Kingfish Reconsidered
Huey Long famously said, "If fascism comes to America it would be on a program of Americanism."
In my youth, when I understood more and knew less, this always seemed to me to be a direct hit on patriotism. Yes, fascism wrapped in an American flag, carrying liberty's torch.
But now I'm older and know a little more and realize how little I understand. I recently encountered that quote again, and it looked like more than a flat slap at U.S.A. patriotism.
Kingfish lived at a time when Americans hotly debated very different images of their essential national ideals -- freedom and liberty. Huey Long himself had a dog in that fight. A similar version was the Townsend Plan. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was another; and the people who bitterly opposed Roosevelt had their own vision, though a negative one. It was a generation in which both the Ku Klux Klan and the Socialist Party reached heights of influence they never attained before or since.
And each of those models of America damned the other as antithetical to freedom and liberty. Each claimed that mantle for itself. Even the American Nazi PArty rallied in New York under a giant image of George Washington. Yet each was willing to bend and warp the fabric of America's laws and customs to attain its end. Each presented itself as the heir to the vision of the Founders. As both North and South did in 1861.
That, I think now, is what the clever politician from Louisiana saw.
In my youth, when I understood more and knew less, this always seemed to me to be a direct hit on patriotism. Yes, fascism wrapped in an American flag, carrying liberty's torch.
But now I'm older and know a little more and realize how little I understand. I recently encountered that quote again, and it looked like more than a flat slap at U.S.A. patriotism.
Kingfish lived at a time when Americans hotly debated very different images of their essential national ideals -- freedom and liberty. Huey Long himself had a dog in that fight. A similar version was the Townsend Plan. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was another; and the people who bitterly opposed Roosevelt had their own vision, though a negative one. It was a generation in which both the Ku Klux Klan and the Socialist Party reached heights of influence they never attained before or since.
And each of those models of America damned the other as antithetical to freedom and liberty. Each claimed that mantle for itself. Even the American Nazi PArty rallied in New York under a giant image of George Washington. Yet each was willing to bend and warp the fabric of America's laws and customs to attain its end. Each presented itself as the heir to the vision of the Founders. As both North and South did in 1861.
That, I think now, is what the clever politician from Louisiana saw.
