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Charles Edward Coughlin was born on October 25, 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was the son of Thomas J. Coughlin, a Great Lakes seaman and church sexton, and Amelia Mahoney, a seamstress. Thomas Coughlin was a United States citizen; Amelia Coughlin, a Canadian. From earliest childhood Coughlin was immersed in Irish-Catholic doctrine and culture.
After graduating from St. Mary's elementary school in Hamilton, he entered St. Michael's High School in Toronto, where he excelled in mathematics and athletics. He then attended St. Michael's College, where he played fullback on the rugby team and gained a reputation as a public speaker.
In 1911, Coughlin entered the Basilian novitiate of St. Michael's. On June 29, 1916, he was ordained a priest and was assigned to Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, where he taught English, psychology, and logic for seven years. He was also known for his production of Shakespearean plays.
When the Basilian community in Canada separated from its French parent order, Coughlin became a priest under the jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Detroit. The popularity of his sermons at St. Leo's Church soon brought him to the attention of Bishop Michael Gallagher, who selected him to establish a new parish in the growing suburb of Royal Oak. The Ku Klux Klan welcomed the new pastor into the community by burning a cross into the parish lawn. This, coupled with the tiny congregation's inability to financially support the operation of the parish, influenced Father Coughlin to try an innovative technique to combat the church's woes.
His first broadcast was on October 17, 1926, on the Detroit station WJR. He was successful from the beginning and more stations began carrying his sermons. Coughlin initially confined his sermons to biblical parables and stories about the life of Christ. In 1930 his format changed, and he began attacking bolshevism and socialism as anti-Christian systems of government.
In 1931 he denounced President Herbert Hoover for failing to combat the depression. He received more than a million letters supporting his stance. Thereafter, his radio "sermons" became exclusively political, economic, and social in content. He stressed the concept of social justice as espoused by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum, which committed the Catholic church to the improvement of the lot of the working man.
Coughlin's favorite scapegoats were international bankers, whom he claimed ran a supranational organization that controlled the world. Coughlin broadcast on Sunday afternoons from the top of a seven-story granite "Crucifixion Tower" adjoining the Shrine of the Little Flower Church, which he had constructed in 1928 with listener contributions. Newspapers around the country ran stories about Coughlin's Sunday sermons, and national magazines carried feature articles about the "radio priest. "
By 1934 he was receiving more than ten thousand letters per day, many of them enclosing cash. His clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred, and he had four personal secretaries.
As his sermons became more controversial, CBS requested that he tone down his oratory. Instead, on January 4, 1931, he devoted his talk to the attempts of CBS to censor him. Pro-Coughlin letters deluged the network and provided the priest with the notion that he could now safely speak out on any subject. CBS promptly canceled his contract. Undaunted, Coughlin established his own network of more than thirty stations stretching from Maine to California. His sermons were occasionally heard by as many as 40 million persons, the largest radio audience in the world.
In 1934, Coughlin established the National Union for Social Justice, which, he explained, was not a political party but a nationwide, nonpartisan people's lobby. Its sixteen principles sought to protect the common working man from the abuses of capitalism. The NUSJ's greatest victory was its eleventh-hour campaign to block the administration's attempt to have the United States join the World Court. In a special nationwide broadcast, Coughlin decried the loss of national sovereignty that this membership would cause. An avalanche of 40, 000 anti-Court telegrams helped stop Senate passage of the bill. Although the National Union attracted approximately 5 million members, it failed to influence further legislation.
In 1936, Coughlin launched a weekly newspaper called Social Justice to promote congressional candidates and reinforce his radio themes. Disillusioned with FDR, Father Coughlin created the Union party a few months before the election of 1936, and chose as its standard-bearer Representative William Lemke of North Dakota. Other supporters included the remnants of Huey P. Long's "Share the Wealth" movement led by Gerald L. K. Smith, and Dr. Francis E. Townsend's group, which sought government pension payments of $200 per month for all over age sixty-five. Coughlin spoke at rallies around the country, castigating FDR and the New Deal. In Cleveland he referred to FDR as a "great betrayer and liar. " Lemke captured only 1 million votes, but Coughlin simply became more extreme in his views and more hysterical in his crusade against Communism.
In 1938, Coughlin accused the Jews of being responsible for all the nation's ills. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, " an account of a purported Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world, appeared in Social Justice. Henry Ford had published this same forged document more than a decade earlier.
Coughlin was forced off the air in 1940 by a National Association of Broadcasters code that forbade controversial broadcasts. After Pearl Harbor, Coughlin continued to be involved with isolationist, pro-Nazi groups who claimed the war had been caused by a British-Jewish-Roosevelt conspiracy. On May 1, 1942, Archbishop Mooney ordered Father Coughlin to desist or be defrocked. The priest obeyed. The postmaster general banned his publications from the mails. Coughlin remained pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower until his retirement in 1966. For the most part he restricted himself to priestly duties, but occasionally he issued a parish bulletin or a sermon warning of the dangers of Communism.
After his forced retirement, Coughlin moved to another suburb, living comfortably but privately, saying Mass each morning in his private chapel.
He died at his home in nearby Birmingham, Michigan.
Father Coughlin was the first American to utilize the radio to advocate political doctrines. He also was a pioneer in pushing American Catholicism into the arena of political activism. Whether or not Father Coughlin ever constituted a threat to democracy, he undoubtedly was one of the most powerful figures outside of the government during the Depression era. The first edition of Coughlin's complete radio discourses, published in 1933, sold nearly a million copies.
In 1932, Coughlin became an ardent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and considered himself at least partially responsible for his election victory. Often referring to FDR as "the boss, " Coughlin sprinkled his 1933 sermons with such slogans as "Roosevelt or Ruin" and "The New Deal Is Christ's Deal. " Roosevelt never reciprocated this sycophancy and always treated Father Coughlin with diffidence, but considered his adulation useful in attracting the Catholic vote. Coughlin asserted that the solution to the depression was to place more money in circulation, and he assured his audiences that the president was on the brink of initiating these inflationary policies. When Roosevelt did not push for such legislation, Coughlin became more strident in his insistence upon the nationalization of credit, currency, and the Federal Reserve System.
Coughlin defended Nazi actions against Communism and accused the Jews of financing the Russian Revolution. In August 1938, Coughlin organized the Christian Front as the "last defense" against Communism. Consisting mostly of young Catholic thugs, its principal activity was baiting and violently beating Jewish people.
He believed that radio would serve the many immigrants who were unable to read.
Quotations:
"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. "
"My purpose is to help eradicate from the world its mania for persecution, to help align all good men, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, Christian and non-Christian, in a battle to stamp out the ferocity, the barbarism and the hate of this bloody era. I want the good Jews with me, and I'm called a Jew baiter, an anti-Semite. "
Father Coughlin, who weighed about two hundred pounds and was five feet, ten inches tall, possessed charm, geniality, and good humor. He exuded charisma and convinced people that he actually knew the answers to the nation's problems. His rich, crisp voice with its slight Irish brogue was called "without a doubt one of the great speaking voices of the twentieth century. "
