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The Pastor With a Fascist Agenda

Early on, The Nation evinced a prescient skepticism toward Father Coughlin’s populism. Turns out we were right to do so.

Roman Catholic priest and broadcaster Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979), circa 1935.

Chris Lehmann writes this month about Tucker Carlson. He quotes an acquaintance calling the podcaster “the Father Coughlin of the twenty-first century”—a peddler of ugly bigotries dressed up as the pseudo-populist vindication of the forgotten man.”

The Nation started sounding the alarm about Coughlin soon after he burst onto the national scene in the early 1930s, denouncing bankers and corporations for preying on ordinary people. An Ontario-born Catholic priest in suburban Detroit, Coughlin began broadcasting his Sunday sermons over the radio and found a massive audience. He initially claimed to support the New Deal, but soon turned against it as insufficiently opposed to high finance. 

Early on, The Nation evinced a prescient skepticism toward Coughlin’s populism. In 1934, Raymond Gram Swing published a two-part profile, warning that the pastor’s program, though vague, bore a clear resemblance to fascism. Swing’s portrait calls to mind none other than........

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