Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio.

### Warren, Donald

MOST Americans who know anything at all about the Thirties "know" there was a native fascist movement which was a clear and present danger to democracy, and that one of its leaders, Charles Coughlin, was a Roman Catholic priest who spewed anti-Semitic propaganda over network radio. It is a short step from such "knowledge" to the conclusion of the anonymous author of the present book's flap copy that Coughlin "paved the way for modern demagogues such as Gordon Liddy and Rush Limbaugh." There is a certain amount of truth in all these claims -- even the last one, tendentiously put though it is -- but truth, like God, is in the details, and the details of Father Coughlin's spectacular career, which are accurately set forth in this tediously written but factually sound academic study, are far more interesting than the caricature that has passed into historical legend.

Born in Ontario in 1891, Charles Edward Coughlin was a cradle Catholic raised on Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that called for what Donald Warren, the author of Radio Priest, clumsily but correctly describes as "the socially integrated (organic) community." Coughlin entered the priesthood in 1916, was transferred to the diocese of Detroit in 1924, built the Shrine of the Little Flower in 1926, and first went on the air that same year. His "Golden Hour" broadcasts were an overnight success, in part because of Coughlin's golden voice (one contemporary described it as "a voice of such mellow richness, such manly, heart-warming confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm, that anyone tuning past it almost automatically returned to hear it again"), but also because of his ability to talk down to a mass audience. Radio, Coughlin explained, "must not be high hat. It must be human, intensely human. It must be simple."

Commercial radio was only six years old when Father Coughlin started broadcasting. Commentators with an instinctive understanding of what worked on radio were few and far between, which is undoubtedly why Coughlin was so popular: the medium was more important than the message. Even Catholic-hating families tuned in avidly to his weekly sermons, and what they heard increasingly had less to do with religion than with politics. Drawing his inspiration straight from the pages of Rerum Novarum, Father Coughlin served up a heady brew of "social justice" (the name of the weekly paper he launched in 1936) and fervent anti-Communism, a one-two punch guaranteed to appeal to lower-middle-class listeners living through the Great Depression.

Coughlin's attacks on Herbert Hoover, whom he called "the banker's friend, the Holy Ghost of the rich, the protective angel of Wall Street," soon brought him to the attention of Franklin Roosevelt. The two men were natural allies, not least because they both viewed laissez-faire capitalism with suspicion, and by 1932 Roosevelt was echoing Coughlin's rhetoric on the campaign trail, calling in one speech for "social justice through social action." But Coughlin was a money nut -- he advocated a silver standard and the abolition of private banking and tax-exempt bonds -- and it wasn't long before he broke with Roosevelt, dismissing the New Deal in 1935 as "two years of matching the puerile, puny brains of idealists against the virile viciousness of business and finance."

It was always probable that Coughlin would sooner or later waltz down the anti-Semitic path most money nuts eventually discover. As early as 1930, he was explaining to a congressional committee that the inventor of Bolshevism was "the Hebrew, Karl Marx," and informing his radio audience that "modern Shylocks have grown fat and wealthy, praised and deified, because they have perpetuated the ancient crime of usury under a modern racket of statesmanship"; by 1938, Coughlin was publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Social Justice and claiming on the air that Kristallnacht was an understandable response to the subversive activities of Jewish Communists. Coughlin's adoption of explicit anti-Semitism and implicit pro-Nazism was a fatal mistake: Pearl Harbor put him beyond the pale, and he vanished into the memory hole. He spent the remainder of his life running the Shrine of the Little Flower (Tom Hayden went to school there, a fact that seems to have escaped Donald Warren's otherwise comprehensive attention) and playing the stock market, dying in obscurity in 1979.

Warren is the staunchest of liberals, but he is also an honest one, and the most useful thing about his book is the way it places Father Coughlin in the complex political crosscurrents of the Thirties. Coughlin's economic credo, for instance, was "fascist" to the precise extent that it resembled the New Deal, while his anti-Semitism was very much in the unhappy tradition of such Catholic apologists as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (the second of whom was a columnist for Social Justice in 1938). These two positions are, of course, interrelated: Coughlin, like Chesterton and Belloc, saw market capitalism as a threat to the organic social order in which all three men devoutly believed, and the fact that Jews figured prominently in both high finance and the Russian Revolution struck them, as it continues to strike paranoid populists, not as an intriguing historical phenomenon but as proof positive of the insidious influence of "international Jewry." (It is not even slightly surprising to learn that Coughlin came to believe FDR was Jewish: that was the way his mind worked.)

The Catholic hierarchy finally managed to silence Coughlin in 1942, but the terrified networks had long since pulled his plug. By then, independent editorial voices, whether lunatic or thoughtful, were no longer wanted: "news analysis" became the job of network employees, then was dispensed with altogether. Instead, reporters were allowed to fold commentary, all of it liberal, into their "objective" news stories (anybody who watched Bob Simon's anti-Likud reports from Israel on The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in the weeks preceding the election of Benjamin Netanyahu knows how this process works). Today's talk-radio shows, most of which are more or less conservative, are a direct response to the liberal monopoly on broadcast commentary, and in this sense as much as any other are the offspring of Father Coughlin.

Needless to say, Coughlin would have been horrified to see the airwaves filled with pro-capitalist opinionizing: he would doubtless have favored the genteel statism of the nightly network newscasts. He might even have preferred Bob Simon to Rush Limbaugh -- a nice example of the law of unintended consequences at work.