Righteous Indignation

If you don't walk away from a speech by Huey Long with a heart full of outrage, then you probably have a heart of stone.

At a time when many were standing in bread lines just to feed their families, there was a small handful of Americans who were incredibly, ridiculously, obscenely wealthy. To Long, this was incredibly unfair and unjust, and dangerously so: this was the sort of situation riots were made of. It's been said that every society is just three foodless days away from revolution (source), and the danger of revolution in America was never more present than during the Great Depression.

Long tapped into this latent anger and sense of injustice, not only because it aligned with his politics but probably more because it was convenient. It wasn't hard for a man as talented as Long to play crowds like a fiddle. He asked his listeners to dump their outrage on the people in power who'd totally failed them. Hoover and FDR couldn't be directly blamed for the Great Depression (that was more the past decade of deregulation and rampant speculative profiteering), but that didn't interest Huey Long in the slightest. He was selling a narrative of a disenfranchised poor working class that was crushed by greedy ruling elites who'd taken all the wealth for themselves.

Naturally, anger is gonna be the primary tone he wants to get across, with a bit of sorrow at the current state of affairs (check out our "Rhetoric" section for specifics) and a great heaping spoonful of hope right at the end. Trust in the Share Our Wealth Program, it will save the country and put food in everyone's bellies and a car in everyone's driveway. And the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Oops—wrong guy.