I’d love have seen him nominated and defeated. It’s also hard to imagine someone worse than FDR (
Oh if that woman hadn’t grabbed Zangara’s arm). Intentions don’t matter if you aren’t successful, could Long successfully been a dictator?
There’s always something or someone worse I’ve learned in life. FDR was clearly very terrified of him, because not only would he have been displaced (and consigned FDR to the political heap as a failed one-term President), but Long would’ve implemented the entirety of FDR’s Socialist agenda by any means necessary (and gone beyond that) and taken all the credit. He would’ve become the Communist dictator, suspending the Constitution, removing judges and other elected officials in his way, using the Depression and what likely would’ve been a popular uprising against these actions as an impetus to take absolute control. The GOP was so weak to dead by 1936/37 that there would’ve been nobody in political opposition to stop him.
Look to what FDR attempted in his second term, court packing (which would’ve effectively outvoted any pesky non-leftist jurists), the purge of the remaining non-Socialist members of the Democrat Party, and continuing expansion of his leftist control. Only Long would’ve been a lot bolder and more aggressive to establish dictatorship (and as it was, FDR was about as close to that as we got, only matched by LBJ).
Scary stuff.