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HUEY LONG SPEAKING AT NBC
Every Man a King
Go here for more about
Huey P. Long.
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Huey Long's Share the Wealth program.
It follows the full text transcript of Huey Long's radio
address Every Man a King, broadcast by NBC - February 23,
1934.
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It is necessary to
scale down the big fortunes.
Is that a right of life, when the young children
of this country are being reared into a sphere
which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120
million people? |
Ladies and
gentlemen, I have only thirty minutes in which
to speak to you this evening, and I, therefore,
will not be able to discuss in detail so much as
I can write when I have all of the time and
space that is allowed me for the subjects, but I
will undertake to sketch them very briefly
without manuscript or preparation, so that you
can understand them so well as I can tell them
to you tonight.
I contend, my friends, that we have no difficult
problem to solve in America, and that is the
view of nearly everyone with whom I have
discussed the matter here in Washington and
elsewhere throughout the United States -- that
we have no very difficult problem to solve.
It is not the difficulty of the problem which we
have; it is the fact that the rich people of
this country -- and by rich people I mean the
super-rich -- will not allow us to solve the
problems, or rather the one little problem that
is afflicting this country, because in order to
cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale
down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the
wealth to be shared by all of the people.
We have a marvelous love for this government of
ours; in fact, it is almost a religion, and it
is well that it should be, because we have a
splendid form of government and we have a
splendid set of laws. We have everything here
that we need, except that we have neglected the
fundamentals upon which the American government
was principally predicated.
How may of you remember the first thing that the
Declaration of Independence said? It said, "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that there
are certain inalienable rights for the people,
and among them are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness"; and it said, further, "We
hold the view that all men are created equal."
Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean,
my friends, to say that all men were created
equal and that that meant that any one man was
born to inherit $10 billion and that another
child was to be born to inherit nothing?
Did that mean, my friends, that someone would
come into this world without having had an
opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of
work, should be born with more than it and all
of its children and children's children could
ever dispose of, but that another one would have
to be born into a life of starvation?
That was not the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence when it said that all men are
created equal or "That we hold that all men are
created equal."
Nor was it the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence when it said that they held that
there were certain rights that were inalienable
-- the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.
Is that right of life, my friends, when the
young children of this country are being reared
into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than
it is by 120 million people?
Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of
the dice or anything like the inalienable right
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
or anything resembling the fact that all people
are created equal; when we have today in America
thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions
of children on the verge of starvation in a land
that is overflowing with too much to eat and too
much to wear?
I do not think you will contend that, and I do
not think for a moment that they will contend
it.
Now let us see if we cannot return this
government to the Declaration of Independence
and see if we are going to do anything regarding
it. Why should we hesitate or why should we
quibble or why should we quarrel with one
another to find out what the difficulty is, when
we know what the Lord told us what the
difficulty is, and Moses wrote it out so a blind
man could see it, then Jesus told us all about
it, and it was later written in the Book of
James, where everyone could read it?
I refer to the Scriptures, now, my friends, and
give you what it says not for the purpose of
convincing you of the wisdom of myself, not for
the purpose, ladies and gentlemen, of convincing
you of the fact that I am quoting the Scripture
means that I am to be more believed than someone
else; but I quote you the Scripture, or rather
refer you to the Scripture, because whatever you
see there you may rely upon will never be
disproved so long as you or your children or
anyone may live; and you may further depend upon
the fact that not one historical fact that the
Bible has ever contained has ever yet been
disproved by any scientific discovery or by
reason of anything that has been disclosed to
man through his own individual mind or through
the wisdom of the Lord which the Lord has
allowed him to have.
Nothing should be held
permanently by any one person.
But the Scripture says, ladies and gentlemen,
that no country can survive, or for a country to
survive it is necessary that we keep the wealth
scattered among the people, that nothing should
be held permanently by any one person, and that
fifty years seems to be the year of jubilee in
which all property would be scattered about and
returned to the sources from which it originally
came, and every seventh year debt should be
remitted.
Those two things the Almighty said to be
necessary -- I should say He knew to be
necessary, or else He would not have so
prescribed that the property would be kept among
the general run of the people, and that everyone
would continue to share in it; so that no one
man would get half of it and hand it down to a
son, who takes half of what was left, and that
son hand it down to another one, who would take
half of what was left, until, like a snowball
going downhill, all of the snow was off of the
ground except what the snowball had.
I believe that was the judgment and the view and
the law of the Lord, that we would have to
distribute wealth ever so often, in order that
there could not be people starving to death in a
land of plenty, as there is in America today.
We have in American today more wealth, more
goods, more food, more clothing, more houses
than we have ever had. We have everything in
abundance here.
We have the farm problem, my friends, because we
have too much cotton, because we have too much
wheat, and have too much corn, and too much
potatoes.
We have a home-loan problem because we have too
many houses, and yet nobody can buy them and
live in them.
We have trouble, my friends, in the country,
because we have too much money owing, the
greatest indebtedness that has ever been given
to civilization, where it has been shown that we
are incapable of distributing the actual things
that are here, because the people have not money
enough to supply themselves with them, and
because the greed of a few men is such that they
think it is necessary that they own everything,
and their pleasure consists in the starvation of
the masses, and in their possessing things they
cannot use, and their children cannot use, but
who bask in the splendor of sunlight and wealth,
casting darkness and despair and impressing it
on everyone else.
"So, therefore," said the Lord, in effect, "if
you see these things that now have occurred and
exist in this and other countries, there must be
a constant scattering of wealth in any country
if this country is to survive."
"Then," said the Lord, in effect, "every seventh
year there shall be a remission of debts; there
will be no debts after seven years." That was
the law.
Now, let us take America today. We have in
American today, ladies and gentlemen, $272
billion of debt. Two hundred and seventy-two
thousand millions of dollars of debts are owed
by the various people of this country today.
Why, my friends, that cannot be paid. It is not
possible for that kind of debt to be paid.
The entire currency of the United States is only
$6 billion. That is all of the money that we
have got in America today. All the actual money
you have got in all of your banks, all that you
have got in the government treasury, is $6
billion; and if you took all that money and paid
it out today you would still owe $266 billion;
and if you took all that money and paid again
you would still owe $260 billion; and if you
took it, my friends, 20 times and paid it you
would still owe $150 billion.
You would have to have 45 times the entire money
supply of the United States today to pay the
debts of the people of America and then they
would just have to start out from scratch,
without a dime to go on with.
So, my friends, it is impossible to pay all of
these debts, and you might as well find out that
it cannot be done. The United States Supreme
Court has definitely found out that it could not
be done, because, in a Minnesota case, it held
that when a State has postponed the evil day of
collecting a debt it was a valid and
constitutional exercise of legislative power.
Ten men dominate at
least 85 percent of the activities that you own.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I may proceed to
give you some other words that I think you can
understand -- I am not going to belabor you by
quoting tonight -- I am going to tell you what
the wise men of all ages and all times, down
even to the present day, have all said: that you
must keep the wealth of the country scattered,
and you must limit the amount that any one man
can own. You cannot let any man own $300 billion
or $400 billion. If you do, one man can own all
of the wealth that they United States has in it.
Now, my friends, if you were off on an island
where there were one hundred lunches, you could
not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or
take the hundred lunches and not let anybody
else eat any of them. If you did, there would
not be anything else for the balance of the
people to consume.
So, we have in America today, my friends, a
condition by which about ten men dominate the
means of activity in at least 85 percent of the
activities that you own. They either own
directly everything or they have got some kind
of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage
to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the
steel mills, they own the railroads, they own
the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the
stores, and they have chained the country from
one end to the other until there is not any kind
of business that a small, independent man could
go into today and make a living, and there is
not any kind of business that an independent man
can go into and make any money to buy an
automobile with; and they have finally and
gradually and steadily eliminated everybody from
the fields in which there is a living to be
made, and still they have got little enough
sense to think they ought to be able to get more
business out of it anyway.
If you reduce a man to the point where he is
starving to death and bleeding and dying, how do
you expect that man to get hold of any money to
spend with you? It is not possible.
Then, ladies and gentlemen, how do you expect
people to live, when the wherewith cannot be had
by the people?
In the beginning I quoted from the Scriptures. I
hope you will understand that I am not quoting
Scripture to you to convince you of my goodness
personally, because that is a thing between me
and my Maker, that is something as to how I
stand with my Maker and as to how you stand with
your Maker. That is not concerned with this
issue, except and unless there are those of you
who would be so good as to pray for the souls of
some of us. But the Lord gave his law, and in
the Book of James they said so, that the rich
should weep and howl for the miseries that had
come upon them; and, therefore, it was written
that when the rich hold goods they could not use
and could not consume, you will inflict
punishment on them, and nothing but days of woe
ahead of them.
Then we have heard of the great Greek
philosopher, Socrates, and the greater Greek
philosopher, Plato, and we have read the dialog
between Plato and Socrates, in which one said
that great riches brought on great poverty, and
would be destructive of a country. Read what
they said. Read what Plato said; that you must
not let any one man be too poor, and you must
not let any one man be too rich; that the same
mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill
that will grind out the extra poor, because, in
order that the extra rich can become so
affluent, they must necessarily take more of
what ordinarily would belong to the average man.
It is a very simple process of mathematics that
you do not have to study, and that no one is
going to discuss with you.
So that was the view of Socrates and Plato. That
was the view of the English statesmen. That was
the view of American statesmen. That was the
view of American statesmen like Daniel Webster,
Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William
Jennings Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt, and even
as late as Herbert Hoover and Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
These big-fortune
holders own just as much as they did.
Both of these men, Mr. Hoover and Mr. Roosevelt,
came out and said there had to be a
decentralization of wealth, but neither one of
them did anything about it. But, nevertheless,
they recognized the principle. The fact that
neither one of them ever did anything about it
is their own problem that I am not undertaking
to criticize; but had Mr. Hoover carried out
what he says ought to be done, he would be
retiring from the president's office, very
probably, three years from now, instead of one
year ago; and had Mr. Roosevelt proceeded along
the lines that he stated were necessary for the
decentralization of wealth, he would have gone,
my friends, a long way already, and within a few
months he would have probably reached a solution
of all of the problems that afflict this country
today.
But I wish to warn you now that nothing that has
been done up to this date has taken one dime
away from these big-fortune holders; they own
just as much as they did, and probably a little
bit more; they hold just as many of the debts of
the common people as they ever held, and
probably a little bit more; and unless we, my
friends, are going to give the people of this
country a fair shake of the dice, by which they
will all get something out of the funds of this
land, there is not a chance on the topside of
this God's eternal earth by which we can rescue
this country and rescue the people of this
country.
It is necessary to save the government of the
country, but it is much more necessary to save
the people of America. We love this country. We
love this government. It is a religion, I say.
It is a kind of religion people have read of
when women, in the name of religion, would take
their infant babes and throw them into the
burning flame, where they would be instantly
devoured by the all-consuming fire, in days gone
by; and there probably are some people of the
world even today, who, in the name of religion,
throw their own babes to destruction; but in the
name of our good government people today are
seeing their own children hungry, tired, half
naked, lifting their tear-dimmed eyes into the
sad faces of their fathers and mothers, who
cannot give them food and clothing they both
needed, and which is necessary to sustain them,
and that goes on day after day, and night after
night, when day gets into darkness and
blackness, knowing those children would arise in
the morning without being fed, and probably go
to bed at night without being fed.
Yet in the name of our government, and all
alone, those people undertake and strive as hard
as they can to keep a good government alive, and
how long they can stand that no one knows. If I
were in their place tonight, the place where
millions are, I hope that I would have what I
might say -- I cannot give you the word to
express the kind of fortitude they have; that is
the word -- I hope that I might have the
fortitude to praise and honor my government that
had allowed me here in this land, where there is
too much to eat and too much to wear, to starve
in order that a handful of men can have so much
more than they can ever eat or they can ever
wear.
Every man a king.
Now, we have organized a society, and we call it
"Share Our Wealth Society," a society with the
motto "every man a king."
Every man a king, so there would be no such
thing as a man or woman who did not have the
necessities of life, who would not be dependent
upon the whims and caprices and ipse dixit
[Latin, meaning an unsupported dogmatic
assertion] of the financial martyrs for a
living. What do we propose by this society? We
propose to limit the wealth of big men in the
country. There is an average of $15,000 in
wealth to every family in America. That is right
here today.
We do not propose to divide it up equally. We do
not propose a division of wealth, but we propose
to limit poverty that we will allow to be
inflicted upon any man's family. We will not say
we are going to try to guarantee any equality,
or $15,000 to families. No; but we do say that
one third of the average is low enough for any
one family to hold, that there should be a
guaranty of a family wealth of around $5,000;
enough for a home, an automobile, a radio, and
the ordinary conveniences, and the opportunity
to educate their children; a fair share of the
income of this land thereafter to that family so
there will be no such thing as merely the select
to have those things, and so there will be no
such thing as a family living in poverty and
distress.
We have to limit fortunes. Our present plan is
that we will allow no one man to own more than
$50 million. We think that with that limit we
will be able to carry out the balance of the
program. It may be necessary that we limit it to
less than $50 million. It may be necessary, in
working out of the plans, that no man's fortune
would be more than $10 million or $15 million.
But be that as it may, it will still be more
than any one man, or any one man and his
children and their children, will be able to
spend in their lifetimes; and it is not
necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up
beyond that point where we cannot prevent
poverty among the masses.
Another thing we propose is old-age pension of
$30 a month for everyone that is sixty years
old. Now, we do not give this pension to a man
making $1,000 a year, and we do not give it to
him if he has $10,000 in property, but outside
of that we do.
We will limit hours of
work.
We will limit hours of work. There is not any
necessity of having overproduction. I think all
you have got to do, ladies and gentlemen, is
just limit the hours of work to such an extent
as people will work only so long as is necessary
to produce enough for all of the people to have
what they need. Why, ladies and gentleman, let
us say that all of these labor-saving devices
reduce hours down to where you do not have to
work but four hours a day; that is enough for
these people, and then praise be the name of the
Lord, if it gets that good. Let it be good and
not a curse, and then we will have five hours a
day and five days a week, or even less than
that, and we might give a man a whole month off
during a year, or give him two months; and we
might do what other countries have seen fit to
do, and what I did in Louisiana, by having
schools by which adults could go back and learn
the things that have been discovered since they
went to school.
[During Long's gubernatorial term, Louisiana
implemented an adult literacy program that
reduced the state's illiteracy rate from 10
percent to 7 percent among the white population
and from 38 percent to 23 percent among the
black population.]
We will not have any trouble taking care of the
agricultural situation. All you have to do is
balance your production with your consumption.
You simply have to abandon a particular crop
that you have too much of, and all you have to
do is store the surplus for the next year, and
the government will take it over. When you have
good crops in the area in which the crops that
have been planted are sufficient for another
year, put in your public works in the particular
year when you do not need to raise any more, and
by that means you get everybody employed. When
the government has enough of any particular crop
to take care of all the people, that will be all
that is necessary; and in order to do all of
this, our taxation is going to be to take the
billion-dollar fortunes and strip them down to
frying size, not to exceed $50 million, and if
it is necessary to come to $10 million, we will
come to $10 million. We have worked the
proposition out to guarantee a limit upon
property (and no man will own less than one
third the average), and guarantee a reduction of
fortunes and a reduction of hours to spread
wealth throughout this country. We would care
for the old people above sixty and take them
away from this thriving industry and give them a
chance to enjoy the necessities and live in
ease, and thereby lift from the market the labor
which would probably create a surplus of
commodities.
Those are the things we propose to do. "Every
man a king." Every man to eat when there is
something to eat; all to wear something when
there is something to wear. That makes us all a
sovereign.
We have got to hit the
root with the ax.
You cannot solve these things through these
various and sundry alphabetical codes. You can
have the NRA and PWA and CWA and the UUG and GIN
[NRA stood for National Recovery Administration;
PWA stood for Public Works Administration; and
CWA stood for Civil Works Administration. "UUG"
and "GIN" were apparently Long's own terms,
thrown in to ridicule the New Deal.] and any
other kind of "dad-gummed" lettered code. You
can wait until doomsday and see twenty-five more
alphabets, but that is not going to solve this
proposition. Why hide? Why quibble? You know
what the trouble is. The man that says he does
not know what the trouble is is just hiding his
face to keep from seeing the sunlight.
God told you what the trouble was. The
philosophers told you what the trouble was; and
when you have a country where one man owns more
than a hundred thousand people, or a million
people, and when you have a country where there
are four men, as in America, that have got more
control over things than all the 120 million
people together, you know what the trouble is.
We had these great incomes in this country; but
the farmer, who plowed from sunup to sundown,
who labored here from sunup to sundown for six
days a week, wound up at the end of the time
with practically nothing.
And we ought to take care of the veterans of the
wars in this program. That is a small matter.
Suppose it does cost a billion dollars a year --
that means that the money will be scattered
throughout this country. We ought to pay them a
bonus. We can do it. We ought to take care of
every single one of the sick and disabled
veterans. I do not care whether a man got sick
on the battlefield or did not; every man that
wore the uniform of this country is entitled to
be taken care of, and there is money enough to
do it; and we need to spread the wealth of the
country, which you did not do in what you call
the NRA.
If the NRA has done any good, I can put it all
in my eye without having it hurt. All I can see
that the NRA has done is to put the little man
out of business -- the little merchant in his
store, the little Dago that is running a fruit
stand, or the Greek shoeshining stand, who has
to take hold of a code of 275 pages and study it
with a spirit level and compass and looking
glass; he has to hire a Philadelphia lawyer to
tell him what is in the code; and by the time he
learns what the code is, he is in jail or out of
business; and they have got a chain code system
that has already put him out of business. The
NRA is not worth anything, and I said so when
they put it through.
Now, my friends, we have got to hit the root
with the ax. Centralized power in the hands of a
few, with centralized credit in the hands of a
few, is the trouble.
Get together in your community tonight or
tomorrow and organize one of our Share Our
Wealth societies. If you do not understand it,
write me and let me send you the platform; let
me give you the proof of it.
Organize your Share Our
Wealth Society.
This is Huey P. Long talking, United States
Senator, Washington, D.C. Write me and let me
send you the data on this proposition. Enroll
with us. Let us make known to the people what we
are going to do. I will send you a button, if I
have got enough of them left. We have got a
little button that some of our friends designed,
with our message around the rim of the button,
and in the center "Every man a king." Many
thousands of them are meeting through the United
States, and every day we are getting hundreds
and hundreds of letters. Share Our Wealth
societies are now being organized, and people
have it within their power to relieve themselves
from this terrible situation.
Look at what the Mayo brothers [Physicians
William J. Mayo (1861-1939) and Charles H. Mayo
(1865-1939) established the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, MN, and the Mayo Foundation for
Medical Education and Research.] announced this
week, these greatest scientists of all the world
today, who are entitled to have more money than
all the Morgans and the Rockefellers, or anyone
else, and yet the Mayos turn back their big
fortunes to be used for treating the sick, and
said they did not want to lay up fortunes in
this earth, but wanted to turn them back where
they would do some good; but the other big
capitalists are not willing to do that, are not
willing to do what these men, ten times more
worthy, have already done, and it is going to
take a law to require them to do it.
Organize your Share Our Wealth Society and get
your people to meet with you, and make known
your wishes to your senators and representatives
in Congress.
Now, my friends, I am going to stop. I thank you
for this opportunity to talk to you. I am having
to talk under the auspices and by the grace and
permission of the National Broadcasting System
tonight, and they are letting me talk free. If I
had the money, and I wish I had the money, I
would like to talk to you more often on this
line, but I have not got it, and I cannot expect
these people to give it to me free except on
some rare instance. But, my friends, I hope to
have the opportunity to talk with you, and I am
writing to you, and I hope that you will get up
and help in the work, because the resolution and
bills are before Congress, and we hope to have
your help in getting together and organizing
your Share Our Wealth Society.
Now, that I have but a minute left, I want to
say that I suppose my family is listening in on
the radio in New Orleans, and I will say to my
wife and three children that I am entirely well
and hope to be home before many more days, and I
hope they have listened to my speech tonight,
and I wish them and all their neighbors and
friends everything good that may be had.
I thank you, my friends, for your kind
attention, and I hope you will enroll with us,
take care of your own work in the work of this
government, and share or help in our Share Our
Wealth Society.
I thank you.
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