Barack Obama not the only President to Face Down a Populist Movement

Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.

The fear and frustration that has helped give rise to the Tea Party movement is not unique in American politics.

During the dark days of the Great Depression, similar populist movements sprang up in opposition to FDR. One of the most powerful was led by Huey Long, the former Governor and then Senator from the State of Louisiana, who launched the “Share Our Wealth Society” in 1934. Under the motto “Everyman a King,” Long called for the redistribution of wealth through steeply graduated income and inheritance taxes. The excess revenue thus collected would provide a fund through which every American would be guaranteed a home worth $5,000 and an annual income of $2,500. In the midst of the hardship of the Depression, Long’s “Share Our Wealth Clubs” spread rapidly and it is estimated that by 1935 his organization had many thousands of chapters and nearly five million members. By this point, Long had also made it clear that he was eyeing a potential run for the presidency, perhaps as a third party candidate. He even published a book, entitled My First Days in the White House that detailed the utopian America that would emerge under his leadership. FDR once called Long-who ran Louisiana like a private fiefdom and whose demagogic appeal aroused a loyal following-”one of the two most dangerous men in America” (along with Douglas MacArthur). Before his threat to run for the presidency materialized, however, Long was gunned down by an assassin in the Louisiana State Capital Building in September, 1935.

The discontent that coalesced around Long’s simplistic solutions to the economic crisis was mirrored in similar movement that was launched by Dr. Francis Townsend in the fall of 1933. Townsend was a retired physician whose “Townsend Plan” called for all persons over the age of sixty to retire and receive a monthly pension of $200 (a substantial sum in 1930s America). An additional requirement was that the retirees spend the pension within 30 days of receiving it. Townsend claimed that his plan would open up the job market to younger workers; increase overall economic activity through the required spending; and provide the elderly with much needed economic security. As was the case with the “Share Our Wealth” movement, Townsend’s “Plan” became wildly popular, especially among the elderly, and within a year or so after its launch “Townsend Clubs” had sprung up all over America and his organization had close to 3.5 million members.

The political discontent exhibited by the followers of Long and Townsend helped inspire FDR’s push for Social Security, the Fair Labor Relations Act, and other reform measures in what is sometimes referred to as the Second New Deal. By 1936, however, FDR found himself confronted by a third populist movement which had emerged under the leadership of Father Charles E. Coughlin. Sometimes referred to as the father of hate radio, Coughlin was an early supporter of the New Deal who had amassed an enormous radio audience through a weekly Sunday program carried on CBS called “The Golden Hour of the Little Flower.” Coughlin attacked communists, “predatory capitalists,” private bankers, and the gold standard with an ever-increasing vehemence that led him to break with Roosevelt and abandon his support for the New Deal by the time FDR was running for re-election in 1936. In the same year, Coughlin made the decision to form his own political party called the Union Party, after Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, a grassroots organization drawn from his estimated 35 to 40 million listeners, and readers of his weekly newspaper, Social Justice.

Under Coughlin’s direction, the Union Party joined forces with Frances Townsend and Gerald K. Smith, a fundamentalist preacher and close associate of the late Huey Long. The party nominated William Lemke as its presidential candidate and by this point espoused a veiled anti-Semitism and xenophobia that in many respects echoed European fascism. In the end, the party only managed to poll just over 890,000 votes, and in spite of Smith’s and Coughlin’s increasingly shrill attacks on FDR-Smith called the 1936 election a choice between “the Russian primer or the Holy Bible…the Red Flag or the Stars and Stripes”…between “Lenin and Stalin or Jefferson!”-Roosevelt won by a landslide.

The Union Party disintegrated after its defeat in 1936 and its three primary founders, Coughlin, Townsend and Smith, would all go their separate ways. With Social Security now in place, interest in the Townsend Plan would fall off considerably and its author would soon drift into political obscurity. In the meantime, both Father Coughlin and Gerald Smith would continue their attacks on FDR on the New Deal, which they increasing referred to as “the Jew Deal.” Indeed, by 1938, Father Coughlin was openly insisting that the Roosevelt Administration was under the control of “international Jewry” and by 1940 that the latter was also responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War. Although Coughlin’s audience had vastly declined by this point, he now found himself under increasing pressure to cease his activities from the Roosevelt Administration, the National Association of Broadcasters, and from officials within the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, Coughlin left the airways near the end of 1940 and in 1942 his publication was banned from delivery by the US Postal Service.

As is the case today, the stark reality of a profound financial crisis followed by a severe downturn in the economy led many Depression-era Americans-anxious about the present and uncertain about their future — to look for simple answers to complex problems. In such an environment, it is all to easy to give in to one’s fears; to blame unknown and unseen forces for the ills of the world; to see foreigners, racial or religious minorities, private intuitions, or even the government itself, as engaged in some sort of conspiracy to deprive the great mass of people of their right to a decent way of life.

FDR understood these fears. He once remarked that “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” He also insisted that the “only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.” FDR in short, saw government in a democracy not as “an alien power,” but as a force for good, so long as the critical balance between the “well informed public” and the intuitions that are meant to serve it are maintained. Based on the gridlock in Congress and the emotional appeal and rising popularity of the Tea Party, it would appear that we are in danger of losing this critical balance. Restoring it may be the greatest challenge and most important accomplishment of the Obama presidency.

Braintruster David Woolner is senior vice president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.