Radio priest

by Donald I. Warren

In 1926, Father Charles Coughlin established The Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan. Over the course of the next four decades, Coughlin built this small Catholic church into a large, ornate, highly profitable and, to many, infamous mecca. Coughlin began his radio career in the late 1920s with a weekly broadcast known popularly as "The Children's Hour," in which he told biblical stories to children. While these early programs were merely the tame sermons of a parish priest, they soon became paranoid political tirades. The program became known as "The Hour of Power," and by the late thirties it was the most controversial broadcast in America. Coughlin used the program and the new medium of radio to command an army of the disaffected. By giving expression to their basest fears and hatreds, he virtually created the "lunatic fringe," a new American phenomenon that inspired hate mobs to go on violent rampages and encouraged self-styled fascist organizations like the Christian