2015高中英语 世界名人演讲词 59 Huey P.Long素材.docVIP

五十九、Huey P. Long Share Our Wealth (Text) and Barbecue Speech (Video) President Roosevelt was elected on November 8, 1932. People look upon an elected President as the President. This is January 1935. We are in our third year of the Roosevelt depression, with the conditions growing worse... We must now become awakened! We must know the truth and speak the truth. There is no use to wait three more years. It is not Roosevelt or ruin; it is Roosevelt’s ruin. Now, my friends, it makes no difference who is President or who is senator. America is for 125 million people and the unborn to come. We ran Mr. Roosevelt for the president of the United States because he promised to us by word of mouth and in writing: 1. That the size of the big man’s fortune would be reduced so as to give the masses at the bottom enough to wipe out all poverty; and 2. That the hours of labor would be so reduced that all would share in the work to be done and in consuming the abundance mankind produced. Hundreds of words were used by Mr. Roosevelt to make these promises to the people, but they were made over and over again. He reiterated these pledges even after he took his oath as President. Summed up, what these promises meant was: “Share our wealth.” When I saw him spending all his time of ease and recreation with the business partners of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with such men as the Astors, etc., maybe I ought to have had better sense than to have believed the would ever break down their big fortunes to give enough to the masses to end poverty--maybe some will think me weak for ever believing it all, but millions of other people were fooled the same as myself. I was like a drowning man grabbing at a straw, I guess. The face and eyes, the hungry forms of mothers and children, the aching hearts of students denied education were before our eyes, and when Roosevelt promised, we jumped for that ray of hope. So therefore I call upon the men and women of America to immediately join in our work an