Lundeen and Coughlin

I've listened to the first two episodes of Rachel Maddow's new podcast, "ULTRA," about Nazi influence campaigns and ultra-right-wingers leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II. 

One thing I came away with is a furrowed brow about how weird and confused the two main "characters" of these episodes seem. 

Both Ernest Lundeen, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota who was a member of the Farmer Labor Party, and the reprehensible Father Coughlin ostensibly believed in a lot of things that would be called socialism or even communism today, like state ownership of major parts of the economy. But at the same time, they were virulent antisemites who thought Jewish people were conspiring to run the world. 

I guess they hated banks and bankers (well, okay!), and the only way they could make that make sense was to convince themselves the people running the banks were inhuman. But how many banks were run by Jewish men at that point? It's just so odd. And they had this attitude before they started working with the Nazis, I think, though maybe that's not entirely clear yet in the podcast's telling. 

Despite the fact that I've lived in Minnesota for more than 35 years, I've never heard of Lundeen before. Coughlin, however, is pretty familiar, though I don't think I knew quite how popular he was. He is said to have had 30 million radio listeners at a time when there were only 130 million people in the country (and probably close to half of the population were children, so does that mean half the adults were listening to him, or did they count kids in the ratings?). 

The way FDR managed to finally shut down Coughlin's radio empire — after the U.S. entered World War II — is kind of frightening in a country with supposed freedom of speech and press. But I have to say, I'm glad it happened.