Fascist Hate Radio Priest Father Coughlin Incited Flock To Form An Army, March On Washington, 1939

[appalachiablue]

- Father Coughlin, 'grandfather of hate radio' speaks against the Federal reserve in 1936 at a political rally in Illinois.
_____________

- 'The Deplatforming of Father Coughlin.' The story of the anti-Semitic radio priest offers an intriguing analog-age precedent to the digital-age debates over the limits of free expression. Slate, Jan. 21, 2021. - Excerpts, Ed. -

On Nov. 20, 1938, WMCA in New York had enough of Father Charles E. Coughlin’s anti-Semitic bile. After a supposed homily entitled “Persecution: Jewish and Christian,” in which he denounced Jews in language that might have been lifted from Der Stürmer, an announcer broke in to distance the station from Coughlin’s talk. “Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered many misstatements of fact,” he informed listeners. Donald Flamm, the president of WMCA, later pledged “not to permit a repetition” of Coughlin’s inflammatory remarks, words that were

“calculated to stir up religious and racial hatred and dissension in this country.”

The story of Coughlin, the demagogic radio priest who dominated American airwaves during the Great Depression, offers an intriguing analog-age precedent to the digital-age debates over the limits of free expression. Then as now, the serene pleasure of no longer having to listen to a noxious voice blare incessantly in the ear coexists with a queasy unease at the realization of how suddenly and imperiously the rulers of corporate media can switch off one’s microphone.. Disenchanted with FDR’s progressive agenda and particularly his recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, Coughlin navigated further and further away from the mainstream. In the election of 1936, he broke dramatically with FDR—it was no longer Roosevelt or ruin, but Roosevelt and ruin. He urged Catholics to vote for the Coughlin-anointed candidate, a nonentity..

Nazi Germany characterized efforts to rein in Coughlin as “a typical case of Jewish terrorism of American public opinion.”

What earned Coughlin his place in the era’s hall of lunatic shame was his increasingly explicit anti-Semitism. The Jews were their own worst enemy Coughlin said in a 1935 interview.

As the Great Depression dragged on, the nasty insinuations turned more brazen and blunt.

It was the forward march of Nazism overseas that would eventually transform the priest into a pariah. The tipping-point year—for both Coughlin and Europe—was 1938. Appropriately, the sound of the Nazi goosesteps came directly into American homes over shortwave radio, live, from Vienna and Berlin: the annexation of Austria in March, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in October, and the anti-Semitic pogrom now known as Kristallnacht, unleashed on the night of Nov. 9–10. Though the domestic zeitgeist had become firmly anti-Nazi, Coughlin continued to use his radio platform to slander Jews. It was just 10 days after Kristallnacht that WMCA in New York felt compelled to call out Coughlin’s many “many misstatements of fact.”

FCC (Federal Communications Commission) Chairman Frank R. McNinch had recently warned broadcasters that should anyone try to “debase radio” as “an instrument of racial or religious persecution,” the FCC would step in and “prevent any such shocking offense.” McNinch emphasized that FDR, a radio expert in his own right, “has consistently sought the safeguarding of radio as an instrument of democracy, never to be used to injure any racial, religious, or other group.” On Sept. 17, 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, Coughlin crossed the line from insult to incitement.

He urged his followers to organize “an army of peace” and march on Washington to protest any change in the neutrality laws that would permit FDR to aid European democracies in the path of the Nazi blitzkrieg.

Anti-Nazi groups called on the FCC to stop the priest’s “use of the airwaves for the purpose of inciting the American people to riot and civil war.”

Coughlin, said the Friends of Democracy of New York, was “an enemy of democracy, a disciple of fascism, an advocate of violence, and a purveyor of racial hatred.”...

Full article,
https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/father-coughlin-deplatforming-radio-social-media.html

[mitch96]

1. From what I've read this guy was a real piece of work.. The Limbaugh of his day.. nt

[appalachiablue]

2. It's estimated he had 20 mill listeners, definitely the grandfather

of US Hate Broadcast. One would think we learned after Coughlin, Julius Streicher and Goebbels; the reason the Fairness Doctrine was enacted in 1949, post-war.

[Cirque du So-What]

3. In an interesting parallel

Coughlin would likely have been charged with sedition, but his radio program was cancelled. I know it's not the exact same as rump and twitter, but it's interesting nonetheless.

[appalachiablue]

4. Disturbing parallels, we learned the power of hate radio, film

and propaganda by the 1940s. In 1949 the US Fairness Doctrine was enacted as a result, to regulate broadcast media.

[UTUSN]

5. Yip, LIMBOsevic the First. & it seems that priests and bishops aren't reined in by Popes.