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COUGHUN, FATHER CHARLES E. 1891-1979

PRIEST AND RADIO FIGURE

Early Career

Father Charles E. Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, to an American father and Canadian mother, which raised questions about his constitutional eligibility when his more zealous followers urged him to run for president in the 1930s. In 1926 the bishop of Detroit appointed the newly ordained priest to the new parish of the Little Flower, named in honor of the recently consecrated Saint Therese of Lisieux, in suburban Royal Oak, Michigan. In an effort to attract people, Father Coughlin began a series of Sunday-evening broadcasts of his sermons on a Detroit radio station in a program called the Radio League of the Little Flower,

From Religion to Politics

Father Coughlin's engaging voice, speaking skills, and message attracted a large audience, and his parish grew quickly. In the early days of his radio ministry he focused on religious and moral issues, but after the stock-market crash of 1929 he began to speak about current topics and their moral implications. His audience continued to grow. In 1930 he entered a contract with the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network, linked to sixteen stations in the Northeast, and his talks became increasingly political. When questions were raised about a radio priest in politics, CBS dropped his contract, and he established an independent network of stations to carry his broadcast.

Success

Throughout his radio career, Father Coughlin's primary audience consisted of Roman Catholics living in eastern industrial cities, but he also attracted a significant audience of Protestants in the Midwest who appreciated his views on political subjects, if not his church. By 1932 his office was receiving as many as eighty thousand letters a week, and he had created a thriving parish and built a large, new sanctuary with a modern radio office for his broadcasts,

Coughlin and Roosevelt

The radio priest became sharply critical of President Herbert Hoover's inability or unwillingness to deal with the Depression and in the 1932 election endorsed Franklin D, Roosevelt's candidacy with the slogan "Roosevelt or Ruin." Father Coughlin always believed he was responsible for Roosevelt's 1932 victory and initially assumed he would be an important adviser to the new president. He endorsed the early programs of the New Deal, and Roosevelt did consult Father Coughlin from time to time. But the president followed little of the priest's advice, especially con™ cerning ways to inflate the currency. Father Coughlin was convinced, as were many others, that cheaper money would ease the ongoing financial crisis and in 1933 supported the idea of shifting the nation from the gold to a silver standard within a year's time. He would later propose another inflationary measure, that of replacing the Federal Reserve System with a federally owned central bank that would issue paper currency in response to consumer demand. Roosevelt was not interested in the silver standard, and Father Coughlin was embarrassed when the administration published a list of people who owned large amounts of silver. The treasurer of the Shrine of the Little Flower was one of the largest silver holders in the nation. Since it was obvious that she had not plunged into the silver market on her own, it appeared that the radio priest was playing the futures market in silver.

Divergent Views

Father Coughlin then began to criticize specific New Deal programs and even the president himself from time to time but did not yet break with Roosevelt. In November 1934, however, he organized the National Union for Social Justice, with himself as head, as a way to assemble his millions of followers into an effective force for change. The organization grew quickly. He claimed to have millions of members, although more-careful estimates suggest that about a million people belonged to the National Union for Social Justice at its peak. He took credit for blocking attempts to have the United States join the World Court in 1935, although in the isolationist atmosphere of the mid 1930s many opposed entangling the United States in the organization and only a few were committed enthusiasts for the court. By mid decade he was periodically indulging in anti-Semitic remarks on his radio program. His anti-Semitism increased over the course of the decade. While there were others who were more strident in their charges against Jews, none had his audience,

Against Roosevelt

In 1936 Father Coughlin finally launched a full assault on Roosevelt, charging the New Deal had brought the nation "Roosevelt and Ruin." The president, according to him, was leading the nation in the direction of communism. He then began to work with other popular political movements of the time, including Francis E. Townsend's Old Age Revolving Pension program and the remnants of Huey Long's Share Our Wealth program. After some negotiation, they agreed to support William Lemke, a congressman from North Dakota, in a presidential run under the banner of the Union Party.

Defeat

Despite the apparent strengths of the coalition that supported the Union Party—Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice in the Northeast, Share Our Wealth in the South, and Lemke in the West—none of these leaders was able to bring the mass of his followers with him. Father Coughlin's direct attack on Roosevelt caused a serious split in his movement, as many admirers and beneficiaries of Roosevelt and the New Deal stayed with the president and the Democratic Party. Lemke received fewer than a million votes in 1936 and received no electoral votes; Roosevelt was overwhelmingly reelected.

Fascism and Anti-Semitism

Father Coughlin had promised to leave the radio if the Lemke campaign failed; for a short time he kept his word, but by 1937 he was back on the airwaves. Now his speeches and his newspaper, Social Justice•, reflected his increasingly bitter anti Semitism and his fascistic positions on current issues. By the end of 1937 he was attacking the nature of democracy itself, and in the next year he organized the Christian Front Against Communism to bring discipline and "God's will" to America. Bullyboys associated with the Christian Front attacked Jews in cities such as New York and Boston. In 1938 Social Justice published the blatantly anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document forged earlier by the czarist government of Russia to discredit Jews by charging that they planned to gain control of the world. Father Coughlin championed Adolf Hitler when war began in Europe in 1939. Only in 1942 was he finally silenced by government pressure on his church. He continued to work at the Shrine of the Little Flower until his retirement in 1966.