Priest's Overflow

Gene & Glenn. Cleveland radio buffoons, are great favorites in their home town. To Cleveland's Public Auditorium for their 1933 Christmas celebration went 18,997 people, up to last week the Auditorium's attendance record. But Gene & Glenn are not to be compared as drawing cards with such headliners in their field as Burns & Allen, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, the Voice of Experience, the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin. One night last week 24,508 Clevelanders paid 25-c- each to see & hear Priest Coughlin of Royal Oak, Mich., make the second of twelve personal appearances aimed at welding the "8,000,000 members" of his National Union for Social Justice into a working political organization.

Priest Coughlin's much-heralded first appearance, in Detroit last month, was generally accounted a near-flop (TIME, May 6). Prepared for an overflow audience, he spoke to a comfortably filled house. He committed the fatal dramatic error of allowing his audience to stare at him for two hours while preliminary speakers exhausted them and he himself grew more nervous by the minute. When his time finally came he was obliged to omit all but a fraction of his prepared address. He offered no program of organization.

Last week Priest Coughlin waited in the wings while his Congressional stablemates (Representatives Sweeney of Ohio, Binderup of Nebraska, Lemke of North Dakota) went through their paces. At 9:40 the burly priest charged theatrically onto the platform, gave his Protestant friend, the Rev. Herbert Bigelow, an impulsive hug, strode up to the microphones. Eighteen thousand people jammed the hall. In the basement were some 7,000 more who had paid to hear Priest Coughlin through loudspeakers, see him for a few minutes after the main show. In the streets some 5,000 lackpenny Clevelanders cocked their ears to loudspeakers. A handful of Socialists carrying placards urging people to join the Socialist Party rather than the National Union had their banners snatched out of their hands by mounted policemen. But vendors of plaster busts and photographs of the radio priest were unmolested.

Faced with his audience's intoxicating overflow, Priest Coughlin overflowed. Time & again, egged on by thunderous applause, he departed from his text to touch new heights of abuse, imprecation, braggadocio.

President Roosevelt, he twice virtually declared, was a liar and hypocrite. Of the Banking Bill, which his foes the bankers also mortally hate and fear, Priest Coughlin roared: "In order to deceive the people of the United States, instead of driving the money changers from the temple as was promised them, the present administration in Washington is sponsoring a new banking bill popularly known as the Eccles bill . . . If you analyze this new bill, now being sponsored by Mr. Roosevelt, you will discover that it is nothing more than a marriage license between a prostitute [the Federal Reserve System] who has wrecked our home and the Government who has deserted his wife, the American people.

"I need not repeat to you that the Federal Reserve Bank no more belongs to the people of the United States than does the Federal laundry or the Federal barber shop.

"It is a private corporation owned by a group of private individuals for the purpose of privately printing and controlling the money of the United States for the private profit of the profiteers."

Of the Patman Bonus bill, which President Roosevelt was in good faith bound to veto. Priest Coughlin predicted: "It would be political suicide for the President to veto the Patman bill. He is too clever a politician for that. If he does veto it--." The priest shrugged a disclaimer for the President's fate in that event.

Senator Bulkley of Ohio had dared to defy Coughlin-inspired telegrams, vote against the Patman bill. "That's his death warrant!" screeched Priest Coughlin. The audience booed approval. Swaying and flailing his arms like a college cheerleader, the priest kept the boo going on & on, finally stopped it with an imperious gesture.

Of New York's Senator Wagner, who had also defied the Coughlin ban, he said simply, "Well, we're going on to New York two weeks from tonight."

"Hereafter," shouted Priest Coughlin in a climactic spasm of exaltation, "anyone who writes a platform for a Presidential candidate must consult the National Union for Social Justice. You members of the National Union are stronger than any President--stronger than any ten Presidents."

Priest Coughlin thus pronounced himself a match for not merely one President but ten for he had already let it be known that he would be the sole head & front of the National Union. Last month he promised to "select, not elect" a guiding National Council of Twelve within ten days, to name the Union's Michigan State Committee at the Cleveland rally. He left Cleveland with neither a Michigan nor an Ohio committee named. He had decided meantime that the lieutenants of his political machine would, like Ku Klux Klansmen, be masked in secrecy. Reason, as explained by his Washington lobbyist, Louis B. Wrard: two friends had joined Huey Long at the Farmers' Holiday Convention in Des Moines (TIME, May 6), had thereby embarrassed Priest Coughlin by giving the impression that they were his ambassadors.

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