Huey Long was also a fierce opponent of Big Oil. His chronic battles in The Pelican State against Standard Oil caused many to see him as a modern day David fighting the Goliaths who taunted them and their hungry stomachs.  The Kingfish, as he enjoyed being called, had given them new roads, free text books, and had done so by helping the little guy at the expense of those he painted as big bullies.

The flamboyant Senator was making many people in power very nervous – including Mr. Roosevelt.  Some called Long a communist; others thought him to be a fascist.  What he really was resembled an unprincipled populist.  Many feared, with good reason, that he might become the catalyst for something in this country similar to the völkisch movement that Hitler had used to gain power in Germany. 

President Roosevelt actually commissioned a secret poll, one of the first such studies ever done, to get a sense of the political strength of Long and his ideas.  He also moved to outflank his potential foe by moving even further to the left, recommending legislation that pandered to the Share-Our-Wealth mindset. 

FDR considered Huey Long to be “one of the two most dangerous men in America.”  The other, by the way, was Douglas MacArthur.

As the summer of 1935 waned, Huey Long was the undisputed political leader of a growing and vocal group of discontented people, but he wasn’t the only star in the constellation of forces arrayed against the president.  Father Charles Coughlin, a vociferous priest who was a master of the air waves speaking to a radio audience of 40 million weekly (this in a day when our country’s population had not yet reached 130 million), was also considering a break with FDR by this time. 

The very idea that Long and Coughlin might get together to challenge him from the left clearly concerned Mr. Roosevelt.  In early September of 1935, FDR invited the radio priest to his home in Hyde Park, New York in an attempt to keep the popular broadcaster in his camp and avoid a political nightmare in 1936.  

By the time Father Coughlin was met by Joseph P. Kennedy (who was being used by FDR as a liaison to Coughlin) at the local train station at 3:00 a.m. on September 10^th, the news had long made its way around the country that Huey Long had been shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was fighting for his life.  Coughlin was with the president later that day when word came that Long had died. 

That was that.

Father Coughlin did break away from Roosevelt two months later.  And in 1936 there was a third party attempt to win the White House.  Coughlin teamed with Long’s self-anointed protégé, an anti-Semitic preacher named Gerald L.K. Smith, as well as Francis Townsend, who promoted a scheme to provide old-age pensions to the elderly.  They in turn orchestrated the nomination of William Lemke, a congressman from North Dakota, to run for president on the ticket of something called the Union Party.  But this was a hoarse whisper compared to the undeniably loud cry that would have been made had Long lived to challenge Roosevelt.

Had Huey Long run in 1936 as a third-party candidate, he just might have won.  Or, at the least, he could have taken enough votes away from FDR to give us President Alf Landon.