1、Huey P. Long: “Every Man a King“delivered 23 February 1934Is that a right of life, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men that is is by 120,000,000 people? Ladies and gentlemen, I have only 30 minutes in which to speak to you this evening
2、, and I, therefore, will not be able to discuss in detail so much as I can write when I have all of the time and space that is allowed me for the subjects, but I will undertake to sketch them very briefly without manuscript or preparation, so that you can understand them so well as I can tell them t
3、o you tonight. I contend, my friends, that we have no difficult problem to solve in America, and that is the view of nearly everyone with whom I have discussed the matter here in Washington and elsewhere throughout the United States - that we have no very difficult problem to solve. It is not the di
4、fficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country - and by rich people I mean the super-rich - will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary
5、to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people. We have a marvelous love for this Government of ours; in fact, it is almost a religion, and it is well that it should be, because we have a splendid form of government and we have a splendid set of laws
6、. We have everything here that we need, except that we have neglected the fundamentals upon which the American Government was principally predicated. How may of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are c
7、ertain inalienable rights of the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness“; and it said, further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.“ Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all me were created equal and that that meant tha
8、t any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing? Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its c
9、hildren and childrens children could every dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation? That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal of “That we hold that all men are created equal.“ Now was it the meanin
10、g of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable - the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more ow
11、ned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people? Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of the dice or anything like the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or anything resembling the fact that all people are created equal; when we have today in America thousands
12、and hundreds of thousands and millions of children on the verge of starvation in a land that is overflowing with too much to eat and too much to wear? I do not think you will contend that, and I do not think for a moment that they will contend it. Now let us see if we cannot return this Government t
13、o the Declaration of Independence and see if we are going to do anything regarding it. Why should we hesitate or why should we quibble or why should we quarrel with one another to find out what the difficulty is, when we know what the Lord told us what the difficulty is, and Moses wrote it out so a
14、blind man could see it, then Jesus told us all about it, and it was later written in the Book of James, where everyone could read it? I refer to the Scriptures, now, my friends, and give you what it says not for the purpose of convincing you of the wisdom of myself, not for the purpose ladies and ge
15、ntlemen, of convincing you of the fact that I am quoting the Scripture means that I am to be more believed than someone else; but I quote you the Scripture, rather refer you to the Scripture, because whatever you see there you may rely upon will never be disproved so long as you or your children or
16、anyone may live; and you may further depend upon the fact that not one historical fact that the Bible has ever contained has ever yet been disproved by any scientific discovery or by reason of anything that has been disclosed to man through his own individual mind or through the wisdom of the Lord w
17、hich the Lord has allowed him to have. But the Scripture says, ladies and gentlemen, that no country can survive, or for a country to survive it is necessary that we keep the wealth scattered among the people, that nothing should be held permanently by any one person, and that 50 years seems to be t
18、he year of jubilee in which all property would be scattered about and returned to the sources from which it originally came, and every seventh year debt should be remitted. Those two things the Almighty said to be necessary - I should say He knew to be necessary, or else He would not have so prescri
19、bed that the property would be kept among the general run of the people and that everyone would continue to share in it; so that no one man would get half of it and hand it down to a son, who takes half of what was left, and that son hand it down to another one, who would take half of what was left,
20、 until, like a snowball going downhill, all of the snow was off of the ground except what the snowball had. I believe that was the judgment and the view and the law of the Lord, that we would have to distribute wealth every so often, in order that there could not be people starving to death in a lan
21、d of plenty, as there is in America today. We have in American today more wealth, more goods, more food, more clothing, more houses than we have ever had. We have everything in abundance here. We have the farm problem, my friends, because we have too much cotton, because we have too much wheat, and
22、have too much corn, and too much potatoes. We have a home-loan problem because we have too many houses, and yet nobody can buy them and live in them. We have trouble, my friends, in the country, because we have too much money owing, the greatest indebtedness that has every been given to civilization
23、, where it has been shown that we are incapable of distributing to the actual things that are here, because the people have not money enough to supply themselves with them, and because the greed of a few men is such that they think it is necessary that they own everything, and their pleasure consist
24、s in the starvation of the masses, and in their possessing things they cannot use, and their children cannot use, but who bask in the splendor of sunlight and wealth, casting darkness and despair and impressing it on everyone else. “So, therefore,“ said the Lord, in effect, “if you see these things
25、that now have occurred and exist in this and other countries, there must be a constant scattering of wealth in any country if this country is to survive.“ “Then,“ said the Lord, in effect, “every seventh year there shall be a remission of debts; there will be no debts after 7 years.“ That was the la
26、w. Now, let us take America today. We have in American today, ladies and gentlemen, $272,000,000,000 of debt. Two hundred and seventy-two thousand millions of dollars of debts are owed by the various people of this country today. Why, my friends, that cannot be paid. It is not possible for that kind
27、 of debt to be paid. The entire currency of the United States is only $6,000,000,000. That is all of the money that we have got in America today. All the actual money you have got in all of your banks, all that you have got in the Government Treasury, is $6,000,000,000; and if you took all that mone
28、y and paid it out today you would still owe $266,000,000,000; and if you took all that money and paid again you would still owe $260,000,000,000; and if you took it, my friends, 20 times and paid it you would still owe $150,000,000,000. You would have to have 45 times the entire money supply of the
29、United States today to pay the debts of the people of America, and then they would just have to start out from scratch, without a dime to go on with. So, my friends, it is impossible to pay all of these debts, and you might as well find out that it cannot be done. The United States Supreme Court has
30、 definitely found out that it could not be done, because, in a Minnesota case, it held that when a State has postponed the evil day of collecting a debt it was a valid and constitutional exercise of legislative power. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I may proceed to give you some other words that I th
31、ink you can understand - I am not going to belabor you by quoting tonight - I am going to tell you what the wise men of all ages and all times, down even to the present day, have all said: That you must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own.
32、 You cannot let any man own $300,000,000,000 or $400,000,000,000. If you do, one man can own all of the wealth that they United States has in it. Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunc
33、hes and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume. So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity in at least 85 percent of the activities that you own. They
34、either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one
35、end to the other, until there is not any kind of business that a small, independent man could go into today and make a living, and there is not any kind of business that an independent man can go into and make any money to buy an automobile with; and they have finally and gradually and steadily elim
36、inated everybody from the fields in which there is a living to be made, and still they have got little enough sense to think they ought to be able to get more business out of it anyway. If you reduce a man to the point where he is starving to death and bleeding and dying, how do you expect that man
37、to get hold of any money to spend with you? It is not possible. They, ladies and gentlemen, how do you expect people to live, when the wherewith cannot be had by the people? In the beginning I quoted from the Scriptures. I hope you will understand that I am not quoting Scripture to convince you of m
38、y goodness personally, because that is a thing between me and my Maker, that is something as to how I stand with my Maker and as to how you stand with your Maker. That is not concerned with this issue, except and unless there are those of you who would be so good as to pray for the souls of some of
39、us. But the Lord gave his law, and in the Book of James they said so, that the rich should weep and howl for the miseries that had come upon them; and, therefore, it was written that when the rich hold goods they could not use and could not consume, you will inflict punishment on them, and nothing b
40、ut days of woe ahead of them. Then we have heard of the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, and the greater Greek philosopher, Plato, and we have read the dialog between Plato and Socrates, in which one said that great riches brought on great poverty, and would be destructive of a country. Read what
41、they said. Read what Plato said; that you must not let any one man be too poor, and you must not let any one man be too rich; that the same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must nece
42、ssarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man. It is a very simple process of mathematics that you do not have to study, and that no one is going to discuss with you. So that was the view of Socrates and Plato. That was the view of the English statesmen. That was the view of A
43、merican statesmen. That was the view of American statesmen like Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt, and even as late as Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of these men, Mr. Hoover and Mr. Roosevelt, came out and said there ha
44、d to be a decentralization of wealth, but neither one of them did anything about it. But, nevertheless, they recognized the principle. The fact that neither one of them ever did anything about it is their own problem that I am not undertaking to criticize; but had Mr. Hoover carried out what he says
45、 ought to be done, he would be retiring from the Presidents office, very probably, 3 years from now, instead of 1 year ago; and had Mr. Roosevelt proceeded along the lines that he stated were necessary for the decentralization of wealth, he would have gone, my friends, a long way already, and within
46、 a few months he would have probably reached a solution of all of the problems that afflict this country. But I wish to warn you now that nothing that has been done up to this date has taken one dime away from these big-fortune holders; they own just as much as they did, and probably a little bit mo
47、re; they hold just as many of the debts of the common people as they ever held, and probably a little bit more; and unless we, my friends, are going to give the people of this country a fair shake of the dice, by which they will all get something out of the funds of this land, there is not a chance
48、on the topside of this Gods eternal earth by which we can rescue this country and rescue the people of this country. It is necessary to save the Government of the country, but is much more necessary to save the people of America. We love this country. We love this Government. It is a religion, I say
49、. It is a kind of religion people have read of when women, in the name of religion, would take their infant babes and throw them into the burning flame, where they would be instantly devoured by the all-consuming fire, in days gone by; and there probably are some people of the world even today, who, in the name of religion, throw their tear-dimmed eyes into the sad faces of their fathers and mothers, who cannot given them food and clothing they both needed, and which is necessary to sustain them, and that goes on day after day, and night after night, when day gets into darkness and b
