Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most serious competition for pre…
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most serious competition for president during the 1930s came from fellow democrat, Huey Long from Louisiana. Long was a radical populist who favored creating a program in which the federal government would confiscate the assets of the extremely wealthy and redistribute them to the less well-off through government minimum incomes. He called his vision and by the mid-1930s, 27,000 clubs sporting the vision’s name sprang up across America. In a folksy comparison, he asked “how many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat?” His radical vision, and thus his threat to FDR’s New Deal approach, collapsed when he was assassinated in 1935 over a dispute over Louisiana state politics.