in which Long outlined his ideas for My First Days in the White House were turned into reasonably coherent prose by Daniell and Christenberry; much of the manuscript Long never even saw until it was in final form.
It was an artless bit of oversimplified future history, written in the past tense to describe the inauguration of President Huey Long, his appointment of a cabinet (Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alfred E. Smith were among its members), and the adoption of national Share-Our-Wealth legislation under the supervision of a committee headed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew W. Mellon! But it was gauged for an audience which already believed that it was possible to redistribute all large fortunes among the nation’s have-nots. It was never meant to convert economists, financiers, and magnates. On the contrary, its principal purpose was to notify all and sundry, especially “all,” that Huey Long was a candidate for president and was confident of victory.
During that early autumn of 1935 the United States stood at a windy corner of world history. In Europe totalitarians had taken over Italy’s tottering liberal monarchy in 1922, and in 1933 the “republic” of Germany. In Louisiana a home-grown fascist with complete dominance over his own state was challenging the national leadership. Long had already put into operation at the local level an authoritarian principle of governmental sovereignty. Legislative and judicial functions were almost wholly concentrated in the hands of an executive who was in reality a “ruler.” The architect of that change was setting himself to expand it to national dimensions.
The seriousness of this situation was recognized by observers of the national scene. Raymond Gram Swing listed five public figures in a volume entitled Forerunners of American Fascism and named Huey Long as the one of potentially greatest national danger. The others were Fr. Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, Sr., Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, and Dr. Townsend. George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor of the Saturday Evening Post, ordered a three-part serial profile of the senator from Louisiana. Most of this was published posthumously, as was all of what was to have been Long’s Mein Kampf: My First Days in the White House.