| June 29 |  |
Editor says, what if Huey Long had survived? muses Travis on his excellent Sanity is Dead blog. Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the July 2011 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1935, on this day in Baton Rouge, the charismatic Louisiana senator Huey Pierce Long formally announced his entrance into the race for the White House even though he had no intention of running for the presidency the following year1.
The greatest President we never had
Huey Long was without a doubt the greatest politician who ever livedLong instead planned to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1936, knowing he would lose the nomination but gain valuable publicity in the process. Then he would break from the Democrats and form a third party using the Share Our Wealth plan as a basis for its program.
He also planned to use Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest and populist talk radio personality from Royal Oak, Michigan; Iowa agrarian radical Milo Reno; and other dissidents. The new party would run someone else as its 1936 candidate, but Long would be the primary campaigner. This candidate would split the progressive vote with Roosevelt, thereby resulting in the election of a Republican as president but proving the electoral appeal of Share Our Wealth. Long would then run for president as a Democrat in 1940. In the spring of 1935, Long undertook a national speaking tour and regular radio appearances, attracting large crowds and increasing his stature.
Long was well on his way to being president in 1940. If Long would have been elected president, there would be no WWII, no profits from the banking interests in Europe and America in financing this war, nor any war profits from American corporations like IG Farben. All of the best laid plans Roosevelt had would have gone to hell in a handbasket.
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Travis
© Travis, 2011-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Politicians Source: Sanity is Dead Labels: Huey Long, Roosevelt, 1936, Presidency, White House. Editor says, 1) according to Long biographers T. Harry Williams and William Ivy Hair
Comment from Alan Abramowitz on Facebook: I cant see avoiding WW2 unless Long sent an assaisination team to Berlin. The Republicans could never have won with Alfred Landon. Roosevelt crushed him in our timeline. At worst Roosevelt would have won a squeaker. Of Long ran as himself then he might have squeaked by Franklin. Father Coughlin was a anti-semite and Hollywood would have turned in him.
Comment from Alan Abramowitz on Facebook: I cant see avoiding WW2 unless Long sent an assaisination team to Berlin. The Republicans could never have won with Alfred Landon. Roosevelt crushed him in our timeline. At worst Roosevelt would have won a squeaker. Of Long ran as himself then he might have squeaked by Franklin. Father Coughlin was a anti-semite and Hollywood would have turned in him.
~ So,he either would not have isolated Japan or evacuated Hawaii?
~ This seems more of a what if rather than a dispatch from the alternate reality. Still, I'm sort of glad I didn't live in a world where Coughlin would have had even more influence
~ Long would have been handicapped by his very Southern speaking...there was a lot of prejudice against a Deep South accent outside the South itself.
~ If Huey Long had be elected President, there would still have been a World War II. It's just that the Nazis would have won. Without U.S. support, both Britain and Russia would likely have collapsed.
And, um . . . since when is I.G. Farben an American corporation? It might have had operations in America, but it was German through and through and would have profited handsomely from a Second World War in which the U.S. wasn't a factor. If you're looking for American companies which profiteered, try Ford Motors, which sold the Third Reich military vehicles until early 1942 (!) and made arrangements to keep its German subsidiaries operating, and generating profits, during the war; or IBM, which sold the Nazis tabulating equipment they used to track the "progress" of the Final Solution. FDR had nothing to do with either case.
~ Perhaps the 1936 election went to Earl Warren rather than Alf Landon. His judicial background would've been a big shift from FDR's executive push.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
