We, the Communists, the leaders of the American proletariat, the vanguard of the oppressed everywhere . . .”
“Led by the Communist Party, the vanguard of the American working class, the toilers of America are uniting to . . .”
While we, the self-styled vanguard, shouted ourselves hoarse on street corners to catch the ears of the casual passers-by, the Fascists who were much better financed took to the air. Father Coughlin, the “Radio Priest,” the most influential of all native would-be Fascist leaders, had an estimated audience of thirty million glued to their radio receivers on Sunday afternoons. It need be said that not all those spellbound by his oratory were aware that his social gospel was Fascist in its basic content and that his “Sixteen Points of Social Justice” so temptingly expounded in his golden voice were modeled on the Nuremberg program of Hitler’s National Socialist Party in Germany.
By 1936 Father Coughlin thought the time ripe for assuming personal command over his followers and to enter the field of national politics by sponsoring a Frazer-Lemke Third Party ticket in the 1936 presidential election. To give his candidates a flying start he decided to address their national nominating convention in Cleveland in person, making this his first political appearance in public.
To get the “feel” of that meeting it may be of help to know that the ideals of democracy, Socialism, Communism—no matter what opposite courses they may take in reality—are all based on the recognition of the fundamental humanity of man, on the striving for some sort of universal brotherhood in which all men are assured of enjoying certain inalienable rights including that of being permitted to live in peace and harmony with their fellow human beings. Democracy, Socialism, Communism share with true Christianity the concept of love thy neighbor—the early Christians actually lived in a form of primitive Communism. The cruel excesses perpetrated by the Communist rulers wherever they came to power no more negate the basic idealistic content of true Communism than the tortures of the Inquisition negate the teachings of Christ.
The motivating force of Fascism, in contrast, is that of hate. Fascism is based on the atavistic urge to kill every other being who dwells in a different cave, whose manners, customs, bodily appearance mark him as different from one’s own clan. Fascism is built on the pagan myth that through sharing some mystic quality in their blood one group of men are constituted a Master Race while the rest of mankind are nothing but subhumans to be exterminated at will, or at best, fit only to serve as slaves to their masters.
I planned to get to that meeting early to have a better chance to observe the behavior of the crowd, and I did.
Yet by the time I arrived both halls of the Public Auditorium, with a combined seating capacity of 14,000, were already packed. A private army of frozen-faced young men in semimilitary uniforms, identical shirts, breeches, and puttees, lined the walls, the aisles, and the wings of the common stage serving both auditoriums, keeping the audience under steady scrutiny. Their baleful eyes were alert for trouble and they made quite a show of resting their hands ominously on the blackjacks protruding from their hip pockets.
The audience was predominantly lower middle class, somberly dressed despite the summer heat; it sat uncommunicative and unsmiling.
It was a creepy sensation—a mass of humanity 14,000 strong, larger than the entire population of many a small town, waiting a full hour before the scheduled start of the meeting in a tense silence which was rarely interrupted by even a whispered sentence. That was Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. They were Americans but their behavior was not that of a normal American audience of squirming and gaily chattering people waiting for the main event. This was an almost motionless group with jaws grimly set, upper lips partially pulled back from the gums by taut facial muscles, gripped by some mystic anticipation. Physically they were one crowd yet spiritually they were not—each of them seemed to be alone with himself, his eyes glued to the empty stage but focused inwardly. They were waiting with muscles coiled like felines before the pounce, like epileptics on the verge of a seizure.
Walking down that long aisle to the press table in front under those unblinking, suspicious eyes was like running a gauntlet. I had a sudden urge to break into a run and it took great effort to saunter down slowly, jaunty and casual, to repeat with the right amount of bored indifference “Reporter” whenever challenged by those uniformed thugs, praying that I be allowed to pass without being asked for my press card which would identify me as the correspondent for the Communist Daily Worker.
All at once it came, as startling as the onrush of a sudden gust of storm—the sharp hiss of a gasp, the sucking intake of breath by thousands of open mouths.
“Father Coughlin is coming!” the whisper rose into a shout and the chamber erupted in a hoarse elemental roar. That roar was totally unlike those heard at National Party Conventions; it was not the cheer of the baseball park, nor the jeer of the picket line. That was the savage howl of the human pack, unarticulated and pulsating, a release of emotions so elemental and brutal that they had been long relegated into the unconscious by thousands of years of civilization for the self-preservation of mankind; an animal howl so primitive that no single individual when alone is capable of sounding it except in moments of stark insanity. That was the cry of humans gone berserk, an emotional explosion that needs to find an outlet in violence, or be sustained untIl total exhaustion sets in.
The entrance of a corps of drummers marching with military precision now raised the already deafening frenzy to a pitch near agony and suddenly Father CoughlIn materialized—a broad-shouldered, muscular man moving with the bounce of an athlete under the cassock of the Roman Catholic priest; flinging away his skirt with an impatient sweep when mounting the platform. He stood there with his feet planted wide apart, a triumphant smile on his face, listening to the howl of the mob as his rightful due. His stance radiated supreme self-confidence; he was the leader surveying his frenzied troops before unleashing them; only his tightly clenched fists belied his outward calm.
I can’t recall a single sentence of what Father Coughlin saId that night and I doubt there was a single individual in that audience who could have accurately retained any part of his address. That speech was not meant to be rooted in the memory of the audience—it was intended to sear the emotions of the listeners and to sensitize them to the point where they would react with similar violence at the slightest stimulus in the future.
Father Coughlin was unlike any other speaker in my memory. He was a spellbinder like Hitler, he could carry an audience, rub their emotions raw and juggle them at will. His voice was clear tenor with an operatic ring, there was a pent-up savagery in each of his sentences which he punctuated with his arm like the downward thrust of a stiletto. Unlike Hitler, he did not threaten, cajole, or thunder that he was the Fuehrer whom they had to follow. To me he was the reincarnation of Arnold, the Abbot of Citeaux, standing before the gates of the besieged city of Béziers, replying to his followers when asked how to distinguish true believers from the heretics in the heat of the assault on that town:
“Kill them all; God will know his own!” As he spoke on I heard Abbot Arnold reporting back to Pope Gregory the Great with pride in his accomplishment.
“Nearly twenty thousand human beings perished by the sword. And after the massacre of the heretics the town was plundered and burnt, and the revenge of God seemed to rage over it in a wonderful manner.”
Who were the heretics in America in the thirties thus to be put to be put to the sword?
For answer let me quote from another would-be Fascist leader who is still around, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who at the time I met him was an itinerant preacher and part-time evangelist talking folksy and preaching politics under the guise of religion. He was the convivial sort, walking around with a small, black leather-bound Bible protruding from his hip pocket. That was not a preaching Bible but merely an oratorical device. Every time he wanted to make a point, he would pull that Bible out of his pocket, hold it high in his left hand, then give it a hard punch with his right fist. That Bible must have had a special acoustic binding for it responded with a resounding “C sharp” crack.
I talked with Smith twice. He was proud of his start with the Louisiana Kingfish, that incipient Fascist Huey Long; he did not hide from me that he was out for fame, power, and the easy fast buck. He did not relish being seen in public conversing with the correspondent of the Communist Daily Worker and was somewhat guarded with me, but not so with Gerold Frank, then a reporter on the Cleveland News, and I am now quoting from the interview Frank had with him:
“I am a reactionary.
“Reaction will produce a ruthless, intolerant, dynamic nationalistic movement which will capture the imagination of the Amer icanpeople. I shall lead that movement. . . .
“I shall attack, and ruthlessly attack a Jew, or an Italian, or a Negro, or any other man because he is a Communist. And he doesn’t have to be a member of the Communist Party to be a Communist. If he’s imbued with Communistic philosophy he’s a Communist. They’re all one to me.
“I shall not attack any minorities because they are minorities. Some of my best friends are Jews. But I shall attack with all my strength any minority if it’s Communistic.
“I shall call for a fusion movement of all patriotic organizations in the country to wipe out with intolerant zeal the last vestiges of Communism and other atheistic destruction. Here and now I announce myself the leader of that movement, a cold blooded, intolerant, frontal attack on the subtle machination of the Communists.”
We, the Communists, thus served as a target to divert the rebellious mood of the masses from those responsible for their economic plight. In consequence millions of Americans were living under the dread of an impending Communist revolution. In all America there was but one group absolutely convinced of the impossibility of a Communist revolution in America—the members of the Communist Party.
I had not met a single responsible member of the Party—and I probed hundreds of them—who sincerely believed that we could have Communism in the United States in our lifetime—our grandchildren, maybe yes, if they were going to be lucky.
There was a good reason for our lack of faith in revolution. While our enemies were frightened by the demonstrated vulnerability and weaknesses of their own existing capitalist system we knew full well how inherently strong that system was—we had batted our heads against it innumerable times and had little but bloody bumps to show for it.
While those on the outside were quaking in contemplation of our imagined strength, we were fully aware of our weaknesses, the gravest of which was our inability to grow.
When I arrived in Ohio in the spring of 1931, the total Party membership in the Ohio Party District numbered about 2,200. Six years later when I left to join the International Brigades in Spain the maximum membership we were able to register still fell short of 2,900—a total net growth of less than seven hundred in six years, despite all the frantic work we did among the unemployed, with all the heartbreaking work we did to help organize the unorganized in the mass production industries of steel, rubber, etc., in Ohio.
Not that we had failed to gain new recruits. I had not bothered to keep accurate count, nor is this said in any sense of boasting, but I can safely record that the number of people I alone had personally recruited into the party both here and in Canada must run well into the hundreds. I am equally safe in asserting that most of those recruits quit the Party shortly after they joined.
The unemployed would march with us: “On to City Hall!” The employed would learn from us how to organize, go out on strike, and set up picket lines to safeguard their rights—and then turn their backs on us afterward because of our party line. All that talk about imperialism, about defending the Soviet Union, was no skin off their noses. What they were interested in was improving their conditions right here and now. If they wanted to hear about Kingdom Come they went to church and not to some Red yapping about a Communist paradise.
“Revolution ? You bet; that’s what many of them foreign countries need, like we had ours in 1776. You’re right about Washington; that sure is a mess that needs cleaning out bad. There is a bunch of no good bastards there who ought to be kicked out on their ass; but people are learning to vote for the man who is their friend and that’s a fact. Just watch the next election!”
These were the proletarians who made up the American work ing class—although most of them would have resented being called any such thing, considering themselves a “better class of people.” They were American citizens; yet the party was at tempting to force them into a straitjacket cut for a Russian muzhik.
That straitjacket was THE PARTY LINE.
