Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression

by Alan Brinkley

Conservatives in the legislature managed to vote down the license tax decisively, inflicting Long with his first major defeat as governor. Emboldened by their success, they talked of impeachment; and Huey, realizing he was on dangerous ground, prepared to retreat. It was too late.41 A tumultuous meeting of the House of Representatives, thrown into chaos by an excessively hasty attempt to adjourn the special session by Long’s Speaker of the House, and involving a jammed voting machine, hysterical shouting and swearing, flying fists, thrown inkwells, and the bloodying of a Long opponent by a Long ally (through a wound inflicted accidentally with a diamond ring or intentionally with brass knuckles, depending on who was telling the story), galvanized the opposition. The now enraged anti-Long faction quickly drew up an exhaustive list of impeachable offenses, accusing the Governor of everything from bad manners to attempted murder. (“You can impeach for anything,” one of the opposition leaders later explained. “Impeachment is a political move.”) A mass meeting in Baton Rouge, with music by the Standard Oil Company band, helped mobilize what popular support the movement had; and within the next few weeks, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Long on eight separate charges.42

Long quickly realized that he could expect little favorable attention from the establishment press in Louisiana—the “lying newspapers,” as he routinely called them. So he created his own system of communications. He made heavy use of the radio. He built an expensive sound truck—he liked to brag it was the first of its kind in the country—so he could tour the state and speak to impromptu crowds (crowds often drawn as much to see the truck as to hear Huey). And he began in March of 1930 to publish his own journal, the sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly Louisiana Progress, which, despite its pretensions to being a legitimate newspaper, was an outspoken (and often effective) propaganda organ for the Long regime.

The state’s citizens were, wrote another Long opponent, “guinea pigs in the first American experiment with the authoritarian state.” Even many of Huey’s allies admitted that the Louisiana government had become a virtual dictatorship.

“They do not merely vote for him,” a St. Louis reporter wrote in 1935. “They worship the ground he walks on. He is part of their religion.” Louisiana voters were saying much the same thing. “He is a God-sent, God-fearing, God protect man. He is like Jesus,” one woman wrote several months later. Said another, “He is … an angel sent by God.”

When asked who was to pay for the public-works projects and social programs he was instituting, Long’s supporters customarily replied “the corporations.” That was, however, only partially true. An even larger proportion of the bill he passed on to future generations of taxpayers through a seemingly endless series of state bond issues.59

ranked near the bottom in per-capita income and literacy, Louisiana remained after Long’s death what it had been during his lifetime—one of the poorest and least developed states in the nation. It would remain so even thirty years later.

“I ain’t gonna get into that fight,” he said in an interview in 1935. “A lot of guys would have been murdered politically for what I’ve been able to do quietly for the niggers. But do you think I could get away with niggers voting? No siree!” His record was true to his words. When he won the Louisiana governorship in 1928, a mere 2,054 blacks were registered to vote, one half of one percent of all registrants. In 1936, just after Long’s death, that already negligible number had actually declined by 11, to 2,043; and since white registration had soared in the same period (a result of Long’s successful effort to abolish the poll tax), blacks now constituted only .3 percent of the state’s registered voters.63

“Unless we provide for redistribution of wealth in this country,” he warned, “the country is doomed.”

It was the issue upon which he had long ago decided to build his national career: the limitation of fortunes and the redistribution of wealth.

Coughlin, like his contemporary Huey Long, played an important role in shaping popular responses to the Depression.

To their supporters, however, Long and Coughlin offered a message of real meaning. They provided, first, an affirmation of threatened values and institutions, and a vision of a properly structured society in which those values and institutions could thrive. They suggested, second, an explanation of the obstacles to this vision, a set of villains and scapegoats upon whom it was possible to blame contemporary problems. And they offered, finally, a prescription for reform, resting upon a carefully restricted expansion of the role of government.

Long, by contrast, reveled in vivid personal abuse. At times savagely, at times almost whimsically, he assailed his targets not just for their power, but for their personal habits, their appearances, and their life-styles.

He was, wrote an amused but impressed H. L Mencken, “the gustiest and goriest, loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damndest orator ever heard on this or any other earth …, the champion boob-bumper of all epochs.”12

California provided the best example of the incursion of local politics into the Share Our Wealth Clubs. Dissident politics there had by 1935 reached an intensity unmatched by any other state. The previous fall, the novelist Upton Sinclair had nearly captured the governorship on a vaguely socialist platform he entitled “End Poverty in California.”

Yet it was the radio itself that was, in the end, the most important influence upon the character of the Long and Coughlin organizations. It gave both leaders direct, immediate access to millions of men and women; it produced a special bond of intimacy and friendship between the speaker and his audience. But that same ease of access had destructive effects upon the movements Long and Coughlin were creating, producing among their followers a sense of detachment from the organizational process.

His anti-Long successor, Jimmie Davis, a Public Service Commissioner (better known as a country singer and composer of “You Are My Sunshine”), won a similarly narrow mandate.

An ugly anti-Semitism infected first his newspaper and then, beginning in November, his radio sermons, spreading like a dark stain until it had become the most conspicuous (although never the dominant) element of his rhetoric. Social Justice soon began to publish the spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which allegedly exposed an ancient Jewish plot to impose financial slavery upon the world. Coughlin’s own editorials spoke stridently of the “communistic Jews”; and in one, he plagiarized egregiously from a speech by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, lifting such passages as: “Almost without exception, the intellectual leaders—if not the foot and hand leaders—of Marxist atheism in Germany were Jews.”8

In mid-1940, he praised the Hitler regime for imposing a new moral purity upon Germany, for reforming the nation’s financial system, and for purging its politics of communists and subversives. “Had we Christians enforced the discipline and produced the good accomplished by the Nazis for a good end,” he argued, “we would not be weeping at the wailing wall.” On other occasions, he urged Americans to consider the virtues of the “corporate state.”

Although Coughlin had written grudgingly after the declaration of war that “we submit to the will of the government,” he continued to write of the superior strength of the Axis powers, of the dangers of associating with the “sleazy Britishers,” and of the responsibility of American Jews for propelling the nation into the conflict. In the spring of 1942, finally, Postmaster General Frank Walker barred the publication from the mails, and Attorney General Francis Biddle warned Archbishop Mooney that Coughlin would face formal charges of sedition if his public activities did not cease. Early in May, Coughlin quietly announced that he had “bowed to orders from Church superiors,” that he was severing his ties to Social Justice and ceasing all political activities.