" He also promised everyone over age 60 an old-age pension (Sindler).
By February 1935, Long's followers had organized over 27,000 "Share Our Wealth" clubs. Roosevelt had to take him seriously, for a Democratic poll revealed Long could attract three to four million voters to an independent presidential ticket. Huey Long did not suffer from excessive modesty. As a high-school dropout who taught himself law and got a law degree in only one year of study, Long was confident he would become President of the United States in 1936. So confident was he that he wrote a book entitled My First Days in the White House. In this book, he named his cabinet, which included President Roosevelt as Secretary of the Navy and President Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. He also conducted long imaginary conversations with FDR and Hoover, which were designed to humiliate them and show their subservience to the country boy from the piney woods of Louisiana. Long was expected to the candidate but he was assassinated on 8 September 1935 (Barksdale). .
Like Long, Father Charles Coughlin was an early supporter who turned sour on the New Deal. For about sixteen years, from the mid-twenties until the United States entered World War II, Father Charles Coughlin was probably the most influential religious figure in the United States. Father Coughlin first took to the airwaves in 1926, broadcasting weekly sermons over the radio. By the early 1930s, the content of his broadcasts had shifted from theology to economics and politics. Just as the rest of the nation was obsessed by matters economic and political in the aftermath of the Depression, so too was Father Coughlin. Coughlin had a well-developed theory of what he termed "social justice," predicated on monetary "reforms." He began as an early Roosevelt supporter, coining a famous expression, that the nation's choice was between "Roosevelt or ruin." Father Coughlin was an early and passionate supporter of President Roosevelt, since he viewed FDR as a radical social reformer like himself.