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STOLEN THUNDER? HUEY LONG'S "SHARE OUR WEALTH," POLITICAL MEDIATION, AND THE SECOND NEW DEAL*
1935, the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was at a crossroads. The programs of his "first 100 days" in 1933 had failed to end the Great Depression, and criticism was mounting. From the left, Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana promoted a plan to "Share Our Wealth"; by February he claimed that 7.7 million had joined more than 27,000 Share Our Wealth societies or clubs. In April 1935, the Democratic National Committee conducted a secret poll, and, to the Committee's chairman, James Farley (1938), the results suggested that Long might hold the balance of power in the 1936 Presidential contest. The summer of 1935 saw the beginning of Roosevelt's "second hundred days." In June, Roosevelt demanded the passage of four liberal bills and added a "soak-the-rich" tax proposal to his "must" list of indispensable legislation. Could Long have upset Roosevelt's bid for reelection? Was the second New Deal, or parts of it, devised to "steal Long's thunder:' as Roosevelt supposedly put it to one of his advisors (Moley 1939:305)?
These questions engage the wider issues of what success means for such social protest movements and assessing their impacts on social policy and the welfare state (Skocpol and Amenta 1986:138-99; Quadagno 1987; Gamson [1975] 1990; Ragin 1989; Goldfield 1989; Quadagno 1992; Clemens 1993; Hicks and Misra 1993; Jasper and Poulsen 1993). Although movements are animated by the desire for social change, the "outcomes" of social movement activities are so infrequently studied that research on outcomes was recently summarized in just two published pages (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1988: 727-28). We are concerned with what we call state-oriented challengers: people or organizations bidding for collective benefits through changes in state policies. If Share Our Wealth influenced the Second New Deal, it would have been an impressive legacy for an organization that died so young, soon after its leader was assassinated in September 1935. Moreover, Long's organization had displacement goals--the aspiration to replace its opponents--which typically doom a challenger to failure (Gamson 1990; Goldstone 1980; Ragin 1989; Frey, Dietz, and Kalof 1992). Roosevelt may have offered concessions in the hope of wooing away Long's supporters. However, that an advisor to Roosevelt recalled...