For his supporters, he was one of the few men with the courage to defy the Establishment and take a stand against the vested interests responsible for the Great Depression, steering America between the Scylla of Fascism and the Charybdis of Communism. To his enemies, he was a demagogue exploiting the desperate masses, an ignorant loudmouthed bigot, a Catiline in a Roman collar. In his own account, he was a simple priest preaching the social doctrine of his Church. For over a decade Father Charles Coughlin held forth to an audience of millions, both on the radio and in his journal Social Justice, providing critical support to FDR in the 1932 election, when he coined the slogan "Roosevelt or Ruin", but turning against him when the New Deal proved insufficiently radical. Hatred of bankers and financiers segued easily into anti-Semitism, Anglophobia into Teutonophilia, horror at Communism into sympathy for fascism. In 1942, he narrowly escaped treason charges for his vocal opposition to the same president he had helped put in power ten years earlier.
Those years of feverish activity are the only reason anyone is interested in a biography of Coughlin, and they are the subject of the overwhelming majority of this book. Unfortunately, Sheldon Marcus' biography is a confused jumble of news reports and personal reminiscences, without narrative flow or structure. Marcus seems singularly uninterested - or perhaps assumes his audience will be - in the substance of Coughlin's political positions, but also provides only the barest glimpses of the personalities involved. The author might be praised for his willingness to present multiple conflicting accounts of the same events and let the reader judge which is the most plausible, but the result is an undifferentiated mass of information more likely to confuse than edify.
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