|
|
Baby Book Store > Baby books beginning with V
|
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression |
Author: Alan Brinkley
Published: 1983-08-12 |
List price: $14.95
Our price: $10.17
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: January 07th, 2009 06:45:51 AM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 Rabble-rousers
Coughlin and the Kingfish were both public personalities who seized on the uncertainties and economic hardship of the depression to churn up the public (or at least certain segments of the public) on behalf of themselves or their causes.
The Kingfish was the most dangerous of the two, setting up a virtual dictatorship in the state of Louisiana. That he intended to seize the presidency as well there can be no doubt and his assassination probably saved the nation from a tragedy.
A Fair Assessment of Controversial Figures
One of the things I've found in reading American history, and especially in books written about the era of the Great Depression, is that President Roosevelt had the greatest smear operation in American History. This operation has carried on to this day, 60+ years after his death. The "establishment" historians are merely foot maidens of the Roosevelt reputation, burnishing the legend of his greatness, overlooking his ineffectiveness both in dealing with the depression and the war, and smearing anyone who ever dared to question the legacy of this supposedly greatest of 20th century Americans. It is an operation that the Kims of North Korea could surely envy.
Two cases in point are Father Coughlin and Huey Long. Another is Charles Lindbergh. These men had the gaul, in their day, to oppose Roosevelt. Thus they have come down to us in our day as Fascists, anti-semites, Nazi sympathizers and Little Hitlers. None of these men was flawless. As a matter of fact, each had grievous faults. Long was a corrupt politician. Coughlin was a brilliant speaker who fell prey to his own over-emotionalism and then easily into rancor, both in politics and with his brethren in the church and who then stooped to the bitter personal attacks and bigotry that cost him the respect of general audiences. Lindbergh was naive and often filled with bloated self-importance; he was short sighted and illogical in many of his views and inarticulate in expressing them. Yet each in their time raised legitimate concerns with the policies of Roosevelt and, I think, were more or less sincere in their protests against the direction FDR was taking this country.
Personally, I think the ideas of Long, Coughlin and Lindbergh were purely crack-pot and founded on ignorance of basic economics and politics. Proof of this is the continued popularity of their ideas (maybe under a different name and guise) among the kooks of the modern lunatic fringe like, say, the Larouchites. These ideas would have been disastrous to the country had they been followed. Yet this is supposed to be a free country where political dissent is allowed; but because Coughlin, Long and Lindbergh dared to question the motives and actions of the idol of the American left, they have been eternally smeared through our history. Looking at this result, I would be moved to ask who were the real fascists: the Coughlins, Longs and Lindberghs; or FDR and his brain trust, and the lap dogs, both in the media of the day, and in the history books since, who have smeared and mischaracterized his opponents and who attempted to use the powers of government to intimidate them into silence.
Which makes this book different and admirable. The author reports on Long and Coughlin with all their warts and doesn't try to conceal any of their weaknesses; however, he is fair to them. He doesn't try to make every disagreement with FDR into evidence of Fascism. He connects the Long & Coughlin programs to legitimate public grievances and shows how wide spread among the public were the feelings that Long & Coughlin expressed. The book is not overly long, yet it is meticulously researched. And though I think, from reading it, that the author is an FDR admirer (just a feeling--I don't really know), he allows FDR's opponents the benefit of the doubt in the sincerity of their opposition.
My own opinion is that Long & Coughlin (especially Coughlin) underestimated the popular power of the presidency. I believe the people, in general, WANT to like the president, whoever he is. We see now, even with a president as unpopular as Bush, how hard it is to balk him, and how easily he has thwarted his congressional opponents in their efforts to reverse his policies. He retains, even in his lowest days, strong support from about 1/3rd of the population, and this is usually enough to maintain a hold on the direction of national policy.
We saw how Clinton held on to enough support, through all his sordid scandals, to frustrate his foes; how long LBJ held a blank check despite his mismanagement of Viet Nam, only losing grip at the very end; and even how such a boob as Carter retains a good measure of public popularity, even after his miserable performance as president and his almost 30 years of asinine behavior after leaving the White House.
FDR was completely ineffective in dealing with the depression. Every one of his programs, and every effort of the New Deal were failures. His value was mainly as a propagandist and cheerleader. He made the people feel better and they loved him and supported him for his good cheer and they elected him four times. He was a brilliant publicist and public speaker. His radio addresses were models of simplifying complicated issues without sereming to speak down to his audience. This was enough to cloud, in the mind of his listeners, the effectiveness (or, rather, ineffectiveness) of his administration.
The popularity of a Coughlin was transient and that of Long was more or less local (though it would have been interesting to see, had he lived, how far he could have gone in challenging FDR following the economic reversals of 1938, then what his stance would have been in the war debates of 1939-40, and if he could have made greater national inroads at this time).
A nation of people elect a president. They vote for him. To repudiate him, to turn against him, means admitting a mistake in electing him. Hence they cling to him long after he has proven a failure, an incompetent or a devious scoundrel. FDR was all of these, but neither Coughlin or Long could erode the people's faith in him because the people want to love their president and to hold on to the idea that their votes for him showed sagacity and wisdom.
Dissident Movements in America - fascinating topic
Praise has been heaped on Alan Brinkley's book in the past, and after reading it, I fully concur with the accolades that past reviewers have granted to this book.
Brinkley sets the tone for his book from the title - "Voices of Protest". He focuses the book on the two main characters (and I do mean characters) present in the subtitle - Huey P. Long and Father Charles E. Couglin.
Brinkley treats us to a brief biographical sketch of each of these flamboyant and ebulent personalities. Long in his silk pajamas receiving a German envoy, and Coughlin stripping down from his clerical garb to a sweat soaked politician are just a couple of the many images that grab the reader during the progression of this discourse.
After explaining who these men were, he goes into their social & political movements - a fascinating tale of Long's "Share Our Wealth" plan, and an equally rich telling of Coughlin's "Golden Hour of the Little Flower". Brinkley has chosen the title Voices of Protest because both of these movements became major political dissident movements in Depression-era America.
Brinkley does a fantastic job of explaining, in historiographic terms, why these movements gathered such steam and were able to become massive social movements rather than just political fodder. In addition to detailing these two major oppositional voices to FDR's new deal, Brinkley also gives us a chapter on other movements that were equally critical of the New Deal, but not nearly as widespread.
I found it especially interesting how Brinkley explained that Long was the primary reason why both of these movements flourished - after his assassination in 1935, both movements really seemed to fall apart.
I enjoyed this book tremendously - it gives new insight into the way that political dissonance took hold in the 1930's and what a big part of American society these two political movements became.
 The Follies of Charismatic Leadership
On the eve of the Great Depression the great Spanish existential and political philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses. In it he predicted the rise of mass man -- undifferentiated, unanchored and unthinking citizens of modern, western societies attached to none of the traditional sources of community, which were being destroyed by capitalism anyway. For Ortega y Gasset, these folks all too easily moved to charismatic, emotional leadership to give meaning in their political lives. Twentieth century thinkers like Dwight MacDonald and Hannah Arendt have explored some of the implications of Ortega y Gasset's work, noting its eerie forershadowing of Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism. American historians such as Richard Hofstadter, meatime, found in American radicalism the same linkages between charismatic leadership and mass man. In Hofstadter's telling this phenomenon folded within the tradition of radical critiques of American capitalism.
Hofstadter's works, most notably The Age of Reform, were pretty critical of the causes of the American attraction to radical politics, such as it was -- that attraction was fostered by emotional anxieties that all too often morphed into nostalgic, irresponsible, politically conservative, anti-Semitic, racist movements.
Alan Brinkley clearly relies of Hofstadter quite a bit, but with a much more sympathetic treatment of American mass politics and its causes. For him, the anxieties were fully justified. He focuses on the alternative visions offered by Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Brinkley argues both men attracted large followings accross the nation by the use of the radio and mass-circulation print publications. By 1935 their combined popularity was enough to scared the hell out of the Democratic Party and President Roosevelt, with the result that FDR pushed through the Second New Deal in the run-up to his 1936 re-election effort. Brinkley argues that Long and Coughlin emphasized redistribution of wealth and economic justice for the common man/consumer, not the New Deal concern with "stabilizing business" and "restoring business confidence." In a sense we have these two rabble-rousers to thank for Roosevelt's turn to the left in 1935 in the form of specific public policies such as the Social Security Act (which Long opposed for some technical federalist reasons, actually).
As part of his argument, then, Brinkley streses the positive, substantive aspects of Long's and Coughlin's message over the psychological anxieties stressed by Hofstadter and his scholarly followers. In what is probably the best chapter in Voices of Protest, "The Dissident Ideology," Brinkley connects the Long/Coughlin program with the anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-capitalistic radical political tradition informing American protest politics, from Thomas Jefferson to Orestes Brownsen to William Jennings Bryan.
Long's Share Our Wealth scheme of income redistribution thus, in Brinkley's telling, represented a geniune, substantive response to the economic hardships of the 1930s and their root cause -- not enough consumer power!
This is good as far as it goes I suppose. But Brinkley certainly could have emphasized more the rank irresponsibility of Long and Coughlin -- they must have known, for example, that simplistic schemes such as Share Our Wealth had zip chance of success. Even if they could succeed in the abstract, they could never be implemented logistically as Brinkley notes in passing. As Voices of Protest makes clear, Coughlin and Long -- despite, or perhaps because of, their manic energies -- had no patience or desire to construct meaningful, sophisticated, sustained politices to help their constituiencies. Long, for example, had no interest in Senate business for most of his term in that august body, no desire to manipulate the institution (a la LBJ for example) and form effective coalitions to bring about meaningful change.
This is a beautifully written, beautifully constructed narrative. Brinkley is a fine heir to popular/scholarly narrative/analytical history in the tradition of Commager, Nevins and Schlesinger. Voices of Protest covers alot of ground already well plowed by masters such as T. Harry Williams in his biography of Long. But Brinkley adds alot more archival sources and fascinating letters from the common people -- mass men -- who Long/Coughlin attracted. But for reformers looking for historical models on which to base effective, modern, sophisticated methods for political and economic change, they'll have to look elsewhere than the examples of Charles Coughlin and Huey Long. I don't think Brinkley emphasizes that quite enough and himself falls for their charismatic qualities -- a serious shortcoming in an otherwise fine book
an impressive piece of history...
I marvel at the depth and range written in Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkley. Without very much firsthand information from Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, Alan Brinkley was able to portray the lives of these two unlikely figureheads of the Great Depression. From their small town beginnings to their national prominence to their movement's downfalls, Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's stories are on display for the history buff or even the average reader.
The first three chapters are devoted to the rise of Huey Long. Starting in Louisiana, he gets his first opportunity to shine in the public limelight as a railroad comissioner. His grass roots campaigning and fight for the lower classes changed the landscape of Louisiana politics from a state voting along religious lines to one voting along economic lines. As governor and a senator of Louisiana, Huey Long continuously fought for the redistribution of wealth and the rights of the local institutions. Rising to national prominence after his campaigning for Hattie Caraway who was the first woman to be elected to a full term in the Senate, Long used his newfound popularity to influence American politics during the Great Depression like no other except for one (Coughlin of course). From his influence on the Presidential Election of 1932 to his Share Our Wealth Plan, Voices of Protest contains all of the information one would want to know about Huey Long's rise and sudden fall after he was assassinated.
After Alan Brinkley discusses Huey Long's rise, he delves into the rise of Father Charles Coughlin. Surrounded by Catholicism from a very young age, Charles Coughlin was destined to become a priest. After getting through seminary, he finally received a new parish in Royal Oaks, a suburb of Detroit. Coughlin was always thought of as a great orator, but even that wasn't enough to pay for the increasing debt incurred by the new parrish. To make money for the church, Coughlin went to the local radio station to use his special talents as an orator. His radio sermons were soon heard across the nation. His influence with the radio was tremendous, causing him to begin a series of politically based chats (starting with his dislike of communism) that would throw him into the political arena as a man of influencial capabilities. Coughlin's tumultuous relationship with Franklin Roosevelt and his National Union for Social Justice are a couple more of the many topics discussed in this section of Vioces of Protest.
Alan Brinkley then moves on to discuss the similarities of Huey Long's and Charles Coughlin's movements, along with their relation to other movements (Socialist, Progressive, Communist) of the time and the political forces that they each, in their own right, become. Alan Brinkley also touches on each of their efforts towards organization in their respective parties and discusses in depth the followers of each's movements, including some alliances that were created solely for Long's and Coughlin's advancement politically or for others advancement. Finally, Alan Brinkley brings Huey Long's and Charles Coughlin's stories to an end with their eventual downfall and also elucidates on the aftermath of those downfalls.
There are two main quotes I would like to share here that I enjoyed as I read Voices of Protest. The first is on page 216 when Alan Brinkley discusses the uneasy alliances, and it is as follows: "Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics." The second is on page 243 when Brinkley discusses the downfalls of Long and Coughlin, and it is as follows: "Far more troubling for the crusades Long and Coughlin were preparing was a single, debilitating weakness: inability to wean their followers from Franklin Roosevelt." Both of these quotes represent hom much political power Long and Coughlin could have had and how much political power Franklin Roosevelt actually had. It is impressive to think about and enjoyable to read about, so I would highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Everyone enjoy!
|
Similar Listings
|
|
Our Baby book picks:
|
|
Search the Baby Products Store
LCS Amazon Store 2.5 © 2009
|
|
|
