Three Extremists: Long, Coughlin, and Townsend 693“His mother’s watching him, and she won’t let him
go too far, but I ain’t got no mother left, and if I had,
she’d think anything I said was all right.”
By 1935 Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement
had a membership of over 4.6 million. His program
called for the confiscation of family fortunes of more
than $5 million and a tax of 100 percent on incomes
over $1 million a year, the money to be used to buy
every family a “homestead” (a house, a car, and other
necessities) and provide an annual family income of
$2,000 to $3,000, plus old-age pensions, educational
benefits, and veterans’ pensions. As the 1936 election
approached, he planned to organize a third party to split
the liberal vote. He assumed that the Republicans would
win the election and so botch the job of fighting the
Depression that he could sweep the country in 1940.
Less powerful than Long but more widely influ-
ential was Father Charles E. Coughlin, the “Radio
Priest.” A genial Canadian of Irish lineage, Coughlin
in 1926 began broadcasting a weekly religious mes-
sage over station WJR in Detroit. His mellifluous
voice rhetoric attracted a huge national audience, and
the Depression gave him a secular cause. In 1933 he
had been an eager New Dealer, but his dislike of New
Deal financial policies—he believed that inflating the
currency would end the Depression—and his need for
ever more sensational ideas to hold his radio audience
led him to turn against the New Deal. By 1935 he
was calling Roosevelt a “great betrayer and liar.”
Although Coughlin’s National Union for Social
Justice was especially appealing to Catholics, it attracted
people of every faith, particularly in the lower-middle-
class districts of the big cities. Some of his talks caused
more than a million people to send him messages of
congratulation; contributions amounting to $500,000
a year flooded his headquarters. Coughlin attacked
bankers, New Deal planners, Roosevelt’s farm pro-
gram, and the alleged sympathy of the administration
for communists and Jews, both of which Coughlin
denounced in his weekly talks. His program resembled
fascism more than any leftist philosophy, but he posed a
threat, especially in combination with Long, to the
continuation of Democratic rule.
Another rapidly growing movement alarmed the
Democrats in 1934–1935: Dr. Francis E. Townsend’s
campaign for “old-age revolving pensions.” Townsend,
a retired California physician, colorless and low-keyed,
had an oversimplified and therefore appealing “solu-
tion” to the nation’s troubles. The pitiful state of thou-
sands of elderly persons, whose job prospects were even
dimmer than those of the mass of the unemployed, he
found shocking. He advocated paying every person aged
sixty years and over a pension of $200 a month, the only
conditions being that the pensioners not hold jobs and
that they spend the entire sum within thirty days. Their
purchases, he argued, would stimulate production,
thereby creating new jobs and revitalizing the economy.
A stiff transactions tax, collected whenever any com-
modity changed hands, would pay for the program.
Economists quickly pointed out that with about
10 million persons eligible for the Townsend pensions,
the cost would amount to $24 billion a year—roughly
half the national income. But among the elderly the
scheme proved extremely popular. Townsend Clubs,
their proceedings conducted in the spirit of revivalist
camp meetings, flourished everywhere, and the
Townsend National Weeklyreached a
circulation of over 200,000. Although
most Townsendites were anything but
radical politically, their plan, like
Long’s Share Our Wealth scheme,
would have revolutionized the distrib-
ution of wealth in the country. The
movement marked the emergence of a
new force in American society. With
medical advances lengthening the
average life span, the percentage of
old people in the population was ris-
ing. The breakdown of close family
ties in an increasingly mobile society
now caused many of these citizens to
be cast adrift to live out their last years
poor, sick, idle, and alone.
With the possible exception of
Long, the extremists had little
understanding of practical affairs. (It
could be said that Townsend knew
what to do with money but not how
Charles E. Coughlin, the “Radio Priest,” was the father of conservative “talk radio.” to get it, and Coughlin knew how to