Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth" vs. the Constitution

Introduction

This paper analyzes Huey Long's speech, Share Our Wealth, delivered in a nationwide radio broadcast in April 1935, in relation to the Preamble to the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. While there are some similarities in the arguments and goals presented by Long and these two foundational documents, there are far more differences — most especially his views concerning income and inheritance limits as a means of achieving a more perfect Union. The analysis draws on relevant excerpts from all three texts before summarizing key findings in the conclusion.

The Preamble and Long's 'Share Our Wealth'

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution is just 52 words long, yet it succeeds in succinctly summarizing the numerous constitutional provisions and protections that follow. It is worth presenting the Preamble in its entirety in order to evaluate its relationship to Long's speech:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

These inspiring words are reflected in Long's speech when he calls for domestic tranquility and the promotion of the general welfare through the establishment of graduated minimum and maximum income levels intended to ensure all American families the basic necessities of life — including homes, old-age pensions, and, most especially, universal educational and employment opportunities. Viewed from a modern perspective, Long's speech does not rise to the oratory level of the Preamble, yet the contemporary sentiments and proposals he advanced were directly aligned with the views of many Americans during this challenging period in the nation's history.

Both the Preamble and Long's arguments include provisions for domestic tranquility and the promotion of the general welfare. Long's arguments, however, are in direct opposition to the Preamble's goal of securing "the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," since Long calls for limits on the amount of money Americans can earn and how much they can inherit. While these limits may in Long's view contribute to "a more perfect Union," placing any restriction on the amount of money Americans can earn and pass on to subsequent generations is widely regarded today as fundamentally at odds with American values. Given these basic differences, the Preamble offers only modest support for Long's arguments, as discussed below.

Where the Preamble and Long's Arguments Diverge

Both Long's speech and the Preamble make clear that creating a more perfect Union requires a number of guarantees that overlap sufficiently to suggest broad-based similarities regarding what that Union should look like. In essence, however, this is where the Preamble's support for Long's arguments ends. The Preamble also makes clear that it is essential to codify these guarantees in a foundational document in order to preserve and protect them for future generations. The Founding Fathers had the foresight to include the Preamble and the provisions that followed in the U.S. Constitution; without them, Long's proposals might have steered the United States toward a rigidly controlled economic order in which no individual could earn substantially more than another, according to various arbitrary formulas.

The arguments in the Preamble and Long's speech diverge on several important points. While the Preamble calls for provision of the common defense and promotion of the general welfare, it does not charge the executive branch with feeding and clothing every American citizen who may be hungry or in need. By sharp contrast, Long argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inability — or seeming unwillingness — to provide such guarantees further exacerbated the desperate economic plight in which many American families found themselves during the Great Depression.

This argument is baffling given Long's own concession in his speech that the president had already borrowed billions of dollars to provide short-term relief. Long first complained that "Instead of his promises, the only remedy that Mr. Roosevelt has prescribed is to borrow more money," then objected to the burden that interest payments on this debt would represent for current and future generations of American taxpayers. These objections were advanced despite Long's simultaneous call for universal higher education at the government's expense. Long concluded his speech by proposing that "there should be an education for every youth in this land and that no youth would be dependent upon the financial means of his parents in order to have a college education."

Presumably, Long expected the enormous sums needed for this proposal to come from greater taxes on the wealthy — a shrinking pool of taxpayers under his own plan — since the only other viable alternative would have been for the government to foot a bill running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, a position directly at odds with his previous objections to national debt and government borrowing.

Long concluded his increasingly contradictory arguments by declaring: "And with it all, there stalks a slimy specter of want, hunger, destitution, and pestilence, all because of the fact that in the land of too much and of too much to wear, our president has failed in his promise to have these necessities of life distributed into the hands of the people who have need of them." It is reasonable to note that this same "slimy specter" has haunted many American families since Long delivered his speech and the problem remains relevant today — but the Preamble and the constitutional guarantees that follow have done far more to address these challenges than Long's contradictory proposals could have accomplished.

Conclusion

In 1933, the flamboyant Huey Long delivered a nationwide radio address entitled Share Our Wealth, proposing a series of measures designed to reduce the income gap between wealthy and poor Americans and guarantee that every family enjoyed a minimum income and household value, with a ceiling of $5 million set on what any single family could earn or bequeath. The analysis showed that there were few points of convergence between Long's proposals and either the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, beyond the shared goal of providing for the "general Welfare" and exercising the rights necessary to accomplish that purpose.

It is reasonable to conclude that had Long's proposals been implemented, the long-term consequences for American innovation and prosperity would have been severe. The economic disincentives built into his system — capped earnings, capped inheritances, and a government bearing the cost of universal higher education while simultaneously reducing its tax base — were internally contradictory and constitutionally unsupportable. The constitutional framework established by the Preamble and elaborated in the Declaration of Independence has proved a far more durable foundation for American prosperity than Long's well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed vision of a redistributed wealth state.