On February 5, 1935, the Louisiana peril cropped up in a discussion of federal appointments. The proceedings of the National Emergency Council recorded this exchange:
THE PRESIDENT: Don’t put anybody in and don’t keep anybody that is working for Huey Long or his crowd! That is a hundred percent!
VICE-PRESIDENT GARNER: That goes for everybody!
THE PRESIDENT: Everybody and every agency. Anybody working for Huey Long is not working for it.
SECRETARY OF STATE HULL: It can’t be corrected too soon.
THE PRESIDENT: You will get a definite ruling any time you want it.
It made little difference. As Hodding Carter later noted, “On our side we had only the federal patronage. In a vote-getting sense, this consisted mainly of WPA work orders which were distributed by the thousands to the anti-Long organizations. They didn’t help much. The poor jobless devils took the work orders readily enough, but they didn’t vote WPA. Few among us could have won even an honestly conducted election.”
On March 5, the second anniversary of Roosevelt’s inaugural, the administration formally conceded that the country had something to fear besides fear itself. Speaking at a Waldorf-Astoria banquet, Ironpants Johnson, now the WPA administrator for New York, attacked the right-wing alliance “between the great Louisiana demagogue and this political padre.” The Kingfish and the radio priest replied over the networks. Johnson returned to the attack—“If you put quotations from Hitler and Father Coughlin in parallel columns, you can’t tell them apart, including anti-Semitism”—and the New Deal’s heavy artillery joined him. Harold Ickes permitted himself to be quoted as saying, “The trouble with Senator Long is that he is suffering from halitosis of the intellect. That’s presuming Emperor Long has an intellect.”
Huey’s intellect was greater than the old curmudgeon’s; he seized equal time to lay his Share Our Wealth program before a nationwide radio audience. Fortunes would be limited to five million dollars. No one’s annual income could be greater than $1,800,000 or less than $2,000. Provisions would be made for old-age pensions, bonuses for veterans, and cheap food through AAA surpluses. Children would receive a free education from kindergarten through college. Every family would be entitled to a $6,000 homestead grant and a radio, an automobile, and a washing machine. In their one foray outside Louisiana, members of Huey’s Share Our Wealth clubs (there were no dues) had elected Mrs. Hattie W. Caraway to fill out her dead husband’s Arkansas Senate seat. Now Huey’s catchy ditty could be heard in slums all over the country:
Every man a king, every man a king,
For you can be a millionaire
But there’s something belongs to others.
There’s enough for all people to share.
When it’s sunny June and December too
Or in the wintertime or spring
There’ll be peace without end
Every neighbor a friend
With every man a king.
To Forrest Davis, author of Huey Long: A Candid Biography, the Kingfish confided that he intended to outlaw the Democratic and Republican parties and serve four terms “as the dictator of this country.” Throughout that spring and summer his popularity snowballed to frightening size. Turner Catledge of the New York Times felt that the administration had blundered in striking back at him; its replies had “probably transformed Huey Long from a clown into a real political menace.” The Democratic National Committee conducted a secret poll showing that Huey, running for the Presidency on a third-party ticket, might take four million votes away from Roosevelt and capture enough key states to throw the 1936 election into the House. Jim Farley, the country’s most skillful political fortuneteller, told Ickes in September that the Kingfish’s vote would exceed six million. Already Huey and his allies were a visible influence in the Second New Deal; social security had acquired much of its momentum from the Townsend Plan, which Long backed, and the raising of taxes in the upper brackets and the Holding Company Act owed much to Huey’s charge that FDR was a prisoner of the rich and the utilities. Huey knew it. In July he charged that Roosevelt was “copying my share-the-wealth speeches that I was writing when I was fourteen years old. So he’s just now getting as smart as I was when I was in knee breeches.”
Late in August, when Congress adjourned, the Kingfish was still skipping up and down Senate aisles, mocking “Prince Franklin,” “Lord Corn” Wallace, “Sitting Bull” Johnson, and Ickes, “the Chicago Chinch Bug.” Yet Huey, like his lonely scold in Baton Rouge, was visited by premonitions. A month earlier he accused his enemies of plotting his assassination with “one man, one gun, and one bullet” and a presidential pardon for the assassin. Now he said that in the next session he expected Congress to obey his orders, “provided I am back here—I may not be back here. This may be my swan song, for all I know.”
It was. On September 8 he was in the Baton Rouge statehouse, cracking the whip over his legislature. Meanwhile one man with one gun was hiding behind a marble pillar in the capitol, ready to fire the one bullet. His name was Carl Austin Weiss; he was an idealistic young physician whose father-in-law, a district judge, had crossed foils with the Kingfish. Huey had retaliated by gerrymandering the judge out of his district and circulating rumors about his ancestry. At 9:20 P.M. Huey strutted across the capitol rotunda. Dr. Weiss stepped out and shot him in the stomach. In the next instant the Kingfish’s bodyguards riddled the doctor’s body with sixty-one bullets, but their chief was fatally wounded. “I wonder why he shot me?” he asked before he lapsed into a coma. Others wondered, too, and their speculation grew during the two days the body lay in state, dressed in white tie and tails. Floral tributes covered three acres; some 250,000 came to watch their leader’s burial on the capital’s front lawn. “He was the Stradivarius, whose notes rose in competition with jealous drums, envious tomtoms,” the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith cried in his eulogy. “His was the unfinished symphony.” Afterward Smith blamed the crime on the news media and Bilbo. Bilbo answered by describing Smith as “a contemptible, dirty, vicious, pusillanimous, with-malice-aforethought, damnable, self-made liar.” Still, the speculation continued. In the bayous, Louisiana’s poor, who owed the Kingfish everything, sang:
Oh they say he was a crook
But he gave us free school hook
Tell me why is it that they kill Huey Long?
Now he’s dead and in his grave
But we riding on his pave’
Tell me why is it that they kill Huey Long?
Over thirty years later Smith told students at the University of Illinois, “It cannot be proved that President Roosevelt ordered the assassination of Huey Long, but it can be proved that those who discussed his assassination were positively of the opinion that it would please the President.” The President’s first reaction to the murder—he was lunching with Father Coughlin and Joseph P. Kennedy at the time—was one of horror. No humane man could find pleasure in such a violent death. In the long run, however, the disappearance of the Kingfish from the national scene certainly brought FDR relief from a serpentine threat. Huey Long was one of the very few men of whom it can be said that, had he lived, American history would have been dramatically different.
Roosevelt knew he must face a third-party challenge from the right anyhow. Smith, Coughlin, and Townsend were determined to see Huey’s symphony finished. Nine months after the funeral the radio priest announced to his vast audience—his hookup had grown to thirty-five stations—that a new party, the Union Party, had been formed. Its convention was held in Cleveland, where Coughlin ripped off his clerical collar, linked arms with Smith and Townsend, and brought admirers to their feet in a standing ovation. If they had come for a show, they got one. His oration was one long slander of the President. Every slur was greeted by waves of frantic applause, and the speech reached its climax in the most dramatic of all rabble-rousing techniques; Coughlin’s great voice wavered and he staggered away from the lectern, collapsing into the arms of his guards as thousands screamed. That
had never happened to him on radio. But he was more than a radio personality now, more than a priest; and it had been years since he had delivered anything remotely resembling a sermon.
In the spring of 1935 the President’s closest advisers concluded that he was slipping in his role as a public educator. When they told him so, he replied, “People tire of seeing the same name day after day in the important headlines of the papers, and the same voice night after night over the radio…. Individual psychology cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.”
Here the public wisdom may be deeper than it seems. There is more to history than politics. In the trivia of one decade the life style of another may lie, awaiting nothing but competent management and a change in the economy. This is not true of all minutiae; one searches in vain for any note of significance in the chain-letter craze that swept the country in May 1935. On the other hand, the excitement in Enrico Fermi’s quaint little Roman laboratory appears in retrospect to be a study in understatement; it is clear from the humorous account by Fermi’s wife Laura that by systematically bombarding all the elements with neutrons, Fermi and his students, though they didn’t know it at the time, had just become the first physicists to split the uranium atom—establishing nothing less than a chain reaction.
Between the trifles and the stupefying are curious developments, some of them far more memorable than any congressional battle that year, which made 1935 a kind of technological watershed. Tiring of Father Coughlin and spinning the radio dial, for example, Sunday listeners might pick up twenty-year-old Orson Welles, playing The Shadow, alias Lamont Cranston:
MARGOT: Oh, Lamont, look! When that waiter started for the kitchen, the door opened without his touching it!
SHADOW (casually): Yes. Works by photoelectric ray.
MARGOT: Oh, what’s that?
SHADOW: Look at each side of the door, Margot. See those chromium fixtures sticking out of the floor? Lights hidden at the top of them? There’s a beam of light between those two bulbs. When anybody approaches the door, his body breaks that ray. Whenever the beam is broken the door opens without touching it.
MARGOT: How clever!
It was clever in 1935, and it was also the crude beginning of the electronics industry, which would eventually eliminate not only doormen but elevator operators, bowling alley pinboys, letter sorters, billing clerks, matchers of textile hues, counters of passing objects, guards at prison gates, insurance actuaries, accountants, magazine distributors, and a thousand other skilled and unskilled occupations. Automation, in a word, had begun.
So had the communications revolution, the displacement of privacy and the written word by Marshall McLuhan’s global village. In June 1935 George Gallup conducted his first poll, for the advertising firm of Young & Rubicam. “Public relations” offices were opened by John Hill, Earl Newsom, and Carl Byoir. In 1935 Becky Sharp, starring Miriam Hopkins, began appearing in downtown theaters. Though many screens were not equipped to handle the process, it was the first feature-length Technicolor motion picture. To color film should be added certain allied developments. Nobel Laureate Guglielmo Marconi had discovered the microwaves which would first be used in World War II radar and, later, in television broadcasting. The Associated Press introduced its wirephoto service in 1935, to be followed by Life in 1936 and Look in 1937; the country was becoming accustomed to the concept of image. Combine all these with two other 1935 innovations—the first night baseball game, in Cincinnati, and the invention of the beer can—and the future middle-aged recreation of boys then in their teens begins to assume a familiar form.
Arthur Sherman’s trailer industry had turned the corner during 1933’s Hundred Days and was rapidly becoming America’s fastest-growing business; within a year two thousand trailers and house cars would convene in Sarasota, Florida. American youth was still expected to be mechanically minded then, and the hottest thing in Mechanics Illustrated was the General Motors independent front-wheel suspension, as described by G.M. President Alfred P. Sloan Jr.: “The simplest way to explain it is to say that we have put knees on our automobiles. Each front wheel will be attached individually to the chassis by its own soft spring. When it encounters a bump or a hole, it will rise or fall independently, as your leg is lifted or straightened by its knee without affecting your other leg or the equilibrium of your body. The result will be that the wheel, not the passenger, will get the jar.” Knee action! But not even Alfred Sloan (or Arthur Sherman) foresaw the growth in American mobility and the interstate highway net.
In 1935 the sound of the Thirties—swing music—was heard for the first time. Benny Goodman, a forty-dollar-a-week clarinetist the year before, was trying to improve his situation by leading his own band. He wasn’t having much luck; on the evening of August 21 the band was about to wind up an engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, and no one had offered to pick up its option. The musicians were as bored by the saccharine, bland fox-trot music as the dancers. Goodman decided to go down in style to the swinging rhythm his sidemen preferred in after-hour sessions, using a Fletcher Henderson arrangement (Henderson, a Negro, was unacceptable to white ballroom managers). Suddenly the audience was aware of vibrant brasses, strong drums, singing saxophones smashing away at full speed, and wild improvisations as hot soloists, including Benny, rose in turn under the spotlight to embroider the theme. The result was electrifying; the room came to life, and in the eyes of the entertainment business the twenty-five-year-old Goodman overnight became king—King of Swing.
Not everyone was enthusiastic; a psychologist told the New York Times that swing was “dangerously hypnotic” because it was “cunningly devised to a faster tempo… than the human pulse” and would tend to “break down conventions.” Yet it was characteristic of the decade that there was some form of swing for every age group. Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey—who was about to make his own memorable debut with “Marie” in Nixon’s Grand Theater in Philadelphia—were idols of the tulle-and-white-buck Palomar, Roseland, Savoy, Hollywood Palladium, Glen Island Casino dancing youth. But there was also swing for children (Spike Jones), sweet swing for the middle-aged (Kay Kyser), sticky swing for the geriatric set (Guy Lombardo, Wayne King, Vincent Lopez), and even intellectual swing at Carnegie Hall, where one could hear subtle, intricate patterns for the most sophisticated ear. Through the reborn phonograph industry, every form of swing was available on 35-cent Bluebird and Decca or 50-cent Columbia records. The diversity, or, as some would have it, the balkanization of taste lay thirty years in the future. This ecumenicalism was true of all lively arts. The concept of X, R, and GP films would have been inconceivable. Everything had to be GP, because 85 million Americans went to the movies once a week, a large part of them as families; the average family annual movie budget was $25, astonishing in the light of Depression admittance prices. There were 17,000 theaters in the country, more than there were banks, twice as many as there were hotels and three times as many as department stores. Each theater owner showed between a hundred and four hundred films a year. He didn’t have time to screen them all. Fortunately for him (and unfortunately for cinema art) the Hays Office, later the Breen Office, did it for him. The Catholic League of Decency, which began its vigil in 1934, saw to it that Hollywood avoided long kisses, adultery, nude babies, or married couples sleeping in anything except twin beds. Language on the silver screen was, as they said then, Rinso White; when Dennis King sang “to Hell with Burgundy,” a thrill ran through audiences, as though a naked woman had run among them. Even titles went through the washing machine. Infidelity mysteriously became Fidelity, and Good Girls Go to Paris Too was transmogrified into Good Girls Go to Paris. In part this censorship is attributable to the values of the time. As Mae West said later, “We weren’t even allowed to wiggle when we sang.” Mae’s films were picketed after her reply to Cary Grant’s “Darling, you need a rest—let me take you away somewhere” slipped past B
reen. (Stroking her coiffure and running her tongue over her teeth, she answered, “Would you call that a rest?”) Life had to go to court for the right to distribute its issue on “Birth of a Baby,” and Time’s thin-lipped comment on Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre was that it “underlines a recent tendency of U.S. publishers: to go as near the limits of censorship as possible.”
In equal part, censorship reflected the needs of a depressed population seeking not realism but an escape into celluloid. Hollywood, John Dos Passos wrote, offered a “great bargain sale of five and ten cent lusts and dreams.” Even in the Depression a dime didn’t buy much lust, if only because blue movies, then as now, appealed to a selected audience. Everyone dreams, on the other hand, so escapism reached the largest possible audience. Americans of all ages and persuasions could enjoy Mutiny on the Bounty, Little Miss Marker, Captain January, Busby Berkeley, and the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, which began appearing in the United States in 1935.
Moviegoing in this period attained its own ambiance, only part of which was seen on the Magnascope screen or heard over the Fox sound-track-on-film which replaced Vitaphone recordings. Everything that came out of the projector became part of the aura. The double feature was important; so was the Saturday serial and selected short subjects—a Terrytoon cartoon, say, with a Pathé newsreel, a Thelma Todd-Patsy Kelly comedy, and a Fitzgerald Traveltalk (“…and so we say Auf Wiedersehen to picturesque, peace-loving Germany”). There were also bank nights, dish nights, bingo, Fleer’s Dubble Bubble Gum, Assorted Charm wrappers, sluglike Tootsie Rolls, a carpet of cold popcorn underfoot, and a great deal of amorous foreplay in the back rows. Most important was the dreaming in the darkness inspired by The Face, The Look, or The Body on screen. The movie mystique began to dissolve with the advent of television, but while it lasted, its power was immense; Gore Vidal was probably right when he put into Myra Breckinridge’s mouth his own conviction that the movies of 1931 to 1945 were the most formative influence upon those who came of age in that “post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse” era.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 18
