Then · the record

In October 1926, Catholic priest Charles E. Coughlin made his first radio address from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, the parish that would remain the centre of his operations for forty years. The broadcasts began as catechism classes for children, then moved into religious services with political overtones; by the 1929 stock-market crash he had built a large, loyal audience and a reputation as a voice for the “common man.” During the 1930s a new Royal Oak post office was built simply to handle an average of 80,000 letters each week, while his weekly audience ran into the tens of millions. In 1935 he created the National Union for Social Justice, which had more than one million paying members by the 1936 presidential election.

On 20 November 1938, in a sermon about the recent Kristallnacht attacks, Coughlin blamed Jews for their persecution and claimed the Nazis had been lenient. New York station WMCA broke with him, writing that the broadcast had been “calculated to incite religious and racial strife in America”; the station said Coughlin had agreed to remove the misrepresentations but had not done so. Stations in Chicago and Philadelphia also cancelled his broadcasts, and National Association of Broadcasters president Neville Miller backed their refusal. The industry code, established in 1929 to address practices such as fair advertising, was revised in 1939 to require the “fair and impartial presentation of both sides of controversial issues” and to prevent stations from selling airtime for presentations by single speakers such as Coughlin.