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Why Trump Is More Father Coughlin Than Franklin Roosevelt

By Jon Meacham

Mr. Meacham is the author of forthcoming book “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.”
May 3, 2018



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In the 1930s and early ’40s, President Roosevelt used radio to unify the country rather than simply speak to his base.CreditBettmann Archive, via Getty Images

Everything seemed to be falling apart. After his election to the presidency in November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt received a talkative friend. If Roosevelt could rescue America from the Great Depression, the friend said, then he would be remembered as the greatest of presidents; if he failed, he would go down as the worst. There were alternatives to democratic capitalism afoot in the world: fascism in Germany and Italy, communism in Russia. Listening to his visitor, Roosevelt was matter of fact. “If I fail,” he said, “I shall be the last one.”

And so, to some extent and some degree, we’ve been here before: a sense of crisis, of crumbling order, of facing destructive forces that may prove beyond our control. We survived the 1930s not least because Roosevelt did not fail, and thus was of course not the last president. Among the weapons he deployed in his wars to save capitalism in the 1930s and democracy itself in the first years of the ’40s, one might seem trivial, but isn’t: the radio.

It can be difficult, in our own media-saturated age, to recall the revolutionary nature of radio and later of television. As Richard Hofstadter, the Columbia historian, wrote, the “growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved.” He added, “Mass communications have aroused the mass man.”

In the beginning of each great electronic media transformation — radio and television, and now social media — there have been anxieties that mass communication would enable demagogy and trivialize governance.

As Father Charles Coughlin, the populist and anti-Semitic radio priest, showed us, radio could have been a divisive force. Observers saw as much at the time. Lawrence Dennis, a Southerner and a former Foreign Service officer, argued in a pair of books in the 1930s that radio and other mass media made Americans susceptible to suggestion.

“We have perfected techniques in propaganda and press and radio control which should make the United States the easiest country in the world to indoctrinate with any set of ideas, and to control for any physically possible ends.”

Which was why Roosevelt’s appeals to what Abraham Lincoln had called “the better angels of our nature” proved so essential. He did not broadcast solely for partisan purposes; he believed that greatness would come — to the country and, not coincidentally, to himself in the eyes of history — if he built beyond his base rather than simply speaking to it.

The television era offered similar perils and promise. In the 1950s observers fretted that presidential candidates were now being marketed like soap, but as the years passed it became clear that visual media had an extraordinary power to unify, if only for a time. Both Kennedy and Reagan understood the dramatic possibilities of the presidency-as-production, turning their hours upon the stage into national sagas.

“There have been times in this office,” Reagan said as he left the White House, “when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”

Great performers, of course — and Reagan was one, as was his Cold War colleague John Paul II, who trained in the theater as a young man — present visions of a world beyond the tactile to their audiences. “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it,” Reagan said in his Farewell Address in 1989.

“But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.”

It’s easy to be cynical about, and dismissive of, such a view. But, as G. K. Chesterton observed after a 1921 tour of the United States, America is “the only nation in the world founded on a creed” — and if natives and newcomers alike can live up to that creed of inclusion, then our best instincts will carry the day.

As a matter of observable fact, the United States, through its sporadic adherence to that creed, is the most far-reaching and successful experiment in pluralistic republicanism the world has ever known. In the main, the America of the 21st century is, for all its shortcomings, freer and more accepting than it has ever been. If that weren’t the case, populist attacks on immigrants and the widening mainstream wouldn’t be so ferocious.

Perhaps borrowing from Henry David Thoreau, President Roosevelt added the most enduring line from his First Inaugural while at work on the speech at the Mayflower Hotel in the first days of March 1933. “The only thing we have to fear,” he wrote, “is fear itself.” Such sentiments are tweetable — one can say a lot in 280 characters — but they have to be deeply held by the one doing the tweeting.

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