Table Of ContentVoices 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
