The New Republic

I just want to make a comment about a recent article correctly disparaging the populism of Palin, by viewing her as in the tradition of William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Joe MCarthy, and George Wallace. On one level this is true, for sure. I just want to add that Bryan and Long were essentially left-wing figures, and would have had no truck with McCarthy and Wallace -- and Palin. Bryan was a fundamentalist Christian who, neverthless, spent a career challenging and fulminating against robber baron capitalism at home, and what he perceived to be corporate-driven imperialism abroad. Even his embarrassing theatrics against science, in the notorious 'Monkey Trial', was motivated by his commitment Social Gospel, and thus his terrible fear that Evolutionary Theory would play into the hands of tycoons; who would incalculate the young into accepting that the economy is a jungle -- and only the 'fittest' should survive. Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and many others of the hideous, anti-government Right are all 'Social Darwinists', which Bryan would have found disgusting from an old-fashioned Christian point of view. Huey Long was colourfully described by 'Time' in the 30's as a combination of Bryan and P.T. Barnum. Furthermore that he was Bryan with brains and without scruples -- and therefore a far more dangerous threat to the Establishment. The Kingfish was also possessed of a first-rate mind, who had completed a law degree in a matter of months, and who had argued a case -- on behalf of the poor -- before the Supreme Court. No less than William Howard Taft was very impressed with his formidable powers of advocacy. Huey Long has gone down in your country's history as something of a home-grown Hitler, and he certainly did have Napoleonic tendencies, but he was equally denounced, whilst alive, for being a Bayou Bolshevik. This element of his politics is missing from Penn Warren's brilliant but politically naive 'All the King's Men', which focuses only on his methods and not his objectives -- as if Huey was the only American politicisn who cut corners. Well, not in elections, which he won by huge majorities without having to rig them, or pander to racial prejudice. As a Senator, Huey's 'Share Our Wealth' movement was proposing an expansion of federal power and responsibilty which would have dwarfed the New Deal. Something like it did come about with World War II; a command economy, rationing, full employment, the GI Bill. With only months to live, Huey pulled Roosevelt to the Left in the 1930's arguing that the New Deal was too ineffective for being too cosy to Big Business. He is the major political influence which shadows the Second New Deal. The definition of a fascist is that they promise full employment, but at the cost of the extinction of trade unions, and working class power. Whereas Long enthusiastically backed the Wagner Act to encourage and legalise collective bargaining, and backed Social Security, and the TVA and the WPA. So unusual and remarkable a figure was Huey Long -- and so threatening to corporate power -- that his lone assassin, Dr Carl Weiss, is the only figure to have gunned down a significant political figure in your History who is celebrated as something of a hero/martyr for delivering democracy from this vile scourge. I think Palin and her thundering, grotesque boosterers really are a scourge against prgoressive reform, but Bryan and especially Huey Long, whatever their faults, were not on the side of the rich and their right-wing puppets. Of McCarthy, who was the most effective and despicable of all American Right-wing demagogues, it should be noted that like Long he was not an Anti-Semite [as many of his followers certainly were] and that he was the first American leader, of the Catholic faith, to achieve mass support amongst Protestants, and who thus paved the way for his family friend and supporter, John F Kennedy, to be [narrowly] elected three years after his death.

- eynesbury

December 1, 2009 at 8:57pm