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What flabbergasted Congressmen in Franklin Roosevelt's message more than its budget-balancing gesture was its philosophy. Though few Congressmen were articulate enough to say so, most of them were sufficiently shrewd to sense that he was breaking with U. S. taxing tradition. The ancient idea that taxes in a Democracy are a means by which citizens, more or less according to their capacity, chip in to the common pot to pay the cost of government, was laid aside. The new Roosevelt theory seemed to be that taxes are a device to achieve a social end which has little to do with paying the bills. From the New Deal standpoint this device would entitle a majority of the country to help themselves from those who have more than the average. The name of this theory, redistribution of wealth, appeared for the first time as the major motive for a tax proposal by a President of the U. S.
"I would sure liked to have seen Huey's face," remarked Will Rogers, a man of millions himself, "when he was woke up in the middle of the night by the President, who said, 'Lay over, Huey, I want to get in with you.'" Senator Long actually made his briefest speech in the Senate after the reading of the President's message: "I just want to say 'Amen.'"
Politics. Why President Roosevelt should have taken this tax stand at this time remained a prime subject of debate during the rest of the Washington week. Some hard-hearted critics insisted that he had spitefully fashioned this tax club as a weapon with which to punish rich Republicans and crusty corporations that had sneered and jeered at the New Deal. Others suspected him of timing the flash of his tax plan in the headlines so as to divert public attention from the collapse of most of his work relief schemes (see col. 2). Still others insisted that by pulling a 1935 rabbit out of his 1933 hat he was once more playing the smartest kind of politics to cut the ground from under the Longs, the La Follettes, the Coughlins until after next year's campaign. Obviously higher taxes for multimillionaires would hit only a few hundred voters while the principle on which they were proposed should win the support of countless thousands of voters. And the fact that there was no real chance of getting the States to agree to a Constitutional Amendment which would permit the U. S. Government to tax their tax-exempt bonds left the back door still wide open for the ultra-rich to escape increased Federal taxation.