American Experiment (296 page)

On the left, preaching industrial unionism, were such leaders as George L. Berry, the veteran head of the pressmen, and two men who had emerged out of the tumultuous immigrant world of New York City, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. No one doubted who was their chieftain—John L. Lewis. With his huge miner’s torso, his shaggy eyebrows beneath a shock of hair, his face fixed in an almost perpetual scowl, his deep rumbling voice, he was a formidable figure both to mine owners and to his AFL rivals.

And so the argument raged at numberless council and committee
meetings between the November 1934 and October 1935 conventions of the Federation. The craft unionists evoked ancient dogma about labor unity and settled arrangements, raised the bogey of “dual unionism,” and deprecated mass-production workers as fair-weather members who would join the new union for higher wages and then pull out. Lewis & Co. urged that above all the Federation must take in the millions clamoring at its gates and organize them in mighty locals that could challenge General Motors and Ford and U.S. Steel. Neither side was monolithic; Green tried conciliation, and men like Dubinsky sought to restrain Lewis from moving too far ahead of his small group. In this fluid situation there was only one constant: the old guard had the votes.

One short hard punch dramatized the final rupture. Hour after hour delegates to the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City had debated a minority report in favor of industrial unionism. Finally Lewis took the floor. “The labor movement,” he said, “is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.” Hence it was morally wrong for craft unions that stood on their own feet “like mighty oaks” not to help weak unions exposed to “the lightning and the gale.” If they rejected the minority report, “high wassail” would prevail at the banquet tables of the mighty. The convention voted it down. Two days later Lewis, trying to revive the issue, ran into Hutcheson’s parliamentary objection. “Small potatoes,” Lewis shouted, and Hutcheson responded in kind. As Lewis moved back to his seat he and Hutcheson had another exchange. Hearing the word “bastard,” Lewis sent Hutcheson to the floor with that one punch. He then straightened his collar and tie, relit his cigar, and sauntered casually to the podium.

“You shouldn’t have done that, John,” said President Green. “He called me a foul name,” said Lewis. “Oh,” said Green, “I didn’t know that.”

Three weeks later Lewis, Hillman, Dubinsky, and others set up a Committee for Industrial Organization, with Lewis as chairman. Despite the group’s promises to work within the Federation, labor was now headed toward civil war, as the craft unionists look an increasingly adamant stand, and pressure from aroused grass-roots leaders pushed Lewis & Co. toward a separate organization. Desperately Green tried to mediate. Not only had he risen through an industrial union, the Miners, but he had written eloquently in favor of industrial unionism as concentrating the strength of skilled and unskilled. Lewis played on this past in a letter to Green:

“Why not return to your father’s house? You will be welcome. If you care to dissociate yourself from your present position, the Committee for Industrial Organization will be happy to make you its Chairman in my stead.” “I am in my father’s house,” Green replied. “It is my firm purpose to
remain there.” In more than thirty years in the labor movement, he added pointedly, “I have never aligned myself with any … dual movement.”

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.