Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin: The Father of Hate Radio. - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, March 21, 1997 by Raymond A. Schroth

There has never been anyone just like him. Not Rush Limbaugh. Not Pat Buchanan. Joe McCarthy? Maybe.

The flip side of the First Amendment has always been that demagogues and hatemongers have been free to grab attention and power for themselves by appealing to what is weakest and worst in the rest of us -- our culpable ignorance, our economic insecurity, our sniveling fear of everything that is different or new.

It is one of the shames of American Catholic history that the first man to combine bigotry with the newly unleashed power of a mass medium -- radio -- was a Roman Catholic priest: Fr. Charles Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Mich., whose 1930s Sunday afternoon broadcasts held millions spellbound and at whose command hundreds of thousands of telegrams would bombard Congress on Monday morning, backing the priest's latest cryp-to-fascist notion of social justice -- and slamming Jews.

Born in Canada in 1891, young Coughlin entered the Basilian order after a mediocre career at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. Uneasy with the restrictions of a religious order, particularly the vow of poverty, he left the Basilians and, in 1926, joined the Detroit diocese as the protege of aging Bishop Michael Gallagher. There he quickly rose to prominence on the strength of two extraordinary gifts: the ability to manipulate people (as a college teacher in Canada he had used his students to build himself a house) and remarkable oratorical skills.

As a theology student he had once held forth brilliantly for an hour and a half on a topic for which he was unprepared -- and in a voice that novelist Wallace Stegner, referring to his radio broadcasts, later described as a voice of such mellow richness, such manly, heart-warning confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm, that anyone tuning past it almost automatically returned to hear it again."

Just the skills, Gallagher decided, to raise funds to build the new Shrine of the Little Flower in the middle-class Detroit suburb of Royal Oak. By October 1926, he was on the air -- first with a weekly catechism class called the children's Hour," which soon evolved into the "Radio League of the Little Flower," carried by the major networks and local stations all over America.

He quickly became -- historians would say today -- the wrong man for a bad time: a deceptively clear voice addressed to a populace stunned and bewildered by the 1929 stock market debacle. It was a period of social disintegration in which, as Walter Lippmann described it, "the individual has become isolated. He trusts nobody and nothing, not even himself. ... He sees only confusion in himself and conspiracies in other men."

The Coughlin catechism class quickly became political and economic commentary, with socialists and communists and "international banksters" as prime targets. By 1935 he replaced the wooden shrine with a towering edifice of granite and marble. By 1935 he formed what amounted to his own political party, the National Union for Social Justice. The following year he started a national weekly, Social Justice, to reinforce the impact of his radio talks and propagate his ideas nationally and internationally. In a 1933 poll by New York radio station WOR, 55 percent named the priest America's "most useful citizen" -- other than the president.

Indeed, in the 1932 election Franklin D. Roosevelt had welcomed the radio priest's support for the New Deal. But Coughlin, who liked to brag to friends about his visits to FDR's home, quickly became, for FDR, both a liability and a pest. The spurned preacher was soon referring to the President of the United States as a "liar" and a "Jew."

Radio Priest, Donald Warren's new, well-documented study of this oft-told sad tale focuses on the political impact of this rabble-rouser's career, particularly his anti-Semitism, his sympathy for both domestic and international fascism, and the charges, not conclusively proven, that Coughlin's crusade was funded by a Nazi Germany anxious to keep America out of World War II. He also repeats allegations at the time that Coughlin was no more devoted to celibacy than to the traditional American values of tolerance and patriotism.

But the book's high drama, at least for us today, is the struggle within both the church and Roosevelt administration to deal with an irresponsible and dangerous person, who was truly undermining the fight against Hitler, without violating his civil rights or offending his millions of Catholic and non-Catholic followers.

In November 1938 Coughlin hit a low point with a series of broadcasts identifying Jews with communism and purporting to demonstrate that the Jews were themselves responsible for Hitler's moves against them. His new archbishop, Edward Mooney, made several attempts to restrain him, to review his scripts, to remove him from editorial control of Social Justice. But the wily preacher -- like the serial killer dispatched at the end of every "Friday the Thirteenth" movie -- kept bouncing back. Mooney wrote to the Vatican: "I do not find him a person of balanced mind or of unselfish good will. ... [He] is proud, stubborn and vengeful."