Crackdown on Coughlin

Father Coughlin, well-known in America for his undaunted struggle against Bolshevism and Jewry, has once again been given a taste of the method of oppression so common in the world's freest democracy. . . .

Thus radio Berlin tried to make capital of the news that the Coughlinite weekly Social Justice had been barred from the U.S. mails. The crackdown on Coughlin was not going to stop there. Attorney.General Biddle announced that he would ask a Federal grand jury (the same jury which nailed Nazi Propagandist George Sylvester Viereck and Ham Fish's Secretary George Hill) to indict Social Justice for sedition, on grounds of peddling "enemy propaganda" and "a systematic and unscrupulous attack upon the war effort of our nation, both civilian and military."

If indicted and convicted under the sharp-toothed Espionage Act of 1917, Social Justice will not only be put out of business, but Father Coughlin may also face a $10,000 fine and up to 20 years in prison. For the Government intends to make this case the beginning of a drive against some 95 "vermin" publications -- just as the Wilson Government's suppression of the left-wing American Socialist and later of Victor Berger's Milwaukee Leader set the pace for suppression of some 400 publications in World War I.

Biddle's job will be to prove that Social Justice has committed sedition by efforts to "interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States." His case, as far as he has revealed it, is that in ten recent issues Social Justice has echoed the ten major propaganda themes of the Axis since Pearl Harbor. Samples:

Jan. 5-". . . Our foreign policy, devoid of all fine phrases, was one blueprinted to defend international capitalism and British imperialism, no matter what the cost might be in traditions, in dollars and in blood to the citizens of our country." Feb. 23-..."Was Pearl Harbor an accident? Was the scuttling of the Normandie an accident? Was the diabolical program of Government muddling an accident? Or was all this planned that way?-planned from within; planned by men who prated of democracy while blueprinting chaos."

March 23-". . . Will the American people want to listen to reason and terminate a war which now no one can win completely, and which Americans can lose completely?"

One Biddle exhibit, to show that Social Justice is guilty of Axis propaganda: an editorial appearing in Social Justice (Dec. 25> 1938) which is identical, almost word for word, with a savagely anti-Semitic speech made by Goebbels, three years before.

At the offices of the Social Justice Publishing Co. in Royal Oak last week a few female Coughlinites puttered around in silence. Coughlin's aged parents, Thomas J. and Amelia Coughlin, listed as sole owners of Social Justice, were visiting "a relative out of the State," according to the colored maid in the $25,000 house bought for them a few years ago by their sensational son.

Coughlin himself, who two years ago claimed he had severed all connections with Social Justice, was at first "not available." But a few days later he made a surprise confession. "... I do here and now publicly state that I, Father Charles E. Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower, alone am responsible for and do control the magazine, its policies and contents."

Meanwhile no responsible editor went to the defense of the anglophobic, antiSemitic, rabble-rousing weekly. But Columnist David Lawrence did raise the question whether the Government was doing the right thing in the wrong way: by barring Social Justice from the mails before it was brought to trial.

Story of an Ad

From the New York Times came a curt note saying merely that the advertisement submitted for publication was "not acceptable." The New York Herald Tribune's Publisher Helen Reid, after many a mental seesaw, also turned it down. No, said she to the ad's sponsors, it would be unseemly for the Herald Tribune to accept an ad dealing so harshly in personalities. The sponsors reminded her that the Herald Tribune's editorial page had recently dealt little less harshly in the same personalities: "appeasolationist" Publishers Hearst, Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, Captain Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News. Mrs. Reid smiled ruefully : that was different, she said.

This week the ad was printed -- but not in New York City. The San Francisco Chronicle slapped it on a conspicuous full-page, over the signature of Friends of Democracy, Inc., one of the earliest and most effective of the "democracy" groups. The ad was as skillful a lashing, in deft, fighting-mad language, as any yet administered to the Hearst-McCormick-Patterson press. Under pictures of the three publishers the ad demanded: "AND WHAT DO YOU CALL 'AIDING THE ENEMY,' GENTLEMEN?" Said the text, after carping quotations from each of the three:

"You three merely call all this constructive criticism, and free speech and a free press? And the ceaseless drip of poison day after day. . . . 'Churchill remains in power . . . because he has succeeded in dragging the U.S. into England's European entanglements' (Hearst). . . . 'We cannot attack Germany in any effective way' (McCormick). . . . 'What any [American troops] were doing in Java and what they were fighting for makes an interesting question. . . .' (Patterson)

"Drip, drip, drip. Day after day after day.. . .

"So millions of this nation's men and women ask you three what you are up to now -- today -- with your endless carping, your spreading of unease, your constant spittle of suspicion of our Government and allies? These millions know the difference between all that and sincere criticism.

"So what are you doing? Not 'aiding the enemy.' Of course not. You are patriotic men. Hurrah for the Red, White and Blue."

A conspicuous anti-libel note explained that the phrase "aiding the enemy" was not used "in its legalistic sense," but in the sense "of the man in the street."

OFF Chief Archibald MacLeish, in Manhattan speeches to conventions of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and Associated Press, asked loyal U.S. editors to purge their own ranks of "minority elements of the American press which are actively engaged in influencing American opinion in directions which lead not to victory . . . but to defeat."

MacLeish did not name names, but he urged the editors to act because the Government cannot, without endangering "the freedom of the honest editor and the loyal publisher," because "the most poisonous and pervasive defeatism is not practiced by those who violate the statutes of their country openly. It is practiced by those who take scrupulous care to stay within the law -- to come, as one of them is reported to have told his staff, 'as close to treason as I dare.' "

Death of a Senescent

The oldest Macfadden publication, Physical Culture, long senescent at 43, was last week put out of its misery "for the duration." Its circulation down to around 175,000 (25,000 below its advertising guarantee), its advertising off 46% from last year (which was off more than 50% from 1935), the onetime money-making muscle magazine, in spite of recently changing its name to Beauty & Health, had seen its losses grow to around $6,000 a month.

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