By Dane Giraud on Plainsight.nz…
On a night in that grey depressive season of 1938, a filth blanketed New York City.
The bandwidth occupied by WMCA.
The pro-Mussolini pro-Hitler priest-turned-radio host Father Charles E. Coughlin made an address to his substantial audience (tens of millions of Americans every week), that bore a closer resemblance to something out of the toxic leaves of Der Stürmer than to any text in the New Testament.
Back in 1934, Father Coughlin established a political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. At one time a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, Coughlin fell out with the president over his perceived warmth to bankers. His union’s platform called for monetary reforms, the nationalization of major industries and railroads, and the protection of labour rights. While not effectively run, its membership would run into the millions, which bore witness to his incredible reach, in a time of material hardship and global instability.
While the original plan of a radio show was to preach the word and share his flavour of social justice, an attack on Jewish bankers changed the course of his radio career. If one was concerned with numbers only, the evolution to a fascist mouthpiece was a smart one.
Read the full article on Plainsight.nz here.
