STOLEN THUNDER - LONG,HUEY SHARE-OUR-WEALTH, POLITICAL MEDIATION, AND THE 2ND NEW-DEAL

In 1934 Huey Long created ''Share Our Wealth,'' a national challenger that sought economic redistribution. Our study explores the outcomes of this insurgency and the reasons for its successes and failures. We first review perspectives on success for social protest movements and provide a new definition of success, based on securing collective goods for a beneficiary group through movement organization efforts. Next we elaborate a ''political mediation'' theory of movement success. This theory holds that to be successful a movement organization must do more than just mobilize supporters and engage in collective action-political conditions must also be favorable to winning new advantages. We then examine historical information about national policymaking in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and quantitative data on spending by the Works Progress Administration. To assess the influence of Share Our Wealth, we analyze a secret poll undertaken by the Roosevelt Administration. The historical and quantitative analyses indicate that Share Our Wealth achieved partial success in ways that support the political mediation theory.