Long also mastered the art of the filibuster. In fact, not long after arriving on the Senate floor, Long, who was pushing for a measure to require Senate confirmation for candidates to Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration launched into a 15-hour and 30-minute filibuster, in which he covered everything from the subject at hand to sharing recipes for oysters and Roquefort dressing before he finally succumbed to the call of nature. The bathroom break ended Long's effort to prevent the Roosevelt administration from rewarding Long's political opponents in Louisiana with NRA jobs, but two days later, Long was at it again, this time using overwrought rhetoric to push for expanded rights for what was already considered in some quarters a radical and almost dangerously socialistic program; Social Security.
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| Social Security Logo |
His flamboyance found a willing audience in a nation wracked by the doubt and fear of the Depression and by the gathering clouds of pending upheaval overseas, and Long soon found himself ranked among other high-profile provocateurs on the left and right, men like Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest who railed regularly against the Jews from radio pulpit, and called, as Long had, for a radical redistribution of wealth.
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| Father Charles Coughlin |
But unlike Coughlin, Long had a pragmatic sense of political expedience, and he was able to gather and discard political alliances as the need struck him.
That was certainly the way he dealt with Roosevelt. While Long had supported the aristocratic reformer from the privileged New York family in his first presidential campaign, and had been especially supportive of some of Roosevelt's early New Deal initiatives, by 1935, he had broken ranks. Perhaps as it was, as Long claimed, that he truly believed that Roosevelt was far too timid and far too much a product of privilege to take the kind of aggressive, socially disruptive, and ultimately revolutionary economic steps that Long, with his socialist background and populist following advocated.
More likely, the back-room pol in Huey smelled blood in the water and believed that he could successfully challenge Roosevelt in the 1936 Democratic primary.
While others may have dismissed Long as an overly ambitious clown, Roosevelt, who was in many respects every bit as a savvy and talented a politician as Huey, recognized that he was, perhaps, the most dangerous man in America.
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