Flashback 1930s: A Time Before Military Adulation

Source : unz.com – September 9; 20224 – Steve Penfield

https://www.unz.com/article/flashback-1930s-a-time-before-military-adulation/

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Before the federal takeover of broadcasting took hold about a century ago, Americans had a healthy distrust of military propaganda. Now that independent journalism is taking shape on the internet, the D.C. Imperials are having to work harder to whip up the next batch of War Fever. Let’s hope they keep failing.

Long before U.S. politicians gave their overwhelming support for brutal massacres in Vietnam to Iraq to Palestine, Americans let their empty pride of “winning” two world wars dissolve their prior restraint from engaging in such reckless violence. The pro-war censorship of global elites today is merely a continuation of the press crack downs in the 1930s that silenced its critics and struck fear into others for generations to come. But it wasn’t always this way.

With flag-waving and loyalty oaths now enshrined into the Greater USA mythos—and ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, AM talk radio, NFL and Hollywood competing to see who can be the most slavishly pro-military—it may be difficult to believe that patriotic Americans once thought much differently on the issue of endless global policing. And many such Americans were not afraid to say so. Just a century ago, loyal American media figures and politicians (both liberals and conservatives with a more independent outlook) had no hesitation in criticizing both the merchants of death along with the gullible serfs who did their bidding.

Americans were reluctant to fight in Europe’s Great War in 1917, when Congress voted for Americans to join the battle. In this great 8-minute video by historian Carlton Meyer, he recalls how:

Only 73,000 Americans volunteered for service during the first six weeks after Congress declared war. This led to the Selective Service Act of 1917. The war was unpopular and 350,000 draftees never reported for service.

Even mainstream sources like ABC News in its coffee table encyclopedia The Century would concede (much later) that after World War 1, a solid majority of Americans had come to realize that we had erred in entering Europe’s clash of empires. While preferring a permanent U.S. role as “international policeman,” the federal broadcasting behemoth admitted:

By the 1930s, a poll would show that more than 70 percent concurred that it was “a mistake for the United States to enter the last war.” (page 95)

Americans didn’t just come to these conclusions on their own. They had much help. And they had some legitimate news options then.

In the period leading up to the Great War and for years afterwards, some (but certainly not all) writers and publishers spoke clearly and strongly against the foolishness of open warfare. H. L. Mencken, one of the nation’s most popular columnists of the 1920s and 30s, routinely skewered both soldiers and the entire military caste. For example, Mr. Mencken, a syndicated columnist with the Baltimore Sun as well as the editor of American Mercury magazine, would write in 1929:

Of all the arts practised by man, the art of the soldier seems to call for the least intelligence and to develop the least professional competency. Every battle recorded in history appears as a series of almost incredible blunders and imbecilities—always, at least, on one side, and usually, on both. (A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 217)

To understand how anyone could survive in American journalism while making statements like that (as were common for Mencken) one has to consider the political atmosphere of the time, which was markedly different than today.

Sober Attitudes on Military Mischief Thrive… for a While

To appreciate the culture of the 1930s, I’ll start with some relatively minor figures of the era. Marine Major General Smedley Butler authored the book War Is a Racket in 1935 and went on a popular speaking tour, following his prominent 34-year military career. Either this one man had more integrity than over 10 million soldiers that came after him, or society then had a much greater appetite for the truth. Maybe some of both.

The next year, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye (R-North Dakota) led a bipartisan seven-member committee that issued its scathing report following two years of investigations on the Munitions Industry and associated bankers. Nye’s 1936 committee report infuriated Washington but helped inform the public on Roosevelt’s upcoming plans to push the U.S. into another foreign conflict.

Even more impressive and more enduring were two prominent publishers of the 1920s and 30s, both of whom ran circles around our current barons of establishment media.

Will Hearst and Robert McCormick: America’s Last Independent Newspaper Publishers

Beginning in 1887, William Randolph Hearst owned a collection of newspapers stretching from San Francisco to New York in 1895, adding over two dozen more urban dailies by his peak in the 1930s. Lawyer and WW1 veteran, Robert “Colonel” McCormick, owned the leading paper in America’s second largest city, the Chicago Tribune, where he had been president since 1911 and editor since 1914.

Hearst was an independent Democrat—fiercely pro-America and pro-labor (before unions were nationalized in the mid-30s) yet strongly anti-communist. McCormick was more of the traditional pro-business Republican with a zeal for law and order. Both of them were fully aware of Franklin Roosevelt’s deceitful military efforts leading up to World War 2. And both publishers were immensely popular by the 1930s—and absolutely hated by the establishment and by communist radicals.

According to pro-FDR media historian Betty Winfield in her 1990 book FDR and the News Media, Hearst and McCormick were so popular with the general public during the 1930s that their newspaper “holdings comprised over 50 percent of the country’s Sunday circulation” (p. 232). By the time Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936, Hearst, McCormick and their staffs of writers were routinely warning their readers about the New Dealers’ totalitarian abuses as well as FDR’s efforts to drag the U.S. into war against Japan and Germany.

And it wasn’t just those two influential publishers sounding the alarms. Editors and journalists at the Los Angeles Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, the Detroit Daily News and many other papers were generally opposed to FDR’s economic and foreign policy, although they drew less attention from New Deal censors (Winfield, p. 129). Justin Raimondo’s book Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, written in 1993 and updated in 2008, does a better job detailing the anti-war positions and popularity of 1930s media figures including Robert McCormick, New Republic columnist John Flynn, Garet Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post, and others.

By 1938, these anti-New Deal publications—coupled with ongoing economic despair—helped convince most Americans that the country was heading in the wrong direction. During the mid-term election that year, Republicans gained 81 seats in the House, 8 seats in the Senate, and 13 new governorships (Winfield, p. 139). Wikipedia’s page for the 1938 election agrees on Republican gains in the House and Senate, but shows a net gain of 12 GOP governors.

After that humiliating loss, Roosevelt stepped up his efforts to pull the U.S. into Europe’s next bloodbath, primarily by “lending” weapons of mass destruction to the British and Soviets (in their war efforts against Germany) and his antagonistic blockade of Japan. These maneuvers made it clear to anyone paying attention in the U.S. and around the world that FDR was determined to be a wartime president, with absolute control of a wartime economy, despite his repeated assurances to the public of the exact opposite. As a career politician, FDR must have known that open warfare would provide the best opportunity to scare Americans into rallying around the flagpole—and giving ‘That Man in the White House’ the unlimited power he seemed to be craving.

Hearst, McCormick and other independent publishers (all of whom were despised by pro-war FCC broadcasters) had spent years warning the public of FDR’s secretive plot to draw America into Europe’s bloody battles. Most famous at the time was the Chicago Tribune’s explosive headline from December 4, 1941:

This was just 3 days before the New Dealers successfully goaded Japan into attacking America’s new military outpost in the Pacific, better known as Pearl Harbor. (Uncle Sam had just seized control of Hawaii in 1893 as an exercise in political power.) The ongoing claim that Japan’s December 7 response to America’s blockade was an “unprovoked” and “surprise” attack on a “neutral country” are all fictions that court historians and media shills repeat to this day.

Most Americans were well aware in 1941 that FDR had dragged the U.S. into another global conflict. But New Deal censors and FCC broadcasters stepped up their efforts to silence all opposing voices and convince the public that war was the only option. And the endless repetition of the “innocent America” fable—along with crude depictions of our “enemies”—has now been accepted as Revealed Truth by generations of unsuspecting Americans.

Since the 1940s, pro-war media and historians have turned reality upside-down on virtually every aspect of WW2. That includes the bizarre depictions of the popular anti-war media of the 1930s.

To the extent that the prominent publisher William Randolph Hearst is remembered at all, many reflexively point to Hearst’s interventionist sentiment during the 1898 Spanish-American War in Cuba, when Bill was only 35, to dismiss this towering figure of the first half of the 20^th century. Invariably, to keep up this narrative of the crazy-Hearst-warmonger, the harsh treatment of Cuban nationals at the hand of imperial Spain must also be dismissed.

The myth of a warmongering Hearst has lived on well past the publisher’s death in 1951. As recently as 2010, regime historians like Evan Thomas (of Newsweek magazine and Inside Washington TV show fame) peddled the false depiction of Hearst as one the country’s leading “War Lovers” in his book of the same name. Countless others before and after him have piled onto Hearst as the embodiment of despicable “yellow journalism”—as opposed to the tame, regal and Regulated Press that unofficially began with the federal Radio Act of 1927 and quickly led to the Golden Age of Propaganda dominated by FCC broadcasters.

Attacks against Hearst were common throughout his more than six decades of publishing. And ironically, the harshest attacks against the independent Democrat came because of his expressly anti-war reporting leading up to U.S. entry to World Wars 1 and 2.

Those unfamiliar with William Randolph Hearst beyond the cartoonish depictions by his critics (which were many) may be surprised to learn of the publisher’s strong opposition to U.S. entry to World War 1. At the time, this was very well known—not just because of Hearst’s popular newspapers, but also the strenuous efforts of the pro-war press to silence him.

For instance, the hawkish Republican New York Tribune ran hit pieces in six successive Sunday editions from April to June 1918 denouncing Hearst for his alleged disloyalty. A good account of this censorship campaign is included in the 2000 biography The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw, even though the author generally dislikes his subject.

According to historian Nasaw, each of the six anti-Hearst articles in the New York Tribune was preceded by a boxed scorecard of the 155 unacceptable articles that Hearst papers had printed since the United States entered the war in April 1917. Those articles included “74 attacks on our allies, 17 instances of defense or praise of Germany, 63 pieces of antiwar propaganda” etc. (Nasaw, p. 268)

Regardless of what anyone thinks of Hearst’s populist Democrat politics at the time, a fair assessment should credit Hearst for being one of the few publishers resisting the British Empire’s propaganda stories of German atrocities in Belgium before U.S. entry to the war. The “Chief”—as Hearst was known to his staff writers—continued his strong opposition to international warfare throughout the 1920s and 30s, until such views became essentially illegal after 1941.

His outspoken anti-war style didn’t hurt the Hearst media empire one bit, as his readership remained high for the entire period. And his newspapers’ pro-peace stance during WW1 obviously didn’t harm Hearst’s public reputation with leading politicians, as evidenced by the 1919 photo (below) of Democrat royalty eagerly standing next to the “scandalous” publisher immediately after the Great War he had openly criticized.

The New Deal regime of the 1930s despised anyone who challenged their sweeping efforts to centralize power. That put Hearst—who initially supported FDR in 1932, but soured on Roosevelt when he turned tyrannical—squarely in their crosshairs. New Deal radicals tormented Hearst for years with sham IRS and FCC investigations.

The partisan campaigns against Hearst got their biggest boost from the 1941 film Citizen Kane, produced by a socialist and prominent FDR campaigner, Orson Welles.

Hollywood and media attitudes since World War 2 have been dramatically different than the largely pro-peace 1920s entertainment and press that helped most Americans then realize that U.S. entry to WW1 was a “mistake.” (The 1927 and 1934 federal takeover of broadcasting probably had much to do with that shift in public opinion. “Free Speech” phonies never talk about those major legal usurpations, by the way, in their tireless efforts to remain in the “insiders” club.)

For over 75 years after WW2, Washington’s adversaries—particularly the Germans—continue to be portrayed in the crudest fashion in hundreds of major films and pro-war propaganda stories. America and its war allies are invariably portrayed as heroic saviors of the free world, omitting many atrocities that U.S. commanders inflicted upon their vanquished enemies.

As for the 1941 film Citizen Kane, partisans in media and academics still maintain that slanderous movie—produced by avid FDR booster, Orson Welles—was nothing more than harmless entertainment. The enormous Wikipedia page on Citizen Kane effusely praises the film and makes no mention of any political affiliation of the producer Welles or any possible motive for him disliking Hearst. That is to say, many people’s blind hatred of independent media has made important context of that particular film and other important aspects of WW2 largely irrelevant. However, at least one independent publisher (who runs this website) and scores of independent writers found here and elsewhere are making strides at challenging the narrative.

As for the political harassment of anti-war publisher Robert McCormick, and a few other notable victims of harassment and censorship during the New Deal period, my 2019 essay “The Forgotten Media Purges of the Great Depression” noted:

Another good read on New Deal media history is Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. This book… has entire chapters on Garet Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post, columnist and author John Flynn, and publisher Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. These chapters cover about 100 pages and provide excellent insights to the time period. Strangely, the author couldn’t afford a single kind word for popular independent publisher Bill Hearst (barely mentioned) or any acknowledgement at all for radio sensation Charles Coughlin—both targets of FDR suppression.

My 2019 essay had a few paragraphs on each of those bolded people cited above, for anyone who wants a condensed summary of Mr. Raimondo’s exceptional book. That prior essay had a longer section on Will Hearst, his admirable “indifference to public opinion” (as war-loving Winston Churchill admitted) and the organized censorship efforts against him by New Deal supporters. Of those censored figures and their publications, the public attacks on Hearst, the Chicago Tribune and the demise of the popular weekly magazine the Saturday Evening Post are probably the most comprehensive in scope. And also the most outrageous as for what Roosevelt got away with.

As for Charles Coughlin, I’ll elaborate here on this eloquent and forgotten pro-peace hero as well as FDR’s public censorship campaign against him.

Remembering Another Anti-War Hero of the 1930s: ‘Radio Priest’ Charles Coughlin

Unfortunately, nearly all surviving accounts of 1930s anti-war efforts portrayed in mainstream media are overwhelmingly negative and often hostile to the point of absurdity. This is true of the America First movement as well as the last two remaining anti-interventionist voices allowed near a radio microphone. But even the biased depictions by pro-war belligerents sometimes leave enough “meat” on the bones to form an indication of what these men stood for.

Radio personalities Boake Carter and Father Charles Coughlin were both popular in the 1930s and prone to criticize Roosevelt’s war efforts. Both were investigated and attacked by FDR and his minions, who eventually got Carter and Coughlin kicked off the air. But before the censors dispensed with their foes, Mr. Coughlin in particular left a record worthy of remembrance. (Boake Carter, a World War 1 veteran, moved to America from England in 1921 and began his radio career in 1930. My 2019 essay had a few paragraphs on him which I won’t be repeating today.)

Of the two, Father Coughlin was by far the more influential and the more loathed by pro-war combatants. (Partisan writers of the PBS smear piece cited below claim that it was the “Catholic hierarchy” that “silenced” Coughlin, letting Democrat and Jewish censors entirely off the hook. That is false, as even hostile Wikipedia and the critical book Voices of Protest extensively document. Coughlin’s forcible removals from radio and print were organized political takedowns.)

Born in Hamiton, Ontario in 1891, Charles E. Coughlin was soon immersed in Catholic social justice philosophy, mixing traditional teachings of Thomas Aquinas with more liberal collectivism that was sweeping Western universities at the time. After completing his seminary education in Toronto, for seven years Coughlin taught English, history and Greek at a small college in Windsor, Ontario (just across the river from Detroit) while also coaching its football team. (Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest, page 88).

In 1923, Coughlin began his first assignment as an assistant pastor in rural Michigan and three years later was promoted to parish priest in a suburb of Detroit named Royal Oak. This is where the eloquent priest drifted into radio broadcasting and eventually national politics.

What initially brought Coughlin into broadcasting in 1926 was a “blazing cross planted on the lawn” of his new church in Royal Oak, Michigan. It was a warning sign from the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (Brinkley, p. 82). In less than a decade, Coughlin’s popularity—with Protestants as well as Catholics—swelled to an incredible 30 million listeners to his one-hour Sunday afternoon show. And he accomplished that with only about 30 radio stations, exclusively in the Northeast and industrial Midwest.

During the early 1930s, while Coughlin was still publicly praising FDR and his New Deal agenda, the Radio Priest had built an enormous following beyond his impressive listening audience. From 1932 until the late 1930s, Coughlin was probably the single greatest draw of any public speaker in America. The priest spoke to overflow crowds Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis, with 30,000 each in Cleveland and NYC’s Madison Square Garden and 60,000 in Pitt stadium (Brinkley, pp. 83, 130, 176).

By 1934, Coughlin “was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and needed a clerical staff of 26 secretaries to manage it. His abundance of donations allowed him to shun corporate propaganda ads (Brinkley pp. 119-120; Louis Ward p. 31). Even if his refusal to hold a regular job in the marketplace made him prone to pandering (e.g., to farmers, unions, welfare recipients, etc.) he was more independent, and more willing to speak out against the twin evils of war-mongering and fiat banking, than practically anyone I can think of today.

Exposing the Sham ‘Treaty’ of Versailles Triggers CBS Censorship Efforts in 1931

A good example of Coughlin’s understanding of foreign affairs, his courage to stand up for unpopular causes, and the intolerance of his critics involves the so-called ‘Treaty’ of Versailles. Unlike many today (such as the editors of Wikipedia), Coughlin saw through the façade about this “peace treaty” that was imposed upon Germany. A century later, it’s fairly easy to comprehend how that vindictive edict came about from England’s starvation blockade of Germany from 1914 to 1919 that forced Germany to sign it in the first place. But this was a fairly radical concept in 1931, when Coughlin dared to broach the topic over a public broadcast.

Establishment historian Alan Brinkley (whose book was admittedly funded by Harvard, MIT and Uncle Sam) sugar coats the 1931 Versailles affair that triggered CBS and NBS censorship of Coughlin. Brinkly also gaslights on the broadcasting cartel being afraid of “offending the federal establishment” in general:

The most serious objection to Coughlin’s early sermons, however, came from CBS, the network that was broadcasting them. The radio industry, subject to more government regulation than most private enterprises, was always sensitive to official displeasure. In the early 1930s, with the relationship between government and radio still undefined, fledgling organizations like CBS were particularly nervous about offending the federal establishment. Coughlin had been injecting politics into his sermons for less than a year when the network apparently decided that he was going too far, and in January of 1931 they quietly but pointedly suggested that he “tone down” his future broadcasts. (pp. 99-100)

The 1933 book Father Charles E. Coughlin by authorized biographer Louis B. Ward provides more details on the priest’s 1931 Versailles broadcasts. Pages 83 to 86 of that book give background on Coughlin’s preparing plans to discuss the Versailles topic in January 1931. They also detail some intrigue on the part of CBS and the White House, both of whom were closely monitoring the priest’s broadcasts and were apparently tapping the phone lines between Coughlin and Pennsylvania Congressman Louis McFadden (smeared by Wikipedia), who was a mentor to the priest on financial matters. McFadden was a former banker and 10-term Republican Congressman who criticized the Fed and was killed in 1936 allegedly by food poisoning after a banquet in New York City, after two prior assassination attempts.

Details of Coughlin’s January 4 broadcast on CBS censorship efforts and the following week’s discussion of Versailles are not provided in either book. However, the transcript of Coughlin’s February 1931 recap on Versailles abuses illuminates the priest’s understanding of the situation:

[during World War 1] Newspaper after newspaper was purchased by foreign gold to sell the wares of partisanship, to stir up hatred founded upon lies, to persuade an easily deceived people to take up arms for the defense of international investments made by American international bankers on foreign soil. Finally, the last American dough-boy sacrificed his life for an ephemeral dream called democracy. Then came the Treaty of Versailles. It was signed, sealed and delivered—that peace treaty which produced neither peace nor democracy, but from whose adulterous loins was bred the abortion of depression.

Its stipulations were cruel, merciless. Germany is forbidden the rights of trade and commerce with the rest of the civilized world. Every ounce of her gold which she possesses is confiscated. Nevertheless, a fine of 33,000,000,000 gold dollars is imposed upon her, although it is well recognized that there are only $11,000,000,000 of gold held in the treasuries of the nations who had despoiled her!

That, my friends, was the beginning of our present sorrow. (Ward, p. 162)

And that is a good example of the measured, articulate, reasonable style of Charles Coughlin, who was adored by the public and despised by New Deal despots.

Harvard and Columbia history professor Alan Brinkley—son of long-time ABC newscaster David Brinkley—is either too lazy or too dishonest to provide any details of Coughlin’s 1931 broadcasts that he denounces as “inflammatory” and “belligerent defiance.” Official outrage at the Radio Priest’s exposing of the Versailles injustice is most perplexing, considering that the controversial sermon came nearly a dozen years after that dubious document was crafted. Yet,

When his contract expired in April of 1931, CBS refused to renew it [and lied about their reasons] … The National Broadcasting Company was similarly evasive but equally adamant. It could offer no broadcasting time to Coughlin. (Brinkley, p. 100)

Fortunately for Coughlin, there were still a few independent broadcasters in America willing to challenge the powers at large. So his weekly radio broadcast survived for the rest of the decade. But it still drew fire from the usual suspects.

Charles Coughlin on International Banking, the Endless Pot of War Funds

Considering the power of fiat bank fraud—that is, turning every $1 of reserves into $5 or $10 of loans—in financing every significant war in Europe and America for at least the last four centuries, any honest public speaker should have something to say on the topic. To his credit, Mr. Coughlin did not shy away from this controversial issue during his years in the spotlight, even if his solution of “public banking” is misguided.

(Modern proponents of public banking conspicuously refuse to answer: A) What is your inflation target? B) What are your reserve requirements? C) How many thousands of pages of “regulations” will be needed to rationalize why a poor black woman needs greater borrowing opportunities than a rich white male? My preference would be a 100% reserve requirement and zero inflation. Let banks loan to whoever they want to; the profit motive is the best remedy to discrimination. Any law more than one page is probably full of corrupt influence and hateful favoritism.)

For an example of Coughlin’s understanding of the banking system, Coughlin warned his listeners on the problem of “permitting bankers to manufacture their own money, to expand and contract currency at will.” In 1933, Coughlin made a major point of criticizing three local (not “international”) banks in Detroit for a lack of reserves leading to their devastating collapse. This triggered federal investigations and a backlash from the Detroit Press, which was owned by one of those failed bank’s president. (Brinkley, pages 113, 115-118)

That alone puts him ahead of so many “liberty” zealots who endlessly decry “The Fed” but give private debt dealers a free pass. The hordes of mass-media delinquents who stay silent on this great scandal are even worse.

Jew-baiting Hacks and their Lies about Coughlin (to cover their extreme war agenda)

Of course, any mention of Coughlin and banking will evoke histrionics that the priest singled out Jews for special (and totally undeserved) attention. This allows war advocates to cover their violence with disingenuous moral outrage. And it allows fiat bankers to continue their rapacious craft of inflation/boom/bust/feast on the carnage, with no real opposition.

Wikipedia provides such cover, with sensational claims that “After making attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to broadcast antisemitic [sic] commentary.” Then they throw in two taunts of “Fascist” in that same paragraph to scare people away.

So does this lengthy 2022 PBS hit piece written and funded by Jewish political factions including a NYT reporter, Tablet magazine, the Maimonides Fund and other wealthy donors. These pro-war, empty-bank apologists claim of Coughlin:

He resorted to shopworn phrases in the lexicon of anti-Jewish hatred, with references to “every money changer in Wall Street” and “international bankers.”

Frightening stuff, for sure! But reality was quite different.

Charles Coughlin went to great lengths to make it clear that any criticism about specific Jewish bankers did not imply broader guilt to the many “good Jews” of America. He even made excuses for Jewish involvement in the dishonest trade of fiat banking in general.

Alan Brinkley’s book Voices of Protest (which Wikipedia and PBS are clearly familiar with) strangely mocks Coughlin who “for no apparent reason” gave a long dissertation on Jewish history that blamed Christians for Jewish banking activity. In that 1933 radio sermon, Coughlin claimed that Jews turned to finance instead of farming because “They were forced into this position by the hatred of Christians.” He went on state that it was “our Christian ancestors who forced the Jew to hoarding gold.” (p. 270)

And the case for Coughlin’s alleged banking bigotry gets even more flimsy when scratching beneath the surface. Brinkley’s hostile book Voices of Protest admits:

Throughout Coughlin’s 1933 and 1934 sermons, reference to Christian (usually Protestant) bankers and financial establishments were nearly 50 percent more frequent than references to Jewish men or firms. (p. 272)

Leading bankers J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, both Protestants, were the most frequent targets of Coughlin’s criticisms, according to Brinkley. And that pattern continued for years.

Transforming a Left-Wing, Anti-War Catholic into a ‘Right-Wing Fascist’

Since Charles Coughlin was the most outspoken anti-war figure of the 1930s—and provoked the most venomous response from pro-war adherents then and now—some explanation seems warranted. The avalanche of abuse heaped on Father Coughlin during his prime is hard to appreciate now, since no media figure today (not even Tucker Carlson) receives such naked hostility, and also since mainstream media has heavily scrubbed the censorship efforts.

As for Coughlin’s politics, even a few minutes of honest research should indicate that the Radio Priest was a man of big-government programs—ostensibly to help unions, farmers and the poor in general. A bit more investigation will bring you to Coughlin’s 16 Principles of the National Union for Social Justice, a concise summary of the priest’s political beliefs announced during a November 1934 broadcast (also provided in pages 287-88 of Brinkley’s screed against Coughlin). Those principles included:

• “a just and living annual wage” for “every citizen willing to work”
• “nationalizing… banking, credit and currency, power, light, oil and natural gas”
• “the right to private property yet in controlling it for the public good”
• “the right of the laboring man to organize in unions” and “the duty of the Government which that laboring man supports to facilitate and to protect these organizations”
• “taxation founded upon the ownership of wealth and the capacity to pay”
• “in the event of a war for the defense of our nation and its liberties, there shall be a conscription of wealth as well as a conscription of men”

His only arguably non-leftist viewpoints consisted of “liberty of conscience and liberty of education.” Coughlin was hardly a Man of the “extreme” Right as so many critics now contend.

As for Coughlin’s attitudes towards Jews, Brinkley’s 348-page book (including footnotes and index) strains for any hint of religious bigotry that can be attributed to the Radio Priest, who was under close scrutiny throughout his 15 years of broadcasting. Yet the Ivy League historian, after making many slights of Coughlin and his character, admits that at least through 1938 (when FDR and Jewish media went berserk for war and censorship) “the case for his anti-Semitism… [has] rested on a very few, usually passing remarks.” (p. 270)

That leaves pro-war censorship (and perhaps some anti-Christian bigotry by Jewish political activists) as the only remaining reasons for the incredible hostility directed towards this prominent man.

Now that internet journalism is taking shape, some overdue attention is finally being given to WW2-era censorship. Ron Unz’s 2018 essay “Our Great Purge of the 1940s” is one such example, although it makes no mention of Coughlin. Regarding Father Coughlin, Counter-Currents online magazine in 2018 did a fair piece on some of the organized efforts to silence him:

the anti-Coughlin campaign was much more focused and sustained, and it originated not from the Justice Department or any other government agency, but from an oddball Left-wing New York newspaper led by one of the most notable editors of the era: Ralph Ingersoll.

The paper was PM, and for the first two years of its existence (1940-42), it exulted in damning Father Coughlin as a seditionist, a yellow-journalist, a Nazi mouthpiece, and an impious opponent of democracy.

The daily newspaper, PM, was funded by silver-spoon retail heir and Democrat operative Marshall Field III. Mr. Field would later finance and sit on the board of directors for Chicago’s infamous community agitator Saul Alinsky.

PM newspaper’s assault on Coughlin included a tear-out sheet for readers to mail to the U.S. Attorney General to get Coughlin’s weekly magazine, Social Justice, banned from mail delivery. Counter-Currents provides a scanned copy of the tear-out sheet for aspiring censors, and notes:

In March ’42, PM started to print tear-out-and-mail questionnaires addressed to Attorney General Biddle, demanding that the government immediately investigate Coughlin and ban Social Justice [magazine] from the US postal system. Forty-three thousand of these were mailed in by loyal readers, the paper reported, and soon enough Biddle lowered the boom.

For some perspective on PM newspaper, it was apparently a pro-war rag right from its launch in June 1940 (see photo above), about 18 months before Japan’s “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor. Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) loves PM newspaper and praised it in a 2012 essay titled “When the 99% Had a Paper.” It was subtitled “The brief, wondrous life of PM” (as the daily paper sold to new owners in 1948 and folded in 1949). But the ideologues at CJR didn’t mention PM’s pro-war censorship efforts or anything about Father Coughlin. The swells at Columbia J-School also forgot that nowhere near 99% of Americans in 1940 supported FDR’s mad dash to war, or that few Americans agreed with the steady diet of left-wing tripe offered by Mr. Field’s pet journalists.

The organized attacks on Coughlin (and to a lesser degree, populist Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey Long) didn’t start with that one left-wing newspaper from NYC that helped destroy the priest’s weekly magazine in 1942.

During the 1930s, organized political elements who wanted to seize control of America were frothing mad about both Long (who was killed in 1935) and Coughlin. Alan Brinkley’s book Voices of Protest adds:

Norman Thomas and the rest of the Socialist Party leadership denounced both Long and Coughlin as decided menaces, as the first manifestations of an American inclination towards fascism; and, like the Communists, Socialist Party members built the publication of anti-Long and anti-Coughlin literature into something like a cottage industry. In Illinois, the Cook County party organization purchased and distributed 5,000 pamphlets denouncing both men. … In Buffalo, Philadelphia, Chicago… and elsewhere, units of the Socialist Party held public forums to discuss the “menace” of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. (p. 238)

The conservative Zionist website strangely called American Thinker builds upon those left-wing smears and continued the trend in a 2019 article titled “The Original Social Justice Warrior: Father Charles Coughlin.” Its first sentence leaves no doubt as to the absolute evil of this meddlesome priest:

The most notorious American anti-Semite [sic] of the 1930s was Father Charles Coughlin, the charismatic pastor of Shrine of the Little Flower in suburban Detroit.

The last example of anything positive (or even neutral) I can find in mainstream journalism about Charles Coughlin is an interview published in 1972 in American Heritage magazine—a full 30 years after the priest was forcibly removed from all public communication. Although the online version of that interview contains many obvious transcription errors, the substance comes through of a man who, during his radio career, held reasonable concerns about banking corruption, wealthy industrialists taking advantage of their workers and the madness of foreign intervention.

Even more impressive was that Coughlin—in his own words, not distortions by critics—expressed no antipathy towards the Jewish media that had unfairly attacked him in the 1930s. The priest’s interview in 1972 was also surprisingly generous towards Franklin Roosevelt, whose administration permanently censored Coughlin from broadcasting in 1940 and revoked the “mailing privilege” (Wikipedia’s odd term) of Coughlin’s newspaper Social Justice in 1942. The “Padre,” as FDR called him during their frequent meetings, still spoke warmly of Roosevelt as someone he personally “loved… when he was away from that darned desk of his.”

That American Heritage interview of Coughlin was over 50 years ago. Since then, this immensely influential anti-war voice of the 1930s has been either demonized or simply airbrushed out of history. Popular anti-war newspaper publishers Hearst and McCormick have received similarly harsh and/or dismissive treatment. All three cases invoke memories of the Soviets famously airbrushing Leon Trotsky out of history books. Only Trotsky’s grass-roots efforts gained a much smaller following at the time.

For the last 80 years, the pro-war and Zionist smear machine(s) have almost completely erased the historical record of both William Randolph Hearst and Father Charles Coughlin, both immensely popular figures of their time, who were destroyed by organized political efforts.

And the excuse of “anti-semitism” cannot explain much of it (or arguably any of it). Hearst had nothing critical to say about Jews (as Jewish biographer David Nasaw quietly admits) but was opposed to U.S. entry into both World Wars. Coughlin, towards the end of his career, criticized Jewish (and non-Jewish) bank fraud and general war-mongering in usually generous terms.

That leaves pro-war zealotry as the leading excuse for censoring the highly influential Hearst and Coughlin, as well as Garet Garrett, John Flynn, Robert McCormick and radio sensation Boake Carter—none of whom were noted as critics of Jews—and many others.

With Boake Carter forcibly removed from his audience of 85 CBS radio stations in 1938, that left radio overwhelmingly pro-FDR and nearly 100% pro-war—with the singular exception of a Canadian-American Radio Priest in Detroit and his one hour show on Sundays. But even that was more than the collection of Debt Dealers, War Merchants and FDR minions could tolerate.

Coughlin was banished from radio in 1940 and blocked from print publication in 1942. After an avalanche of abuse, Wikipedia confirms the essentials:

After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939, the Roosevelt administration forced the cancellation of his radio program…

The online encyclopedia continues:

After the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. declaration of war in December 1941… The Roosevelt Administration stepped in again. On April 14, 1942, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote a letter to the Postmaster General, Frank Walker, in which he suggested that the second-class mailing privilege of Social Justice be revoked, in order to make it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to its readers.

Yet some dishonest activists today (and the 1979 NYT obituary for Coughlin) maintain it was the “Catholic hierarchy” that silenced their most prolific voice in America.

If nothing else, it should be clear that Father Coughlin didn’t go down without a fight. I can’t say as much for our next batch of sunshine patriots.

The ‘America First’ Movement: Your Father’s (Safe and Boring) Anti-War Club

That brings us to the America First Committee, easily the most familiar anti-war collective of the pre-WW2 era, and arguably the most impotent. I had initially planned to devote greater attention to that outfit, but the more I researched other figures like McCormick, Hearst and Coughlin, the less impressed I became with America First.

However, since my lead photo of Charles Lindbergh speaking at a 1941 rally is a fairly well-known event, I decided to take it easy on the cover and build up to the more powerful elements as things progressed. But I added the lead caption that mentioned McCormick, Hearst and Coughlin as a hint of things to come.

Also important, no single image of McCormick, Hearst or Coughlin can possibly do justice to what these men stood for—even if their warnings were eventually shouted down by the mobs. Here’s something I’ve learned over the years that keeps coming back to me and seems relevant here: Image is nothing… unless you’re an empty suit.

For the America First gang, image was everything. The polished political dandies of America First were all about sounding proper, safe and respectable. In the end, they stood for nothing. And they completely failed. After only four days of adverse conditions!

As for the content of the America Firsters’ message, I would challenge any supporter of those guys to show me ONE interesting sentence ever spoken at one of their public rallies. Sheepishly uttering something about “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration” as the three groups “pressing this country toward war” hardly counts—even if it did trigger an insane reaction by the cited parties.

For background on the America First Committee, I’ll defer to Run Unz’s 2018 essay on the Great Purge of the 1940s which had a concise section on them:

it quickly grew to 800,000 members, becoming the largest grass-roots political organization in our national history. Numerous prominent public figures joined or supported it, with the chairman of Sears, Roebuck serving as its head, and its youthful members included future presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford as well as other notables such as Gore Vidal, Potter Stewart, and Sargent Schriver. Flynn served as chairman of the New York City chapter, and the organization’s leading public spokesman was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who for decades had probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero.

Throughout 1941, enormous crowds across the country attended anti-war rallies addressed by Lindbergh and the other leaders, with many millions more listening to the radio broadcasts of the events.

Yet this group of celluloid heroes dissolved into nothing on December 11, 1941, a mere four days after the Roosevelt regime got its dream come true of Japan retaliating in Pearl Harbor against USA’s devastating economic blockade.

For perspective on AFC’s 800,000 members, Wikipedia’s account of Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice states: “At the height of the Union’s popularity, it reached a membership of 7.5 million people.” In both cases, it’s safe to say a majority of members were of a nominal commitment level, probably more so for America First.

Coughlin’s weekly magazine, Social Justice, peaked out at “a circulation of more than a million” according to critics at Tablet magazine. America First had no in-house publication. Coughlin’s National Union held local meetings around much of the country, particularly in New England states and the industrial Midwest. America First did technically have 450 local chapters, but actual involvement was apparently low, based on the paucity of any references to local meetings. Funding for the National Union was entirely from small individual donations. Funding for AFC was primarily from wealthy captains of big business, according to Wikipedia.

On the “Jewish question” that outraged many, if Lindbergh, Flynn, Gore Vidal and company had any backbone whatsoever, they could have calmly pointed out some basics regarding Jewish representation in U.S. media at the time. Besides Jewish publishers Adolph Ochs at the New York Times, former Federal Reserve chief Eugene Meyer at the Washington Post, and many other newspapers and magazines staffed with Jewish writers and editors—America’s two leading radio broadcasters, NBC and CBS, empowered by exclusive FCC privileges, were both run by Jews. The National Broadcasting Company was run by a Jewish immigrant from Russia named David Sarnoff (1891-1971). The Columbia Broadcasting System was run by a Jew named William S. Paley (1901-1990), whose wealthy father had emigrated from Ukraine.

The Jewish book publishing industry’s 1940 screed Germany Must Perish! (praised by NYT, WaPo and Time magazine) was possibly more explicitly genocidal than anything German media was publishing then. Also in 1940, the British propaganda movie Night Train to Munich was alerting UK and American audiences to the Kraut menace, inserting Anglo-Zionist xenophobia over the unification of German citizens trapped in Czechoslovakia. The evidence to support AFC’s claim of British/Jewish/Roosevelt war-mongering should have been abundant and readily understandable to anyone. But America First retreated under pressure, failing to make such a case.

New Deal historian Betty Winfield—a Missouri school of journalism professor—recounts that as of 1940, NBC and CBS (who were staunchly pro-war) held a commanding “86 percent of the total night-time radio power in the country” (p. 110). Since the FCC and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission, were strictly controlling broadcast licensing since 1927, NBC and CBS had few competitors from their very beginning—which was the whole point of federal licensing.

The intellectuals running the America First Committee should have had hundreds of examples of war-mongering histrionics (Jewish and otherwise) at their disposal. But they declined to present any case defending Lindbergh’s (barely whispered) remarks that inflamed so much pro-war rage.

And it gets worse. Another glaring oversight by America First patriots (then and now) is the basic premise of broadcast rationing. That is, immense federal barriers to keep out the subversives and maintain sanitized narratives for D.C. supremacy. One might think that small-government “conservatives” and any sincere “liberals” would oppose such federal interference on our supposedly Free Press. But that assumption would be wrong.

Root Cause 101: The Gigantic Barriers on Public Broadcasting

If professional pundits ever choose to stop whining about “fake news” and “hate speech” and get serious about improving things, they might want to take a look at enabling laws like the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, both of which empower pro-welfare and pro-war alarmists with immense privileges. The America First Committee, apparently, failed to grasp either of these great assaults on the country they claimed to love.

Even today, “free-speech” phonies of the corporate Left/Right conspicuously overlook the enormity of those two heinous laws from 1927 and 1934. This tells me that many of the “sponson me” crowd are either incredibly ignorant of history or really just want to get attention by complaining loudly about trivial partisan distractions.

Thankfully today, with the growth of independent media, there are some outsiders who buck this trend. Three good examples of writers keenly aware of the problem (in theory and in practice) with federal speech rationing are:

• a 2004 essay from the Mises Institute by B.K. Marcus; this deals with legal theory and is silent on Roosevelt;
• a 2017 article “FDR’s War Against the Press” in Reason magazine by University of Alabama history professor David Beito; and
• the 2001 book Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, by Jesse Walker, the most comprehensive of the three and worth the effort for anyone interested in media history.

All of those works, and more, are discussed in my essay on Forgotten Media Purges. So by my informal count for this century, that’s at least four people who recognize the root cause of state-sponsored propaganda in America… and probably well over 4,000 legacy media insiders who just wanna be part of the racket while pandering to their base.

Considering the steady decline of American culture over the last 80-90 years, I suppose that’s a step in the right direction. But this country could use a few more people eager to “strike the root” on this major topic.

In practice, those two disastrous laws act as an enormous Poll Tax on Public Debate, keeping over 99.9% of the public away from the broadcast microphone—a privilege that legacy media fiercely guards while stubbornly denying. Those laws, and the sprawling FCC bureaucracy they created, empower corporate control freaks with almost unlimited ability to flood the airwaves with state-crafted narratives, crippling attacks on their foes and fawning praise of the eloquent brutes (Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Churchill, the Kennedys, MLK, Obama, etc.) that totalitarians admire.

Move Evidence of AFC Meekness: Every Educated American Knew FDR was Pushing for War

When evaluating the courage or cowardice of the America First Committee, let’s recall that during the 1930s anti-war publishers Hearst and McCormick and their newspaper “holdings comprised over 50 percent of the country’s Sunday circulation,” according to media historian Betty Winfield in her book FDR and the News Media. Throw in millions of listeners to Father Coughlin’s weekly radio show. Also factor in the recent memories of Americans who solidly rejected U.S. involvement in the previous World War of 1917-18.

So the America First Committee certainly had outside resources to counter the pro-war hype, in addition to their substantial 800,000 members. McCormick, Hearst and Coughlin were all loudly warning the public of FDR’s deceitful efforts to drag the U.S. into Europe’s broiling battlefield. There was virtually no grass-roots support in America for joining Europe’s war at the time. For the most part only politicians, broadcast media and some academic cranks wanted war.

Nevertheless, within two days after Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee was in full retreat, announcing plans published in the (pro-war) New York Times edition of December 9 that AFC decided to cancel an upcoming rally in Boston.

By December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America First collapsed in utter ruin. Not only did their organization cease to exist. But its leadership now openly endorsed Roosevelt’s, the British Empire’s and Jewish media barons’ desire to go kill those diabolical Krauts and Japs that the three war-loving groups had long been demonizing.

Wikipedia’s hostile entry on the America First Committee provides a long quote from Charles Lindbergh’s announcement of surrender. That statement included:

…our country has been attacked by force of arms and by force of arms we must retaliate. Our own defenses and our own military position have already been neglected too long. We must now turn every effort to building the greatest and most efficient Army, Navy and Air Force in the world. When American soldiers go to war it must be with the best equipment that modern skill can design and that modern industry can build.

A statement from the America First Committee published in an Iowa newspaper (also quoted by Wikipedia) on December 12 continued:

We are at war. Today, though there may be many important subsidiary considerations, the primary objective is not difficult to state. It can be completely defined in one word: Victory.

For the next four years after Pearl Harbor, the lies and distortions surrounding U.S. involvement in World War 2 would reach such a fevered pitch that America has still not recovered—more than 80 years later!

Our collective refusal to honestly face our past complicity with evil has led to more military adventures and continued cultural decline. Since the brief peace after 1945, America’s fealty to all things military helped imperial Washington launch disastrous and usually illegal wars against Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Russia and now funding genocide in Palestine. Today, the dominant messaging has entranced supporters of both major parties to delusions that: Our warriors are heroes; their warriors are terrorists.

We now live in a level of belligerent stupidity that even the most craven pro-war fanatics in 1935 could never have imagined.

The Fruits of World War 2: Fighting ‘Nazis’ by Turning into Fascists?

If the censorship of anti-war voices prior to World War 2 had simply ended after allied “victory” in Europe and Japan, that might warrant the prevailing dismissal by court historians on the gravity of those purges. But the steady lurch towards federal control—of everything—suggests that the New Dealers’ war against free speech did not end in 1945. And America’s alleged “victory” over fascism is also highly questionable.

While most Americans were basking in their post-war comfort, the centralization of power in Washington D.C. continued to slowly and steadily march forward. With independent voices either cancelled entirely or heavily marginalized from 1942 until the rise of internet publishing in the 1990s, American culture now stands highly influenced by authoritarian attitudes on all meaningful aspects of daily life.

And the smothering hyper-legalism needed to enforce these sprawling bureaucracies has devasted America’s former industrial base and pushed most people into retail and service jobs, where no real “wealth” is created. The totalitarian culture of fear and conformity—something we were supposedly fighting against in the 1940s—has made even miniscule steps of progress in any of these areas nearly impossible.

I’ll leave for another day my analysis of the magnitude of federal interference in each of those areas and the harm caused in all cases. For today, I’ll just note that the leadership of both parties in Washington is overwhelmingly pro-National Socialism (or Global Socialism) on nearly every one of those topics.

Donald Trump is considered a “threat” to the establishment for supporting private gun ownership, pushing back on climate hysteria and resisting the more extreme elements of federal race baiting. He too supports national involvement on at least 80% of the listed areas above.

Just How Much has ‘Military Adulation’ Soaked into American Culture?

Even though most Americans don’t “serve” in the military and don’t spend every moment salivating about war, that doesn’t mean we are rehabilitated in any collective way from the drunken orgy of violence perpetrated over the last century in the name of “democracy.”

With internet journalism just getting on its feet—and with four generations of Deep State misinformation to contend with—there is still much damage to learn from and repair. And our government-controlled education system isn’t helping.

Thanks to some combination of ignorance, fear and pride—across legacy media, entertainment, education and organized religion—our very language has been corrupted. And this is no accident.

When people talk like fools for long enough… we eventually start acting like fools. A century of frequent censorship and war-mongering—with persistent torture of the language—has left a majority of Americans too dumbfounded to recognize fact from fiction.

For instance, the elected members of America’s Congress (who are quite fluent in double-speak) recently disgraced themselves with over 50 standing ovations to a foreign warlord who has abused America for decades. And none of them will be held accountable for their duplicity.

For another recent example of mind-boggling levels of military pandering, I’ll turn to acting president Joe Biden. In a prepared speech after his poor handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan left a nation in ruins and 13 soldiers dead, Mr. Biden said:

They were part of the bravest, most capable, and the most selfless military on the face of the Earth. And they were part of, simply, what I call the ‘backbone of America.’ They’re the spine of America, the best the country has to offer. (8/26/2021 C-SPAN video and transcript)

He was talking about people who got paid to go on a violent foreign invasion that didn’t help anyone in America one bit. And Democrats are supposed to be the “rational” ones when it comes to senseless war-making. Many Republicans like Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley and the incorrigibles of AM talk radio are significantly worse.

In a more general sense, a country that forces children to begin the day with an idiotic loyalty oath, and one that cannot start a sporting event without blubbering about “bombs bursting in air” is neither a free nor peaceful society. When you add in the cradle-to-grave authoritarianism noted above, our $100 trillion in total debt bondage, and those acts of wanton servility… these are evidence of distress from a culture nearing collapse.

A century of prideful and reckless war-mongering tends to do that.

Some Closing Words on Militarism, from a more Sensible Journalist of the Era

One of the few independent journalists to have survived the great purges of the 1940s was libertarian columnist and author H. L. Mencken, who went into early retirement during the war years. After the war, he returned to writing but had much less influence now than during his prime in the 1920s and 30s. Yet Mencken still had his lively passion and penetrating wit.

In his book Minority Report published in 1956, Mencken observed that:

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits. The primeval bandit chiefs eventually became kings. Something of the bandit character still attaches to the military professional. He may fight bravely and unselfishly, but so do gamecocks. He may seek no material rewards, but neither do hunting dogs. His general attitude of mind is stupid and anti-social. It was a sound instinct in the Founding Fathers that made them subordinate the military establishment to the civil power.

By the 1950s, such sensible thoughts on military affairs were well outside the mainstream of acceptable viewpoints. And nothing like that description of military “bandits” has been allowed in mainstream publishing since then to tarnish “the bravest, most capable, and the most selfless military on the face of the Earth,” as Team Biden recently called them.

Information Overload; Still Searching for Substance

With the rise of internet news, Americans now have more sources of credible information than any time since the late 1930s. On military affairs, some anti-war “heroes” today include columnists Philip Giraldi, Pepe Escobar, Caitlin Johnstone, Chris Hedges, Max Blumenthal and many others featured regularly at Elon Musk’s liberated Twitter, Fox-free Tucker Carlson, Zero Hedge, Lew Rockwell, MintPress, The Unz Review and other independent websites that don’t hide behind FCC cartel privileges.

Following in the footsteps of Marine veteran Smedley Butler from a century before, today we have former Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter, retired Army Colonels Lawrence Wilkerson and Douglas Macgregor and former CIA analyst Larry Johnson all speaking out against endless wars for American empire.

After four long generations of stumbling in the dark and heading towards the abyss, Americans finally have options for news with a diversity of viewpoints and without a protective government barrier. But we don’t have anything close to the peaceful community spirit that largely came to an end in December 1941.

For over 300 years, America had strong communities and a modest central government. Since the 1930s it’s been just the opposite. European immigrants to America once had the wisdom to recognize evil, the courage to walk away from it, and the faith to invest time and effort to build something better. Very little of those positive (not uniquely “American”) values survive today in the West. And foolish military crusades played a large role in that transition.

In the 1930s, even a casual observer of Robert McCormick, Bill Hearst and Charles Coughlin had some idea of where those men stood on most important matters of the day (see 20 topics of National Socialism from Agriculture to Wage Controls, etc.). And all three of those public figures actually stood for something. The same cannot be said of the single-issue stiffs of America First.

Today, I have no idea where most Left/Right “sponsor me” cucks and attention-seeking “influencers” stand on anything of real substance. That is, being “anti-war” or “anti-capitalism” or “anti-foreigner” or “anti-government” and nothing else… just leaves people angry and confused.

Email: spenfieldNY@gmail.com