The Continuing Crisis
THE CONTINUING GRISIS October passes, and in his ravening for that impalpable pother that he calls news, the journalist again rushes past a story worth pondering longer than the noise-filled...
...Marilyn J. McCusker, 35, of Osceola Mills, Pennsylvania, became the first woman coal miner to die in an underground accident...
...My guess is that the aging Radio Priest did too...
...Here was a visionary...
...Certainly few Americans today understand Father Coughlin's erstwhile legitimacy, and there was more to him than mere bigotry...
...Some of these pithy formulations are still capable of jolting the adrenal glands of concerned Americans...
...Our eyes constantly met during lunch His influence on me was quite extraordinary...
...It will be a very hard decision for them...
...His office was a grand chamber atop a 150-foot tower, bathed in floodlights and accessible only by a spiral staircase...
...Father Coughlin's economics would have pleased them, and one sees him today, in an honored second act, gravely discussing corporate rapine and Wall Street treachery on the Dick Cavett show...
...The mesmerizers of our own day have adopted so many of Father Coughlin's other quackeries, why not his insight into the Rothschilds...
...In his struggle against the rich and the powerful, Father Coughlin's polemics were always fearless and brilliant...
...October was a very pleasing month for the Wonderboy...
...Ponder that, and tell me Mr...
...Consider this instructive final event...
...And in Louisville, Kentucky, where a two-year-old baby died when the family dachshund chewed off its legs, Mr...
...Here would be a dignified exit, and not an implausible one...
...There, accompanied by a Great Dane, he wrote...
...Now there is a little-known fact...
...His mighty electoral forces trounced the Massachusetts Messiah in Florida, and on November 5 the miracle recurred in Iowa...
...And if only our soi-disant liberals were more forgiving, he might have hollered himself through the 1970s, though today his audience of yahoos would be replaced by blank-faced members of Common Cause or the Americans for Democratic Action...
...He exposed American internationalists as tools of the British and, facts are facts, the Rothschilds...
...Could a similar fate befall the Ayatollah Nader or Jane and Tom...
...Irving Kristol has dubbed the "New Class" were rattled when {continued on page 39) one of their own, Mr...
...Is he a lavished pet of the family or a normal household pet...
...No dogs let out howls in the night...
...America's entrance into World War II put him on the wrong side of this last issue...
...How advanced these ideas were you can weigh for yourself...
...I think he felt it for me...
...Is it a memorial to one of the course's ardent customers, as pro-shop coves insist...
...And in historic Lynn, Massachusetts, debate still swirls around that gravestone found near the 13th hole of the Gannon Municipal Golf Course...
...The Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, and in progressive Rawalpindi, Pakistan, 10,000 Islamic sports fans turned out to see 26 men bastinadoed on a gaily decorated platform...
...THE CONTINUING GRISIS October passes, and in his ravening for that impalpable pother that he calls news, the journalist again rushes past a story worth pondering longer than the noise-filled moment...
...It was a curious conclusion for one of America's most renowned mesmerizers, but then there is always something curious about mesmerizers-our contemporary batch included...
...Beginning as a bewildered victim of the Ku Kluxian metaphysique, he became a Catholic civil-rights advocate, and in the late 1920s established a radio show intent on dispelling bigotry from the American mind...
...Over four decades ago he called on government "to limit the amount of profits acquired by any industry," but to no avail...
...He thumped for ideas which, though unorthodox in his day, are now items of ardent faith amongst the enlightened-some even constitute the law of the land...
...Roaring against "the policies of greed," "the filthy gold standard," "modern shylocks," "the slave standard of the Rothschilds," and so forth, he was the aboriginal consumer activist...
...Would 13 percent have been overdoing things...
...It's a problem we have to figure out," Mr...
...As with the mountebanks of our time, he had a primordial charm that fascinated many contemporary eminences...
...Upon being convicted of procuring a 13-year-old boy, he stunned progressive sociologists with a trenchant elocution, culminating in the shout, "I'm no pimp...
...And by the end of the month the Wonderboy could claim another historic first...
...He was shut off, never to be revived...
...Eric Blow, director of the local animal shelter, is confronting the attendant problems with the kind of judicious equanimity that today characterizes men of his high calling, whether in Washington or in the provincesv Should the dachshund be destroyed...
...No thunderclaps were heard...
...At 8:45 a.m., on October 27, 1979, the Rev...
...That jeremiads against Rothschildism were again sounding from the clergy must have eased his passage...
...During the 1930s Father Coughlin was a man of the greatest moment...
...Anathematizing gold, he advocated regular doses of inflation to vivify the economy...
...Doubtless he would bring us back to fundamentals: oil profits, the salaries of the oil bosses, their perks, their shadowy associations, their last names, their oejigipjis...
...The mysterious allure of Black Panthers and other 1960s and 1970s ranters loses its unique daffiness...
...When Churchill's forebodings reached our shores he denounced them as inspired by British imperialism and Rothschildism...
...In the obituaries there was none of that prophet-without-honor froth that so often accompanies the mortal passage of an American crank...
...The lilts are familiar...
...A decade or so later he ended as the righteous advocate of a bigotry that in Europe was then inspiring genocide...
...There's a lot of different angles to look at...
...I shall never forget him...
...McCusker, a roof bolter, had sued the Rushton Mining Company in 1977 for denying her the opportunity to achieve her life's ambition...
...Where did it come from...
...Yet in the end it was in a remote Detroit suburb that this forward-looking activist breathed his last...
...He championed collectivisms now common to the American economy...
...Other rabble-rousers in our history served up the Catholics, the blacks, immigrants, and the poor...
...Law-and-order advocates in Wilmington, Delaware, were put on alert when the Department of Corrections announced that it may have to auction off its 78-year-old gallows to retire a $21,650 debt owed the Community Legal Aid Society...
...ane L other factoxs essential for an understanding of any economic problem...
...In the 1930s he derided the hoary orthodoxies of the saturnine Hoover ("the Holy Ghost of the rich"), and prescribed national control of credit and money...
...Galbraith's red-hot monographs in the New York Review of Boqks...
...Marco Mason, a part-time sociologist, was convicted of having bitten off the nose of his estranged wife, Katherine, an attorney currently on leave from the National Labor Relations Board...
...Father Coughlin's was a social justice movement...
...In response to those Americans who urged rearmament, he cunningly demonstrated their relationship with generals, industrialists, and the Rothschilds...
...People are killing each other out there, and I was just trying to get them off the streets...
...Eric Blow, director of the Jefferson County Animal Shelter, is not thoroughly equipped to be Secretary of State for either a Kennedy or a Carter administration.fc...
...Forty million people once hung on his every word, and what splendid words they were...
...Some have a legitimacy in their time that is difficult for later generations to grasp...
...It [the dog] is,bound to hold a very high-ranking position in their family...
...Marvin Hughes, 36, the "male madam" who ran a "call boy" operation from behind the counter of a New York City donut shop, is headed for the hoosegow-though do not be surprised if he eventually turns up on the college Chautauqua circuit...
...That this venerable shouter lapsed in his sleep was a sad culmination...
...In Richmond, Virginia, Mr...
...Seldon Rodman found him "friendly, tolerant, a good listener...
...Scientists have produced indisputable evidence that'the musicians' egregious ptaying raises the alkaline content in condemned animals, thus rendering their meat fit only for Russians...
...English novelist Hugh Walpole saw him as "a quiet, stocky, gentle and beautiful-eyed man with whom I felt instantly a strong bond...
...Or is it a tasteless joke...
...History will duly record that the Radio Priest was something of an ideological pioneer...
...And the solution...
...And by October 27 he had been consigned to a remote and unsavory sector of Americana...
...Yet by the time he died most Americans thought he had exited many years before...
...or extolling one of Dr...
...Moreover, his advanced views were not confined to economic issues...
...The Rev...
...Members of what Mr...
...Galbraith in several ways, not the least of which was his style...
...Yet it is a matter of the historical record as chronicled by Arthur Schle-singer, Jr., in The Age of Roosevelt, Book III...
...Political pros all over the country sat up and took notice when he averted a possible row between Jews and Catholics in the New York Democratic Party by choosing as his New York campaign director Mr...
...Actually Father Coughlin was a precursor to pr...
...Like many a mountebank, Father Coughlin believed his ideas to be decades ahead of his time-an understandable conceit, given the provenance of at least some of those ideas: The Radio Priest was an early customer of the fledgling Brookings Institution...
...Like other mountebanks, Father Coughlin was under pressure from his followers to name names, to be specific, to put flesh on the sources of their anxiety...
...He recognized President Roosevelt's devious route toward war, identifying it as a route taken to fatten the English and, be it noted, the Rothschilds...
...He opposed arms spending and foreign policy adventures...
...Long before Dr...
...Prophet Davis, 54, shot himself in the nose while allegedly attempting to shoot Miss Helen M. Johnson...
...How I would have relished hearing his analysis of, say, the energy problem...
...Another milestone in the women's liberation movement was reached when Mrs...
...Moreover, in Chicago an unknown but very health-conscious assailant forced a young woman to swallow 60 iron supplement tablets after raping her...
...Did Father Coughlin winter in Gstaad...
...Joel McCleary, a Buddhist...
...Few are simple bigots...
...Blow authoritatively intoned...
...There is no record of it...
...Father Coughlin's counsel is lost forever...
...Here was a man of vigilance...
...Gloom befell musicians in Kotka, Finland, when they were barred from rehearsing near the Kotka slaughterhouse...
...His followers' major anxieties were inspired by envy, and so he served them the rich, the powerful, and the Jews...
...According to an Associated Press-NBC poll, this autumn our President became the first President ever to sink to an approval rating of 19 percent...
...Here, however, I may be in error...
...Charles E. Coughlin gave up the ghost...
...Hosea Williams has recognized the humanitarian efforts of Libya's Colonel Muammar el-Qu.addafi, and has personally bestowed a Martin Luther King, Jr., medal on the lunatic...
...Actually I thought I heard snatches of Coughlinian wit and wisdom in the wake of Andy's martyrdom...
...How much more apt it would have been for him to have expired in front of a microphone, hollering to his customary audience of comatose adherents...
...Galbraith's first best-seller, Father Coughlin was wise to Wall Street, the international bankers, the giant corporations, and various allied infamies...
...Witches meeting in New York predicted that his renomination was in the bag...
...He was a consummate diatribist, capable of confecting sonorities of awesome idealism and violence...
Vol. 12 • December 1979 • No. 12
