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"Between the team of Huey and the Priest, we have the whole bag of crazy or crafty tricks possessed by any Mad Mullah or dancing dervish who ever incited a tribe or people through illusion to its doom—Peter the Hermit, Napoleon Bonaparte, Sitting Bull, William Hohenzollern, the Mahdi of the Sudan, Hitler, Lenin, Trotsky and the Leatherwood God—here they are—all boiled down to two with the radio and the newsreels to make them effective and if you don't believe they are dangerous . . . you don't know the temper of this country in this continued moment of distress!"
In the Senate. Rare was the Washington radio which was not tuned to Hugh Johnson's address. Senator Long, by his account to his colleagues next afternoon, almost missed it. "While I was about to undertake to throw myself into the arms of Morpheus," he related, "I thought I heard my name being mentioned over the radio in the next room. I listened for a little while, and, lo and behold, I became convinced that perhaps I was being mentioned. . . ."
He then proceeded, with the help of an interview given American Magazine in 1920 by Bernard Mannes Baruch, General Johnson's onetime employer, to "show the Senate that this Bernard M. Baruch and Hugh Johnson, inside and second-story combination of wreckers of Presidents, have been doing this thing so long, and rigging the market for their own individual profits, that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary—and let there be no dispute about it." From Baruch and Johnson, Senator Long progressed to targets closer home, President Roosevelt and Postmaster General Farley, winding up with a fling at Senate Leader Robinson: "I would sound another warning to the Senator from Arkansas. . . . Beware! Beware ! If things go on as they have been going on, you will not be here next year."
Capitol reporters who knew his mettle and had heard him off the record had long marveled at the patience with which "Joe" Robinson had borne for two years the antics of the senior Senator from Louisiana. That patience now came abruptly to an end. Sticking out his pugnacious chin, Senator Robinson rose and bellowed his rage: