Editing Text:Every Man a King (section)

== We have got to hit the root with the ax. ==
You cannot solve these things through these various and sundry alphabetical codes. You can have the NRA and PWA and CWA and the UUG and GIN [NRA stood for National Recovery Administration; PWA stood for Public Works Administration; and CWA stood for Civil Works Administration. "UUG" and "GIN" were apparently Long's own terms, thrown in to ridicule the New Deal.] and any other kind of "dad-gummed" lettered code. You can wait until doomsday and see twenty-five more alphabets, but that is not going to solve this proposition. Why hide? Why quibble? You know what the trouble is. The man that says he does not know what the trouble is is just hiding his face to keep from seeing the sunlight.

God told you what the trouble was. The philosophers told you what the trouble was; and when you have a country where one man owns more than a hundred thousand people, or a million people, and when you have a country where there are four men, as in America, that have got more control over things than all the 120 million people together, you know what the trouble is. 

We had these great incomes in this country; but the farmer, who plowed from sunup to sundown, who labored here from sunup to sundown for six days a week, wound up at the end of the time with practically nothing. 

And we ought to take care of the veterans of the wars in this program. That is a small matter. Suppose it does cost a billion dollars a year -- that means that the money will be scattered throughout this country. We ought to pay them a bonus. We can do it. We ought to take care of every single one of the sick and disabled veterans. I do not care whether a man got sick on the battlefield or did not; every man that wore the uniform of this country is entitled to be taken care of, and there is money enough to do it; and we need to spread the wealth of the country, which you did not do in what you call the NRA.

If the NRA has done any good, I can put it all in my eye without having it hurt. All I can see that the NRA has done is to put the little man out of business -- the little merchant in his store, the little Dago that is running a fruit stand, or the Greek shoeshining stand, who has to take hold of a code of 275 pages and study it with a spirit level and compass and looking glass; he has to hire a Philadelphia lawyer to tell him what is in the code; and by the time he learns what the code is, he is in jail or out of business; and they have got a chain code system that has already put him out of business. The NRA is not worth anything, and I said so when they put it through. 

Now, my friends, we have got to hit the root with the ax. Centralized power in the hands of a few, with centralized credit in the hands of a few, is the trouble.

Get together in your community tonight or tomorrow and organize one of our Share Our Wealth societies. If you do not understand it, write me and let me send you the platform; let me give you the proof of it.