Coughlin in New York

A political champion may make a huge success in the provinces, but he is not worth his ice water until he has cried his cause in New York City. Abraham Lincoln made his first big national impression before an audience in Cooper Union in 1860. William Jennings Bryan chose the rostrum of old Madison Square Garden to launch his first Presidential campaign in 1896. Such job-seekers as Herbert Hoover, Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt have counted New York the climax of their speaking tours. Similarly Rev. Charles E. Coughlin of Royal Oak, Mich., after opening the membership drive for his National Union for Social Justice before an apathetic audience in Detroit, followed by a triumph in Cleveland, last week put himself to the critical test in Manhattan.

In Father Coughlin's economics, the U. S. has plenty of everything except money, and since only $5,250,000,000 worth of currency is in daily circulation, he reasons that an additional two billion worth of greenbacks would be amply covered by the nine billion gold & silver reserve in the Treasury. To hear Father Coughlin expound this theory, 18,000 New Yorkers packed into Madison Square Garden's Auditorium. Just before the meeting the box office dropped the price of $2 seats to 50-c-, thus ruining speculators who had loaded up. Nevertheless, an overflow crowd of 5,000 was waiting before loudspeakers in the basement.

"If I come into the midst of this city, which, in the minds of most Americans, has consecrated itself to the worship of Wall Street," announced the political priest, "I come not to criticize or berate individuals. I come to lift my voice on the doorsteps of a modern Temple of Mammon only to condemn a system of private money control."

The audience may not have understood the nature of Father Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice. But it did feel the emotional appeal of the sweating orator on the platform. At will the plump priest changed boos for the "prostituted press" to resounding cheers for assembled newshawks. In a phrase he switched catcalls at Senator Wagner's vote against the Bonus to huzzahs for Senator Wagner, "the friend of Labor!"

Father Coughlin got some of his biggest applause when he shouted out against President Roosevelt's new relief wage scale: "Think of it--a meagre $50 a month for administrative work! . . . There is an American standard of living. My friends, if we are forced to see $19 or even $50 paid for such work in what we call a New Deal, then this plutocratic, capitalistic system must be constitutionally voted out of existence!"

So saying, Father Coughlin departed mopping his brow, left town next day to spend the night with a friendly plutocratic, capitalistic stockbroker named Francis P. Keelon at swank suburban Larchmont.

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