***
The building of Father Coughlin’s empire had been a brilliant one-man accomplishment in media manipulation, exploiting aspects of the national character which were then but little understood: American innocence, the nation’s yearning for simple solutions, its joiner complex, and the carnival instinct for collecting shiny junk. Had the priest been born a generation later, he would have made a superb host on a television talk show or a Madison Avenue account executive, for he was a born salesman. He could have merchandised almost anything. He chose to peddle hate.
Now in his forty-fifth year, he was a big, sleek, well-groomed, bespectacled Canadian with a voice like an organ. Detroit had first heard that marvelous voice in 1926, when the Ku Klux Klan—toward which he would later display a peculiar tolerance—burned down his church in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb. The shocked director of the local radio station WJR suggested that he deliver a series of sermons over the air asking contributions for a new church. By the end of 1930 Coughlin had organized the Golden Hour of the Little Flower, broadcast over seventeen CBS stations, plus occasional local cut-ins, from 6 to 7 P.M. CST Sundays. Members of his vast unseen audience could not only hear the radio priest’s florid metaphors and rolling tirades; they could also acquire a Sacred Relic by sending him money. In return they received a tiny chrome-plated cross stamped “Radio League of the Little Flower,” and with it this letter:
My dear Friend:
With this letter it is my privilege to send you a souvenir crucifix. As I announced over the air, it has touched a relic of the True Cross….
Devotedly yours in Christ,
CHAS. E. COUGHLIN
P.S. If some friend wants a crucifix, let me know.
C.E.C.
Three months after he joined CBS, he was getting an average of 80,000 letters a week enclosing more than $20,000. Eventually, after especially popular broadcasts, the number of envelopes would pass a million and require 150 clerks to sort out the bills and stock the change. In 1934 he was getting more mail than anybody in the country, including President Roosevelt. His church had been rebuilt long ago (with nonunion labor). The marble and granite tower of its seven-story Shrine could be seen all over Royal Oak; at night dazzling spotlights played across a gigantic bas-relief figure of Christ spread across it. Beneath the Saviour was carved the single word, “Charity.” On the stones of the church were various inscriptions, some from the Scriptures and some just good service club slogans. Time claimed that “Charity Crucifixion Tower reminds many Detroiters of a silo” and christened its architect “Silo Charlie.” In riposte Coughlin cried that the news magazine “is not forgiven for indirectly insulting the crucified Christ whose monument is described by Time as a ‘silo.’ By inference, are we Catholics and Protestants who receive our spiritual food and drink from the Victim of the cross—are we cattle, content to fill ourselves with silage? By printing such classical billingsgate Time has stubbed its toes against eternity.”
From the side of Charity Crucifixion Tower, Christ’s agonized expression looked out upon a bizarre scene—a gasoline station beneath a gigantic sign reading “Shrine Super-Service,” a “Shrine Inn,” and a Little Flower hot dog stand. Inside the church itself other vendors spread their wares: picture postcards of Silo Charlie, crucifixes “personally blessed” by him, Bibles, anti-Semitic pamphlets, copies of the Brooklyn Tablet, and, after 1934, stacks of the Father’s Social Justice magazine. (At the height of its popularity, Social Justice was on sale in two thousand American churches.) Tourists were asked to make as little noise as possible—not, as one might suppose, because they were in a place of worship, but because at the very top of the tower, accessible only by a circular staircase, the radio priest sat chain-smoking, stroking his Great Dane, and composing his weekly sermon. The enormity of this task was well-known to the visitors. After CBS dropped him because he had become controversial, the priest organized his own network of over sixty stations, supported by contributions from the faithful. His flock had become the largest in the history of Christianity. Fortune called him “just about the biggest thing that ever happened to radio”; he outdrew Amos ’n’ Andy, Dr. Fu Manchu, and Ed Wynn. So great was his weekly harvest of currency that he had become the country’s principal speculator in silver, which he described on his Sunday programs as “the Gentile metal.” Like a Pope, he granted audiences; occasionally he would graciously consent to receive the President’s personal emissary, Joseph P. Kennedy, who was frantically trying to find some common ground between them.
It was impossible. No such ground existed. Father Coughlin had supported FDR in the beginning; his war cry in 1932 had been “Roosevelt or ruin,” and as late as April 1934 he assured a rally in New York’s Hippodrome Theater, “I will never change my philosophy that the New Deal is Christ’s deal.” It was a rash promise. For one thing, he now had 500,000 ounces of silver, and the President wasn’t being very cooperative with the silver bloc. The radio priest was mortified when the Secretary of the Treasury gave the press a list of silver speculators, headed by Coughlin’s private secretary. He could have survived that—after all, Woodin’s successor at the Treasury was Henry Morgenthau, who as a Jew could be depicted as a born enemy of the Gentile metal—but in his need to create new sensations or lose his audience, the radio priest was being driven to excesses which, in the long run, could only lead to hostility toward a President who had preempted the political center.
The hostility grew as Coughlin’s power grew. His National Union for Social Justice claimed a signed-up membership of 7,500,000, the most militant of whom took to the streets in what Social Justice called “platoons” of twenty-five each, looking for Jews. The preferred method for creating an incident was to offer copies of the magazine for sale to passersby who were known to be or just looked Semitic, and jump them when they declined; it was employed several times in front of Nedick’s orange juice stand on Times Square, where Irish policemen were admirers of the radio priest. Meanwhile he was opening fire on Roosevelt’s new allies in the labor movement. He denounced the American Federation of Labor, recommending that the government, following the example of Italy and Germany, settle industrial disputes by decree. What he wanted, Raymond Gram Swing pointed out, was “a fascist solution of the labor problem.”
Supported by Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, Coughlin insisted that he also had the backing of Pius XI. It was true that the Pontiff had said “every minister of the holy religion must throw himself, heart and mind, into the conflict for social justice,” but the Osservatore Romano, speaking for the Holy Father, took pains to point out that he hadn’t meant the kind of Social Justice advocated by the priest of Royal Oak, and William Cardinal O’Connell of Boston accused Coughlin of disseminating “demagogic stuff to the poor.” By this time the radio priest was beginning to display the arrogance of power; he informed his ecclesiastical betters that his magazine was a private venture and therefore none of their business. Anyone who crossed him now was going to have his knuckles rapped. La Guardia was awarded the Shrine’s “ill will” prize for criticizing Adolf Hitler and thus “breeding international bad feeling.” Liberals were called Communists. Organized labor, the flock was told, was being masterminded in Moscow. The faithful must “think Christian, act Christian, buy Christian” and beware of world Jewry: “Call this inflammatory if you will. It is inflammatory. But rest assured we will fight and we will win.”
Early in 1935 Coughlin published the totalitarian program of his National Union for Social Justice. Point One set the tone: he demanded “Liberty of conscience and education,” but no freedom of speech, which would have meant the end of his Radio League—unless he was running the country, which presumably was what he had in mind. At the same time he broke with Roosevelt. The New Deal became the “Jew Deal.” The President was “a liar,” an “anti-God”; in a Cincinnati speech Coughlin advocated the elimination of FDR by “the use of bullets.” This was too much for Westbrook Pegler, a Catholic layman and admirer of European strong men;
in his column he wrote that federal investigators of subversion should have treated Coughlin just as they were treating Earl Browder, instead of tiptoeing “around him for fear he would cry up a holy war.”
It wasn’t too much for Mrs. Dilling, whose list of powerful Communists included Senator Borah, Chiang Kai-shek, Eleanor Roosevelt, H. L. Mencken, and Mahatma Gandhi. It didn’t offend James True, inventor of the “kike-killer” (Pat. No. 2,026,077), a short rounded club made in two sizes (one for ladies). It didn’t offend Joe McWilliams, the soapbox Führer, or Lawrence Dennis, the intellectual of the radical right. Most interesting of all, no reproaches were found in the Hearst press. “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a ‘Fascist,’” Hearst declared, “you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS UP FOR AMERICANISM.” Beginning in November 1934, Hearst sent reporters disguised as students into college classrooms, to trap teachers in unconventional comments. Nobody wanted to change the American economic system, he said, except for “a few incurable malcontents, a few sapheaded college boys, and a few unbalanced college professors.”
Considering the tens of millions who were reading and listening to incendiary remarks, it is not surprising that some of them reacted violently. Between June 1934 and June 1935 the American Civil Liberties Union noted “a greater variety and number of serious violations of civil liberties” than in any year since the World War, and the ACLU records were incomplete, owing to the suspension of all constitutional guarantees in the state of Louisiana.
***
If Father Coughlin was the propaganda minister of Depression extremism, Senator Huey Pierce Long Jr. was universally acknowledged as its leader. The radio priest had the audience, but he preached nihilism. Dr. Townsend, who had become their ally, could count ten million followers, but he didn’t know how to get things done. Huey Long, the consummate politician, had everything: constituents, a program, and an intuitive sense of when and how to seize power. He was the only antagonist who genuinely frightened Franklin Roosevelt.
The legend of Huey Long has been set down in two memorable novels, by John Dos Passos in Number One and Robert Penn Warren in All the King’s Men. The truth is at least as compelling. Huey was born in a log cabin, in the bitter poverty of Winn Parish, and he was distinguishable from other wool-hats only by his genius. He began by selling a shortening called Cottolene to the gallused men and calicoed women who would trust him to the grave and beyond. In eight months he completed the Tulane University three-year law course and, by special dispensation from the Louisiana Supreme Court, became a lawyer at the age of twenty-one, an achievement that no Tulane student, before or since, has ever matched. Later he displayed his virtuosity before the United States Supreme Court, establishing the constitutionality of a school book law which had been rejected in the lower courts. He presented his argument without legal assistance, without a lawbook, with only a one-page brief; and he won the admiration of Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
Huey could never have been elected governor without back-room deals with Standard Oil lawyers. He took it the way he could get it. But Huey, unlike the corrupt politicians of New Orleans, saw what had to be done. Louisiana was held in thrall by out-of-state corporations. There were only thirty miles of paved roads in the entire state, hospitals were virtually closed to the poor, the major rivers were unspanned by bridges, there was no schooling for half the children. As Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover came to visit Louisiana. It amused him. He even smirked at the state’s treasured Evangeline myth. Very little was known about her, he said; even her name was questionable; she might have been called Gwendoline. It was an unforgivable thrust, and in the autumn of 1928 Huey, now thirty-five and a candidate for governor, parried it for the wide-eyed rednecks and Cajuns. Standing on a cotton bale beneath flickering torches at Martinville, he delivered one of the most moving perorations in American politics:
“And it was here that Evangeline waited for her lover Gabriel who never came. This oak is an immortal spot, made so by Longfellow’s poem. But Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have that have never come? Where are the roads and highways that you spent your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment. But they lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the tears of those who still weep here.”
Elected, he broke the power of the corporations. Louisiana’s poll taxes were abolished, new taxes were levied on business, a debt moratorium was declared, the poor were exempted from the general property tax, textbooks were free, children rode in school buses. In three years he gave the state 2,500 miles of paved roads, 6,000 miles of gravel roads. Twelve bridges went up. Property assessments were reduced 20 percent, and at his new night schools 175,000 illiterate adults were taught to read and write. He was the only southern governor to treat blacks as equals; when the head of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to come into the state and campaign against him, Huey told reporters, “Quote me as saying that that Imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana, and that when I call him a son of a bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth.”
He had been elected on the slogan “Every man a king, but no man wears a crown.” One man did. Huey did. He called himself Kingfish after the head of Amos ’n’ Andy’s lodge, the Mystic Knights of the Sea, and “by the spring of 1935,” Hodding Carter wrote, “Huey Long owned Louisiana.” Newspaper critics like Carter went armed day and night. Some were beaten, kidnapped, and jailed. When his secretary’s husband threatened to sue him for alienation of affections on the eve of his election to the Senate, Huey had him put in an airplane and flown through the skies all over the state until votes were in; then he was brought down. Every state judge was in his pocket, including the entire state supreme court. All policemen, state and municipal, reported directly to him. He alone held power over the schoolteachers, tax collectors, the state government, the banks, and the governor. Finally his legislature outlawed democracy. Huey, not voters, would decide who had been elected to what. When New Orleans rumbled with discontent, he called out the militia and entered the city at the head of his troops, like Caesar. He said he had tried to reason with his opponents: “That didn’t work and now I’m a dynamiter. I dynamite ’em out of my path.”
Early in 1935, after his legislature had shouted through forty-four bills in twenty-two minutes, one of the few honest men left in it rose to say, “I am not gifted with second sight. Nor did I see a spot of blood on the moon last night. But I can see blood on the polished floor of this capitol. For if you ride this thing through, you will travel with the white horse of death.” He was hooted down. If any blood was spilled, it wouldn’t be Huey’s; he was surrounded by bodyguards carrying revolvers and submachine guns. And soon, his henchmen prophesied, he would be protected by the U.S. Secret Service, because it was clear to them—and to many of his enemies—that Huey’s next address would be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.
Already he was a national figure, second only to FDR. He was the most widely discussed politician in the country. Clearly he was preparing to move beyond the borders of Louisiana. He was deeply involved in Texas politics, and he was planning to purge Joe Robinson of Arkansas, Senate majority leader, and Pat Harrison of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate finance committee. His outrageous clowning was the subject of editorials and cartoons in every metropolitan newspaper. At a Long Island party he drank too much, sauntered into the men’s room, and ordered a tall young man standing at the urinal to “Step aside for the Kingfish of Louisiana.” When the youth wouldn’t, Huey, unconventional as always, attempted to direct the trajectory of his stream between the other’s legs. He missed, and left the party with a black eye. That was low comedy, but there was littl
e laughter in a Senate cloakroom when he told his colleagues, “Men, it will not be long until there will be a mob assembling here to hang Senators from the rafters of the Senate. I have to determine whether I will stay and be hung with you, or go out and lead the mob.”
The President wrote his ambassador to Italy that Americans “are going through a bad case of Huey Long and Father Coughlin influenza—the whole country is aching in every body.” That included Roosevelt. Like the radio priest, Huey had supported Roosevelt in 1932. (Unlike Coughlin, the Kingfish could rightly claim that FDR couldn’t have been nominated without him.) Now he was angry at the entire New Deal. His income tax returns were being questioned, Farley was withholding federal patronage from him, and WPA projects in Louisiana had been suspended because of irregularities in local administration. The Kingfish’s chief grievance, however, was that he wasn’t President, and he felt he ought to be. He wrote a book, My First Days in the White House. (Roosevelt, he wrote, would be his Secretary of the Navy.) Asked if there would be a Long-for-President movement in 1936, he snapped, “Sure to be. And I think we will sweep the country.” One of the few men on Capitol Hill to stare Huey down was Harry S. Truman. The obscure Missourian was carrying out one of the traditional chores of freshman senators, presiding over the Senate, when Long delivered one of his more venomous speeches. Afterward the Kingfish asked him what he thought of it. Truman answered sharply, “I had to listen to you because I was in the chair and couldn’t walk out.” But as the New Deal approached its second anniversary there were fewer and fewer Trumans. Huey was openly ridiculing the President on the Senate floor as “a liar and a faker,” and it is a measure of Roosevelt’s desperation that he was driven to solicit support from Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, the most noisome racist in the South. Bilbo scorched “that madman Huey Long,” but all he achieved was to attract a tornado of angry mail from his own constituents.
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