Franklin D. Roosevelt, right, faced a movement similar to the tea party when Sen. Huey Long, left, led an improbable movement to redistribute wealth. Obama vs. tea party: Think FDR vs. Huey Long

In the aftermath of the massive Democratic losses on Election Day, the tea party movements have proved that their efforts made a significant contribution to the Republican victories. Though only a few true tea party candidates were actually elected — most prominently Rand Paul in Kentucky and Marco Rubio in Florida — there can be no doubt that the movement’s energy and anger were perhaps the crucial factor.

President Barack Obama worked hard in the last weeks of the campaign. But his message was — as it has been for many months — without much passion and without much impact. It is not surprising that Obama did little to mobilize the right. What is surprising is how little his campaigning mobilized his own constituency. This leaves Democrats with the question of how to go forward in the face not only of defeat but of discouragement.


It is in times like these that a leader is most needed, and Obama is the only option. What can he learn from the challenges — and successes — of his predecessors?

Seventy-six years ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself confronted with a tea party of his own. He was two years into his presidency and six years into the Great Depression. Unemployment was close to 20 percent, and the unprecedented efforts to provide relief to the jobless were far from enough to make a real difference. Roosevelt’s great experiment in economic reform — the ambitious National Recovery Administration — was floundering. He had significant achievements, to be sure. FDR had shored up a tottering banking system, passed important financial reform, stabilized the agricultural economy and launched a bold public works program. But he also faced challenges by a bewildering number of protest movements that seemed to threaten his presidency.

Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana and, by 1934, a senator, was leading an improbable movement to redistribute wealth. “Share Our Wealth” attracted broad support across much of the country with Long’s promise to guarantee every family $5,000 in wealth and annual income of $2,000 to $2,500 a year — funded by confiscatory taxes on the rich.

The implausibility of this redistribution was no obstacle to Long’s ambitions. The “excess wealth” of the rich would not come close to funding his plan. But the Share Our Wealth plan was broadly popular. Many Democrats were beginning to see him as a serious threat to Roosevelt’s reelection.

Long was not alone. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest in Detroit who had developed a vast audience for his weekly radio sermons, transformed his warm homilies into a passionate attack on “international bankers” and the gold standard. Like Long, he built a national organization — the National Union for Social Justice — which attracted hundreds of thousands, at times perhaps millions, of Americans, not all Catholics. Once a great champion of Roosevelt, Coughlin had turned against him. By the end of 1934, Coughlin was organizing other dissidents to challenge FDR in 1936.

Francis Townsend, an elderly physician in Long Beach, Calif., created another large constituency for his “Old Age Revolving Pension Plan.” It called on government to provide everyone over age 60 with a pension of $150 a month (the figure soon jumped to $200) “on condition that they spend the money as they get it.” The program, he argued, would pump new money into the economy and restore prosperity. A nationwide transaction tax (similar to the European value-added tax) could fund it.

These formidable national movements were only the beginning. Across the country, in state after state, Americans were mobilizing behind efforts to restore prosperity and overturn what they considered the failures of the New Deal. In Georgia, Gov. Eugene Talmadge was denouncing banks, railroads and monopolies and spouting stormy populist rhetoric. In Mississippi, Gov. Theodore Bilbo (later one of the South’s most notorious racists) was organizing disaffected constituents behind an attack on “Wall Streeters” and corporate monopolies.

“The middle and Western states,” according to one journalist, “are crawling with radical farm leaders whose individuals may be small and localized but whose aggregate power to make or break administrations would be great, if they are ever brought together.”

Among them was Floyd Olson, leader of the populist Farmer-Labor Party. “I am not a liberal,” he asserted. “I am what I want to be — I am a radical.” He called for public appropriation of idle factories and state ownership of utilities. Philip La Follette, part of a great Wisconsin political family, led a third party in his state and hinted that he might break with Roosevelt and create a party of his own.

The League for Independent Political Action, formed by a group of politicized Eastern intellectuals, called for replacing capitalism with a form of socialism. And in Iowa, Milo Reno — whose family had a long history of support for Grangers, Greenbackers and Populists — became a flamboyant critic of the New Deal.

By spring 1934, this motley group of dissidents were beginning to organize. Reno linked himself to Coughlin. Long sought alliances with Olson and Townsend and gave a fiery speech to Reno’s constituents. “A power has arisen in this country greater than the government itself,” the publisher of the St. Louis Star-Times warned Roosevelt early in 1935. “The new power, unless checked, will itself become government."

Roosevelt was aware of this threat to his reelection in 1936. He had weapons of his own — and he was not afraid to use them. Despite restiveness across the nation, the president still had a strong Democratic majority in Congress. He used it to launch a series of important new programs in 1935: Social Security, the Wagner Act, the Works Progress Administration, tax reform and utilities regulations.

He co-opted much of the populist firebrands’ language with a fiery, at times demagogic, rhetoric. At a large rally right before the 1936 election, FDR unleashed an attack on what he called “the old enemies of peace ... monopoly, speculation, reckless banking ... [and] war profiteering.”

He proceeded to an extraordinary climax:

"Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it, these forces met their master."

Even members of his own administration were appalled by what one former aide called “the violence, the bombast, the naked demagoguery” of his words. But voters rallied to his call and reelected him by one of the greatest landslides in U.S. history — 61 percent of the popular vote, victory in every state but Maine and Vermont, 76 Democratic seats in the Senate and 331 out of 420 in the House.

Waging rhetorical war



The early 21st century is very different from the 1930s. The Great Depression was much deeper than the economic crisis of today. The Republican Party — which presided over the Depression for almost four years — was discredited and without power. Congress supported almost anything Roosevelt wanted.

Obama’s circumstances are dramatically different. He never had real control of Congress, even when he had his own significant majorities. He now faces a Republican landslide in the House and a depleted majority in the Senate. The modern tea party movements are different from the populist protests of the 1930s — much more in tune with the right, far more critical of government and unlikely to be co-opted by Obama and his party.

What, then, can today’s Democrats learn from Roosevelt’s successes in the face of the Depression, massive unemployment and a growing number of movements expressing anger and despair?

Obama is not without achievements of his own. He helped manage the successful shoring up of the banking system that began in the last months of the Bush administration. He launched an unprecedented stimulus package that almost certainly helped keep the economy from unraveling further. He passed important financial regulations, even if far weaker than Roosevelt’s reforms. Perhaps most important, Obama succeeded in passing a universal health care bill that many presidents of both parties — including Roosevelt — were never able to do.

But Roosevelt succeeded not only because he had significant achievements. He succeeded because he publicized his successes and touted his triumphs. He was everywhere visible — in the newspapers, on the radio, in the newsreels. There was almost nothing he would not do, almost nowhere he would not go, to promote himself and his programs.

The power of his personality, as much as the weight of his achievements, was among his most important assets. As a result, he was able to vanquish not only the Republicans but also the broad swath of populist anger that, for a time, seemed likely to defeat him.

Obama’s task is far more difficult: a recalcitrant Congress; a powerful GOP opposition with almost unlimited resources; a communications world that makes it more complicated for any individual — even a president — to dominate the political landscape; and an angry electorate that, while less organized perhaps than the dissidents of the 1930s, has more electoral clout than the Depression movements ever had.

But it is not enough to blame Obama’s troubles on problems beyond his control. He has at least as much rhetorical skill as Roosevelt had — and he has demonstrated his ability to inspire and mobilize a vast constituency. The strange reticence that Obama demonstrated over the past year has given the Republicans and the tea party movements the ability to drown out what could have been, and could still be, a powerful Democratic message.

Among the most egregious of Obama’s failures was his seeming abandonment of his own most important achievement — a health care success that he has failed to defend or even explain.

Obama seems, by temperament and inclination, to be a cool, level-headed conciliator. Until recently, he has tried to reach across the ideological party divide despite the obvious obduracy of the Republicans. He may well decide that such a strategy is the best way to deal with the Democratic defeats this week.

But there seems, at least for now, little likelihood of such a strategy's succeeding. This is not a time to conciliate. It is a time to fight, just as Republicans did in their implacable effort to ensure Obama’s failure.

Roosevelt faced similar disillusionment and unpopularity. There was a wide and growing sense that his would be a failed presidency in the face of a rising tide of populist anger. But Roosevelt saved himself not only because of legislative success. He saved himself by waging oratorical war against his opponents.

Can Obama do the same? He has the ability and talent to succeed. The question now is: Does he have the will?

Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University, is the author of “Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression.” His most recent book is “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”