Every Man a King

Posted by Bogumil

“Limit fortunes and spread the wealth.” Extracts from the 1933 autobiography of populist Louisiana maverick politician Huey P. Long

Unlike some of the more obscure figures covered on this blog, Huey Long does not require much of an introduction. Despite his short career in the US Senate, Long is one of the few congressional politicians from his era who still has a level of international name recognition, even if his modern reputation is not always universally positive. Governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, then Senator for the state from 1932 until his assassination in 1935, Long in his day was hailed by some as a progressive hero and reviled by others as a demagogic, incipient fascist. The occasional comparisons one sees made today between Long and Donald Trump are accurate enough on one level, in that both have been widely and fervently compared to Mussolini and Hitler, while at the same time being praised (not always by different people) for their populist stances and for their alleged understanding for the needs of the ‘little man’. There are also significant differences between the two, of course. Unlike Trump, Long was a career politician without much direct experience in private enterprise. His style and his outlook were also far removed from New York, being heavily shaped by Louisiana’s faction-driven political culture, which was tangled up in a complex web of class enmities, nepotism, machine politics, and regional hostilities. Long furthermore was a self-identified man of the Left, something which Trump has never been, even during the latter’s brief, now long-past flirtations with the Democratic Party. All of these various factors help provide some context for Long’s political worldview, which was heavily centered around the interventionist power of the state – Long was one of the few mainstream (i.e. non-Communist) figures in US politics to publicly criticize President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation for not going far enough, and his 1934 Share Our Wealth program was notorious for its stated ambition of using legislative authority to radically redistribute the wealth of American society. The text below, an excerpt of three chapters from Long’s 1933 autobiography Every Man a King, provides an overview of Long’s political outlook and of some of the practical proposals which he made to alleviate the suffering caused by the Great Depression. These chapters constitute an effective summation of the aims of the ‘Long Plan’, the series of bills introduced in 1932-33 (all rejected) which would later serve as the ideological springboard for Long’s famous Share Our Wealth movement.

The Effort to Spread the Wealth Among the Masses

I had come to the United States Senate with only one project in mind, which was that by every means of action and persuasion I might do something to spread the wealth of the land among all of the people.¹

I foresaw the depression in 1929. In letters reproduced in this volume, I had predicted all of the consequences many years before they occurred.

The wealth of the land was being tied up in the hands of a very few men. The people were not buying because they had nothing with which to buy. The big business interests were not selling, because there was nobody they could sell to.

One per cent of the people could not eat any more than any other one per cent; they could not live in any more houses than any other one per cent. So, in 1929, when the fortune-holders of America grew powerful enough that one per cent of the people owned nearly everything, ninety-nine per cent of the people owned practically nothing, not even enough to pay their debts, a collapse was at hand.

God Almighty had warned against this condition. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and every religious teacher known to this earth had declaimed against it. So it was no new matter, as it was termed, when I propounded the line of thought with the first crash of 1929, that the eventful day had arrived when accumulation at the top by the few had produced a stagnation by which the vast multitude of the people were impoverished at the bottom. Continue reading →

Must the World Destroy Itself?

Posted by Bogumil

Freda Utley, America First member and ex-Communist, argues the isolationist case against US involvement in WWII

Freda Utley is one of those writers who was incredibly popular during their day, but whose relevance and name recognition has largely faded as the decades have passed. This is somewhat unfortunate in Utley’s case, because her life was varied and fascinating, and she wrote a number of significant works on Asia, communism, and fascism which deserve to be remembered. Utley’s early background was progressive, middle-class, and solidly English. The financial difficulties the family experienced after her father passed away in 1918 helped lead Utley, already an idealistic young woman, into socialism – first as a member of the Independent Labour Party, then from 1927 as a passionate activist for the British Communist Party, and eventually as a paid employee of the Comintern. In 1930 she and her husband (Arcadi Berdichevsky, a Russian Jew and Soviet functionary), moved to Moscow permanently, and it was here that Utley’s slowly-blooming disillusionment with Communism became overwhelming. Utley’s firsthand experiences of Soviet poverty, corruption, inefficiency, and ultimately terror (her husband was arrested and sent to Siberia in 1936) led her to leave the USSR, eventually settling in America, where her reputation as a writer saw her become something of a minor celebrity for a time, rubbing shoulders with figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and Cornelius Starr. Yet Utley’s reawakened liberal principles, fostered via direct experience under totalitarianism, led her down some controversial avenues as WWII commenced. Utley’s view at that time was that the Soviet Union was the most totalizing dictatorship in existence, and therefore stood as the greatest enemy to human liberty. Hitlerism, while still villainous, was also clearly the lesser of two evils, and a negotiated peace with Germany was thus essential in order to save Britain from destruction and to prevent Europe’s domination under a “monolithic Communist empire.” This stance naturally brought Utley into the isolationist camp, and thereby under the wing of the America First Committee; articles like the one transcribed below, from October 1941, provide a good summation of her position during this period (although perhaps some of the arguments are not quite so convincing with the benefit of hindsight). This particular article was distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies by America First, and helped make Utley’s name as an anti-war campaigner. It also caused her considerable trouble in trying to attain American citizenship, being directly cited by US authorities (along with Utley’s Communist past) as evidence that the author was a hostile enemy alien.

An Englishwoman Pleads:
Must the World Destroy Itself?
Freda Utley
October, 1941

First published in Common Sense, August, 1941, under the title “God Save England From Her Friends.” This revised version was transcribed from the The Reader’s Digest of October, 1941, vol.39, no.234.

FREDA UTLEY, well known as an author and lecturer on three continents, has firsthand knowledge of the world’s present battlefronts. As correspondent for the London News Chronicle she covered Japan’s war against China. For six years she lived in Russia, a convinced believer in the Soviet experiment, and labored as a government official in the Comintern, the Commissariat of Foreign Trade and the Institute of World Economy and Politics. Her resulting complete disillusionment with the Communist Utopia is graphically described in her recent book, The Dream We Lost. Coming to America, Miss Utley has devoted herself to publicizing the truth about Communism as it was revealed to her in Moscow. Among her other books are Japan’s Feet of Clay, Lancashire and the Far East and China at War. Miss Utley was born in The Temple, London. Her father came from the little village of Utley, in Yorkshire, named for the family. He was able to trace his ancestry back to the conquest of Britain by the Vikings. The author asked to revise and expand this article for The Reader’s Digest.

A year hence it may seem to most English people that England’s friends in the United States were more dangerous to her than those Americans called isolationists. For too many American friends of Britain, swayed entirely by their emotions, refuse to consider England’s present situation realistically. They speak as if the defeat of Germany were a foregone conclusion, simply because the Americans have decided upon it. Would-be saviors, not only of Britain and her Empire, but of the whole world, they exhort the British not to give up the fight “until Hitlerism is destroyed,” although by now it should be obvious to any keen observer that England cannot reconquer the Continent of Europe. Yet anyone who dares to face such facts is denounced as an appeaser, or worse.

In England, forums of intelligent citizens debate the terms of the eventual compromise peace. Yet so fearful are Americans of being called defeatists or appeasers that hardly anyone in this country will admit that the best chance of saving both England and some democracy in the world is for the United States to back England at the proper moment in a negotiated peace, before the balance of forces turns itself yet more heavily in Germany’s favor.

Being an Englishwoman, I hope fervently, of course, that the United States will continue all-out aid to England. For the defeat of England would be a catastrophic disaster for America. But I hope Americans will realize that in due season the United States must be prepared to back England in negotiating peace. It is time that Americans of good will and intelligence discuss realistically the pros and cons of a not too distant peace without letting wishful thinking obscure their judgement. Continue reading →

Pelley’s Christian Commonwealth

Posted by Bogumil

“For Christianity and the Constitution!” Silver Legion of America leader William Dudley Pelley and his program for a ‘Christian Commonwealth’

Fringe movements, whether in politics or religion, tend to attract fringe individuals. George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, once made the observation that: “Creativity IS fanaticism. Every creative genius has had to be a fanatic. Many of them have been burned at the stake… In between the Communists and the Nazis is the great mass of non-fanatics, the TV watchers and the comic book readers.” He might have had a point. It is hard to be a revolutionary or a radical without being a fanatic to some degree – and fanaticism of any kind is, by definition, not exactly “normal.” William Dudley Pelley, who led the fascistic Silver Legion of America (the ‘Silver Shirts’) during the interwar era, was almost the quintessential example of the kinds of fringe individuals who frequently find their way into radical politics. A successful journalist and Hollywood screenwriter who had been radicalized through his time covering the Russian Revolution and by his experiences with Jewish film executives, Pelley in the mid-1920s began experiencing divine ‘visions’ which led him into a career as a best-selling spiritualist teacher and writer. Pelley believed that his visions were sent by Christ and that he had been chosen for a great purpose, and it was these visions which inspired him to found the Silver Legion in 1933 with a goal of bringing about the renewal of the United States on both a spiritual and a material level. The USA’s rebirth under the Silver Legion would see it become a “Christian Commonwealth” – a society still fundamentally based on the American Constitution, but made both more equitable and more efficient through application of the principles of ‘Christian Economics’ revealed to Pelley in his mystical and clairvoyant visions. Pelley spelled out the essence of his ideas in a number of works; his overview of the ‘Christian Commonwealth’ and its economic precepts, excerpted below, is taken from his book No More Hunger! This book was first published in 1933, but the text below is taken from a revised edition published after WWII (my copy is from 1961). So far as I am aware, the only significant difference between the original and revised editions is the removal of a chapter in which Pelley calls for blacks, Mexicans, and “improvident backwoods whites” to be made wards of the state and put onto Native American-style reservations where they can be tapped for domestic labor; Pelley, for all his eccentricities (he also became a UFO enthusiast in the 1950s), was apparently down-to-earth enough to know which way the post-War wind was blowing.

The Program for a Christian Commonwealth
From William Dudley Pelley’s
“No More Hunger”

Unfortunately, when the average man hears the words “new system” uttered or when some enthusiastic person begins to prate about a “better economic order”, the immediate conclusion is drawn that some sort of violent revolution is being recommended or promoted, or that the sponsor is indulging in philosophical day-dreams because he had lost his business or can’t find a job.

Furthermore, a Wise Teacher has aptly remarked: “Tell men not too great truths with suddenness, lest they turn and rend you, or call you addled in your wits.”

Over the years we have had every sort of makeshift plan to cure our economic ills: the Townsend Plan, the Upton Sinclair Plan, the Utopian Plan, and others.

The trouble with most of these palliatives has been that they were not advanced by practical economists who would take into account the country’s actual plight of lost buying power that cannot be restored along the old profit-making and profit-taking lines.

Some of these Plans contained commendable recommendations for redistributing wealth on a more equitable basis but did not get down to brass tacks and face the staggering truth that there is precious little unborrowed or unpledged wealth let to be distributed. Furthermore, such wealth as they would redistribute would have to be seized by confiscatory methods. To loot the present rich, or soak the fortunate that the unfortunate may benefit, is equally deplorable with making the poor man of the present face his fate and like it.

What most of the economic strategists have been and are really trying to do, whether they are honest enough to admit it or not, is to find some plan that will jump all of us out of poverty in a day and a night while at the same time being careful not to alter any of the fallacious methods that have always been employed for accumulating wealth, and that in the hands of master manipulators have resulted in exactly the evils that have beggared us today.

They want to retain all the old evils while at the same time abolishing them. They want to go right along taking profits on the predatory basis while at the same time curbing the activities of all individuals who seem to do it successfully. Continue reading →