192 ChaPter^4
ticular hated oil companies, successfully sued Standard Oil for unfair business
practices, and even suggested if he became president, he would only tax oil
corporations, at exorbitant rates of course.
Long was charismatic and likeable, so posed a threat to the New Deal.
Indeed, he frustrated even his own party members when he frequently made
speeches claiming that there was almost no difference between Democrats and
Republicans and calling for a redistribution of wealth [“but there’s something
belonging to others/There’s enough for all people to share”]. By mid-1935,
over 7.5 million Americans had joined over 27,000 Share Our Wealth clubs.
There were no membership dues, and the clubs were open to both Whites
and Blacks who would meet regularly to discuss Long’s ideas and try to
develop ways to put his plans into practice. When the KKK and other racist
groups attacked Long for including Blacks in his clubs, he responded that he
was trying to help the poor, and African-Americans were the poorest group
in the U.S. By most accounts, Long was thinking about running against FDR
for the Democratic nomination in 1936, but in September 1935 he was assas-
sinated, shot by the relative of a political enemy in the state capital of Baton
Rouge. His political ideas, however, lived on, and continued to challenge the
New Deal even after Long’s death.The “Second” New Deal
The “Thunder” from leftist critics of the New Deal, and, even more, the con-
tinued high rates of unemployment, low wages, homelessness, and hunger
made it necessary for FDR to adapt. Roosevelt was a dedicated Capitalist, to
be sure, but a brilliant politician as well, so he was never so ideologically rigid
that he could not try out new ideas or programs. Consequently, he listened,
at least to some degree, to his critics, and in 1935 began to create new policies
to address the depression, and that became known as the Second New Deal.
Finally, to some extent, FDR was addressing the problem of the depression as
a problem of consumption, and he took measures to create jobs so that typi-
cal needy Americans could get wages and thus buy the goods they needed to
survive. Many of his critics claimed that Roosevelt had adopted the ideas of
John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who argued that the main eco-
nomic purpose of government was to increase employment—and thus wages
and purchases—and that, contrary to the “bible” of the balanced budget, the