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Fr Charles Coughlin

1891–1979

 

In a world seemingly dominated by television, it can be forgotten what a powerful force radio once was in the United States - and still is in other parts of the world.  As the Canadian media guru Marshal McLuhan observed, it is a hot medium, ideal for broadcasting of powerful nationalistic or political messages, and it remains much favoured by demagogues of the third world.

      One of the earliest exponents of the power of radio was Fr Charles Edward Coughlin, 'the Radio Priest' whose views dominated the public affairs of America in the days of the New Deal.  To a modern medium he brought the enthusiasm and passion of his Irish ancestors.

      He was born in Canada, in Hamilton, Ontario.  His father, Thomas J. Coughlin, was a sailor on the Great Lakes waterways and also a church sexton.  Thomas Coughlin was a US citizen, while Mrs Coughlin, Amelia Mahony by birth, was a Canadian.

      The Irish-Catholic culture was strong in Canada, and Coughlin was reared in a very traditional way.  He was sent first to St Mary's Elementary School in Hamilton, and then to St Michael's High School in Toronto.  His best subjects were maths and athletics.  He went on to St Michael's College, where he played rugby - too often seen as an upper-class sport - and made a name for himself as a debater.

      His religious upbringing prompted a vocation for the priesthood, and in 1911 he entered the novitiate for the Basilian order who ran St Michael's.  He was ordained in 1916 - the year of the Easter Rising - and sent to work at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario.  Though his productions of Shakespeare were popular, he also taught English, psychology (from a Catholic point of view, a new, and potentially dangerous subject) and logic.

      Though Canadian, Windsor is near enough to Detroit to be heavily influenced by the culture of the United States.  When the Canadian Basilians separated from their French parent order, Coughlin became a priest under the rule of the archbishop of Detroit.  Like all the northern industrial cities, Detroit had a significant Irish population.  Fr Coughlin worked in the parish church of St Leo's, where his outspoken sermons became popular.  The local bishop, Dr Michael Gallagher, selected him to establish a new parish in the suburbs of Royal Oak.

      Though the Irish might have been well represented in the cities of Michigan, in the country it was different.  Fr Coughlin was welcomed into Royal Oak by the local Ku Klux Klan burning a fiery cross on the presbytery lawn.  Aside from this Protestant intolerance, typical of attitudes towards Irish Catholics at the time, there were few actual parishioners.

      For the masses, radio, literally broadcasting, was new.  The British Broadcasting Corporation had been established in 1922, and commercial radio was only getting under way in America.  In the northern cities many people were of European origin, and though they spoke and understood English they could not read it.  Coughlin hoped to teach them through radio.  On 17th October 1926, he made his first broadcast over WJR, the Detroit station.  He was an immediate hit, and soon his on-the-air sermons were being relayed to many other stations.  At first his message was purely a religious one, and he talked about the gospel message of Christ's life and told simple parables extolling traditional Christian values.  It was a very typical God-spot routine, as broadcasters of today would call it.

      But the times were changing.  In 1930 he began to attack bolshevism and socialism, which were making their way through the emigrant communities of the United States.  From this external threat of the new, godless philosophies, he moved on in 1931 to attack President Herbert Hoover for his failures to counter the rising unemployment of the Great Depression that was now sweeping the United States.  In Europe, the economic downturn was a fertile ground for the rise of Communist and Fascist parties.

      The message proved a popular one.  Fr Coughlin received over a million letters from listeners supporting his views.  He had touched a nerve, and though to some the departure of a priest into the hurly-burly of politics seemed improper, his radio 'sermons' from then on dealt with political, social, and economic matters.

      To his critics, he could point to the church's own concern with these matters, through the teachings outlined in Rerum Novarum (New Things), the famous and forceful papal encyclical of Leo XIII.  The church's social programme, and its care for the needs and legitimate aspirations of workers, was based on this document.  The pope had emphasized the duties of the capitalists to the workers whose labours created their fortunes.  This was not always a popular message, and Coughlin went further.  His enemies were the international bankers, those scapegoats of so many radicals and reformers between the wars.  By manipulating capital and credit they were controlling the world.  Real power lay not with the citizen, but with the shadowy men behind boardroom doors.

      Coughlin had used contribution from those millions of listeners to build a church in Detroit called the Shrine of the Little Flower - the cult of St Thérèse of Liseux was then a popular one.  He broadcast on Sunday afternoons, the radio signals going out from a high granite tower beside the church.

      These colourful activities made good copy.  Soon newspapers and magazines were running stories about the Radio Priest and his views.  The first edition of his complete radio sermons became a mammoth bestseller, selling a million copies in 1933.  By the following year he was getting ten thousand letters a day, many with contributions in cash.  He had four secretaries and a staff of over a hundred.  The simple sermons had become big business, and with size came influence.

      Personally, Coughlin was a charming and convivial person.  He had that special confidence of the born preacher and exuded a certainty that he had all the answers for an increasingly worried nation.  He was also a broadcasting genius, his firm voice with the slight Irish intonation was said to be 'without doubt one of the great speaking voices of the twentieth century'.

      In 1932 he had become an active supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  His support, he thought, had been partially responsible for bringing FDR to the White House - a large claim.  He insisted that 'the new deal is Christ's deal', and it was 'Roosevelt or ruin'.  But the wise president kept his distance from this overzealous support.

      The Columbia Broadcasting System, of which the Detroit station was an affiliate, had already asked Fr Coughlin to calm his rhetoric.  In the course of a broadcast in January 1931 he exposed their efforts to 'censor' him, and the network bosses were deluged with letters in support of Coughlin.  The priest now felt he could say what he wanted, with no regard to the church or capitalism.  CBS cancelled his contract.

      Coughlin was unfazed.  He put together a network of forty stations, crossing the continent from Maine to California.  His sermons, if they could still be called that, were heard at times by the largest radio audiences in the world, sometimes as many as forty million people.  He was the father of the radio and television evangelists which are now such a feature of broadcasting in North America and elsewhere.

      FDR was conscious, as all presidents must be, of the Irish-American and Catholic vote.  Coughlin's own solution to the Great Depression was to put more money into circulation, and claimed that FDR was planning to do this.  Such inflation would have been ruinous; it had undermined democracy in Germany, and many felt it could do the same in America.  This was not to be the policy of the New Deal, and Coughlin began to call for the nationalization of credit, money, and the Federal Reserve.

      From broadcasting, Coughlin's ambitions moved to actual politics.  In 1934 he founded the National Union for Social Justice.  This was not claimed to be a political party, but a movement to protect the rights of the workers.  It ran a newspaper, Social Justice, to carry its message.  Its one victory was a campaign to prevent the United States from joining the World Court, which he saw as undermining national sovereignty.  Though its membership rose to five million, it never again achieved the same impact as it had in the early 1930s.

      Now anti-Roosevelt, Coughlin established the Union party to fight in the election of 1936.  But third parties never do well in the United States, and their candidate polled only a million votes, even though it had drawn together the fragments of other political movements on the radical right.

      Failure left Coughlin undaunted.  He only moved further to the extreme right.  He reprinted the bogus 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' in his paper, and accused the Jews and international Jewish financiers - those bogeymen of the right and left - of being responsible for America's problems.  Here he had the sympathies of some, like Henry Ford, who should have known better.  Coughlin said the Jews were behind communism and began to defend the Nazis.

      Some of his sentiments were shared widely in society, both in the United States and in Ireland.  In August 1938 he organized the Christian Front as an anti-Communist movement, but his young supporters spent their time attacking Jews.  Though he might defend this, using the example of Christ and the moneychangers in the temple, it was bringing the street politics of Europe into America.

      His enemies now confronted him.  At last, in 1940, his broadcasts were finally stopped by the National Association of Broadcasters.  Never again would a demagogue have free access to the airwaves of the United States in the unrestricted and unregulated way that Coughlin had had in the 1930s.

      Pearl Harbour and the entry of the United States into the war brought his career to an end.  He was silenced by his bishop in May 1942, and his papers were banned from the US mail.  He remained the parish priest at the Shrine of the Little Flower until he was forced to retire in 1966, and then lived privately in Birmingham, Michigan, until his death on 27th October 1979.

      He was, notes Francis R. Burns, 'undoubtedly one of the most powerful figures outside the government during the Depression era'.  The influence he exerted over the American people was powerful and immediate, but in the end the institutions of both church and state were stronger than a demagogue who had hoped to be America's Hitler.  At one time he was the most influential Irishman in the world, but in the end the will of the people prevailed.