Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio

In 1942, with the U.S. at war with a Nazi regime long praised by Father Charles Coughlin of the Shrine of the Little Flower in the Detroit community of Little Oak, Archbishop Mooney, his exasperated superior, finally put an end to the ""unpriestly folly."" Coughlin's slick radio sermons had already been stopped; now he was warned to cease involvement with the rabble-rousing publication he had founded, Social Justice. To a perturbed President Roosevelt, Mooney apologized: ""The arena of politics is no place for one whose ecclesiastical character surrounds him... with a protective consideration he personally could never claim."" Yet the silenced saint of the populist Right would retain ties to his church until his death in 1979 at the age of 88. A combination of Huey Long and Joe McCarthy in clerical cassock, with a touch of Goebbels thrown in, Coughlin was the first and most successful radio preacher of the interwar years. His blend of anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, combined with mellifluously menacing anti-government invective, raised millions of dollars from the discontented for Coughlin's various projects. Between 1926 and 1941, more mail arrived for him most weeks than was received at the White House. At his urging, loyal listeners would fire tens of thousands of telegrams to Congress, where he was feared for his ability to mobilize the otherwise inarticulate. His Sunday ""Hour of Power"" became an uneasily accurate title, intimidating many of his political, business and religious targets. Stifled after Pearl Harbor, he would never regain his clout. Although Warren (The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation) has done his homework, he has not done justice to his subject. Sloppily written and whipsawed by bewildering time shifts, the biography evokes a career in bigotry clearly ominous even amid Warren's narrative lapses. Film rights: Goldfarb & Graybill; all other rights, Simon & Schuster. (July)