Overview
In 1926, Father Charles Coughlin established The Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan. Over the course of the next four decades, Coughlin built this small Catholic church into a large, ornate, highly profitable and, to many, infamous mecca. Coughlin began his radio career in the late 1920s with a weekly broadcast known popularly as "The Children's Hour," in which he told biblical stories to children. While these early programs were merely the tame sermons of a parish priest, they soon became paranoid political tirades. The program became known as "The Hour of Power," and by the late thirties it was the most controversial broadcast in America. Coughlin used the program and the new medium of radio to command an army of the disaffected. By giving expression to their basest fears and hatreds, he virtually created the "lunatic fringe," a new American phenomenon that inspired hate mobs to go on violent rampages and encouraged self-styled fascist organizations like the Christian Front and the German-American Bund to plot the downfall of the federal government and the disenfranchisement of American Jews. Based on more than twenty years of research, including unprecedented access to FBI and Catholic Church archives, Radio Priest is a definitive and timely biography, including revelations of Coughlin's ties to the Nazis and to fascist leaders such as Mussolini and the English aristocrat Oswald Mosley. In April 1995, after home-grown American extremists were arrested for bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City, stories about obscure radio personalities like Mark Koernke (Mark from Michigan) began appearing in The New York Times, asking if slogans like Koernke's "I love my country. I fear my government" could have incited such violence. But as Donald Warren argues in Radio Priest, to understand the paranoid fringe, one must understand its populist, deeply American roots.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In 1942, with the U.S. at war with a Nazi regime long praised by Father Charles Coughlin of the Shrine of the Little Flower in the Detroit community of Little Oak, Archbishop Mooney, his exasperated superior, finally put an end to the "unpriestly folly." Coughlin's slick radio sermons had already been stopped; now he was warned to cease involvement with the rabble-rousing publication he had founded, Social Justice. To a perturbed President Roosevelt, Mooney apologized: "The arena of politics is no place for one whose ecclesiastical character surrounds him... with a protective consideration he personally could never claim." Yet the silenced saint of the populist Right would retain ties to his church until his death in 1979 at the age of 88. A combination of Huey Long and Joe McCarthy in clerical cassock, with a touch of Goebbels thrown in, Coughlin was the first and most successful radio preacher of the interwar years. His blend of anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, combined with mellifluously menacing anti-government invective, raised millions of dollars from the discontented for Coughlin's various projects. Between 1926 and 1941, more mail arrived for him most weeks than was received at the White House. At his urging, loyal listeners would fire tens of thousands of telegrams to Congress, where he was feared for his ability to mobilize the otherwise inarticulate. His Sunday "Hour of Power" became an uneasily accurate title, intimidating many of his political, business and religious targets. Stifled after Pearl Harbor, he would never regain his clout. Although Warren (The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation) has done his homework, he has not done justice to his subject. Sloppily written and whipsawed by bewildering time shifts, the biography evokes a career in bigotry clearly ominous even amid Warren's narrative lapses. Film rights: Goldfarb & Graybill; all other rights, Simon & Schuster. (July)Library Journal
Warren (sociology, Oakland Univ., Mich.) gathered much documentation under the Freedom of Information Act on the controversial Catholic radio preacher of the 1920s and 1930s. Canadian-born Coughlin left his Basilian religious community to become a secular priest of the Detroit archdiocese and established a remarkably modern shrine at Royal Oak. From there he championed the poor in compelling radio preaching and gradually developed an audience of millions. Moving into national prominence, he shifted from religious matters to political ones and asserted anti-Roosevelt, anti-Wall Street, anti-Semitic, and pro-Fascist positions. Coughlin was finally silenced in 1941 by his bishop and eventually died in 1979. Warren presents fairly the prewar climate and the dilemma posed by Coughlin to his superiors, yet, overall, the massive material is pieced together in a disjointed way. A modern psychospiritual biography of Coughlin has yet to be written. Still, Warren adds to the corpus of literature on this dangerous example of extremism. Recommended with reservations.Anna M. Donnelly, St. John's Univ. Lib., New YorkMary Carroll
Oakland University sociology and anthropology professor Warren's biography traces the trajectory of Reverend Charles Coughlin from traditional populism and support for FDR's New Deal to naked anti-Semitism and praise for fascists. Canadian-born Coughlin founded the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, outside Detroit, in 1926; the same year he began broadcasting on powerful WJR, a key CBS station, and later the network. Coughlin's mellow voice and air of sincerity "built an electronic neighborhood" where listeners readily accepted his mix of religious and political subjects. He attacked Norman Thomas in 1928, Herbert Hoover in 1932, and FDR after 1934, and joined Townsendites and (after Huey Long's assassination) Gerald L. K. Smith in the Union Party in 1936. With war clouds looming in Europe, Coughlin's isolationism became ever more paranoid and anti-Semitic; "Social Justice" (his publication) grew more inflammatory and his supporters (especially the Christian Front) more violent. Coughlin's archbishop forced him off the air in 1942; despite his lower profile until his 1979 death, Coughlin remains a hero to today's right-wing extremists. A timely reminder of hate radio's ugly history.Maud Casey
Commercial radio was a mere six years old when Charles Coughlin -- the Catholic priest who's been credited with inventing hate radio -- made his first broadcast from Royal Oak, Michigan in 1926. Coughlin was the first personality to bring his own version of politics to the airwaves, and he railed against "banksters," "plutocrats," "atheistic Marxists," and especially "international financiers" (read: Jews). Within a decade, his show, "The Hour of Power," had picked up 16 million listeners as well as chummy fans like Ezra Pound, Henry Ford, Bing Crosby, Joseph Goebbels and Benito Mussolini. Coughlin's influence became enormous: He had an embattled relationship with Franklin Roosevelt (Coughlin called him "anti-God" on-air), he led the Christian Front (the 18 Freemanesque Brooklynites indicted as members of a national paramilitary organization) and was purported to have been funded by the Nazis.As with most dark characters, there was a wily, seductive side to Coughlin. In Radio Priest, Donald Warren's new biography of Coughlin, the wife of a British fascist reveals one of Coughlin's trade secrets. "He [used] a walking stick, in which he demonstrated that by staying back from the microphone and shouting and then moving close, for conveying an intimate voice, the dramatic effects desired could be attained." Radio Priest is full of similarly revealing details but, as with so much about this repulsively compelling historical figure, Warren lets it whiz past him unexplored and uninterpreted.
Although Coughlin is clearly a forerunner of media personalities like Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, Warren makes no such connections -- an omission that makes you wonder why Warren chose to write this book now. And although Coughlin is fascinating, it's easy to feel bombarded by Warren's scattershot facts while his strangely formal, awkward prose style obscures his subject. The irony in a dull study of a dazzlingly outrageous, Nazi-sympathizing radio preacher is put into relief by arresting glimpses of Coughlin's radio rants. In one he delivered soon after Kristallnacht, he declared that "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." Warren's 20 years of research (which accounts for the almost 50 pages of footnotes) are apparent in the quantity of truly fascinating material and in endless quotes from other sources -- including other Coughlin biographies, all of which end up sounding more interesting than this one. --Salon
Kirkus Reviews
All the facts about one of the Depression era's most controversial and influential figures—but little understanding of his motives.Warren (Sociology and Anthropology/Oakland Univ.) could not have picked a better time to write a biography of Catholic priest and 1930s radio personality Charles Coughlin, perhaps the most notorious and influential American anti-Semite of the 20th century. Coughlin's message of left-wing economics and right-wing nativism is often cited as a model for Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, and his brilliant use of radio to mobilize millions of listeners earns him frequent comparisons to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. Warren provides a mass of detail about Coughlin gleaned from more than 20 years of interviews and research. He provides fresh information about the priest's troubled relationship with the Church hierarchy reaching all the way to Rome. He also attempts new explanations of why the US government decided not to indict Coughlin for sedition and offers a wealth of circumstantial evidence appearing to confirm the long-simmering charge that Coughlin took money from the Nazis. Sadly, what Warren fails to provide is the kind of human insight into an intriguing character that would have made this book much more compelling and valuable. Why, for example, did Coughlin continue on the self-destructive course of blaming Jewish conspirators for drawing America into WW II, even as an embarrassed Church and enraged government laid ever-tighter siege to his crumbling Detroit-based empire? Warren gives us all the details of Coughlin's 1942 downfall but none of the insight.
How sad that this book that might have taught us so much about today's paranoid populism turned out to be of so little value.