“All in this living world you’ve got to do,” he insisted, “is to limit individual incomes to one million dollars a year, and fix it so nobody when he dies can leave to any one child more than five million dollars. And let me tell you something: holding one of those birds down to a measly million dollars a year’s no sort of hardship on him. At that rate of income, if he stopped to bathe and shave, he’d be just about five hundred dollars the richer by the time he got his clothes back on. “What we got to do is break up those enormous fortunes like the billion-dollar Mellon estate. By allowing them a million dollars a year for spending-money you’ll agree we wouldn’t be hurting ’em any to speak of. We’d have the balance to distribute amongst all the people, and that would fix things so everybody’d be able to live like he could right now if he made five thousand a year. Yes sir, like he was having five thousand a year and a team of mules to work with, once we share the wealth!” Today it is almost impossible to visualize the effect of so alluring a prospect on a countryside forced at that time to rely on the Red Cross for seed corn and sweet-potato slips to assure a winter’s food supply. The rural Negroes in particular, their “furnish” sadly shrunken as a result of the depression, accepted it almost as gospel that Huey Long was promising them five thousand dollars a year and a team of mules. The impact of Long’s oratory was so clearly obvious that a special committee waited on him at Texarkana, where he planned to close the campaign on Saturday night, to ask that he remain in Arkansas over the weekend to address meetings in the tier of counties along the Mississippi River on Monday, the day before the election. He agreed to do this, canceled plans to drive to Shreveport from Texarkana, and drove back to Little Rock instead. Since this left the accompanying newsmen with no grist for the early Monday editions, and since he had been quoting the Bible right and left in his speeches, not to mention the fact that in the glove compartment of his Cadillac a well-thumbed Bible reposed beside a loaded revolver and an atomizer of throat spray, he was asked where he expected to attend church the next morning. “Me go to church?” he inquired incredulously. “Why I haven’t been to a church in so many years I don’t know when.” “But you’re always quoting the Bible and so....” “Bible’s the greatest book ever written,” he interrupted, “but I sure don’t need anybody I can buy for six bits and a chew of tobacco to explain it to me. When I need preachers I buy ’em cheap.”