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| Huey Long |
“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?”Those were Louisiana’s United States Senator’s Huey Long’s opening words in a nationwide radio speech, broadcast on February 23, 1934. In this classic speech, “Every Man a King,” Long demonstrated, with rhetorical skill that few politicians have ever matched, how a liberal politician can dominate the conservative South. He made income inequality into a moral, biblical, and philosophical injustice. Income inequality continues to plague the Western economies in 2025, and one suspects that this is the underlying issue that is leading to world-wide political turmoil. Yet, conservative doctrine often blocks the Western nations from solving the wealth gap.
A populist politician represents economic protection for ordinary persons, in contrast to the rich and powerful. As we shall see in a moment, Huey Long brilliantly wielded a trifecta of conservative values to promote his populist policies. Reaching out to America’s poor, Huey Long’s stunning speech did not refute his conservative opponents: no, Long preempted them. A liberal in conservative dress, a speaker who cited conservative values to relieve his voters’ economic oppression, Long was a populist phenomenon. No populist like him has emerged since.
Speaking during the desperation of the Great Depression, and ahead of his time in economic policy, a Keynesian before Keynes, Long pounded against the wealthy oligarchs and huge corporations that dominated the American economy, leaving ordinary workers to struggle in grinding poverty. In contrast to modern-day liberals, who issue tedious economic lectures, Long posed a simple point:
“We have no very difficult problem to solve.” [italics added]And what was that “no very difficult problem”? The only difficulty, Long insisted, came when the greedy, “super-rich” economic barons wielded political power:
“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.”Now, what were Long’s arguments?
Long’s First Traditional Authority: The Declaration of Independence
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| Declaration of Independence |
First, Long cited the Declaration of Independence, the United States of America’s founding document. In that Declaration, Thomas Jefferson spoke for equality:
“How many 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 of 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.’”Long instantly gave that premise startling economic application:
“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 $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?”Now, since Thomas Jefferson was an oligarch among oligarchs, I suspect that he meant exactly that. But Long was on a roll!
“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 120,000,000 people?”Having repurposed Thomas Jefferson, Long then turned to the Holy Bible.
Long's Second Traditional Source: The Bible
Long’s audience was, in general, deeply religious. Long accordingly gave a rather long explanation that he intended to refer to the Scriptures and emphasize “the wisdom of the Lord.” What part of the Bible supports populism, the audience might wonder? (I certainly did!) Long eventually got specific:
“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.”
To prove this, Long cited the Year of Jubilee:
“50 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.”Long neglected to say whether the United States should practice universal debt relief every seven years, nor did he mention the economic consequences of revamping the banking system so radically. That, however, was not the point. Instead, Long's point was that debt was overwhelming ordinary Americans, and that biblical morality justified offering relief. Indeed, not content merely to cite the Bible, Long emphasized the moral principle behind the Jubilee:
“I believe that was the judgment and the view and the law of the Lord, that we would have to distribute wealth every so often, in order that there could not be people starving to death in a land of plenty.”Over the years, conservative Christians, especially the prosperity gospel preachers, cite the Bible to justify leaving the economic structure untouched. Long turned this around. Biblical law, he emphasized at length, required the community to reverse growing inequality and restore a measure of economic justice.
Long insisted that the Jubilee required systematic debt forgiveness:
“‘Then,’ said the Lord, in effect, ‘every seventh year there shall be a remission of debts; there will be no debts after 7 years.’ That was the law.”It was only then that Long reviewed figures about American indebtedness. He claimed that the total amount of American currency was only about $6 trillion, and that the total amount of American debt was “45 times the entire money supply of the United States.” But he had already established the solution to that shocking, unpayable debt: the Year of Jubilee. And who would pay the price? The super-rich.
Long's Third Traditional Source: Plato's Republic
For his third authority, Long turned to the Greek philosopher Plato:
“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.”Only as his speech neared his conclusion did Long state his utopian solution, a new kind of society, a new kind of government, a new kind of nation:
“Now, we have organized a society, and we call it ‘Share Our Wealth Society,’ a society with the motto ‘every man a king.’”
Forestalling an obvious criticism, Long declined to speak for total income or wealth equality. That might have branded him as a communist, not a populist. He slyly moderated his views into something that a conservative voter might find reasonable; Long argued more for a minimum wage and old-age pensions. Thus, as his speech neared his conclusion, Long spoke for moderate equality. Not really “every man a king” at all. The slogan gave way to political realities:
Long’s Proposal
Only now, having made his case for change, did Long lay out his economic policy. He proposed reducing the wealth of a superrich person to “less than $50 million.” He proposed a modest old-age pension and a limited work week.
Yet, as he continued his speech, Long reiterated the cumulative, traditional wisdom that underlay his policies: that God, the philosophers, and economics all pointed toward “Share the Wealth:”
“We do not propose to divide it up equally. We do not propose a division of wealth, but we propose to limit [the] poverty that we will allow to be inflicted upon any man's family.”
Long’s Proposal
Only now, having made his case for change, did Long lay out his economic policy. He proposed reducing the wealth of a superrich person to “less than $50 million.” He proposed a modest old-age pension and a limited work week.
Yet, as he continued his speech, Long reiterated the cumulative, traditional wisdom that underlay his policies: that God, the philosophers, and economics all pointed toward “Share the Wealth:”
“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 100,000 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 120,000,000 people together, you know what the trouble is.”Okay, who was going to argue against God? Long had demonstrated how to use conservative authorities to support liberal policies.
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| Huey Long Campaign Poster |
You could call Long’s conclusion arrogant, or you could call it biblical. You could say that he was wrong, your choice. But no one can doubt that Long was incredibly persuasive. No one in 1934 could ignore him. The man had grown up in the grinding poverty of the Deep South, and he came to prominence during the horrors of the Great Depression, when the capitalist system was falling apart at the seams.
Simple math shows that only very high taxes on the wealthy could have paid for Long’s policies. However, perhaps sensing that no one would vote for higher taxes, at any time, for any reason, Long cleverly depicted himself as an anti-tax conservative.
Can Later Speakers Learn from Long?
Modern-day politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez echo many of Long’s policy concepts. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are persuasive enough in their own right, but they never seem to break out of the extreme liberal mold into which they have poured themselves. Long, in contrast, started with the conservative mold, stating conservative values that were supported by conservative authorities. He then showed how those ideas could help ordinary people. Long did not carefully smooth around the worries and ministrations of the conservative religious right. Instead, he utterly preempted the religious right. And, unlike populists like Donald Trump, who speak for the ordinary people while serving the oligarchs, Long reached out to people who, like him, had grown up poor, neglected, and hopeless.
Modern-day politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez echo many of Long’s policy concepts. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are persuasive enough in their own right, but they never seem to break out of the extreme liberal mold into which they have poured themselves. Long, in contrast, started with the conservative mold, stating conservative values that were supported by conservative authorities. He then showed how those ideas could help ordinary people. Long did not carefully smooth around the worries and ministrations of the conservative religious right. Instead, he utterly preempted the religious right. And, unlike populists like Donald Trump, who speak for the ordinary people while serving the oligarchs, Long reached out to people who, like him, had grown up poor, neglected, and hopeless.
As a leader, Huey Long was often described as a dictator who bullied people and overrode the Constitution. I do not doubt those criticisms for a moment, and I do not defend Long’s leadership. Long was perhaps less racist than most successful southern politicians of the time, although that doesn’t say much. Long's slogan “Every Man a King” omits women, although the fact that he addressed his audience as “ladies and gentlemen,” not “gentlemen,” put him a bit ahead of his time. All the same, modern-day liberals could learn from the way he spoke, encapsulated by conservative values and pithy slogans: Share Our Wealth (not share the wealth, but share our wealth) and Every Man a King.
by William D. Harpine
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Biblical Note: the Jubilee is described in Leviticus 25 KJV:
“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”
Philosophical Note:
Plato’s views about wealth were more detailed and subtle that what Long implied. But, by that point, Long was steaming along, and I wonder how many of his voters had actually studied Plato anyway. Plato did write this (in Jowett's translation):
“Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.” Plato, Republic, 422
Readers might want to look at Professor Ernest Bormann’s brilliant article, “A Rhetorical Analysis of the National Radio Broadcasts of Senator Huey Pierce Long,” published in Speech Monographs. It is behind a paywall, but a good library can probably get it for you.
Special thanks to AmericanRhetoric.com for posting a transcript of Long's speech.
Copyright 2025 by William D. Harpine
Image of Huey Long, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Image of Huey Long's campaign poster, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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