The Populist Explosion. John B. Judis
move aggressively during his first two years to reform banking and provide jobs through new government programs. He created a National Recovery Administration that was supposed to work out corporatist arrangements between business and labor and stem cutthroat price competition. But Roosevelt did not directly address economic inequality, which had grown during the years of the Republican majority and which progressive economists believed lay at the heart of the crash and the Depression. It took pressure from outside to get Roosevelt to do this, and much of it came from Louisiana politician Huey Long. Long created a populist movement that Democrats feared would threaten Roosevelt’s reelection and possibly even the existence of the Democratic Party.
Long grew up in Winn, Louisiana, a small, poor farming town that was a hotbed of populist and socialist support. He carried on the populist tradition, campaigning for governor on the slogan, “Every man a king, but no man wears a crown,” and railing against oil companies and the “money power.” Elected governor in 1928, he funded Louisiana’s roads, healthcare system, and schools, while exempting low-income people from taxes and proposing (and eventually getting) an extraction tax on oil companies. He didn’t repudiate racism, but he didn’t actively encourage it either. “Don’t say I am working for niggers, I’m not. I’m for the poor man—all poor men,” he declared. Dictatorial and charismatic, he was an exemplar of the populist who became the unifying force holding “the people” together. One reporter wrote of Long’s constituents, “They worship the ground he walks on.”
Long got elected to the senate in 1930, and in 1932 he backed Roosevelt for president. But soon after Roosevelt took office, Long broke with him. He spoke out and voted against the Government Economy Act. He claimed it was the work of “Mr. Morgan” and “Mr. Rockefeller.” In February 1934, Long announced on radio the formation of a Share Our Wealth Society. Its centerpiece was a proposal to cap a family’s wealth at $5 million and income at $1 million through taxes, and to use the revenue to provide every family a “household estate” that would be enough for “a home, an automobile, a radio, and ordinary conveniences” and a guaranteed annual income to “maintain a family in comfort,” as well as an old-age pension.
Long’s tax rates on the wealthy were draconian, but they still would not have produced the revenue necessary for what he promised. Roosevelt’s allies in the media mocked Long’s proposal. The New Republic sent Long a mock questionnaire about the details of his plan, asking, “Upon what statistics of economic studies do you base your conclusions?” But the very extravagance of Long’s plan established a political divide between him and the powers-that-be that could not easily be bridged. It defined the movement’s radicalism the way free silver, the sub-treasury plan, and the nationalization of railroads defined the People’s Party.
Long’s Share Our Wealth clubs—more than 27,000 had started by the following February—functioned not only as local political organizations but as the basis for a new political party. They were often run out of churches and schools. In addition, Long boasted of a mailing list of more than 7.5 million. Long’s most active base, like that of the People’s Party and subsequent populist movements, was not among the very poor. It was among the middle class, who feared that they would be cast down by the Depression into the ranks of the very poor. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote of Long’s followers:
Having gained a foothold in the world of bourgeois respectability, they stood in danger of being plunged back into what they viewed as an abyss of powerlessness and dependence. It was that fear that made the middle class, even more than those who were truly rootless and indigent, a politically volatile group.
Roosevelt and the Democrats feared Long’s candidacy. In 1935, the Democratic National Party did a secret poll in which they determined that if Long ran on a Third-party ticket against Roosevelt in 1936, he could win between three and four million votes and throw the election to the Republicans. That fear was an important factor in Roosevelt and the Democrats joining forces that year to pass what was called “the Second New Deal.” Unlike the first, it dealt directly with the issue of economic inequality that Long had repeatedly raised.
On June 19, the Senate passed the Social Security Act, which provided old-age pensions and unemployment compensation. On the same day, Roosevelt surprised Congress by proposing a tax reform measure to encourage “a wider distribution of wealth.” He imposed levies on large businesses and raised taxes on the wealthy and on large inheritances. Long criticized the proposals as being weak, but they were widely portrayed as “soaking the rich.” Roosevelt also incorporated populist rhetoric in his presidential campaign that year, championing the “average man” against the “economic royalists.”
As it turned out, Roosevelt did not have to fear Long’s candidacy. In September 1935, the Kingfish was assassinated in Baton Rouge. And in 1936, Roosevelt won another landslide. But Long had a significant influence over the New Deal and over American politics. He and his movement pushed Congress to adopt programs that became pillars of American policy for the next four decades. Long brought the New Deal’s outlook into line with the public’s underlying concern about the inequality of wealth and power.
George Wallace
The ’60s were thought of as an era of ferment on the left. In Europe, there were the May–June 1968 protests in France and the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969. In the United States, it was the time of civil rights, black power, anti-war, feminism, and environmentalism. But it was also when a rightwing populist, George Wallace, acting in opposition to civil rights rulings and legislation, blew a large hole in the roof that New Deal liberalism had erected over American politics.
The New Deal had rested on a tacit alliance between liberal Democrats and conservative Southern Democrats who resisted any legislation that might challenge white supremacy. As a result, key New Deal legislation, including the Social Security and Minimum Wage acts, were formulated to exclude Southern blacks from their benefits. But after World War II, northern Democrats, propelled by the Cold War’s ideological struggle, Brown v. Board of Education, and a powerful civil rights movement, embraced the black American cause.
As the party of Abraham Lincoln, Republicans had traditionally been receptive to black civil rights, and the Republican leadership in Congress supported Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Barry Goldwater was an early dissenter, but in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson easily defeated him. Johnson’s victory did not, however, signal widespread support for his civil rights initiatives, and after he passed the Voting Rights Act and launched the War on Poverty, a popular backlash grew. Wallace turned the backlash into a populist crusade.
Wallace was raised in a rural small town in Alabama. His father and grandfather dabbled in politics. They were New Deal Democrats under Roosevelt’s spell. Wallace would eventually make his name as an arch-segregationist, but he was initially a populist Democrat like Long for whom race was strictly a secondary consideration. When he was a delegate to the 1948 Democratic Convention, he didn’t join the Dixiecrat walkout in protest of the party’s civil rights platform. He initially ran for governor in 1958 as a New Deal Democrat and lost against a candidate backed by the Ku Klux Klan. After that, he pledged, “I will never be outniggered again.”
In 1962, Wallace ran again and this time he won as a proponent of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In 1963, he gained notoriety when he attempted to block two black students from registering at the University of Alabama. In 1964, he ran in the Democratic primaries against Johnson’s surrogates in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland and got about a third of the vote—as high as 43 percent in Maryland, where he carried 15 of 23 counties. In 1968, he ran as an independent against Nixon and Humphrey. In early October, he was ahead of Humphrey in the polls, but in the end, he got 13.5 percent of the vote and carried five states in the South. In 1972, he ran as a Democrat, and stood a chance of taking the nomination when an assassin shot and crippled him while he was campaigning in May for the Maryland primary.
Wallace emphasized his opposition to racial integration, but he framed it as a defense of the average (white) American against the tyranny of Washington bureaucrats. Big government was imposing its way on the average person. Appearing on Meet the Press in 1967, Wallace summed up his candidacy:
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