Every Man a Kingfish

Over at Concurring Opinions, law professor Gerard Magliocca argues that Amity Shlaes's superb history of the New Deal, The Forgotten Man, pays too little attention to FDR's success in neutralizing populist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long:

Let's assume for purposes of discussion that Shlaes is right about the economics. Is that the end of the matter? I don't think so. The next question is whether activist government was necessary to prevent something worse from happening. I'm not talking about a dictatorship. I'm simply referring to a political movement in favor of even more interventionist or redistributive policies that would have gained traction because the government was not doing enough.

The problem is that there is a forgotten man in "The Forgotten Man"—Huey P. Long. "The Kingfish" of Louisiana became a national figure in 1934 and 1935 with his "Share Our Wealth" movement, which was the organization that he intended to use for a presidential bid in 1936. (Long was assassinated in late 1935). Among other things, he wanted to establish a personal income cap through massive wealth and income taxes to pay for public works and subsidies for the poor. FDR told his aides that he "needed to steal Long's thunder" in 1935, which led to the proposal of Social Security and a much more modest wealth tax. (FDR was also responding to other protest movements—Father Coughlin and Dr. Francis Townsend come to mind).

It's an intriguing argument. But as Magliocca himself notes, Long "became a national figure in 1934 and 1935." By that point, FDR had already saddled the economy with the disastrous National Industrial Recovery Act and National Recovery Administration, which a unanimous Supreme Court thankfully struck down in 1935. There's certainly no question that Long's authoritarian populism would have been far worse for the country than the New Deal, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement of FDR's misguided policies.

For more on The Forgotten Man, don't miss Nick Gillespie's classic 2008 interview with Amity Shlaes.

Comments

[mitch]

FDR gets credit for everything – even Carl Austin Weiss’s work!

[Warren]

Srsly. Is Magliocca really suggesting that the bullet wouldn’t have stopped Long’s heart had it not been for the New Deal?

If anything Long’s wagon was hitched to the New Deal star, ‘if a little socialism is good more is even better’. I seriously doubt Long could have gone very far had FDR not already dismantled the constitutional rights Americans once cherished.

[Brett Stevens]

World War II bailed FDR out from a failing presidency. We should re-think our historical interpretations of that war.

[What\'s for supper?]

Long will always be top shelf in my book of quotations:

“Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.”

or

“Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.”

[SpongePaul]

H. P Long was CRAZY!!! my uncles dad was the corener who commited him. just an FYI since there was no law saying you were no longer in power if you went apeshit, he fired the then head of hospitals, and replaced him with one who said he was sane, and viola he was out and back to politics, but seriously people, the man was a loon, a nutjob

[John]

There is a pretty credible theory that Weiss didn’t shoot long but instead punched him in the mouth causing Long’s bodyguards to unleash a hail of bullets that killed but Weiss and Long. Considering that Weiss was shot more than 60 times, the theory is entirely plausable.

“Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy.”

Ain’t that the truth.

[Alan Vanneman]

Don’t you mean “Nick Gillespie’s classic and wildly popular 2008 interview with Amity Shlaes”?

[ChicagoTom]

For anyone interested here is a review of the book by Jon Chait over at TNR:

Now here is the extremely strange thing about The Forgotten Man: it does not really argue that the New Deal failed. In fact, Shlaes does not make any actual argument at all, though she does venture some bold claims, which she both fails to substantiate and contradicts elsewhere. Reviewing her book in The New York Times, David Leonhardt noted that Shlaes makes her arguments “mostly by implication.” This is putting it kindly. Shlaes introduces the book by asserting her thesis, but she barely even tries to demonstrate it. Instead she chooses to fill nearly four hundred pages with stories that mostly go nowhere. The experience of reading The Forgotten Man is more like talking to an old person who lived through the Depression than it is like reading an actual history of the Depression. Major events get cursory treatment while minor characters, such as an idiosyncratic black preacher or the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, receive lengthy portraits. Having been prepared for a revisionist argument against the New Deal, I kept wondering if I had picked up the wrong book.

Many of Shlaes’s stories do have an ideological point, but the point is usually made in a novelistic way rather than a scholarly one. She tends to depict the New Dealers as vain, confused, or otherwise unsympathetic. She depicts business owners as heroic and noble. It is a kind of revival of the old de haut en bas sort of social history, except this time the tycoons from whose perspective the events are narrated appear as the underappreciated victims, the giants at the bottom of the heap.

[….]

“Even if you add in all the work relief jobs, as some economists do,” she has contended, “Roosevelt-era unemployment averages well above 10 percent. That’s a level Obama has referred to once or twice-as a nightmare.” But Roosevelt inherited unemployment that was over 20 percent! Sure, the level to which it fell was high by absolute standards, but it is certainly pertinent that he cut that level by more than half. By Shlaes’s method of reckoning, Thomas Jefferson rates poorly on the scale of territorial acquisition, because on his watch the United States had less than half the square mileage it has today.

[Warty]

I like Chait’s implicit assumption that FDR caused unemployment to drop by half.