Luther Thomas’ radio addresses (Adorno 1997). Thomas was the Protestant
counterpart to the clerico-fascist Catholic radio priest of Detroit, Father Charles
E. Coughlin, a friend of Henry Ford, and both were friends of Dr. Joseph
Goebbels and Adolf Hitler (Hitler 1943:639; Taylor 1983:6; Baldwin 2001).
Christian Crusade
Both clerico-fascist religious as well as political radio agitators, Thomas and
Coughlin, were the American intellectually and theologically smaller, light-
weight versions of the German intellectually and theologically greater heavy-
weight, Carl Schmitt, Hitler ’s main jurist and political theologian. Both
followed, purposely or automatically, the Hitlerian wave technique (Hitler
1943; Adorno 1997:40). Both were always cautious enough to keep open the
road for retreat and could even counterbalance their anti-Semitic statements
by appeals to gentiles and Jews alike (Adorno 1997:40; Baldwin 2001). As a
whole, the speeches of both clerico-fascists may show a certain crescendo in
violence and aggressiveness, due to the increasing scope of their Christian
crusade against Jews and Bolshevists. This crescendo, however, was inter-
rupted, whenever they met any difficulties with public agencies. By and large
Thomas’ and Coughlin’s radio speeches belonged to the realm of indirect
semi-hidden, fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Most of their techniques
could be traced back to their endeavor to excite hatred and violence without
committing themselves. Both clerico-fascist orators fed upon the general bias
of commonsense connected with a particular phenomenon and expanded it
by subsuming it under high-sounding categories, such as the forces of evil,
the Pharisees, or the Battle of Armageddon. Both agitators replaced argu-
mentation by the technique termed the name-calling device (Adorno 1997).
This device was grounded not only in the weakness of the fascist reasoning.
That was, from the viewpoint of its profiteers, reasonable enough. It was,
rather, based upon a cynical contempt for the audience’s capacity or inca-
pacity to think. Hitler expressed this contempt overtly. Thomas and Coughlin
reckoned with an audience who was too weak to maintain a continuous
process of making deductions. The people were supposed to live intellectu-
ally from moment to moment and to react to isolated, logically unconnected
statements, rather than to any consistent structure of thought. The people
knew what they wanted and what not, but they could not detach themselves
from their own immediate and atomistic, individualistic reactions. It was one
of the main devices or tricks of Thomas and Coughlin to dignify this atom-
88 • Rudolf J. Siebert