Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  He recounts his experiences with Dr. Townsend, the country doctor out of Nebraska. “He was so slender, so thin, never weighed more than 120 pounds, had a good thatch of white hair.

  “In 1933, at sixty-seven, he was Health Commissioner in Long Beach, California, and selling a little real estate on the side. He was dealing with old people. He was aware of their lack of money and of anybody’s interest in them. He wrote a three-hundred word letter to the editor of the Long Beach Telegram. His idea: a gross income tax of two percent on everybody in the country, no exceptions. Proceeds to be divided among all people over sixty, the blind and disabled, and mothers of dependent children. They had to spend it within thirty days. He wasn’t a great economist, but he had something figured out in his mind.

  “It caught on so quickly, he didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t a movement at first. But then ten thousand letters came in a month. People from Long Beach sent this clipping all over the country. Other papers picked it up. He turned his real estate office into headquarters. From then on, it was part o the American scene.”

  I remember the national convention in Indianapolis. 1939. H. L. Mencken was covering it for the Baltimore Sun. He liked Doc. At the press conference, Mencken was cheering Dr. Townsend on. A reporter turned to Mencken and said that all the established newspapers were against this crackpot plan, and “The way you talk, Mr. Mencken, it sounds as though you’re for it.” I remember Mencken saying, rolling his big cigar in his mouth, “I’d love to see the Townsend Plan enacted tomorrow morning. I’d also like to see New York City bombed from the air. I love a spectacle.”

  My work was unlike ordinary newspaper reportage. You also had to be a promoter. The plan was carried on by contributions. We would set up a Doctor’s Birthday Party on January thirteenth every year. Then we’d have a Founder’s Day on September thirtieth. Then we’d have a Homecoming Day. On these three occasions, the ladies would bake cakes and all. There’d be cake sales. We had organizers in each of the forty-eight states. Yet it wasn’t organized as it might be by a computer. This was something that had grown unexpectedly, and nobody thought it would last. It was just thrown together….

  It was strictly a grass roots movement, nothing else. But it served its purpose. It brought the Social Security plan into being. When he signed the bill, late in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt was apologetic. He said: the Social Security plan has not been fully worked out yet by the actuaries. But he had to enact it to forestall the Townsend Plan. People were just screaming. They wanted pensions.

  Dr. Townsend was called everything. He was called a charlatan, a man draining money from people, the hard-won pennies of the old. He never took a nickel out of it. He founded the newspaper and took a salary, $90 a week. Many years later, it was $150 a week.

  He wasn’t an economic genius but his common sense and instinct caused him to hit upon this plan. He was never strong in the cities. His strength was always in the rural areas and small towns. That’s where the twelve thousand clubs were. Men like Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith sensed if they could get these people, they could put over any program they wanted. Dr. Townsend was a genius in politics, if nothing else. When these men came around him—and I’m sure they wanted to use him for their own purposes—he never said no. He never said yes, either. He always said, “That’s very interesting.” He would try to use them. He had a lot of native shrewdness. Nobody was going to take his clubs away from him.

  The movement was at its height just before the war and went downhill after that. It lost its momentum. The Townsend Plan was a Depression movement. Now it became a piebaking movement, just old people. But in the Thirties, it had direction: it was going to influence the Government, and it did.

  Senator Russell Long

  United States Senator from Louisiana.

  IT WAS my good fortune to be the son of a man like Huey Long. He always provided wealth for his family, even in the Depression. I was born and raised in a laboring man’s neighborhood, and I knew what wretchedness was. Even though our people were poor, you might say we did pretty well for the kind of folk we came from.

  Huey Long had a great sympathy for the Negro, even though, unfortunately, very few were permitted to vote in Louisiana. He did not carry the racial fight for the black man in Louisiana. He thought he was carrying as many crosses as he could, the way it was. He didn’t want to be crucified on that one.

  I was about seventeen when he died.137 I heard some of his speeches and I could see its effect on his audience. He’d go to places where he’d never been before, where they had never heard him. When he finished, he had’em.

  He had been a traveling salesman when he was a youngster and his approach as a political speaker was pretty much the same. Selling. He’d warm the crowd up with some jokes. After a while, he’d start explaining one point, then another, carrying his audience with him—to where he’d really score. He’d return to humor, an anecdote, and then bear down again. He had the audience so tense, you’d think something was gonna snap. Suddenly, he’d relieve the tension by reaching the climax, followed by quick jokes … and everybody just relaxed. He’d make them laugh and cheer, from the serious to the ridiculous. He wouldn’t move the crowd to tears. That wasn’t his approach. But he certainly sold them points they’d never been sold before.

  I enjoyed being in the crowd and hearing those speeches. One time, he was due to make a speech in the large football stadium in New Orleans. He was listening over the radio to the other speeches. Then he fell asleep and snored. He was tired. I could heard the crowd three blocks away. When he showed up, you might as well quit talking. The crowd shouted, “Let’s hear Huey!” And that was it.

  He never worried about how long he talked. He’d tell everybody to call their friends and neighbors and turn on the radio. He’d say, “I’m not gonna say anything important for the next few minutes, so make those calls.” Because he wanted them to hear about all the stealing and corruption he’d found in Washington … that somebody else was engaged in.

  You’d walk down the street, you couldn’t escape the sound of his voice. Every home in New Orleans would have him turned on. His voice could be heard all over town till maybe one o’clock in the morning. New Orleans stayed open all night. It was that kind of town.

  He was really catching on around the country. His plan was pretty well patterned after the old Populist philosophy. Money had gotten down to where a few people had practically all of it. He thought it was time you spread it among everybody. His share-the-wealth program was for one-third of the nation’s money to be divided among all the people, even though you did permit the other two-thirds to be captured by the upper one percent. It had a lot of popular appeal.

  His critics would say: In three or four years, the wealthy would have the money back in their coffers anyway. The Long people would answer: Maybe so. But think what a good time we’d have in the meanwhile. (Laughs.)

  Huey Long had great impact on the Roosevelt Administration. Dr. Altmeyer told me about it.138 He was one of the people who put together the Social Security program. He said, when they’d meet at the White House to discuss the program, Roosevelt was talking more about Huey Long than he was about Social Security. It was designed in a large measure as a backfire against Huey Long.

  It was to cut the progress Huey Long was making that Roosevelt moved to the left with liberal New Deal measures. He began as a reactionary. When Roosevelt sent down the economy bill, cutting government salaries and veteran’s benefits, Huey made a speech, “The Victory over the Helpless.” In one talk, he read from a veteran’s letter: “… with the new Roosevelt program, I won’t be needing these. So you can wear ’em.” The fella enclosed his false teeth. (Laughs.) The crowd just roared.

  Roosevelt didn’t buy all of Huey Long’s program, but he certainly moved in that direction. His welfare programs paralleled in many respects what Huey Long was advocating. When the NYA was put into effect, Roosevelt gave my father credit as being a forerunner. We had a program very
similar to it in Louisiana.

  Westbrook Pegler wrote in his column that Huey Long had the support of the LSU student body because he had one-third of ‘em on the payroll. About a third of the students did have scholarships to help work their way through college. He wanted to go far beyond that. He wanted to provide every young man and young lady who could make passin’ grades, the chance to work their way through college.

  This was in the early Thirties. A lot of people who today are bank presidents came to LSU with nothing more than a shirt on their back, and not so much as a change of underwear. Today they are prominent people.

  Huey Long started out in favor of Roosevelt, and then they went their separate ways. Roosevelt, I think, made a mistake in underrating Huey. My guess is if my father had lived, he’d have run for President on the third party ticket in 1936. He might have kept Roosevelt from winning. I guess he was thinking in those terms. He probably would have caused Landon to win. If that had been the case, he’d have been a real prospect to win four years later.

  Some people have suggested that this was a selfish approach, putting his own ambition above the good of the nation. His reply would be: If the public would suffer with Roosevelt or Landon, the sooner both are out, the better. Certainly, if Roosevelt hadn’t moved left, Huey Long would have captured the public’s imagination. He wasn’t doing so bad as it was.

  He knew Doctor Townsend and he knew Father Coughlin. I’m not sure they spent much time together, but they were all aware of what the others were doing. They were speaking from the same point of view. While each had a different approach, there was no fundamental difference.

  I imagine he had many more good innings left, if the Good Lord had let him live. He was thirty years ahead of his time.

  Evelyn Finn

  I LIVED IN BATON ROUGE when Huey Long was shot. I coulda been up there at the capitol when it happened. My brother and I used to go there a lot. They had night sessions, because it was cooler at night. This time I said, “Oh, I’m tired of seein’ ’im.” So he went by himself. We was home listening to the radio and we heard the news. My brother came home. He’d been up in the spectators’ gallery. He said, “There was a terrible commotion. They wouldn’t let us out for a long time. I wonder what happened.” I thought, “Well, no wonder. Huey Long was shot.” He came home and didn’t know it.

  In 1933, she left St. Louis for a few years. Temporarily, she abandoned her work as a seamstress to run the family grocery store in her home town, Baton Rouge.

  The grafters, Huey’s boys, till they got caught up with, they went to town. There was a fella came into the store. He was foreman of a WPA gang—it was called somethin’ else before that.139 Anyway, they was buildin’ these beautiful homes on WPA money. The servants that worked in these homes, I’d cash their checks. They’d say: “We’re So-and-So’s maid, we’re So-and-So’s yard man.” All these politicians paid their servants with WPA money, get it?

  Negroes’d go in town and get their rations. But they couldn’t eat it. Full of worms and weevils. They would tell me when they come into the store. They couldn’t use half of what they got. But they went and got it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get anything. Because who dished it out would say: “If you don’t take it, there’s no use to give it to you.” That’s what they’d give the Negro.

  One day, a couple of fellas came around. They said they were Huey Long’s boys. Election was comin’ up. We had a lot of votes in the family. They explained all the wonderful things Huey Long was doing. Our road was mud. I said, “You only come around when you want votes.”

  The next morning, there was a big truckload of gravel, comin’, with five or six men on it. They had plenty of manpower, the WPA did. The foreman said, “We give everybody what they want.” Oh, that Huey! He was somethin’.

  Gerald L. K. Smith

  “Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, D.D…. the gustiest and goriest, the loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damnedest orator ever heard on this or any other earth.”

  —H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun, 1936

  A rugged, though slightly subdued, seventy-one, he and his wife, Elna (after whom the Foundation is named … “she came into a handsome inheritance”) are impresarios of a religious enterprise in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Once a celebrated spa, it had become ghostly until the energetic appearance of Mr. Smith. It is something of a shrine now, offering The Passion Play, with the latest in stereophonic equipment (“… if this noble spectacle is anti-Semitic, the New Testament is anti-Semitic.” A General Motors executive pronounced it better than Oberammergau’s.), a gallery of sacred art, and The Christ of the Ozarks.

  This last is a remarkable phenomenon: The Christ of the Ozarks, a seventy-foot statue on the peak of Magnetic Mountain. The sculpture is astonishingly white, “… we ordered a special kind of mortar.” It is visible from four states. The Saviour’s outstretched arms appear to be blessing them with equally Wondrous Love: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas.

  At twilight, Mr. Smith is at the foot of the hill, his head bowed, his Stetson at heart, his Lincoln Continental nearby. From within the circle of The Christ, hymns pour forth. The voices of Kate Smith and Tennessee Ernie Ford are stereophonically loud and clear.

  “Let it never be said that Gerald Smith is using the name of his Saviour to make a fast buck. But if I were a young man, I’d take options on land out here… .”

  Mr. and Mrs. Smith (“We have been married forty-seven years, and I love her as much now as the day she became my bride.”) are gracious hosts: a country dinner and effusive conversation. He is grievously wounded at having been “quarantined,” these past years, by the mass media, though he is an admirer of Ronald Reagan… .

  He still keeps a hand in secular as well as sacred affairs: “Three girls are busy every day, as I dictate articles for more than two hundred right-wing publications.” His own journal, The Cross and the Flag, founded in 1942, is going fairly strong … celebrated for its pungent philippics against the “Jewish Establishment” and recalcitrant blacks.

  We are in a stately Victorian house: stained-glass windows, profuse with religious artifacts, portraits, statuary, Tiffany lamps and chandeliers, Persian rugs…. “Every stone in this house has been personally cut by hand.” What was once the prayer room of the original occupant, a Confederate officer, has been transformed into a bathroom: “I don’t think God makes himself available only at certain hours like eleven o‘clock Sunday morning.” In addition to paintings of The Saviour, there is, facing the entrance, a portrait in oil of Henry Ford, the elder.

  I WAS INTRODUCED to the Depression while I was in Shreveport, Louisiana. I was pastor of the most sophisticated church. The leadership included the top men in the community. Then the curtain fell. I had the experience of standing at the door of the church on Sunday mornings, meeting weeping men and women who had lost everything.

  In the meantime, Huey Long had risen to power. He referred to Louisiana as the last stand of the feudal lords. Human slavery was still being practiced. When a Negro or a poor white was arrested, he would be assigned by the judge, district attorney or sheriff to the deputy, who happened to own a plantation or sawmill. It was a matter of common practice.

  Then came the Depression, and sophisticated people became penniless. Fifteen thousand homes were coming up for mortgage foreclosures in the city. The building and loan company decided to foreclose, before the HOLC could advance loans.

  I couldn’t stand the tears of these people, and I offered aggressive resistance to this. I urged the company to postpone these foreclosures. They said it was none of my business. Lo and behold, I was waited on by the leaders in my church. They brought pressure on me to resign. They were silent partners in this thieving enterprise.

  I called my friend, Huey Long: “The hypocrites in my church are planning to steal $50 million.” In about thirty minutes, the phone rang. It was the head of the building and loan association. Weeping and wailing, he said, “Dr. Smith, what can I do? 140 You have no idea what
Huey Long said to me. He’s going to ruin me. He has told me to do anything you want me to do.” I said, “All you need to do is cross the street to the courthouse and cancel the foreclosures.” They were canceled. It confirmed my great affection for Huey Long, and it lost me my job as pastor of the King’s Highway Christian Church.

  “I’ve been asked, ‘Why did you leave the formal ministry?’ I said, ‘Because I want to go to Heaven.’ I insist on being called Mr. Smith. I don’t like a man that hits me and says, ‘Don’t hit back, I’m a clergyman.’ Take all these preachers causing all this trouble, stirring up the anarchists and all. They go out and tell these people what to do. Take off your collar and just be a private citizen in this controversy. So when someone hits back, they’re not slapping a priest or beating a clergyman.”

  Huey Long and I developed a mutual respect for each other. When his power was at an apex, he said to me, “If God was Governor of Louisiana, he couldn’t find enough honest men to make a chairman for each county. If anything happens to me, Gerald, you’re the only one of this gang that shouldn’t go to the federal penitentiary. These boys who were barefooted when I found them just can’t keep their hands out of the public till.”

  Huey Long developed a philosophy in which I helped him along. He was the only man of this century who knew how to think like a statesman and campaign like a demagogue. His share-the-wealth program sounded like demagoguery to reactionaries, but it was sound. The barons of monopoly came into the state. They bought up all the natural resources: the oil, gas and timber concessions—everything from oil to trees, from sulfur to fish. Huey Long said the wealth on top of our ground and underneath must be shared with the people. He said: No man should be allowed to accumulate a fortune of more than $5 million without a progressive levy against him. Imagine. We appealed to intelligent conservatives.

  My strategy was to project Huey Long as candidate for President in ‘36, as Wallace was in ’68. It was the understanding we’d split the Roosevelt vote. But we would have a say about who the Republican candidate was. If Huey Long had lived, we would never have nominated this protoplasmic substance, Landon.