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Huey’s intellect was greater than the old curmudgeon’s; he seized equal time to lay his Share Our Wealth program before a nationwide radio audience. Fortunes would be limited to five million dollars. No one’s annual income could be greater than $1,800,000 or less than $2,000. Provisions would be made for old-age pensions, bonuses for veterans, and cheap food through AAA surpluses. Children would receive a free education from kindergarten through college. Every family would be entitled to a $6,000 homestead grant and a radio, an automobile, and a washing machine. In their one foray outside Louisiana, members of Huey’s Share Our Wealth clubs (there were no dues) had elected Mrs. Hattie W. Caraway to fill out her dead husband’s Arkansas Senate seat. Now Huey’s catchy ditty could be heard in slums all over the country: Every man a king, every man a king, For you can be a millionaire But there’s something belongs to others. There’s enough for all people to share. When it’s sunny June and December too Or in the wintertime or spring There’ll be peace without end Every neighbor a friend With every man a king. To Forrest Davis, author of Huey Long: A Candid Biography, the Kingfish confided that he intended to outlaw the Democratic and Republican parties and serve four terms “as the dictator of this country.” Throughout that spring and summer his popularity snowballed to frightening size. Turner Catledge of the New York Times felt that the administration had blundered in striking back at him; its replies had “probably transformed Huey Long from a clown into a real political menace.” The Democratic National Committee conducted a secret poll showing that Huey, running for the Presidency on a third-party ticket, might take four million votes away from Roosevelt and capture enough key states to throw the 1936 election into the House. Jim Farley, the country’s most
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
Then there were the not-so-small days. In particular there was August 17, 2000. The only three words on the Surfer magazine cover that featured a photo of Hamilton riding Teahupoo on that date were “Oh My God.” Only a few months earlier a surfer had died in far tamer conditions, his neck broken and face torn off on the jagged coral, and that must have been on everyone’s mind when Hamilton, towed by Darrick Doerner, took off on a wave so massive and so vicious that spectators watching from boats feared they were watching a man’s last ride. There was just so much fury in this wave, a meat-grinder-cement-truck-wrath-of-God fury, that even now to watch it on video is a sobering experience. As the wave rose around him Hamilton couldn’t see it; he was riding backside, his body turned away from the barrel. But he could feel it, and his mind, he said later, screamed at him to abort, eject—anything but go through with this. At the same time, hesitation would have been fatal. As the lip slammed down on the reef the tube convulsed, the spray exploded around him, and he disappeared from sight. For a heartbeat or three no one knew if the wave had gotten him. Then he emerged, gliding along with his arms in the air. If Hamilton had fallen, the wave cognoscenti agreed, the only thing left of him would have been a red stain on the reef.
“it would appear that only rarely—if at all—will the utilities favor the continued employment of man over a model of man.” But how could that be? Why would the judgment of an expert—a medical doctor, no less—be inferior to a model crafted from that very expert’s own knowledge? At that point, Goldberg more or less threw up his hands and said, Well, even experts are human. “The clinician is not a machine,” he wrote. “While he possesses his full share of human learning and hypothesis-generating skills, he lacks the machine’s reliability. He ‘has his days’: Boredom, fatigue, illness, situational and interpersonal distractions all plague him, with the result that his repeated judgments of the exact same stimulus configuration are not identical. . . . If we could remove some of this human unreliability by eliminating this random error in his judgments, we should thereby increase the validity of the resulting predictions . . .”
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
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