🚀 go-pugleaf

At the same time Hitler was murdering populists and suppressing
their program even has he posed as a champion of the movement,
a genuine populist was attacking another leader, Franklin Roosevelt,
 the New Deal President who shared much of Hitler's pro-establishment
agenda.  In the end Huey Long got just what the German populists
got.
......
Senator Huey Long was shot to death in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana on September 8, 1935, nine months after making this
speech from the floor of the United States Senate.

Note: As you read this, remember, the dollar of 1933 could buy over eleven
times
what the modern (1995) dollar buys (Source: U.S. Dept. of Labor,
Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index)

_________________

SHARING OUR WEALTH

by Huey Long

(Source: p.410-412, of Senate Record, Sess. 1 of
the 74th Congress)

President Roosevelt was elected on November 8, 1932.
People look upon an elected President.  This is
January 1935.  We are in our third year of the
Roosevelt depression, with conditions growing worse

We must now become awakened!  We must know the
truth and speak the truth.  There is no use to
wait three more years.  It is not "Roosevelt or
ruin;" it is Roosevelt's ruin.

Now, my friends, it makes no difference who is
President or who is senator.  America is for
125 million people and the unborn to come.  We ran
Mr. Roosevelt for the presidency of the United States
because he promised to us by word of mouth and
in writing:

1. That the size of the big man's fortune would be
reduced so as to give the masses at the bottom
enough to wipe out all poverty; and

2.  That the hours of labor would be so reduced that
all would share in the work to be done and in
consuming the abundance mankind produced.

Hundreds of words were used by Mr. Roosevelt to
make these promises to the people, but they were
made over and over again.  He reiterated these
pledges even after he took his oath as President.
Summed up, what these promises meant was:

    "Share our wealth."

 When I saw him spending all of his time of ease
and recreation with the business partners of
Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with such men as
the Astors, etc., maybe I ought to have had better
sense than to have believed  he would ever break
down their big fortunes and give enough to the
 masses to end poverty -- maybe some will think
me weak for ever believing it all, but millions of other
people were fooled the same as myself.  I was like a
drowning man grabbing at a straw, I guess.  The faces
and eyes, the hungry forms of mothers and children,
the aching hearts of students denied education were
before our eyes, and when Roosevelt promised, we
jumped for that ray of hope.

So therefore I call upon the men and women of
America to immediately join in our work and movement
to share our wealth.

There are thousands of share-our-wealth societies
organized in the United States now.  We want 100,000
such societies formed for every nook and corner of
this country -- societies that will meet, talk, and work,
all for the purpose that the great land that belongs to
us may be shared and enjoyed.

We have nothing more for which we should ask the Lord.
He has allowed this land to have too much of everything
that humanity needs.

So in this land of Gods abundance we propose laws, viz.:

1.  The fortunes of the multimillionaires and billionaires
shall be reduced so that no one person shall own more
than a few million dollars to the person.  We would do
this by a capital levy tax.  On the first million that a man
was worth, we would not impose any tax. We would
say, "All right for your first million dollars, but after
you get that rich you will have to start helping the
balance of us."  So we would not levy any capital levy
tax on the first million one owned.  But on the second
million a man owns we would tax that 1 percent, so that
every year the man owned the second million dollars he
would be taxed $10,000.  On the third million we would
impose a tax of 2 percent.  On the fourth million we would
impose a tax of 4 percent.  On the fifth million we would
impose a tax of 8 percent.  On the sixth million we would
impose a tax of 16 percent.  On the seventh million we
would impose a tax of 64 percent; and on all over the
eighth million we would impose a tax of 100 percent.

What this would mean is that the annual tax would bring
the biggest fortune down to $3 or $4 million to the person
because no one could pay taxes very long in the higher
brackets. But the $3 to $4 million is enough for any one
person and his children and his children's children.  We
cannot allow one to have more than that because it
would not leave enough for the balance to have
something.

2.  We propose to limit the amount any one man can
earn in one year or inherit to $1  million to the person.

3.  Now, by limiting the size of the fortunes and incomes
of the big men, we will throw into the government
Treasury the money and property from which we
will care for the millions of people who have nothing;
and with this money we will provide a home and the
comforts of home, with such common conveniences
as radio and automobile, for every family in America,
free of debt.

4.  We guarantee food and clothing and employment
for everyone who should work by shortening the hours
of labor to thirty hours per week, maybe less, and to
eleven months per year, maybe less.  We would have
the hours shortened just so much as would give work to
everybody to produce enough for everybody; and if we
were to et them down to where they were too short, then
we would lengthen them again.  As long as all the people
working can produce enough of automobiles, radios,
homes, schools, and theaters for everyone to have that
kind of comfort and convenience, then let us all have
work to do and have that much of heaven on earth.

5.  We would provide education at the expense of the
states and the United States for every child, not only
through grammar school and high school but through
to a college and vocational education.  We would  have
to build thousands  of more colleges and employ 100,000
more teachers; but we have materials, men, and women
who are ready and available for the work.  Why have the
right to a college education depend on whether the father
or mother is so well-to-do as to send a boy or girl to college?
We should give every child the right to education and
a living at birth.

6.  We would give a pension to all persons above sixty years
of age in an amount sufficient to support them in comfortable
circumstances, excepting those who earn $1,000 per year
or who are worth $10,000.

7.  Until we could straighten things out -- and we can
straighten things out in two months under our program
 -- we would grant a moratorium on all debts which people
owe that they cannot pay.

And now you have our program, none too big, none too
little, but every man a king.

We ow debts in America today, public and private,
amounting to $252 billion. That means that every child
is born with a $2,000 debt tied around his neck to hold
him down before he gets started.  Then, on top of that,
the wealth is locked in a vise owned by a few people.
We propose that children shall be born in a land of
opportunity, guaranteed a home, food, clothes, and
the other things that make for living, including the right
to an education.

Our plan would injure no one.  It would not stop us from
having millionaires -- it would increase them tenfold,
because so many more people could make $1 million
if they had the chance our plan gives them.  Our plan
would not break up big concerns.  The only difference
would be that maybe 10,000 people would own a
concern instead of 10 people owning it.

But, my friends, unless we share our wealth, unless
we limit the size of the big man so as to give something
to the little man, we can never have a happy or free
people.  God said so.  He ordered it.

We have everything our people need.  Too much of food,
clothes, and houses -- why not let all have their fill and lie
down in the ease and comfort  God has given us?
Why not?  Because a few own everything.  The masses
own nothing.

I wonder if any of you people who are listening to me
were ever at a barbecue!  We used to go there
 -- sometimes 1,000 people or more.  If there were
1,000 people, we would put enough meat and bread
and everything else on the table for 1,000 people.
Then everybody would be called and everyone would
eat all they wanted.  But suppose at one of these
barbecues for 1,000 people that one man took
90 percent of the food and ran off and ate until he
got sick and let the balance rot.  Then 999 people
would only have enough for 100 to eat and there
would be many to starve because of the greed of
just one person for something he couldn't eat
himself.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, America, all the people
of America, have been invited to a barbecue.  God
invited us all to come and eat and drink all we wanted.
 He smiled on our land and we grew crops of plenty to
eat and wear.  He showed us in the earth the iron and
other things to make everything we wanted.  He
unfolded to us the secrets of science so that our
work might be easy.  God called: "Come to my feast."

Then what happened?  Rockefeller, Morgan and
their crowd stepped up and took enough for 120
million people and left only enough for 5 million
for all the other 125 million to eat.  And so many
millions must go hungry and without these good
things God gave us unless we call on them to put
some of it back.

End of  "Sharing Our Wealth" by  Huey Long

MORE  BY LONG (and about him):
.  The true
lawgiver ought to have an heart full of
sensibility.  He ought to love and respect his
kind, and to fear himself.
                         --Edmund Burke
------
Before he was gunned down in the Louisiana statehouse
in 1936 in the month he threatened a Buchanan-like
third-party candidacy against Franklin Roosevelt,
populist democrat, Senator Huey Peirce Long
made this remark on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

"We are told that there never was a ruling class that
abdicated.  A great deal of speculation is made over
who is the leader and who are the party leaders of
this nation, who are the leaders of Congress.  I have
been here long enough to say that if I had any
legislation in the United States Congress today, I
would a whole lot rather know that it had the
sanction and approval of Morgan and Rockefeller
and Baruch than to know it had the sanction and
approval of every party leader in both houses
of Congress.  They are here to fight the tax on
the importation of oil as gasoline prices are
raised to make their point.  They are here to
fight the tax on the stock exchanges...
Now these men are fighting the inheritance tax
and the surtax.  The newspapers tell us that
this is a great effort to soak the rich.  Soak
the rich--the "soak the rich campaign."  It
is no campaign to soak the rich, Mr. President.
It is a campaign to save the rich.  It is a
campaign the success of which they will
wish for when it is too late, if it fails,
more than anyone else on earth will wish
for it...

   "The great and grand dream of America that
all men are created free and equal, endowed
with the  inalienable right of life and liberty
and the pursuit of happiness--this great dream
of America, this great light, and this great
hope--has almost gone out of sight in this day
and time, and everybody knows it; and there is
a mere candle flicker here and yonder to take
the place of what the great dream of America
was supposed to be.

   "The people of this country have fought
and have struggled, trying by one process and
the other, to bring about the change that would
save the American country to the ideal and
purposes of America.  They are met with the
Democratic Party at one time and the Republican
Party at another time, and both of them at
another time, and nothing can be squeezed
through these party organizations that goes
far enough to bring the American people to a
condition where they have such a thing as a
livable country.  We swapped the tyrant 3,000
miles away for a handful of financial slave owning
overlords who make the tyrant of Great Britain
seem mild.

"...
"Whoever tries to guard the existence of these
fortunes becomes a statesman of high repute.
He is welcomed in the party counsels.  Whoever
undertakes to provide for the distribution of
these fortunes is welcomed in no counsel.

  "They pass laws under which people may be
put in jail for utterances made in wartimes
and other times, but you cannot stifle or
keep from growing...the spirit of the American
People, if there is going to be any spirit in
America at all."

    *    *    *

>From Long's last interview (a hostile one):
-----

"It's the rule of the people ain't it?" he demanded.

"Some people say you are a demagogue."

The Kingfish was scornful.

  "The people who say that think anybody who presumes
to talk for the people is a demagogue.  There are all
kinds of demagogues.  Some deceive the people in the
interests of the lords and masters of creation, the
Rockefellers and Morgans.  Some of them deceive the
people in their own interest.  I would describe a
demagogue as a politician who don't keep his promises.
On that basis, I'm the first man to have power in
Loozyanna who ain't a demagogue.  I kept every promise
I have made to the people of Loozyanna.  None of them
ex-es and bellyachers that have been fightn' me down
there ever kept his promises when he was in office.
It was an unheard-of thing until Huey P. Long got in."

-----

>From Hugh Davis Graham (Associate Professor of History,
Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Institute
of Southern History), Huey Long (N.J.:Prentice Hall,1970):

"Long had reached the State House largely by following a
consistent policy of violating the traditional rules and
procedures of the political game.  He had fundamentally
transformed the old Railroad Commission, and in the
campaign of 1928 he had ignored the polite decorum of
political gentility by inundating his opponents with
humiliating ridicule.  As governor he became his own
floor leader, often openly bullying recalcitrant
legislators in their own traditional sanctum.  When the
Legislature adjourned after eight months, Governor Long
could point to a considerable achievement. He had passed
a $30,000,000 highway to sustain his road and bridge
building program, piped cheaper natural gas to New
Orleans, repealed the tobacco tax, AND INCREASED
SEVERANCE TAXES ON THE EXTRACTIVE "FOREIGN" CORPORATIONS.
He had ingeniously circumvented the constitutional
ban on state aid to parochial schools by distributing
 free textbooks to all school children rather than
through their schools--thereby especially cementing
his class appeal in Catholic southern Louisiana.  This
progressive and free-spending program was doubtless
resented by conservatives, and his tax of five cents
a barrel on refined oil especially angered the powerful
oil lobby, but his program was far from a radical one.
Yet during the special legislative session called by
the overconfident young governor in 1929, this
resentment boiled into demands for impeachment.  The
anti-Longs disparately sought to stop Huey before he
could firmly root his power in the masses of voters.
They had a case of sorts against the high-handed
governor, but they pressed it with incredible
sloppiness and produced a rambling and often trivial
indictment that betrayed the primacy of their political
motives.  And in a political contest none could match
the adroitness and ruthlessness of Huey Long.

"...

 "The freshman Senator from Louisiana was ill disposed
to play the deferential role of the model freshman
senator.  He immediately seized upon the initiative in
his new national forum with a two-pronged verbal assault,
first against the inflated fortunes of the Mellons,
Rockefellers, Morgans, and Baruchs, then against the
miseries of depressed America.  He played to the
galleries and delighted newsmen in flaying plutocrats
and in ridiculing with an impish wit the more
conservative of his staid senior colleagues.  'I do not
talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here,'
Long soberly affirmed, 'I do not talk one way back there
in the hills of Louisiana and another way here in the
Senate.'"

"...Long sought the root cause of the depression in the
statistical analysis of the degree and extent of corporate
monopoly and maldistribution of wealth.  Frustrated by
the ponderous seniority system and by the unwillingness
of either Hoover Republicans or Senate Democrats to
support his proposal to "share our wealth," Huey
resigned all of his new committee seats...in protest. ..

"Long received little more support for his wealth-sharing
proposal from President Roosevelt's administration than
he had from that of Hoover.  Although he voted for many
of the New Deal reforms, he remained a constant critic
on the left when debating economic policies. ...

  "As the Depression proved resistant to the reforms of
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Long's swelling "thunder
on the left" alarmed the New Dealers, whose ranks he
eventually deserted in disgust with their unwillingness
to support his radical formula for redistributing the
nation's wealth.  When an assassin's bullet cut him
down in September, 1935, the enigmatic Long had
attracted the devotion of millions of the dispossessed,
but he had also generated widespread fear and hatred....

 "Long's break with Roosevelt and administration leaders
led him publicly to attack their program and to direct
toward them his characteristic derision.  The President
became Prince Franklin, Knight of the Nourmahal (after
Vincent Astor's yacht, which frequently bore Roosevelt).
The Secretary of Agriculture became Lord Corn Wallace;
Harold Ickes, the Chicago Cinch Bug; Hugh Johnson,
Sitting Bull.  In retaliation, Roosevelt directed the
Postmaster General to channel federal patronage to the
anti-Longs and subsequently arranged for HAROLD ICKES
to curtail $10,000,000 worth of PWA projects in Louisiana.
Further, Roosevelt directed the Bureau of Internal Revenue
to initiate a tax investigation which led to the
inditement of several prominent Long aids for tax
evasion.  In addition the Senate began investigating
the clouded circumstances of the election of Long's
junior colleague, Senator John Overton.

 "LONG's answer to Roosevelt's opposition and his
solution to "America's Crisis" was to transform his
share-the-wealth proposal in 1934 into a full-blown
Share Our Wealth movement.  He had first introduced his
proposal in the Senate as early as March, 1932.  By
1935 he had organized over 27,000 Share Our Wealth
clubs and claimed a membership of 4,684,000 and a
mailing list of 7,500,000.  Every state was
represented, although the heaviest concentrations
were in the South and in the north central states,
where Huey had campaigned so successfully for
Roosevelt in 1932."

Huey Long:

  "Even after the President of the United States had
thrown down the pledge which he had made time after
time, and rather indicated the desire, instead, to
have all the common people of America fed from a
half-starvation dole, while the plutocrats of the
United States were allowed to wax richer and richer,
even after that, I made the public proposition that
if he would return to his promise and carry out the
pledge given to the people and to me that, regardless
of all that had passed, I would again support his
administration to the limit of my ability.

  "Of course, however, I was not blind; I had long
since come to the understanding that he was chained
to other purposes and to other interests which made
impossible his keeping the words which he uttered
to the people.

"...

  "It is impossible for the United States to preserve
itself as a republic or as a democracy when 600 families
own more of this Nation's wealth--in fact, twice as
much--as all the balance of the people put together.
Ninety-six percent of our people live below the poverty
line, while 4 percent own 87 percent of the wealth.
America can have enough for all to live in comfort
and still permit millionaires to own more than they
can ever use; but America cannot allow the
multimillionaires and the billionaires, a mere handful
of them, to own everything unless we are willing to
inflict starvation upon 125,000,000 people."

  "Let me say to the members and well-wishers that
in this movement, the principles of which have
received the endorsement of every leader of this
time, and of other times, I am not concerned over
my personal position or political fortune; I am
only interested in the success of the cause; and
on any day or at any time when, by our going for
any person or for any party, we can better, or
more surely or more quickly secure home, comfort,
education, and happiness for our people, that
there is no ambition of mine which will stand in
the way.  But there can be minimum of success
until every child in this land is fed, clothed
and housed comfortably and made happy with
opportunity for education and a chance in life."

Huey Long was gunned down by a young physician,
son of a prominent anti-Long family Carl Weis,
whose actions on that day are as enigmatic as those
of John Hinkley and others whose madness just
happened to serve the Establishment's interests.
Weis had never met Long.

>From the New York Times obituary of Long:

"...He made himself an unquestioned dictator, though
a state legislature was still elected by a nominally
free people, as was also a Governor, who was, however,
nothing but a dummy for Huey Long.  In reality
Huey Long set up a fascist government in Louisiana.
It was disguised, but only thinly.  There was no outward
appearance  of revolution, no ,march of Blackshirts
upon Baton Rouge, but the effectual result was to lodge
all the power of the State in the hands of one man. ...

"...When masses of people are already to run after a
professed miracle worker, it is essential that we have
trained minds to confront the ignorant, to show the
credulous the error of their ways, and to keep alive
and fresh the true democratic traditions in which this
country was cradled and brought to maturity."

Today, in the age of Patrick Buchanan, the New York Times
still performs its essential task, viz, the task of constantly
protecting  us, the credulous ignorant, from running after
the miracle


Dick Eastman
Yakima
U.S.A.
Every man is responsible to every other man.



Look what these two democrats had to say:

R. Buckminster Fuller:

   "Gold is the super-helicopter of the open-market-world-trading
stratagems of the makers-of-money-for-self by the legalized
manipulation of the money equity of others, all unbeknownst to
the initial wealth equity-owning others. ...

   "By 1953 it became apparent that the Wall Street lawyers
were moving the major American corporations out of America.
Of the the 100 largest corporations in America four out of
five of their annual investment dollars in new machinery
and buildings for 1953 went exclusively into their foreign
operations.  This four-fifths rate persisted for a score
of years."

(And continued beyond that, as today China has enjoyed
receipt of the largest transfer of industrial capital
from one country to another in all history, industrial
capital from the "would-have-been" U.S. economy. --D.E.)

Huey P. Long (who was shot):

   "I had come to the United States Senate with only one
project in mind, which was that by every means of action
and persuasion I might do something to spread the wealth
of the land among all of the people.

   "I foresaw the depression in 1929.  In letters
reproduced in this volume (i.e. Every Man a King--D.E.)
I had predicted all of the consequences many years
before they occurred.

   "The wealth of the land was being tied up in the
hands of a very few men.  The people were not buying
because they had nothing with which to buy.  The big
business interests were not selling because there was
nobody they could sell to.

   "One percent of the people could not eat any more
than the other one per cent; they could not wear much
more than the other one per cent.  So, in 1929, when
the fortune holders of America grew powerful enough
that one percent of the people owned everything,
ninety-nine per cent of the people owned practically
nothing, not even enough to pay their debts, a
collapse was at hand.

   "...So it was no new matter...when I proposed the
line of thought with the first crash of 1929, that the
eventful day had arrived when accumulation at the top
by the few had produced a stagnation by which the
vast multitude of the people were impoverished at the
bottom."

   "There is no rule so sure as that one that the same
mill that grinds out fortunes above a certain size
at the top, grinds out paupers at the bottom.  The
same machine makes them both; and how are they made?
There is so much in the world, just so much land, so
many houses, so much to eat and so much to wear.  There
is enough--yea, there is more--than the entire human
race can consume, if all are reasonable.

   "All the people in America cannot eat up the food
that is produced in America; all the people in America
cannot wear out the clothes that are made in America;
nor can all of the people in America occupy the houses
that stand in this country, if all are allowed to share
in homes afforded by the nation.  But when one man must
have more houses to live in than ninety-nine other people;
when one man decides he must own more foodstuff than
any other ninety-nine people own; when one man decides to
have more goods to wear for himself and family than any
other ninety-nine people, then the condition results
that instead of one hundred people sharing the
things that are on earth for one hundred people, that
one man, through his gluttonous greed, takes over
ninety-nine parts for himself and leaves one part
for the ninety-nine.

   "Now what can this one man do with what is intended
for ninety-nine?  He cannot eat the food that is intended
for ninety-nine people; he cannot wear the clothes that
are intended for ninety-nine people; he cannot life in
ninety-nine houses at the same time; but like the
dog in the manger, he can put himself on the load of
hay and he can say:

  "'This food and these clothes and these houses
are mine, and while I cannot use them, my greed
can only be satisfied by keeping anybody else from
having them.'"

And this quote:

   "...if we could simply let the people enjoy the
wealth and the accumulations and the contrivances
that we have.  If, with the invention of every machine,
we could secure the education of every man; if with
increased production of every kind there could be less
toil, more hours of pleasure and recreation; if there
could be a happy and contented people enjoying what
the Almighty has made it possible to provide;  if
there could be people clothed with the materials that
we have to clothe them with, and no place to put it;
if the people could be sheltered in the homes we
have today, that the bank has taken away from them
because they cannot pay the interest on the mortgages
--if that could be done, if we could distribute this
surplus wealth, while leaving these rich people with
all the luxuries they can possibly use, what a
different world this would be."

And Long's "Share Our Wealth" Plan:

  The increasing fury with which I have been, and am
to be, assailed by reason of the fight and growth of
support for limiting the size of fortunes can only
be explained by the madness which human nature attaches
to the holders of accumulated wealth.

   "What I have proposed is:

1.  A capital levy tax on the property owned by any
one person of 1% of all over $1,000,000;  2% of all
over $2,000,000 etc., until, when it reaches fortunes
over $100,000,000 the government takes all above that
figure; which means a limit on the size of any one man's
fortune to something like $50,000,000  ...

" 2. An inheritance tax which does not allow any one
person to receive more than $5,000,000 in a lifetime
without working for it, all over that amount to go to
the government to be spread among the people for its
work.

"3.  An income tax which does not allow any one person
to make more than $1,000,000 in one year, exclusive of
 taxes, the balance to go to the united States for
general work among the people.

  That the public press should regard my plan and effort
as a calamity and me as a menace is no more than should
be expected, gauged in the light of past events.
According to Ridpath, the eminent historian:

   "'The ruling class always possess the means
of information and the processes by which it
is distributed.  The newspaper of modern times
belongs to the upper man.  The under man has
no voice; or if, having a voice, he cries out,
his cry is lost like a shout in the desert.
Capital, in the places of power, seizes upon
the organs of public utterance, and howls
the humble down the wind.  Lying and
misrepresentation are the natural weapons of
those who maintain an existing vice and
gather the usufruct of crime.'"
   "--Ridpath's History of the World, p. 410."

I recommend the John Goodman movie:  "Kingfish"
about Huey Long--it follows the biographies
I read very closely, unlike other bio-dramas
from Hollywood.

Dick Eastman
Yakima
U.S.A.
Every man is responsible for EVERY other man.