“‘It’ll be a lot easier this time,’ Huey went on while we were talking
during that Saturday golf game, ‘because you know and I know I make my
best speeches when I’m taking the hide off of somebody. I never could
make a decent Fourth of July oration in my whole damn life. But give me
something to raise hell about and somebody to blame for doing it, like I
had when I was campaigning for Mrs. Caraway in Arkansas, and nobody can
stop me!
“‘Not only that, but you’ll get on the radio and give out interviews to
the newspapers before I hit town, with all that same old business about
this interesting and controversial personality that’s about to come to
town, the man they had been reading and hearing so much about, and they
would have this chance to come out and find out the truth for
themselves. Also what date he’ll be there and so on, and how he would
talk about a topic of importance to the whole country, and most of all
to them, with Joe Whoozis to preside over the meeting, and that’ll draw
a big crowd every time, no matter if they’re Democrats or what. And no
matter if they’re Democrats or what I’ll have every last, living one of
them talking and thinking and voting my way before I get through.’
“You see, all Huey ever wanted was to get a crowd in front of him. You
could leave the rest to him. He had done just that in Arkansas three
years before, and everything was better organized by 1935. Not only
would I be there with arrangements and interviews, but the boys would
have come to town and distributed literature and cartoon circulars to
every house in the place and printed copies of some of Huey’s speeches
about share-the-wealth and so on.
“‘We’ll do it just like Arkansas, only on a hell of a lot bigger scale,’
he said. ‘We’ll have all the copies we need of _My First Days in the
White House_ along with the Share-Our-Wealth book, which we didn’t have
in ’32, and when I come to town with the sound trucks and deliver the
speech of my life, you just watch them flock over to our side.... Yes,
sure, there’s enough money to pay for all those books and pamphlets and
everything else we’ll need.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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