The Death of Huey P. Long
The official slogan of the Share The Wealth movement was "Every Man a King (But No One Wears a Crown)", which also became the title of a song co-written by Long in 1935 to promote his proposal.
Huey Long was a populist, extremely popular in his home state of Louisiana, but many saw his Share Our Wealth proposal as an unworkable plan that threatened the reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Many also suspected that Huey Long was planning on using the Share Our Wealth Society as a vehicle for mounting a third party challenge to Roosevelt during the 1936 Presidential election. Any Presidential ambitions which Long might have had were cut short when he was shot by an assassin on September 8, 1935, in Baton Rouge; he died two days later on September 10, 1935.
Biographers T. Harry Williams and William Ivy Hair speculated that the Senator had never intended to run for the presidency in 1936. Long planned to form a third party in 1936 that would run a candidate who would probably lose, but also split the progressive vote, causing Roosevelt to lose as well. Long would then run for president on his new party's ticket in 1940.
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Famous quotes containing the words death and/or long:
“I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
—Bible: New Testament Jesus, in Matthew, 5:5.
The third of the Beatitudes, from the Sermon on the Mount. The words recall those in Proverbs 37:11, “But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” In his Notebooks, the author Samuel Butler wrote, “I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.” (Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, p. 220, 1951)