Coughlin was more than willing to roll up his sleeves for the role of attack dog for the Democratic Party. The centrist Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to win a major party's presidential nomination, had become an increasingly bitter foe of the New Deal and FDR. This was all the provocation Coughlin needed. After tipping off FDR in a telegram, Coughlin took to the air to flay his fellow Catholic as a bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street.
Liberals often debated among themselves whether Coughlin's contribution was worth the price of his unflinching demagoguery. Until late in 1934 the answer was invariably yes. Chief among his defenders was Monsignor John Ryan, the most respected liberal Catholic intellectual and theologian in America at the time. When Coughlin unfairly and cruelly ripped Al Smith to shreds, many wondered whether it was time to distance themselves from the Radio Priest. Ryan intervened and declared the rabble-rouser was "on the side of the angels." This was the standard liberal defense of the supposedly right-wing Coughlin. He was fighting the good fight, so who cared about his excesses?
At a congressional hearing on FDR's monetary policy, Coughlin offered a two-hour peroration that held the committee transfixed. "If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program," he blustered, "I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!" "I know the pulse of the Nation," he further declared. "And I know Congress will do nothing but say: 'Mr. Roosevelt, we follow.'" "God is directing President Roosevelt," he added. "He is the answer to our prayers." In his sermons the leader of America's religious left sounded like he'd borrowed Mussolini's talking points: "Our Government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely, that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not for the laborer."29
So how did Coughlin suddenly become a right-winger? When did he become persona non grata in the eyes of liberal intellectuals? On this the historical record is abundantly clear: liberals started to call Coughlin a right-winger when he moved further to the left.
This isn't nearly as contradictory as it sounds. Coughlin became a villain in late 1934 almost solely because he had decided that FDR wasn't radical enough. FDR's less than fully national-socialist policies sapped Coughlin's patience — as did his reluctance to make the priest his personal Rasputin. Still, Coughlin managed for most of the year to qualify his support, saying things like "More than ever, I am in favor of a New Deal." Finally, on November 11, 1934, he announced he was forming a new "lobby of the people," the National Union for Social Justice, or NUSJ. He issued sixteen principles of social justice as the platform for the new super-lobby. Among its articles of faith:
* that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family...
* I believe in nationalizing those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
* I believe in upholding the right of private property yet of controlling it for the public good.
* I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
* I believe in the event of a war and for the defense of our nation and its liberties, if there shall be a conscription of men let there be a conscription of wealth.
* I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights. I believe that the chief concern of government shall be for the poor, because, as is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.30
The following month Coughlin issued another seven principles, to elaborate exactly how the NUSJ would combat the horrors of capitalism and modern commerce. These were even more explicitly anticapitalist. Thus it was the government's "duty" to limit the "profits acquired by any industry." All workers must be guaranteed what we would today call a living wage. The government must guarantee the production of "food, wearing apparel, homes, drugs, books and all modern conveniences." "This principle," Coughlin rightly explained, "is contrary to the theory of capitalism."31
The program was largely derived from the prevailing views of the liberal wing of the Catholic Church, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor and Wisconsin Progressive labor parties, and Coughlin's own well-worn themes. That his economic doctrine should be influenced from the disparate branches of American populism shouldn't be a surprise. From the outset, Coughlin's ideological roots intermingled with those of many New Dealers and progressives and populists. At no time was he ever associated with classical liberalism or with the economic forces we normally connect with the right.
This returns us to one of the most infuriating distortions of American political debate. In the 1930s, what defined a "right-winger" was almost exclusively opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The muckraking journalist J. T. Flynn, for example, is often labeled a leading light of the Old Right for no other reason than that he was a relentless FDR critic and a member of America First (indeed, he was one of the most articulate voices decrying the incipient fascism of the New Deal). But Flynn was no classical liberal. He had been a left-leaning columnist for the New Republic for much of the 1930s, and he denounced Roosevelt for moving in what he considered a rightward direction. As for his isolationism, he considered himself a fellow traveler with Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party, Charles Beard, and John Dewey.
Senator Huey Long, the archetypal American fascist, is likewise often called a right-winger by his detractors — though his place in the liberal imagination is more complicated. Many Democrats, including Bill Clinton, still admire Long and invoke him very selectively. Long inspired Sinclair's It Can't Happen Here as well as the far superior All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, and his larger-than-life persona elicits an ambivalent reaction from liberals who admire his economic populism but dislike his unrefined demagoguery. But leaving all that aside, what cannot be denied is that Long attacked the New Deal from the left. His Share the Wealth plan was pure booboisie socialism. His well-documented opposition to the actual Socialist Party was entirely cultural and pragmatic, not ideological. "Will you please tell me what sense there is in running on a socialist ticket in America today?" Long quizzed a reporter from the Nation. "What's the use of being right only to be defeated?" Meanwhile, Norman Thomas was regularly beseeched by his rank and file to show more sympathy to Coughlin and Long. "Now I am a socialist," an Alabama man wrote Thomas in 1935, "have been for thirty five years...[Long] is telling the people the things we have been telling them for a generation. They listen to him...while they thought we were fools."32
What makes Long so recognizable as a fascist was his folksy contempt for the rules of democracy — "the time has come for all good men to rise above principle" — and his absolute faith that he was the authentic voice of the people. His rule over Louisiana certainly transcended that of a mere political boss. He had an authentic organic connection with his constituents that seemed to exceed anything Americans had seen before. "There is no dictatorship in Louisiana. There is a perfect democracy there, and when you have a perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship."33 Oddly enough, what may have allowed so many liberals and socialists to recognize the fascism in Long's politics was their own elitism and cosmopolitanism. Long had no use for pointy-headed experts and elites. His was an undiluted populism of the sort that throws aside dogma and celebrates the wisdom of the mob above all else. He appealed to the narcissism of the masses, proclaiming that through his own will to power he could make "every man a king." He had a relationship with his folk more akin to Hitler's relationship to the Volk than FDR could ever manage. As such, many liberals saw it as threatening, and rightly so.