Charles Edward Coughlin was a Roman-Catholic priest who rose to prominence during the Great Depression through his popular radio broadcasts. Father Coughlin also became a powerful political figure who supported FDR’s New Deal, but was later forced off the radio due to his extremist views.
Early Life
Charles Edward Coughlin was born on October 25, 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario. After graduating from St. Michael’s College in Toronto, he entered St. Basil’s Seminary and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1916.
Coughlin moved to the United States and was incardinated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit in 1923. Three years later, he was assigned to the Shrine of the Little Flower, which was a small congregation of 25 Catholic families. Owing largely to his powerful sermons, Coughlin grew the congregation to more than 600 parishioners.
Radio Broadcasts
In 1926, Coughlin began broadcasting a weekly program on a local Detroit radio station. While he initially discussed religion, his broadcasts became more political as the Great Depression set in. CBS later picked up his program and broadcast it nationally for four years.
After Coughlin refused to back off his criticism of President Herbert Hoover’s Administration, CBS declined the renew the contract on his radio show. Coughlin went on to establish his own radio network, which expanded to include 30 stations. During the 1932 presidential election, Coughlin publicly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once FDR was elected, Coughlin used his radio broadcasts to tout the benefits of the New Deal.
Coughlin’s popularity continued to grow, with the first edition of his complete radio scripts selling more than a million copies. In 1934, he created the National Union for Social Justice, a political organization that advocated for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and workers’ rights.
Over time, Coughlin split with President Roosevelt, failing to support his re-election in 1936. By the end of the 1930s, Coughlin had become even more critical of FDR, accusing the President of “leaning toward international socialism or sovietism.” Arthur Miller wrote:
Father Charles E. Coughlin, who by 1940 was confiding to his ten million Depression-battered listeners that the president was a liar controlled by both the Jewish bankers and, astonishingly enough, the Jewish Communists, the same tribe that twenty years earlier had engineered the Russian Revolution… He was arguing… that Hitlerism was the German nation’s innocently defensive response to the threat of Communism, that Hitler was only against ‘bad Jews’, especially those born outside Germany.
Coughlin’s views grew more extreme, as did his anti-Semitism. When the U.S. entered World War II, the National Association of Broadcasters effectively ended Coughlin’s radio career. The U.S. Post Office also prohibited dissemination of his publication, Social Justice. On May 1,1942, Archbishop Francis Mooney ordered Coughlin to cease his political activities under threat of being defrocked. Coughlin retired from the Shrine of the Little Flower Church in 1966. He died on October 27, 1979.
