Charles
Edward Coughlin (1891-1979) was born in Ontario Canada to Irish Catholic
parents and felt called to the priesthood during his teens. After graduating from Seminary and teaching
at a Catholic college for 7 years, he migrated to the United States by way of
Detroit Michigan where he was assigned a small church of about 26 families.
Father
Coughlin was greatly influenced in his thinking by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical On the Condition of the Working Class
which was written in 1891 but was part of his seminary training (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html). In it the pope called for great reforms in
western society to improve the lot of the lower classes and create a more just
society. By this time Industrialization
had become widely established in the western world, but organizations and laws
to protect the rights of the worker, lagged so far behind, that the individual
laborer was marginalized while investors and company owners grew fabulously
wealthy. The general mood of the day
among the lower classes was to turn towards socialism as a means of redressing
the great unbalance that existed. Pope
Leo XIII considered socialism a spiritual error and contrary to human nature
which ordinarily and rightly desires private ownership of goods attained
through their labors. The pope called on
Church leaders, captains of Industry, and the world’s governments to take
positive actions to alleviate the hard working and living conditions of the
lower classes. This became the core of
Father Coughlin’s political thinking for the rest of his life but this also
regularly came out in his preaching. He
was neither a socialist or capitalist, but stood somewhere in between the
two.
Sometimes
bad things happen in our lives that though painful, open the door of
opportunity. In 1926, the Ku Klux Klan
burned a cross on the front lawn of Father Coughlin’s parish church because
they didn’t appreciate Roman Catholicism in general and Father Coughlin’s
reforming views in particular. Local
radio station WJR invited him to speak on the air as sort of a rebuttal to his
critics and it was so popular that soon a weekly broadcast was born.
CBS picked
up the broadcast and began to air it nationwide on their network free of
charge. Over time Coughlin became quite
critical of then President Herbert Hoover’s policies which he and many others
thought were perpetuating the misery of the Great Depression (in the early
years of the depression the national unemployment rate was 26% and there was no
social safety net).
When CBS asked him to tone down his rhetoric,
he refused and CBS cancelled their free sponsorship. When the free sponsorship got cancelled,
Father Coughlin began raising funds to continue the broadcast and was quite
successful in doing so. One of the
fruits of the radio show was that Father Coughlin attracted more people into the
church and soon his parish sanctuary had to be remodeled to accommodate 600
worshippers on Sundays.
In the 1932
election, Father Coughlin became an ardent supporter of candidate Franklin
Delano Roosevelt for President. His line
was “It is Roosevelt or Ruin for America” as the Great Depression continued and
worsened. His endorsement of Roosevelt
was so strong that he boldly declared “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal” and that
“God is directing President Roosevelt”.Ironically, when he began seeing that
Roosevelt supported capitalistic ideas, he cooled off about him considerably
and founded an organization supporting of worker’s rights called the National
Union for Social Justice. The platform
for this organization whose membership was in the millions called for
nationalization of major utilities and the railroads and protection of worker’s
rights.
Father
Coughlin wasn’t against capitalism just unfettered capitalism, he was also
against communism and socialism. His
political ideas centered around the rights of the common man and in many ways
were similar to those of William Jennings Bryan a decade before. He was deeply suspicious of big government
but even more so of big-business. His
belief in the nationalization of utilities sprang from his view that the
resources they made their profits from, were actually god-given resources for
all of humanity. In one sense, he was
right, but what he failed to see is that while God indeed did create things
like coal and electricity, He did not put up power poles and rail lines to
deliver these items to the general public.
One
interesting aspect of Coughlin’s political views was on monetary policy. He latched on to the idea that gold, which
was the basis of our currency at the time, was not the measure but the master
of its value. He strongly agitated during
the depression that the value of gold be arbitrarily doubled which would then
justify doubling the money supply, while people’s debts would be much smaller
by comparison. This was rejected early
on by President Roosevelt as a cure for the Great Depression, but components of
this idea were studied and adopted by Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve in
recent years to prevent a full-on Depression in 2008. Does this idea work or create even more
problems? This is yet to be determined.
After 1936,
Coughlin fell into great public disgrace for being supportive of the fascist
policies of Hitler and Mussolini. His
view was that their policies were the antidote to communism. He also blamed the Great Depression on a
conspiracy of Jewish bankers and believed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
was also the work of the Jews. He felt
that Nazism and Fascism were nothing more than European responses to the threat
of Bolshevism which was being instigated by a group of evil Jews. Despite
this, Coughlin claimed he was not anti-semitic and that he welcomed all Jews of
good will. When WWII began, Coughlin
denounced the atrocities and the Nazis, but his reputation had already been
damaged by then having been on the wrong side of Naziism. Many radio stations started dropping his
show, but faced with angry picketers for doing so, they found themselves
restoring the program to their schedules.
He also
began a newspaper called Social Justice that became a forum for his
Anti-Semitic views. Although the Vatican
certainly wanted him silenced, it was pressure from the Roosevelt
administration that led to the cancellation of his radio program. Interestingly, Roosevelt who was a
Protestant, went to Joseph P. Kennedy, president Kennedy’s father and a Roman
Catholic himself, and asked him to help tone down Father Coughlin.
After Pearl
Harbor, America was a different place.
Father Coughlin was considered seditious and controversial and the rules
of Broadcasting were changed by the FCC to contain anyone who was quite
controversial or in opposition to the government. When Father Coughlin’s radio show was finally
cancelled, he continued to produce his newspaper, but this got shut down when
the Postmaster general shut down Coughlin’s right to use the U.S. mail to
distribute his paper because its views were not supportive of the
administration or the war effort. Essentially
the Roosevelt administration changed the laws on free speech even though it was
their constitutional responsibility to protect it, and all of their efforts
were targeted to shut down Father Coughlin.
Many of the FCC rules were still in place until the era of Ronald Reagan
when he had them revised back in favor of free speech. This deregulation paved the way for the
modern era of talk radio where equal time for alternative viewpoints is no
longer required.
In 1942, Father
Coughlin’s bishop ordered him to cease and desist from all politics and to
return to his duties as a parish priest which he did until his retirement in
1966. From then until his death in 1979,
Father Coughlin continued to write pamphlets denouncing the evils of communism.
During his
peak years on the radio as many at 30 million listeners regularly tuned in to
his broadcasts. Just to give some
perspective, this number is the equivalent to having the combined audiences of
Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The
difference of course is that Father Coughlin worked at a time when there were
substantially less choices of who to listen to than there are today. His mailroom received 80,000 letters a
week.
Many
commentators suggest the appeal of Father Coughlin in America was his
isolationist views (America first, International relations second) and his
penchant for conspiracy theories about Wall Street, The Federal Reserve, and
the Federal Government. Contemporaries
of the era said that he spoke with such passion that even though he rambled and
often repeated himself, it was a thrill to hear. When people came to his rallies, the
excitement was said to be comparable to what was happening in Germany with
Hitler and his Nazi rallies. People were
worked up into state of great excitement and excess. Other commentators on the art of radio said
that Coughlin had a deep, rich, honey-like voice that was very manly and
soothing and that even if you wanted to turn the dial past him, the quality of
his voice would draw you back.
From the
perspective of today, Father Coughlin looks like a bit of a hate-monger and bleeding-heart liberal blended with populism and a potent elixer of religion . He definitely demonized people he disagreed
with and in some cases quite unjustly.
But it is always best to try to understand a man in the context of his
times. The Great Depression was a
desperate time for 1 in 4 Americans.
There were many voices in this time calling for America to try socialism
because it seemed that capitalism had failed us. It doesn’t seem untoward that Father
Coughlin, in touch with the needs of his congregation and a common man himself
would hold such views. He was no
economist or politician, just a shepherd of souls. Perhaps we should indulge him a bit for his
very un-nuanced views.
On the other
side of the equation, while I can sympathize with the need for national unity
in a time of great peril, as was World War II, my personal opinion is America
has always been well-served by its Constitution and Bill of Rights. In light of that, the suppression of Father
Coughlin’s rights to be a voice of dissent, looks to me like the government
over-reach of the worst kind.
Nevertheless, Father Coughlin truly was a broadcasting pioneer and being
a pioneer of any kind has always been fraught with peril.
Posts
