Pioneering Hate Radio
by Dick Polman
OCTOBER 12, 2009 TAGS:
Perhaps Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and all their right-wing broadcasting brethren will soon deem it fitting to visit the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Southfield, Mich. They could place a wreath at the base of the tall, narrow gravestone that marks the eternal resting place of Father Charles Coughlin, their spiritual godfather, the man who first blazed the trail for hate radio.
Oct. 27 marks the 30th anniversary of Coughlin’s death, and it’s a testament to our characteristic American amnesia that his name barely resonates today. There was a time, during the Great Depression, when the bespectacled, powerfully built, organ-voiced “Radio Priest” hawked his demagogic wares to a weekly listening audience of 45 million. At the peak of fame he received an average of 80,000 letters a week, a volume that nobody else could match, not even President Roosevelt.
Fortune magazine called Coughlin “just about the biggest thing that ever happened to radio,” and he pulled more listeners than the hugely popular Amos & Andy. Radio was new, but he figured it out fast. For starters, he was blessed with splendid vocal chords; one contemporary lauded Coughlin’s “mellow richness,” his “manly, heart-warming confidential intimacy,” his “emotional and ingratiating charm.” But Coughlin’s true gift was his ability to dumb down his message for mass consumption; as he liked to say, a radio broadcast “must not be high hat…. It must be simple.”
And what a message it was. Never before had a freelance communicator possessed the technological tools and the instinctive skills to tap the paranoia, ignorance, and violence of the American id. Coughlin’s successors on hate radio owe him a debt of thanks for pointing the way.
The historian William Manchester once wrote that Coughlin managed to “exploit aspects of the national character which were then but little understood: American innocence, the nation’s yearning for simplistic solutions, its joiner complex, and the carnival instinct for collecting shiny junk.” And these traits were exacerbated during the Great Depression; millions of credulous people yearned not only for easy answers, but also for convenient scapegoats.
Coughlin’s scapegoats were the Jews.
As a parish priest in suburban Detroit - presiding over his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower – Coughlin had already built a big radio following prior to Franklin Roosevelt’s ascent to the White House in 1933. On his CBS-sponsored show – 6 p.m. on Sundays, titled “The Golden Hour of the Little Flower” – he seemed at first to be fairly liberal in his political leanings. He championed the little guy made poor by the Depression and strongly supported FDR in the ’32 campaign, coining the term “Roosevelt or Ruin.”
But he quickly soured on the new president, and by 1934 he was telling listeners that FDR was a tool of “the international bankers”; he soon amended that phrase to be “international Jewish bankers.” By 1935 he was referring to the New Deal as “the Jew Deal.” He said on the air that Roosevelt was “a liar” (back then, people didn’t talk publicly about presidents that way), and even suggested in a speech that it might be beneficial if FDR perished via “the use of bullets.”
Meanwhile, Coughlin broadened his message to the foreign policy realm; the more the Nazis persecuted the Jews, the more virulently the priest attacked the Jews. He did so by adopting the Nazi’s favorite propaganda trick: painting the Jews as both predatory capitalists and predatory communists, this covering all ideological bases.
During a late 1938 broadcast, he declared that the Nazis had been right to unleash Kristallnacht on Nov. 9 (burning 110 synagogues, arresting 30,000 Jews and murdering 91), because, in his view, the Jews were all communists. He explained: “If Jews persist in supporting communism directly or indirectly, that will be regrettable. By their failure to use the press, the radio, and the banking house – where they stand so prominently – to fight communism as vigorously as they fight Nazism, the Jews invite the charge of being supporters of communism.”
He also feared a Jewish-communist conspiracy on American shores, and warned in a speech: “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” And he certainly didn’t think that America should fight the Nazis in battle: “Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English, but citizens of Germany?” (Actually, by the late ’30s, the Nazis had already stripped the Jews of their rights as German citizens. But hate-radio broadcasters, even back then, were not exactly members of the reality-based community.)
Coughlin’s isolationism ultimately doomed him; after Pearl Harbor, and after Hitler declared war on America, there was no longer a mass audience for his message. And the Catholic hierarchy made it official during 1942, when the archbishop in Detroit ordered Coughlin to zip his lip and tend solely to his parish duties. Coughlin did as he was told; for the last 37 years of his life, before dying at age 88 in 1979, he confined his passions to the occasional anti-communist pamphlet.
But what’s less well known, and well worth noting, is that even at his peak Coughlin was not always free to pump his filth however he pleased. CBS, discomfited by his stridency and perhaps even seized by a fit of decency, summarily dropped his show (although this didn’t stop Coughlin; with money from his grassroots fans, he put his show on 60 independent outlets). And a 1939 broadcast industry rule – bowing to the federal government’s belief that free speech on the radio was not limitless – ultimately drove Coughlin off the air in New York and Chicago. The stations insisted on pre-approving his scripts; he refused, and wound up exiled to a tiny station in New Jersey.
Coughlin’s successors – Limbaugh, Beck, and so many others, all of whom have their own scapegoats and straw men – would surely be aghast at these speech restrictions. Today they are far more fortunate. They have a major political party that hops to their tune. They flourish in a time of deregulation, with few government curbs on broadcast speech. They have a major broadcast powerhouse, Fox News, ready and willing to help them inflame and entertain. And, most of all, they have millions of credulous followers – “frenzied, bitter, hostile, irrational.”
No, wait… that’s how historian Alan Brinkley described Coughlin’s followers. The American id is a hardy perennial, and Coughlin was the first to prove it on radio. His successors owe him some graveside homage on this 30th anniversary day. C’mon, guys. It’s a be-there.
Oct. 27 marks the 30th anniversary of Coughlin’s death, and it’s a testament to our characteristic American amnesia that his name barely resonates today. There was a time, during the Great Depression, when the bespectacled, powerfully built, organ-voiced “Radio Priest” hawked his demagogic wares to a weekly listening audience of 45 million. At the peak of fame he received an average of 80,000 letters a week, a volume that nobody else could match, not even President Roosevelt.Fortune magazine called Coughlin “just about the biggest thing that ever happened to radio,” and he pulled more listeners than the hugely popular Amos & Andy. Radio was new, but he figured it out fast. For starters, he was blessed with splendid vocal chords; one contemporary lauded Coughlin’s “mellow richness,” his “manly, heart-warming confidential intimacy,” his “emotional and ingratiating charm.” But Coughlin’s true gift was his ability to dumb down his message for mass consumption; as he liked to say, a radio broadcast “must not be high hat…. It must be simple.”
And what a message it was. Never before had a freelance communicator possessed the technological tools and the instinctive skills to tap the paranoia, ignorance, and violence of the American id. Coughlin’s successors on hate radio owe him a debt of thanks for pointing the way.
The historian William Manchester once wrote that Coughlin managed to “exploit aspects of the national character which were then but little understood: American innocence, the nation’s yearning for simplistic solutions, its joiner complex, and the carnival instinct for collecting shiny junk.” And these traits were exacerbated during the Great Depression; millions of credulous people yearned not only for easy answers, but also for convenient scapegoats.
Coughlin’s scapegoats were the Jews.
As a parish priest in suburban Detroit - presiding over his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower – Coughlin had already built a big radio following prior to Franklin Roosevelt’s ascent to the White House in 1933. On his CBS-sponsored show – 6 p.m. on Sundays, titled “The Golden Hour of the Little Flower” – he seemed at first to be fairly liberal in his political leanings. He championed the little guy made poor by the Depression and strongly supported FDR in the ’32 campaign, coining the term “Roosevelt or Ruin.”
But he quickly soured on the new president, and by 1934 he was telling listeners that FDR was a tool of “the international bankers”; he soon amended that phrase to be “international Jewish bankers.” By 1935 he was referring to the New Deal as “the Jew Deal.” He said on the air that Roosevelt was “a liar” (back then, people didn’t talk publicly about presidents that way), and even suggested in a speech that it might be beneficial if FDR perished via “the use of bullets.”
Meanwhile, Coughlin broadened his message to the foreign policy realm; the more the Nazis persecuted the Jews, the more virulently the priest attacked the Jews. He did so by adopting the Nazi’s favorite propaganda trick: painting the Jews as both predatory capitalists and predatory communists, this covering all ideological bases.
During a late 1938 broadcast, he declared that the Nazis had been right to unleash Kristallnacht on Nov. 9 (burning 110 synagogues, arresting 30,000 Jews and murdering 91), because, in his view, the Jews were all communists. He explained: “If Jews persist in supporting communism directly or indirectly, that will be regrettable. By their failure to use the press, the radio, and the banking house – where they stand so prominently – to fight communism as vigorously as they fight Nazism, the Jews invite the charge of being supporters of communism.”He also feared a Jewish-communist conspiracy on American shores, and warned in a speech: “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” And he certainly didn’t think that America should fight the Nazis in battle: “Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English, but citizens of Germany?” (Actually, by the late ’30s, the Nazis had already stripped the Jews of their rights as German citizens. But hate-radio broadcasters, even back then, were not exactly members of the reality-based community.)
Coughlin’s isolationism ultimately doomed him; after Pearl Harbor, and after Hitler declared war on America, there was no longer a mass audience for his message. And the Catholic hierarchy made it official during 1942, when the archbishop in Detroit ordered Coughlin to zip his lip and tend solely to his parish duties. Coughlin did as he was told; for the last 37 years of his life, before dying at age 88 in 1979, he confined his passions to the occasional anti-communist pamphlet.
But what’s less well known, and well worth noting, is that even at his peak Coughlin was not always free to pump his filth however he pleased. CBS, discomfited by his stridency and perhaps even seized by a fit of decency, summarily dropped his show (although this didn’t stop Coughlin; with money from his grassroots fans, he put his show on 60 independent outlets). And a 1939 broadcast industry rule – bowing to the federal government’s belief that free speech on the radio was not limitless – ultimately drove Coughlin off the air in New York and Chicago. The stations insisted on pre-approving his scripts; he refused, and wound up exiled to a tiny station in New Jersey.
Coughlin’s successors – Limbaugh, Beck, and so many others, all of whom have their own scapegoats and straw men – would surely be aghast at these speech restrictions. Today they are far more fortunate. They have a major political party that hops to their tune. They flourish in a time of deregulation, with few government curbs on broadcast speech. They have a major broadcast powerhouse, Fox News, ready and willing to help them inflame and entertain. And, most of all, they have millions of credulous followers – “frenzied, bitter, hostile, irrational.”
No, wait… that’s how historian Alan Brinkley described Coughlin’s followers. The American id is a hardy perennial, and Coughlin was the first to prove it on radio. His successors owe him some graveside homage on this 30th anniversary day. C’mon, guys. It’s a be-there.
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Helen Mosbrook wrote on November 1, 2009 11:55am
Mr. Polman, your article is full of left-wing lies and propaganda. There is nothing hateful about the opinions of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or anyone else on Fox News. These are men who love the United States of America and are trying to save it from demagogues like our current President. I hope it is not too late. [Report Comment]
