Then as Now

...Coughlin's thunderous warnings against Wall Street, capitalists, and moneychangers also fed the fears of Long's Anglophobic constituents who, if it were possible, would have eliminated international bankers and the money powers...

...His rabid anti-Semitism and anti-communism are well-known...

...During the Depression decade, Brinkley cautions, it was a debilitated Populism that dominated...

...It is change, then as now, that menaces—that prompted the different constituents of Long and Coughlin to feel their values, culture, and power slipping away, that challenged the infallibility of the Bible, eroded their community and personal autonomy, exposed their most sacrosanct beliefs as archaic, and undermined the most hallowed principles of the republic...

...He enlisted in Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 campaign but later became an adversary...

...Neither man acknowledged his debt to Populist traditions, a debt which in Long's case was considerable...

...Its emphasis shifted from the religious and ethnic concerns of the 1920s to the issues of privilege and centralized power...

...Conveying more than the life and times of Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, Voices of Protest assumes that the then-current ideological fashions were not created from nothing...

...Long and Coughlin never confronted the hard realities of capitalism...

...Further, it adumbrates historical continuities that seem startlingly relevant today: Populist ressentiment, a suspicion of authority, the moral absolutism of a traditional and provincial world, a sense of powerless-ness in the face of distant, centralized fiscal and political power...

...Brinkley draws upon the past in illuminating and important ways...

...His immediate environment of Winn Parish, a poor hill county, had been dominated by Populists and, in the pre-World War I decade, by a strong Socialist, Eugene Debs constituency...

...Both men, for all their shafts against central fiscal authority, and for all their rhetorical obeisance to Populism, conceded a large and forceful role to such authority...

...The Presidency was at least a possibility when he was shot dead by a madman at age forty-two...

...They cannot be dismissed merely as demagogues who offered only irrational appeals and attention-getting stunts...

...It's not even past...

...Brinkley surveys Coughlin's rise to power, his remarkable popularity in the mid-1930s, his increasingly obsessive concern with New Deal monetary policies, his mercurial shifts in attitude toward Roosevelt, and his final descent into bitterness and hostility...

...Senator...

...in return he was rewarded by a near-religious adulation from Louisiana's poor and middle class...

...Unlike the Bryanites, it ignored local exploiters and exploitation and dwelt upon the seemingly irresistible trend toward centralization in distant urban centers...

...With Coughlin, and especially with Long, he traces the Bry-anite legacy of Populism and, before that, the fear of remote power expressed by Jefferson's sturdy yeomen and, in different form, by Jacksonian democracy—and, one might add, by rural society and states'-righters from the outset of government...

...A charismatic figure with a fine ear for the demotic tongue, Coughlin increasingly focused on social-economic themes...

...Alan Brinkley's superb account of the leadership and politics of the discontented in Depression America reaffirms as much...

...they focused instead on specific villains and institutions...

...However different in important aspects, each one's message affirmed threatened values and rested on some of our deepest impulses—local enterprise, informal credit mechanisms, small entrepre-neurships, fear of distant fiscal and political institutions...

...Coughlin, for one, favored a single Federal banking agency...

...His strongest support came out of northern Louisiana, which had been gripped by a recurrent political radicalism...

...Milton Cantor (Milton Cantor is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

...Smith, and Theodore Bilbo—he keeps the focus on Long and Coughlin...

...Long was not at all adverse to using whatever state or Federal institutions might vault him into power or help him consolidate his power...

...The reader learns that Long instinctively exploited his cultural roots, as Brinkley traces his career from secondary state official to governor to U.S...

...Granted that his achievements were mostly showy, he still gave more to the people of his state than any previous leader...

...Indeed, middle-class support for Long is one of Brinkley's most notable findings...

...Moreover, he was quite aware of being a singular presence: when a group of reporters tried to categorize him, he admitted to being "sui generis...

...He defended the individual and the community against gesellschaft encroachments...

...The threat now, as then, is one of a relentlessly modernizing society, and, Brinkley shrewdly observes, it affected the middle class more than it did the working class or the rural dispossessed of the inter-war years...

...Nor was either man, finally, able to imagine a productive economy in which large national institutions or the Federal Government were absent.' Well-researched, rich in narrative, and tightly argued, Voices of Protest has lessons to ponder for the 1980s...

...Surely Long was one of the extraordinary figures of American political history...

...While Brinkley does not neglect other evangels of populism or fascism— including Eugene Talmadge, G.L.K...

...n William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, Gavin Stevens observes, "The past is never dead...

...His weekly radio talks, which commanded an enormous audience, struck a vein of deeply rooted and cherished national values...

...Long grew to manhood in small-town America, with all that meant in face-to-face associations, a rooted family, a closed community, the sense of neighborliness and stewardship— values that remained part of his mature outlook as well as a source of his popular strength...

...the White House regarded him as unpredictable and potentially dangerous, and Roosevelt was unresponsive to his blandishments...

...Father Coughlin's portrait offers fewer surprises...

...He was a unique mix: Demagogue and savior, a ruthless mongoose of ambitions, he grabbed unprecedented public power as governor but, despite the utterly poisonous political atmosphere of Louisiana, repudiated the ruling interests—including Standard Oil—and fulfilled his campaign promises...