Voices of Protest HUEY LONG, FATHER COUGHLIN, AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION ALAN BRINKLEY VOICES OF PROTEST Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression ALAN BRINKLEY Vintage Books A Division of Random House New York First Vintage Books Edition, August 1983 Copyright © 1982 by Alan Brinkley All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1982. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint material: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, for excerpts fom the Wallace Memoirs, Copyight © 1976 by Columbia University and the Warburg Memoirs, Copyright © 1980 by Columbia University Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Brinkley, Alan. Voices of protest. 1. United States—Politics and government—1933-1945. 2. Long, Huey Pierce, 1893-1935. 3. Coughlin, Charles Edward, 1891- 4. United States—Social conditions—1933-1945. ;. United States—Economic conditions—1933-1945. L Title. E806.B75 1983 973-9i’6 83-3496 elSBN: 978-0-307-80322-1 To Anita Gordon CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface Prologue 1. The Kingfish Ascending 2. Beyond Louisiana 3. Crisis and Renewal A. The Radio Priest 5. “Roosevelt or Ruin” Photo Insert 6. Searching for Power 7. The Dissident Ideology 8. Organizing q. Followers lo. Uneasy Alliances 7. The Dissident Ideology 8. Organizing q. Followers 10. Uneasy Alliances 11. The Last Phase Epilogue Appendix I: The OuestioTi of Anti-Semitism mid the Problem of Fascism Appendix II: The lo.q.'T Democratic National Committee Poll Appendix III: Father Coualilm’s Preamble mid PriTiciples of the National Union for Social Justice Notes Locations of Manuscript Collections About the Author Illustrations follow this page PREFACE T his is a book about two remarkable men—Huey P. Long, a first-term United States Senator from the red-clay, piney-woods country of northern Louisiana; and Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit. From modest origins, they rose together in the early years of the Great Depression to become the two most successful leaders of national political dissidence of their era. This is also a book about the nature of political protest in modern America. It is an examination of the imposing political movements that Long and Coughlin led; of the millions of men and women from all regions of the country who admired and supported them; of the organizations they formed, the alliances they forged, and the ideas they espoused. Long and Coughlin presided over a popular insurgency more powerful than any since the populist movement of the 1890s. As such, they gave evidence of the PREFACE X his is a book about two remarkable men—Huey P. Long, a first-term United States Senator from the red-clav, piney-woods country of northern Louisiana; and Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit. From modest origins, they rose together in the early years of the Great Depression to become the two most successful leaders of national political dissidence of their era. This is also a book about the nature of political protest in modern America. It is an examination of the imposing political movements that Long and Coughlin led; of the millions of men and women from all regions of the country who admired and supported them; of the organizations they formed, the alliances they forged, and the ideas they espoused. Long and Coughlin presided over a popular insurgency more powerful than any since the populist movement of the 1890s. As such, they gave evidence of the extent and the limits of popular willingness to challenge the nation’s economic and political system. These latter concerns help to explain why I have chosen to treat Long and Coughlin together in this study. The two men were not personal friends or formal political allies. Indeed, they viewed each other with much suspicion and some contempt. But despite the tenuousness of their personal relationship, their political movements wrere closely—in fact, inextricably—linked. Long and Coughlin drew’ from similar political traditions and espoused similar ideologies. And as time went on, their constituencies increasingly overlapped and merged. Politicians and journalists in the 1930s saw nothing inconsistent about discussing these two movements as part of a common phenomenon; they did so constantly. There is good reason to do so again. Anyone attempting to assess the public impact of Long and Coughlin confronts several obstacles from the start. The first is the personalities and careers of the two men themselves, the powerful and ominous images that both continue to evoke. For more than seven years, Huey Long wielded a control of the government of his native Louisiana so nearly total, so antithetical to many of the nation’s democratic traditions, that there was some justification for popular characterizations of him as a “dictator.” Mention of his name decades later brings to mind a vision of ruthless, brutal power, of the reckless ambition of Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark, of the specter of despotism. Father Coughlin, for his part, became after 1938, in the last years of his public career, one of the nation’s most notorious extremists: an outspoken anti-Semite, a rabid anti-communist, a strident isolationist, and, increasingly, a cautious admirer of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Those who recall him almost invariably remember a man of hysterical passion and hatred, a harsh and embittered bigot.1 Such images are not altogether false, but neither are they complete. Long’s remarkable accumulation of power was largely a local phenomenon, of concern to few outside Louisiana. Coughlins bigotry was late in appearing; and those who heard him before 1938—by which time he was already in decline as a public figure— were generally unaware of and unaffected by it. It is always difficult to separate the character of a political movement from the characters of those who lead it. At times, perhaps, it is also inappropriate to do so. In the cases of both Long and Coughlin, however, controversial personal careers have tended to obscure and distort a larger political significance. A second obstacle to the assessment of these movements is a shortage of evidence. Neither the leaders themselves nor their organizations left any papers or records of significance. Both movements existed in an era before modern opinion­ polling. Only after both had in large measure collapsed did either face the test of a national election. Many avenues to an evaluation of their strength, behavior, and character, therefore, are closed. I have attempted to compensate for the absence of more systematic records by relying upon a wide range of other, often fragmentan" sources: the letters and writings of supporters of Long and Coughlin; national and local press reports of the activities of the two movements; speeches and publications of the two leaders; and obsen^ations of their impact by other political figures of the time.- There is, finally, a third obstacle to the study of these movements: the legacy of nearly five decades of harsh ideological debate over the nature of mass politics. Few