Reverend Coughlin and Donald Trump

Has anyone resembling Donald Trump achieved celebrity status in the American past? Has anything like the Trump phenomenon happened before? The other day I ran across a 1939 booklet by Reverend Charles E. Coughlin titled Am I an Anti-Semite? The word “I” in the title struck me. Looking online to see if Rev. Coughlin’s career resembled Donald Trump’s, I found that Coughlin had often been characterized as egotistical. Although Trump is not an anti-Semite, he is often called narcissistic and he even describes his narcissism as a useful quality in a leader. The label “demagogue” that’s being applied this year to Trump was often applied in the 1930s to Rev. Coughlin.

Both Coughlin and Trump served apprenticeships in media prior to achieving nationwide adulation. Coughlin’s famous hour-long Sunday afternoon radio sermons began back in 1926 and Trump’s career on television was starring in 14 years of The Apprentice reality TV program.

Two of their favorite themes are identical—stopping immigration into the U.S. and fostering assertive U.S. nationalism. Rev. Coughlin’s first three years on the radio had been devoted mainly to religion, but when the Great Depression struck he turned his emphasis to the problems American working people were facing, and that began his mass following. By the end of 1934, his radio audience had grown to an estimated 30 million listeners and he was receiving about 10,000 letters a day, up to 80 or 90,000 letters a week. Like Trump trumpeting his poll numbers and his victories in primary elections, Coughlin too exulted publicly in his popularity.

In 1932, Coughlin endorsed Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential candidacy and after Inauguration Day his continuing support helped Roosevelt start shifting leftward. But then in mid-1934, Coughlin turned against Roosevelt, charging that his failure to fundamentally change the U.S. money system was a fatal flaw. (Coughlin wanted to have the creation of money based on the country’s productive output rather than on the amount of loans issued by banks.)

When world tensions rose in the late 1930s, Coughlin ardently opposed internationalism and promoted U.S. nationalism,

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which he tied to Christianity. He endorsed General Franco of Spain as a Christian rebel in the mold of George Washington. In mid-January 1939, when Congress seemed about to exempt Spain’s loyalist government from U.S. neutrality laws, overnight Coughlin created a mass campaign of telegrams to U.S. senators that defeated the lifeline for the Spanish republic, which then lost Barcelona, and with it Spain’s civil war.

Coughlin also battled other manifestations of “internationalism,” especially any aimed against Nazi Germany. He relied on his listeners’ ignorance of world affairs (another affinity with Trump) by portraying world leaders’ alarm about Hitler as being due to Nazi persecution of German Jews. (The real reason was because Hitler threatened Europe’s balance of power.) To embellish his viewpoint, Coughlin began claiming after Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”—a riot against Jews in Nazi Germany) that “not one Jew was put to death officially for his race or religion” (Why Leave Our Own? 13 Addresses on Christianity and Americanism, January 29, 1939, 49; note a parallel here with Donald Trump’s disregard for facts). Nazism, said Coughlin, was “a defense mechanism set up against Communism, and… atheistic Jews were altogether too prominent in the promotion of Communism” (47).

Soon after World War II started in Europe, the U.S. government promulgated new radio regulations that ended Coughlin’s access to many major radio stations. Meanwhile, the Catholic hierarchy was trying more quietly to restrain him. But not until well after the U.S. officially entered World War II as a belligerent did the Catholic Church successfully muzzle Rev. Coughlin. On May 1, 1942 the newly appointed bishop of Detroit threatened to defrock him unless he confined all his work to his local parish. Coughlin complied. By then his star was falling anyway, and even at the peak of his cult, running for president was never an option due to his Canadian birth.

Not just Coughlin and Trump’s shared gift for demagogy and their shared achievement of adulation resemble each other, but so do some of the results. Like Trump today, Coughlin at his peak was beyond the control of any institution or organization. Until 1942 the Catholic hierarchy did not apply naked coercion against Coughlin for fear he might lead a mass exodus from the church. Likewise today, the Republican Party isn’t going to repudiate Trump while he’s riding high, because he might then lead a mass defection from the party. Not unless Trump stumbles worse than

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he has so far will the Republican Party repudiate him, for the GOP needs his millions of current backers.

In the big picture, Rev. Coughlin eventually proved controllable because his anti-Semitic pronouncements went too far for most Americans. Pronouncements by Donald Trump have yet to prove equally revolting to most Americans, and unless that changes, all it might take this autumn is just one substantial ISIS attack on U.S. soil to catapult Donald Trump into the presidency.

Meanwhile, however, extremism in action by some of Trump’s supporters might demand hard choices from him. If he denounces such acts, he might lose millions of supporters. However, if he remains silent after rightwing extremist acts, he might alienate many other supporters. Such a dilemma hastened the fall of Rev. Coughlin in 1940 and ’41 when he refused to criticize a group called “The Christian Front” which his rhetoric had inspired. Christian Front members were harassing Jews on the streets of New York City, including Jewish women, children, and elders. When Rev. Coughlin refused to distance himself from the Christian Front, his following shrunk and the Catholic Church then silenced him without risking a mass exodus. In Trump’s case, although he answers to no church or other institution, he could lose millions of supporters before Election Day if he denounces extremist acts by far rightists, but could lose millions of other supporters if he doesn’t denounce such acts.

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