American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Consciously or not, American communists, socialists, and trade unionists were acting in the spirit of the great working-class movements that had emerged during the industrial revolution. Millions of Americans, however, had grown up in another, more middle-class tradition that rivaled working-class ideology in its intellectual and moral power and its social impact. This was the social-reform movement within the three great Western religions, stemming from the emphasis on collective morality, philanthropy, and responsibility in Judaism; from reformism, abolitionism, and the missionary spirit—including missions to the urban poor—in the Protestant churches; from the heightened Roman Catholic concern with social justice.

  This last was not least. As the miseries of the factory system became more acute and widespread during the nineteenth century, Catholics had turned back to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas of six hundred years before—especially his definition of a just order that balances social duties with individual rights—and to other thinkers and actors in the Thomist tradition. These ideas came to a dramatic focus in 1891with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, or On the Condition of the Working Class. While broadly concerned with maintaining an ordered and equitable society under the tutelage of the Church, Leo’s call for social action to relieve poverty was a trumpet blast for hundreds of young priests who every day, in their parishes, confronted the human wreckage left behind by the march of industry.

  In the industrial city of Toronto at the end of the century existed an order, the Basilian Fathers, that was deeply stirred by the Catholic movement for social justice. To a school run by this order there came a twelve-year-old boy escorted by his parents, a seamstress and a church sexton. The boy’s mother, it was said, on giving birth had murmured a prayer: “A girl—for the—convent,” or if a boy, “please, God—a priest.” Brought up by these pious parents, the boy did become a priest, after starring at school as scholar and athlete. Before his proud mother in the front pew he celebrated his first mass in the summer of 1916. His name was Charles E. Coughlin.

  There seemed nothing remarkable about this young priest as he went about his parish duties during the next few years—except for two things. One was his persuasive, almost enticing voice, warm, resonant, portentous. The other was his willingness to use that newfangled device, the radio. He had hardly settled into his final parish in Royal Oak, twelve miles north of downtown Detroit, when he began building a new church, using up-to-date fund-raising devices, and arranging with a local radio station to offer sermons over the air in order to attract new parishioners. Soon that voice— adorned with a bit of an Irish brogue and charged with such “manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm,” in Wallace Stegner’s words, as to be one of the “great speaking voices of the twentieth century”—was attracting listeners by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands, and finally by the millions.

  Success did not soon spoil Charles Coughlin—or at least cause him to forget who he was and where he was. He was a priest under the authority of a bishop to whom he gave unceasing and proper obeisance, receiving in turn the protection—against politicians, the public, even others in the hierarchy—that only a bishop could provide. And he was a priest in the Detroit area, a social wilderness even before the depression and an economic wasteland after it struck. Sickened by the poverty and desperation all around him—Detroit had the highest jobless rate of any major city by April 1930—the young priest struck directly at the foundation of the problem: unbridled capitalism. It was not worth saving, he charged; “in fact it is a detriment to civilization.” Often he coupled these attacks with denunciations of communism, socialism, divorce, birth control, Prohibition.

  Plenty of people were attacking capitalism by this time; Coughlin stood out for his audacity. He named names: Herbert Hoover, the Rothschilds, the Dillon-Reads, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—Morgan, Mellon, Mills, and Meyer. He lambasted such Catholic heroes as Al Smith for “selling out” to Morgan and other capitalists, such Catholic dignitaries as William Cardinal O’Connell for his notorious “silence on social justice.” By 1934 Coughlin was simply a phenomenon, with a steady weekly audience of at least ten million, scores of assistants to handle the million letters that might come in after a major speech, and a magnificent new church of his own next to a 150-foot stone tower in which he had his office.

  One man the young priest revered, aside from his bishop—Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had had some contact with the New York governor before and during the 1932 campaign, and had even worked quietly for him at the convention; he could not openly endorse Roosevelt but made up for this with ferocious attacks on Hoover. After the Hundred Days, however, his adulation became public, and almost total. It was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” The New Deal was “Christ’s Deal.” Coughlin wrote fulsome letters to the President, praising FDR as magnificent, fearless, a natural-born artist with the radio. He adjured his followers to support the President, to love him. Even more, he began to insinuate himself into the extended White House. He referred to the President as the “boss”; called staff members by their first names; offered free advice. On their part, friends of the Administration such as Joseph Kennedy and Frank Murphy held Coughlin’s hand to keep him on board.

  As Roosevelt’s popularity waxed, so did Coughlin’s. His mail, his audience, his unsolicited donations from listeners rose to new highs. Earlier Coughlin had demonstrated his power when CBS, the radio network over which he spoke, asked him to water down his fiery speeches. CBS retreated after Coughlin indignantly appealed to his listeners. When CBS later refused to renew his contract, the “Radio Priest” simply organized his own network. Thereafter he could overcome complaints from local radio stations by threatening to take his orations—and his audiences—elsewhere. And his audiences were broadening as he reached out beyond the desperately needful people of industrial Michigan to members of the lower-middle and middle-middle classes—to persons who had gained and were clinging to some bourgeois respectability, to skilled craft workers, even to farmers.

  By 1934 Coughlin appeared unassailable, for his power lay in his own personal constituency—his audience. For him the power was the medium that linked him to his followers. But his followers had power over him too. His listeners were leading him even while he was leading them. As Coughlin lauded Roosevelt and denounced the “plutocrats,” he aroused his listeners’ hopes and hatreds to fever pitch. Soon the priest began to have policy differences with the President; Coughlin’s central concern was with money and its control, which he wanted shifted from the bankers to the government, while Roosevelt had broader legislative concerns. But the widening gap was both political and psychological; Coughlin was now on a separate trajectory from the President’s, and his deep-seated ideological differences with FDR were bound to mount under electoral pressures.

  Late in 1934 Coughlin announced his plan to form a new association, the National Union for Social Justice, as “an articulate, organized lobby of the people.” Thus he would mobilize his audience for action. There would be card files, membership lists, local meetings. But no one doubted the nature of the symbol and the instrument of the new organization. It was the microphone.

  The microphone gave another commanding figure a strong grip on the imagination of the American people during the early 1930s. Huey Long was one of the first politicians to use radio, as far back as the mid-1920s, but the power of his visual impact—his rumpled hair, loosened collar, and violent gestures—did not carry through the medium, and his sharp, insistent voice contrasted with Coughlin’s smooth and sonorous delivery. As he reached for a national audience in the early 1930s, however, Long learned to moderate his voice and switch easily back and forth between “Luziana corn pone” for home audiences and a clear and resonant style for the networks. By 1935 his political speeches over NBC were reaching huge audiences, exceeded only by those of Coughlin and Roosevelt.

  What Long said, as much as how he said it, was arresting. Although his policy positions
shifted somewhat over the years, his central, unvarying pitch was that Roosevelt, Morgan, and the rest had seized control of the nation’s riches. The only solution was his Share Our Wealth plan. He offered “facts and figures.” Two percent of the people owned 60 percent of the wealth, he contended. It was as though all Americans had been invited to a great barbecue. “God called: ‘Come to my feast.’ ” But the big capitalists “stepped up and took enough for 120,000,000 people and left only enough for 5,000,000 for all the other 125,000,000 to eat. And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back.”

  How put it back? Long proposed that the government confiscate all inheritances of more than $1 million, take in income tax any and all money a person made over $1 million in a year, and heavily tax existing wealth. Then would come the sharing. The government would guarantee every needy family a minimum income of $2000-$3000 a year. Even better, each such family would be granted a basic “household estate” of $5000, “enough for a home, an automobile, a radio,” and other goods. Government would also support stepped-up aid to farmers, pensions for the aged, education for the young, public works, shorter working hours. Long left many of the details vague and the complexities unaddressed, but he promised to call in “some great minds” to help him.

  Such proposals created an uproar in the press, even in the New Deal atmosphere. All this was demagogic pandering at its worst, cried conservative editors. Long himself, as H. L. Mencken had perceived earlier, was “simply a backwoods demagogue of the oldest and most familiar model— impudent, blackguardly, and infinitely prehensile.” It was easy for economists to punch holes in his economic program; at the very least, the available money, no matter how drastically squeezed out of the rich, would not have met the human needs he dramatized. Still, however simplistic the plan, it was not “an attempt to divert attention away from real problems; it did not focus resentment on irrelevant scapegoats or phony villains,” Alan Brinkley concluded. “It pointed, instead, to an issue of genuine importance; for the concentration of wealth was, even if not in precisely the form Long described it, a fundamental dilemma of the American economy.” It was also a fundamental moral dilemma of American democracy.

  Long expected the uproar, he welcomed it, he thrived on it. He was a child of conflict, born in a state almost schizoid in its division between the Catholic, French Cajun, and mercantile cultures of southern Louisiana and the Protestant, lumber, oil, small-farm cultures upstate, born in the northern poor-white region that had been seared by populist and other challenges to the old white power structure. As a child he had embodied conflict, fighting—though not physically if he could help it—with his brothers and playmates, infuriating his teachers and other elders with his impudent questions, later harshly attacking anyone who stood in the way of his political ambition. His pugnacity and tireless campaigning paid off early. In 1918, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected the youngest member ever of the state’s Railroad Commission. He then spent ten years stumping up and down the state, and in 1928 won the governorship.

  He looked the part of the fighter as he castigated his enemies, his rubbery features tightening in righteous wrath, hair streaming down on his face, arms pumping, voice driving and piercing. His tactics as governor provoked his foes to fight back through investigations, the courts, an impeachment effort, appeals to Washington, but with little success. Long’s power stemmed more and more from practical action. Out of his contempt for the old guard, the wide exposure to suffering people he had gained as a door-to-door salesman, and the snubs he was handed by the socially privileged of his adopted city of Shreveport came a lifelong concern for the poor that as governor he converted into tangible results. In a state crying for expanded public services, he and his allies immensely enlarged the Louisiana highway system, built bridges, improved public health services, provided schoolchildren with free textbooks, upgraded the school system in general and Louisiana State University very much in particular.

  A “bad Huey” appeared to struggle with a “good Huey”—his ruthless power-seeking versus his concern for people, his challenge to the establishment that included an unconstitutional effort to tax advertising in large newspapers, his attack on privilege that left out solid measures such as child-labor laws, minimum-wage laws, old-age insurance. Still, by the early 1930s the “Kingfish,” as he now liked to be called, had clamped so firm a grip on Louisiana politics that he could agitate on the national stage as a United States senator. This brought him into political collusion and then collision with Roosevelt.

  The collusion was strictly practical. When the Roosevelt forces at the 1932 Democratic convention supported the seating of Long’s delegation, the senator worked to keep Louisiana and other southern delegates in line for the New York governor. The two men had never liked each other. Long considered Roosevelt a political dilettante; after Montana senator Burton Wheeler, along with George Norris, had helped bring him around to the governor, Long told Wheeler, “I didn’t like your son of a bitch,” but would support him. Roosevelt, for his part, viewed the Louisiana senator as one more strident voice that could be kept in harmony by judicious combinations of evasion, flattery, and deals. But behind practicalities and personalities lay an ideological conflict that Roosevelt had not yet fully grasped. Long was determined to carry his populist and egalitarian ideas into the national arena, while the President was still engaged in brokerage. Meanwhile, the Kingfish would maintain his grip on his Louisiana base, using his own judicious combination of force, fraud, and favors.

  The collision was not long in coming. The Hundred Days electrified the country but turned off Huey Long. He opposed the Economy Act, anti-inflation efforts, the Administration’s rejection of the veterans’ bonus payment, and above all the NRA. On a visit to Roosevelt, the Kingfish played the boor, keeping his straw hat on, or whipping it off to tap the President on the knee or elbow; but he could not puncture FDR’s genial façade. “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow,” he muttered on leaving the White House, “I can’t win any decision over him.” About ready to break away from Long, the Administration cut off patronage and reopened a suspended probe of Louisiana shenanigans. Long compared Hoover to a hoot owl and Roosevelt to a scrootch owl.

  “A hoot owl bangs into the roost and knocks the hen clean off, and catches her while she’s falling. But a scrootch owl slips into the roost and scrootches up to the hen and talks softly to her. And the hen just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know, there ain’t no hen. ”

  Long would evade the scrootch owl. Early in 1934 he announced over a radio network his plan for a new national organization, the Share Our Wealth Society, with the slogan “Every Man a King.” It would fight for the egalitarian principles the Kingfish had long since proclaimed: heavy taxes on big fortunes and incomes, guaranteed family income, and the rest. Long was now adding a plan for local Share Our Wealth clubs that would blanket the nation. Popular reaction was quick, strong, and sustained. Tens of thousands of letters and applications poured into Long’s offices during the succeeding months—so many that Long had to set up a work force that spilled out of his Senate office into extra rooms and even into the corridors. By the end of 1934 his Share Our Wealth movement boasted of having three million members—though observers then and later differed over the extent to which this was a solid following or a “glorified mailing list.”

  By this time Long had established a communications kingdom of his own, embracing his monthly newspaper, American Progress; his autobiography, Every Man a King; a huge mailing and “membership” list; and frequent recourse to the NBC radio network. This last was crucial. Ad-libbing freely, using his voice skillfully, attacking his foes unstintingly, quoting the Bible promiscuously, he built up by 1935 one of NBC’s biggest audiences.

  It was clear that the 1936 election campaign would be dominated by three masters of the radio. The age of electronic political communication was already underway
.

  The Politics of Tumult

  On the face of it, Roosevelt seemed to be riding high politically as he entered his midterm in January 1935. He and his party had won a convincing victory in the congressional elections two months before. Many of his New Deal programs were solidly in place. The great mass of people still loved him, many to the point of veneration.

  The President, in fact, was headed into a time of troubles, and he may have known this, at least intuitively. While European affairs were relatively quiet for the moment, Hitler had consolidated his power and seemed more threatening and truculent than ever. Not to be outdone, Mussolini was threatening war in Ethiopia over territory on the border of Italian Somaliland. The murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia by a Croatian terrorist in Marseilles had left people with revived memories of the assassination in Sarajevo twenty years earlier, and its dire consequences. In January the President, a supporter of the World Court, was handed a sharp reminder about the limits of his own power over foreign relations when the Senate vote for membership in the World Court failed of the required two-thirds.

  But Roosevelt’s main troubles lay at home. Politically he was little daunted by the resurgence of business opposition on the right, because the Liberty League and the rest gave him choice campaign targets. Far more threatening was the mobilization of popular forces behind Long, Coughlin, and the other voices of protest; and probably Roosevelt sensed that the expectations he had aroused in his first two years were rising to new heights and would now sweep back onto the Administration. It is doubtful, though, that the President yet felt intimidated by this prospect; he was an old hand, after all, at operating in the political center against both right and left.

  Rather, his main problem during these cold winter weeks was intellectual. This leader who had showed himself such a master of experimentation, improvisation, and tactical maneuver now had to face hard strategic alternatives that embraced policy and program as well as politics. He had still made no final choice between conciliating or at least mollifying business and seriously reforming it, between ordering and rationalizing business in the spirit of the NRA and atomizing or regulating it in the spirit of Louis Brandeis, between balancing the budget and spending heavily to meet acute human needs. Go left or stay in the center? To move right was not an option for the New Deal.