Every man a King, and every populist a pitchfork

It takes a certain level of narcissism to run for President.  And it takes some chutzpah to write a self-aggrandizing political manifesto.  But it took both, with a heft dose of megalomania, for Louisiana Senator Huey Long to write his forgotten 1935 book My First Days in the White House.

In a current age when conservatives rightly bemoan the quasi-European instincts of the current occupant of the Oval Office, Huey Long’s passion for forcible wealth distribution and populist demagoguery is a stark reminder that true unfettered Socialism is more than trillion dollar deficits and semi-nationalized banking.  Long’s second “autobiography” details more than just his romantic and naive notions of how democracy operates but a frightening picture of an America ruled by Presidential fiat.  While Long opens his novel proclaiming that his forthcoming 1936 campaign was “destined to save America from Communism and Fascism,” the result he describes in the pages that follow outline a nation as repressive as anything Orwell could have conceived.

My First Days reads like Mein Kampf meets Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The centerpiece of the novel is Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program which he introduced in 1934 as an attack on what he deemed were the causes of the Great Depression – J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers and the Federal Reserve.  But unintentionally, the spotlight is cast largely on Long’s ego and fanciful notions of how he would govern.

President Long’s cabinet selections aren’t just approved by the Senate without debate, but done so by 4pm of his first day in office.  And not unlike another supposed “Cabinet of Rivals”, the new President’s selections are a who’s-who collection of political names from the 1920’s and 30’s.  Former Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt are both named – and accept - while other less known notables like New York Gov. (and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee) Alfred E. Smith take lesser administrative posts.  With each of these names, Long envisions brief conservations where with the turn of a phrase, the new Commander-in-Chief turns political enemies into dutiful allies. 

The same conversation occurs among the targeted financial classes.  After first telling his Attorney General that he wishes to, in essence, reverse the occupants of Wall Street and the prisons, Long decries:

…there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of people walking the streets today, their pockets bulging with ill-gotten gain, who should be in jail for economic crimes. But there must be thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of people in jail, who should be free. I mean there are fathers of families, who stole a loaf of bread, or a bottle of milk, or a pig, or broke into a store to get canned goods to keep their wives and children from starving to death in this great economic crisis, and were punished with as heartless a cruelty as was ever displayed by Roman tyrants against the early Christians.  

Sensing their days are numbered, the “first families” of American finance sit down to dinner with Long.  One half expects to see Long playing the role of Al Capone in the baseball bat scene from The Untouchables as he calmly lays out his “Share Our Wealth” agenda, including a cap of $5 million of income for any American.  In a style typical for the book, Long’s opponents not only change their tune but gladly make a common cause with him.  The Ford family seeks a private audience with Long and promises to give up their wealth to build houses for their employees.  Rockefeller writes to the President to tell him of how much he privately embraces the notion of only being able to keep $5 million in total net assets.  In his generosity, Long ”compromises” by adjusting his program’s wealth cap to only a 99% tax on a net wealth (not taxes, but net assets) of $8 million.  And you thought the estate tax was bad.  

Not unlike the current President who declared “we cannot go back to endless cycles of bubble and bust,” Long has an equally dim view of cyclical economics, stating to his economic advisers that “we must not permit a boom…Move into every line and see what is necessary to have only rational revival of our country.”  As Long makes painfully clear, his definition of recovery isn’t creating wealth but simply redistributing it.  Not even the Supreme Court, in Long’s fictionalization, finds his power grabbing unconstitutional – an outcome FDR could have only dreamed of before his attempted court packing in 1937.

Worse than Long’s politics are his prose.  Curt in some areas and overly flowery in others, My First Days is structured like a compromised work between a B-novel writer and a court stenographer.  Even Long’s supposed private remarks read like stump speeches:  

“We have a Government here which has not hesitated to spend billions of dollars and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to kill human beings in other lands, under the sacred name of war. As President of the United States, I shall not hesitate a second to spend millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, to kill germs that prey upon the human race, and to war against disease.”

Had Huey Long lived, My First Days would have likely terrified what remained of the economic establishment.  As it would turn out, some aspects of Long’s vendetta against corporate America would come to pass despite the return of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House.  Frustrated by the New Deal’s inability to boost the economy out of Depression and taunted by Long-esque economic populists, FDR’s second term became a “soak the rich” witch-hunt including prosecuting former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.  Mellon and others were taken to court for retroactive tax evasion, despite the fact that their deductions were legal at the time them took them.  These measures, and others, created a “Second Depression” in 1937, forcing beleaguered markets down even further.  

Even in death, Long’s legacy still managed to create the economic calamity his election would have likely caused.