Father Charles Couglin: The Radio Priest
Father (later Monsignor) Charles Coughlin was a Catholic priest who mixed religion with politics, and who used his very popular radio show to cultivate a religious-based political populism that sought to influence Presidential politics in the era during and after the great depression. Charles Edward Coughlin was controversial. He was born in Canada, but was based out of a diocese near Detroit at Royal Oak, Michigan's National Shrine of the Little Flower church. Father Coughlin was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience. He had up to thirty million listeners who tuned in to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s.
Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario. His parents were Irish Catholics. He was ordained to the priesthood in Toronto, Ontario in 1916 and was sent to teach at Assumption College, in Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit. In 1923 Coughlin left his and moved to Detroit, where he became associated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit in 1923. After being transferred several times to different parishes, in 1926 he was assigned to the newly founded Shrine of the Little Flower, a small parish composed of 25 families in the largely-Protestant suburban community of Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin was a talented orator and his powerful preaching soon caused the parish congregation to flourish.
That same year Coughlin began his radio broadcasts on radio station WJR. He was motivated by a series of cross burnings by the Ku Klux Klan on the grounds of his church. Coughlin hosted a weekly hour-long radio program and in 1930 his program was picked up by CBS for national broadcast. At first, Coughlin mainly covered religious topics in his weekly radio addresses. But as the Great Depression began to devastate the country, his speeches turned to political topics and these dominated his radio speeches throughout the 1930s. Radio was a new technology at the time and Coughlin was able to reach a very large national audience that extended well beyond his own Catholic base. He presented his message in strong, aggressive and angry rhetoric.
Political views
In January of 1930 Coughlin's radio addresses became more political in its message. At that time he began a series of attacks against socialism and Soviet Communism. He also criticized capitalists in America. He said that it was Capitalist greed that had made Communist ideology so attractive to many Americans. He told his audience: "Let not the workingman be able to say that he is driven into the ranks of socialism by the inordinate and grasping greed of the manufacturer." His constant attacks on communism earned him a national reputation as an outspoken anti-Communist. Later that year, in July of 1930 he gained notoriety as a prominent witness before the House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities.
In 1931 the CBS radio network required Coughlin to have his radio scripts reviewed prior to broadcast by the network, as a pre-condition to their footing the cost of his airtime. He refused to do so. Instead he raised money to create his own syndicated national linkup, which soon reached millions of listeners on 36 stations that agreed to carry his broadcast.
At first Father Coughlin was a strong supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Coughlin endorsed Roosevelt during the 1932 Presidential election. He was an early supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and used the phrase "Roosevelt or Ruin" in his broadcasts, a slogan that became famous during the early days of the first FDR administration. He told his audience "The New Deal is Christ's Deal." In January 1934, Coughlin testified before Congress in support of FDR's policies. He said, "If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program, I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!" He told the Congressional hearing, "God is directing President Roosevelt."
But Coughlin's support for Roosevelt and the New Deal began to fade in 1934. Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ), a worker's rights organization which grew impatient with what it viewed as the President's unconstitutional and capitalistic monetary policies. His radio programs preached a message complaining about the negative influence of "money changers" and "permitting a group of private citizens to create money" at the expense of the general welfare of the public. He called for for monetary reform based on "free silver", something that had been an issue earlier in the century. Coughlin called the Great Depression a "cash famine" and he proposed monetary reforms, including the nationalization of the Federal Reserve System, as the solution. His organization, the NUSJ, called for work and income guarantees, nationalizing necessary industry, wealth redistribution through taxation of the wealthy, federal protection of workers' unions, and decreasing property rights. They wanted government to control the country's assets for public good. In one of his broadcasts, Coughlin said:
"We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also so to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited."
By 1934, Coughlin was the most famous Roman Catholic speaker in the United States on political and financial issues. He had a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. By 1934, he was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day and he had a staff of over a hundred people to keep up.
In 1934, when Coughlin began criticizing the New Deal, Roosevelt sent Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Frank Murphy, both prominent Irish Catholics, to try to get Father Coughlin to tone down his criticism. It did no good. Coughlin ignored them and began calling Roosevelt a tool of Wall Street. Coughlin supported Huey Long until Long was assassinated in 1935. He then supported William Lemke's Union Party in 1936. Coughlin's opposition to the New Deal grew as his radio talks continued to attack Roosevelt, capitalists, and what he called Jewish conspirators.
Many of Coughlin's previous supporters began to break ranks with him over his criticism of FDR. Another nationally known priest, Monsignor John A. Ryan, who had initially supported Coughlin, withdrew his support after Coughlin began criticizing Roosevelt. Joseph P. Kennedy, who strongly supported the New Deal, wrote in 1933 that Coughlin was "becoming a very dangerous proposition" and called him "an out and out demagogue". Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) in a successful effort to get the Vatican to silence Coughlin in 1936.
In 1935, Coughlin's denunciation of Roosevelt continued. He told his audience, "I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness." He said that Roosevelt was "leaning toward international socialism on the Spanish question". His NUSJ gained a strong following among nativists and opponents of the Federal Reserve, especially in the Midwest. As Coughlin criticized Wall Street and Communism,calling them the "twin faces of a secular Satan".
Coughlin was an isolationist. He called for "Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity", a message that was well received by others in the 1930s isolationist movement in the United States. Irish Catholics were especially supportive of his isolationist message.
In 1936, Coughlin helped found a political party called the Union Party. Its co-founders were old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who had taken control of Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement after Long's assassination in 1935. The Union Party attracted support from populists on both sides of the political spectrum who were unhappy with Roosevelt. Its membership also included former members of the Farmer-Labor Party. For the 1936 Presidential election, the party nominated William Lemke, a U.S. Congressman from North Dakota, as the party's candidate for President. The vice-presidential nominee was Thomas C. O'Brien, a labor lawyer from Boston. In the election Lemke received 892,378 votes nationwide, less than 2 percent of the total popular vote, and no electoral votes. Coughlin had promised to retire if Lemke did not get nine million votes. When he fell well short of this total, Coughlin stopped broadcasting briefly. He went back on the air in 1937.
After the 1936 election, Coughlin spoke in sympathy for the governments of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy, saying that they were an antidote to Communism. He blamed Jewish bankers for backing the Russian Revolution and he called Russian Bolshevism a Jewish phenomenon. He disseminated these controversial beliefs in both his radio broadcasts and his weekly magazine, Social Justice. The magazine had began publication in March of 1936. During the last half of 1938, Social Justice reprinted an article in weekly installments purporting to be called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was a Russian forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.
Coughlin denied that he was antisemitic, despite his frequent criticism of Jews. In February 1939, when the American Nazi organization the German American Bund held a large rally in New York City, Coughlin, in his weekly radio address, distanced himself from the organization. He told his audience: "Nothing can be gained by linking ourselves with any organization which is engaged in agitating racial animosities or propagating racial hatreds. Organizations which stand upon such platforms are immoral and their policies are only negative." In August, 1939, in an interview with Edward Doherty of the weekly magazine Liberty, Coughlin once again denied that he was an Anti-Semite, stating "I want the good Jews with me."
On November 20, 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht (the Nazi attack on German Jews, Jewish Synagogues, and Jewish-owned businesses), Coughlin told his radio audience, "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." After this speech, some radio stations, including those in New York and Chicago, began refusing to air his speeches without pre-approved scripts. In New York, his programs were cancelled by radio stations WINS and WMCA. His only radio audience in the region was on the Newark part-time station WHBI. On December 18, 1938 thousands of Coughlin's followers picketed the studios of station WMCA in New York City to protest the station's refusal to carry Coughlin's broadcasts. A number of protesters had antisemitic statements on their signs, such as "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" and "Wait until Hitler comes over here!" The protests continued for several months.
At its peak, Coughlin's radio show was extremely popular and his office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners. The size of Couglin's radio audience was estimated at close to 30 million listeners each week. The hierarchy in the Catholic Church did not approve of Coughlin's message, but under church doctrine, only Coughlin's superior, Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, had the canonical authority to direct him to cease his broadcasting and Gallagher supported Coughlin. The Roosevelt administration took action itself, after receiving a legal opinion that, while the First Amendment protected free speech, it did not necessarily apply to broadcasting, because the radio spectrum was regulated as a publicly owned media. New regulations and restrictions were created that were designed to force Coughlin off the air. For the first time, authorities required regular radio broadcasters to seek operating permits. When Coughlin's permit was denied, it seemed as if he had been silenced. Coughlin worked around the restriction by purchasing air-time, but having to buy the weekly air-time on individual stations reduced the number of listeners that he was able to reach, and strained his resources. When Bishop Gallagher died, he was replaced by a less sympathetic superior.
After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Coughlin's opposition to the repeal of a neutrality law led to a decline in his public support. In October 1939, one month after the invasion of Poland, the Code Committee of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) adopted new rules which placed more firm limitations on the sale of radio time to advocates of controversial public issues. Scripts were required to be submitted in advance and radio stations were threatened with the loss of their licenses if they failed to comply. As a result, in the September 23, 1940 issue of Social Justice, Coughlin complained that he had been forced from the air.
Coughlin argued that the First Amendment still guaranteed and protected freedom of the written press and he was able to print his editorials without censorship in his own newspaper, Social Justice. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the US declaration of war in December 1941, the anti-interventionist movements rapidly lost support. Isolationists like Coughlin were seen as being sympathetic to the enemy. On April 14, 1942, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote a letter to the Postmaster General, Frank Walker, and suggested the possibility of revoking the second-class mailing privilege of Social Justice. This would have resulted in a cost that would make it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to his readers. Walker scheduled a hearing for April 29, which was later postponed until May 4.
Biddle met with banker Leo Crowley, who was a friend of Bishop Edward Aloysius Mooney of Detroit, Bishop Gallagher's successor. On May 1, Bishop Mooney ordered Coughlin to stop his political activities and to confine himself to his duties as a parish priest. Coughlin complied with this direction. He remained the pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower. The pending hearing before the Postmaster, which had been scheduled to take place four days later, was cancelled as a result.
Despite the end of his public career, Coughlin remained in his position as parish pastor until retiring in 1966. He died in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1979 at the age of 88.
Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario. His parents were Irish Catholics. He was ordained to the priesthood in Toronto, Ontario in 1916 and was sent to teach at Assumption College, in Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit. In 1923 Coughlin left his and moved to Detroit, where he became associated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit in 1923. After being transferred several times to different parishes, in 1926 he was assigned to the newly founded Shrine of the Little Flower, a small parish composed of 25 families in the largely-Protestant suburban community of Royal Oak, Michigan. Coughlin was a talented orator and his powerful preaching soon caused the parish congregation to flourish.
That same year Coughlin began his radio broadcasts on radio station WJR. He was motivated by a series of cross burnings by the Ku Klux Klan on the grounds of his church. Coughlin hosted a weekly hour-long radio program and in 1930 his program was picked up by CBS for national broadcast. At first, Coughlin mainly covered religious topics in his weekly radio addresses. But as the Great Depression began to devastate the country, his speeches turned to political topics and these dominated his radio speeches throughout the 1930s. Radio was a new technology at the time and Coughlin was able to reach a very large national audience that extended well beyond his own Catholic base. He presented his message in strong, aggressive and angry rhetoric.
Political views
In January of 1930 Coughlin's radio addresses became more political in its message. At that time he began a series of attacks against socialism and Soviet Communism. He also criticized capitalists in America. He said that it was Capitalist greed that had made Communist ideology so attractive to many Americans. He told his audience: "Let not the workingman be able to say that he is driven into the ranks of socialism by the inordinate and grasping greed of the manufacturer." His constant attacks on communism earned him a national reputation as an outspoken anti-Communist. Later that year, in July of 1930 he gained notoriety as a prominent witness before the House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities.
In 1931 the CBS radio network required Coughlin to have his radio scripts reviewed prior to broadcast by the network, as a pre-condition to their footing the cost of his airtime. He refused to do so. Instead he raised money to create his own syndicated national linkup, which soon reached millions of listeners on 36 stations that agreed to carry his broadcast.
At first Father Coughlin was a strong supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Coughlin endorsed Roosevelt during the 1932 Presidential election. He was an early supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and used the phrase "Roosevelt or Ruin" in his broadcasts, a slogan that became famous during the early days of the first FDR administration. He told his audience "The New Deal is Christ's Deal." In January 1934, Coughlin testified before Congress in support of FDR's policies. He said, "If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program, I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!" He told the Congressional hearing, "God is directing President Roosevelt."
But Coughlin's support for Roosevelt and the New Deal began to fade in 1934. Coughlin founded the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ), a worker's rights organization which grew impatient with what it viewed as the President's unconstitutional and capitalistic monetary policies. His radio programs preached a message complaining about the negative influence of "money changers" and "permitting a group of private citizens to create money" at the expense of the general welfare of the public. He called for for monetary reform based on "free silver", something that had been an issue earlier in the century. Coughlin called the Great Depression a "cash famine" and he proposed monetary reforms, including the nationalization of the Federal Reserve System, as the solution. His organization, the NUSJ, called for work and income guarantees, nationalizing necessary industry, wealth redistribution through taxation of the wealthy, federal protection of workers' unions, and decreasing property rights. They wanted government to control the country's assets for public good. In one of his broadcasts, Coughlin said:
"We maintain the principle that there can be no lasting prosperity if free competition exists in industry. Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also so to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited."
By 1934, Coughlin was the most famous Roman Catholic speaker in the United States on political and financial issues. He had a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. By 1934, he was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day and he had a staff of over a hundred people to keep up.
In 1934, when Coughlin began criticizing the New Deal, Roosevelt sent Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Frank Murphy, both prominent Irish Catholics, to try to get Father Coughlin to tone down his criticism. It did no good. Coughlin ignored them and began calling Roosevelt a tool of Wall Street. Coughlin supported Huey Long until Long was assassinated in 1935. He then supported William Lemke's Union Party in 1936. Coughlin's opposition to the New Deal grew as his radio talks continued to attack Roosevelt, capitalists, and what he called Jewish conspirators.
Many of Coughlin's previous supporters began to break ranks with him over his criticism of FDR. Another nationally known priest, Monsignor John A. Ryan, who had initially supported Coughlin, withdrew his support after Coughlin began criticizing Roosevelt. Joseph P. Kennedy, who strongly supported the New Deal, wrote in 1933 that Coughlin was "becoming a very dangerous proposition" and called him "an out and out demagogue". Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) in a successful effort to get the Vatican to silence Coughlin in 1936.
In 1935, Coughlin's denunciation of Roosevelt continued. He told his audience, "I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness." He said that Roosevelt was "leaning toward international socialism on the Spanish question". His NUSJ gained a strong following among nativists and opponents of the Federal Reserve, especially in the Midwest. As Coughlin criticized Wall Street and Communism,calling them the "twin faces of a secular Satan".
Coughlin was an isolationist. He called for "Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity", a message that was well received by others in the 1930s isolationist movement in the United States. Irish Catholics were especially supportive of his isolationist message.
In 1936, Coughlin helped found a political party called the Union Party. Its co-founders were old-age pension advocate Francis Townsend, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who had taken control of Huey Long's Share Our Wealth movement after Long's assassination in 1935. The Union Party attracted support from populists on both sides of the political spectrum who were unhappy with Roosevelt. Its membership also included former members of the Farmer-Labor Party. For the 1936 Presidential election, the party nominated William Lemke, a U.S. Congressman from North Dakota, as the party's candidate for President. The vice-presidential nominee was Thomas C. O'Brien, a labor lawyer from Boston. In the election Lemke received 892,378 votes nationwide, less than 2 percent of the total popular vote, and no electoral votes. Coughlin had promised to retire if Lemke did not get nine million votes. When he fell well short of this total, Coughlin stopped broadcasting briefly. He went back on the air in 1937.
After the 1936 election, Coughlin spoke in sympathy for the governments of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy, saying that they were an antidote to Communism. He blamed Jewish bankers for backing the Russian Revolution and he called Russian Bolshevism a Jewish phenomenon. He disseminated these controversial beliefs in both his radio broadcasts and his weekly magazine, Social Justice. The magazine had began publication in March of 1936. During the last half of 1938, Social Justice reprinted an article in weekly installments purporting to be called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was a Russian forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.
Coughlin denied that he was antisemitic, despite his frequent criticism of Jews. In February 1939, when the American Nazi organization the German American Bund held a large rally in New York City, Coughlin, in his weekly radio address, distanced himself from the organization. He told his audience: "Nothing can be gained by linking ourselves with any organization which is engaged in agitating racial animosities or propagating racial hatreds. Organizations which stand upon such platforms are immoral and their policies are only negative." In August, 1939, in an interview with Edward Doherty of the weekly magazine Liberty, Coughlin once again denied that he was an Anti-Semite, stating "I want the good Jews with me."
On November 20, 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht (the Nazi attack on German Jews, Jewish Synagogues, and Jewish-owned businesses), Coughlin told his radio audience, "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." After this speech, some radio stations, including those in New York and Chicago, began refusing to air his speeches without pre-approved scripts. In New York, his programs were cancelled by radio stations WINS and WMCA. His only radio audience in the region was on the Newark part-time station WHBI. On December 18, 1938 thousands of Coughlin's followers picketed the studios of station WMCA in New York City to protest the station's refusal to carry Coughlin's broadcasts. A number of protesters had antisemitic statements on their signs, such as "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" and "Wait until Hitler comes over here!" The protests continued for several months.
At its peak, Coughlin's radio show was extremely popular and his office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners. The size of Couglin's radio audience was estimated at close to 30 million listeners each week. The hierarchy in the Catholic Church did not approve of Coughlin's message, but under church doctrine, only Coughlin's superior, Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, had the canonical authority to direct him to cease his broadcasting and Gallagher supported Coughlin. The Roosevelt administration took action itself, after receiving a legal opinion that, while the First Amendment protected free speech, it did not necessarily apply to broadcasting, because the radio spectrum was regulated as a publicly owned media. New regulations and restrictions were created that were designed to force Coughlin off the air. For the first time, authorities required regular radio broadcasters to seek operating permits. When Coughlin's permit was denied, it seemed as if he had been silenced. Coughlin worked around the restriction by purchasing air-time, but having to buy the weekly air-time on individual stations reduced the number of listeners that he was able to reach, and strained his resources. When Bishop Gallagher died, he was replaced by a less sympathetic superior.
After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Coughlin's opposition to the repeal of a neutrality law led to a decline in his public support. In October 1939, one month after the invasion of Poland, the Code Committee of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) adopted new rules which placed more firm limitations on the sale of radio time to advocates of controversial public issues. Scripts were required to be submitted in advance and radio stations were threatened with the loss of their licenses if they failed to comply. As a result, in the September 23, 1940 issue of Social Justice, Coughlin complained that he had been forced from the air.
Coughlin argued that the First Amendment still guaranteed and protected freedom of the written press and he was able to print his editorials without censorship in his own newspaper, Social Justice. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the US declaration of war in December 1941, the anti-interventionist movements rapidly lost support. Isolationists like Coughlin were seen as being sympathetic to the enemy. On April 14, 1942, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote a letter to the Postmaster General, Frank Walker, and suggested the possibility of revoking the second-class mailing privilege of Social Justice. This would have resulted in a cost that would make it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to his readers. Walker scheduled a hearing for April 29, which was later postponed until May 4.
Biddle met with banker Leo Crowley, who was a friend of Bishop Edward Aloysius Mooney of Detroit, Bishop Gallagher's successor. On May 1, Bishop Mooney ordered Coughlin to stop his political activities and to confine himself to his duties as a parish priest. Coughlin complied with this direction. He remained the pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower. The pending hearing before the Postmaster, which had been scheduled to take place four days later, was cancelled as a result.
Despite the end of his public career, Coughlin remained in his position as parish pastor until retiring in 1966. He died in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1979 at the age of 88.