Word: townsend
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...critics of left and right who pelted the Administration. Some of them Roosevelt could shrug off; others were far from laughable: Father Coughlin, who described himself as "a religious Walter Winchell" and believed that all bankers were devils and Jewish bankers the most devilish of the lot; Dr. Francis Townsend, who proposed to give every oldster over 60 a pension of $200 a month with the proviso that he spend it within the month; Huey Long, Louisiana's "messiah of the rednecks," who, in a rare moment of insight, called himself "a wedded man with a storm...
...movement gathered strength and power, Townsend got into politics with some old cronies. In 1936 he helped found the cryptofascist Union Party, with Gerald L. K. Smith, the pitchman of Huey Long's Share the Wealth program (and later a founder of the America First Party and a convicted subversive in World War II), and Father Charles E. Coughlin, priest-leader of the notorious "social justice" movement. Their presidential candidate, North Dakota's Representative William Lemke, polled a mere 891,000 out of 44,000,000 votes. Later, for refusing to answer a congressional committee, Townsend was sentenced...
Fanning Old Fires. In 1939 Dr. Townsend sat in dejected silence in the gallery as the House of Representatives crushed his plan, 302 to 97. By then, social security was all the thing. (Townsend contemptuously refused to accept his own social security paycheck of $99.15 until he was 86.) After his wife's death in 1951, Dr. Townsend spent his days restlessly traveling, speaking to the faithful, trying to rekindle the old fires. In the midst of a tour last month, he caught pneumonia, died of complications in Long Beach last week, a wispy old-fire breather...
...Among many made-in-California imitations and rivals of the Townsend Plan, two achieved notable power and the support of millions of voters: Upton Sinclair's E.P.I.C. (End Poverty in California) and the Ham-and-Eggs movement, both Utopian schemes to aid the poor and aged. Running as the Democratic nominee for Governor on an E.P.I.C. platform in 1934, Sinclair got 879,000 votes to Republican Frank Merriam's 1,138,000. Ham-and-Eggs, cooked up by a radio announcer and two admen, attracted wide public support (and several notorious scoundrels), forced a special referendum...
Died. Dr. Francis Everett Townsend, 93, California visionary, whose pension plan never came to pass; of pneumonia; in Los Angeles (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS...