Huey Long: “Our Growing Calamity” Address

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In this radio speech delivered on January 19, 1935, and read into the Congressional Record on January 23, 1935, Long continues his attack on Roosevelt. He soon concludes that Roosevelt has so complicated the issue of providing old-age pensions on a national basis that his real aim must be to “scuttle [the pension plan] inside and out.” The reason Roosevelt's program will not work, Long explains, is the president's reluctance to tax multimillionaires and billionaires. Instead, Roosevelt would tax working people, placing an additional burden on them and on the states in which they reside.

Long presents his own argument with customary plainness. There is no way that Roosevelt can pay for his programs to help the American people “unless that money is scraped off the big piles at the top and spread among the people at the bottom, who have nothing.” One of Long's political gifts was his ability to present his economic arguments in clear, picturesque language. Next, he portrays the president as fearful of Wall Street's reaction to his economic programs: Indeed, Roosevelt has been unwilling to propose a comprehensive relief agenda, which would, in Wall Street's view, hamper economic recovery. As a result, Long asserts, the depression has actually worsened: “The Roosevelt depression is just a double dose of the Hoover depression.”

After providing statistics to show how the economy has worsened under Roosevelt, Long draws the following conclusions: The worker's standard of living has been lowered, the average worker cannot support his family in “health and decency,” and the gap between rich and poor is growing greater. Here Long attacks Roosevelt's credibility, suggesting that the president is intentionally vague about what he proposes to do: “You could tell what Mr. Hoover meant to do, or rather meant not to do, whereas understanding what Mr. Roosevelt means to do compared to what he does do is difficult.”

Again invoking the Bible, Long uses some verses from the book of Nehemiah to frame the plight of Depression-battered Americans and to spell out the debt-relief measures he believes should now be adopted. Additional scriptural quotations descrbe the ancient Hebrew concept of the jubilee year, which the senator would like to see honored. He presents himself as a kind of prophet and moral guide. Even nonbelievers, Long insists, should heed the words of great American figures from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt who believed that society would prosper only if all of its citizens shared its wealth.

Long implies that like Rome, America may fall because its common people cannot prosper. Acknowledging that he is a Baptist, Long quotes an attack on greed by the sitting pope, Pius XI, which seems to anticipate Long's own excoriations of the superrich. The antidote to the concentration of resources is for the American people to establish Share Our Wealth clubs in their communities. Long sees himself as fighting for humanity. Only through a mass movement, he suggests, can Roosevelt and the Washington politicians be forced to act to help impoverished people. The problem, in Long's view, is not overwhelming. Indeed, he affirms the potential of his solution to the crisis in one sentence: “All this can be done with ease only if we will say to the rich, ‘None shall be too rich!’”