Charles Coughlin

Charles Edward Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on October 25, 1891, and ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Toronto in 1916. In 1926 he became pastor of a new parish outside Detroit, the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, and began broadcasting Sunday sermons on a local station, WJR, to fill empty pews in a small congregation.

The broadcasts outgrew the parish almost immediately. By 1930 Coughlin's Radio League of the Little Flower carried a national program on CBS, and by the mid 1930s his weekly Golden Hour of the Shrine of the Little Flower aired on as many as 58 stations to an estimated 30 million listeners, a share of the national radio audience no religious broadcaster before or since has matched. Listener mail arrived at a rate of tens of thousands of letters a week, funding a broadcasting operation on a scale that dwarfed his parish.

Coughlin's early programs mixed Catholic teaching with Depression era populism and support for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He broke with Roosevelt by the mid 1930s and moved toward increasingly conspiratorial and nativist politics, laying the theological and technical groundwork, a national audience assembled entirely through purchased and donated airtime, that both his own later broadcasts and rival evangelical broadcasters would build on. The National Religious Broadcasters, founded in 1944, formed in part from evangelical anxiety that networks might simply hand religious airtime to whichever voice, Coughlin's among them, drew the largest audience.

By the late 1930s, Coughlin's broadcasts and his magazine, Social Justice, had become vehicles for open antisemitism. He blamed Jewish bankers for the Depression and for the 1917 Russian Revolution. In late 1938, Social Justice printed weekly installments of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated text long used to justify persecution of Jews. After the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, Coughlin told listeners on November 20 that Jewish persecution had only followed earlier Christian persecution, and on December 5 he broadcast material documented as lifted nearly verbatim from a speech by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's own research holds Coughlin among the most prominent antisemitic voices in American public life of the era.

The mechanism that ended his career was regulatory rather than criminal. On September 23, 1940, Coughlin announced the cancellation of the Golden Hour program. On April 14, 1942, the Postmaster General suspended Social Justice's second class mailing permit on wartime sedition grounds, cutting off its distribution. On May 1, 1942, Archbishop Edward Mooney of Detroit, acting under authority the Catholic Church held over its own clergy, ordered Coughlin to cease all political activity and confine himself to pastoral duties, under threat of defrocking and possible prosecution. Coughlin was never criminally charged. He remained pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower, all future public remarks reviewed in advance by the archdiocese, until his retirement in 1966, and died in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on October 27, 1979.