Father Charles Coughlin and Welles

[johngos]

Hi,

I'm struggling to track down a quote I am sure I read and was attributed to Welles, in which he talked of his disdain for Father Charles Coughlin, the controversal radio broadcaster of the 1930's.
Can anyone help track this down?
Regards
John

[jbrooks]

Hmm. I heard or read something recently where Welles mentioned Father Coughlin. But I can't recall where it was. Perhaps it was the BBC Arena interview program. It may be part of his discussion of why he wanted to do "War of the Worlds." (He wanted to teach people not to believe everything they hear on the radio). I don't have time to re-watch it right now, but it's on Youtube.

***

Okay, I made time. Here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKt2O7LZxcI

The Father Coughlin reference is at about the 0:20 mark.

[johngos]

That's really kind of you. Thanks so much

Hmm. I heard or read something recently where Welles mentioned Father Coughlin. But I can't recall where it was. Perhaps it was the BBC Arena interview program. It may be part of his discussion of why he wanted to do "War of the Worlds." (He wanted to teach people not to believe everything they hear on the radio). I don't have time to re-watch it right now, but it's on Youtube.

***

Okay, I made time. Here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKt2O7LZxcI

The Father Coughlin reference is at about the 0:20 mark.

[Glenn Anders]

An even more direct connection to Welles' remarks about Father Coughlin's influence at the time of "The War of the Worlds" broadcast may be found in the fact that a number of the older Mutual affiliate stations in New England were broadcasting Coughlin's Sunday sermon at that fateful hour in October 1938. Had that not been so, many more East Coast listeners might have tuned into the invasion of the little green men in "real time." The panic, substantial as it was, might have been even more acute.

And so, Welles interest in the views of Father Coughlin was both political and practical.

Glenn

[MartynH]

Hi there

I am a new member. I have been a Welles fan for 25 years now. The high point for me was when I attended the premiere of Don Quixote in London in 1993. Even though the film was not what I thought it was going to be, it was great just to be there.

As I recall, Welles referenced this in the Arena Interview of 1982 - Welles said ' there were fascist priests called Father Couglin wanting to keep us out of European engtanglements'. Welles wanted to prove his theory that most people believed what they heard on the radio. It's a seminal point in Welles' life and had the honour of being the first line uttered in Kane ' Don't believe everything you hear on the radio'

[Wellesnet]

About three weeks after Welles and the Mercury Theatre's WOTW broadcast in 1938, Father Coughlin made headlines himself with his infamous broadcast of Nov. 20, which today is the 75th anniversary of. It can be heard at this Archive.org page:

https://archive.org/details/Father_Coughlin

[Jeff Wilson]

I live very close to his one time church, the Shrine of the Little Flower. It's a striking building, but I doubt they memorialize Coughlin anywhere. At least I would hope not.

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, but it’s good that the broadcasts can still be listened to, for historical purposes. Actually, at first listen, Coughlin’s point - that the Nazi persecution of Jews received far more media attention in the US then Stalin’s murder of millions of Christians in Russia - doesn’t sound all that unreasonable. He does criticize the Nazis, but makes a clear distinction between religious Jews (whom he treats sympathetically) and secular, international Jews (whom he sees as the driving force behind Communism). His main venom seems reserved for atheists in general.

However, if one considers that Coughlin had recently printed, in his magazine "Social Justice", excerpts from THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, the Czar-commissioned conspiracy theory that internationalist Jews were plotting to take over the world, one can see why many liberals of the time were justifiably gunning for Coughlin, and looking for any excuse to “read between the lines”, so to speak, of any of his public statements.

In his broadcasts, Coughlin seems to see everything in very stark, black and white terms, describing the Spanish Civil War for example, as a battle between athiests and Christians. This calls to mind Gore Vidal’s point in one of his historical novels that the Vatican in general was soft on Fascism because it saw Hitler as “the last stout shield against Stalin, the Anti-Christ.”

Coughlin doesn’t say it directly, but for many, his implications about US media bias put him in line with Hitler, whose statement about Welles’s WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast for example, was blatantly anti-semitic, inferring basically that the US’s Jewish-dominated mass media had conditioned the American public to be so frightened of Nazi Germany, that even an invasion from Mars was enough to put them into a panic.

By using Stalin’s atrocities to soft-peddle Hitler’s, Coughlin was being callous at best, and casting his lot with the Nazis whether he intended to or not.

Here's another good page on Coughlin:
http://www.fathercoughlin.org/father-co ... itism.html
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