Charles Coughlin Quotes

I mean that you have been constantly deceived. Are you not aware that this so-called democratic country of ours has been controlled by the capitalist and the plutocrat? Have you not learned through bitter experience that no political party seriously cares for your welfare. The mockery of your vote was all that counted. I mean that you have been victims of class legislation—of legislation designed to protect the rich and the property rights of the rich; legislation which sneered at the poor and at human rights.

The most dangerous Communism [...] is the wolf in sheep's clothing of conservatism who bent upon preserving the policies of greed.

I oppose modem capitalism because by its very nature it cannot and will not function for the common good. In fact, it is a detriment to civilization.

One thing is sure. Democracy is doomed. This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads—I take the road to fascism.

Are you for the old deal with its industrial dictatorship and its doctrine of laissez faire-ism or are you for a new deal whereby the government shall legislate against unfair competition, against concentration or profits in the hands of stockholders?

When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.

If Congress fails to back up the President in his monetary program, I predict a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly!

Nor does the concept of the Fascist or Nazi dictator appeal to the American liberty loving citizen with his traditional love for democracy and republican institutions which bar both Nazism and Fascism.

The representatives of labor should have a voice in the management of the business.

I believe in upholding the right to private property but in controlling it for the public good.

At any rate I was persuaded by a lot of gentlemen, important gentlemen around the country, to get up an organization for the purposes of indoctrinating the people with the principles of social justice. That was it. It wasn't political, although you can't prove it wasn't political. If you’re indoctrinating anybody today, you’re in politics.

I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness.

Our government still upholds one of the worst evils of decadent capitalism, namely, that production must be only at the profit for the owners, for the capitalist, and not the laborers.

Modern capitalism violates right order because it so employ the working of wage earning classes as to divert business and economic activity to its own advantage without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice, and the common good.

Then, too, there was Father Coughlin. "I take the road of Fascism," he said in 1936, before forming the Christian Front, whose members referred to themselves as "brown shirts." His virulently anti-Semitic radio program, regularly transmitting claims from the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reached almost 30 million Americans at its height—the largest radio audience in the world at the time. Those listeners tuned in at the end of 1938 as Coughlin was justifying the violence of Kristallnacht, arguing that it was "reprisal" against Jews who had supposedly murdered more than twenty million Christians and stolen billions of dollars in "Christian property"; Nazism, he said, was a natural "defense mechanism" against the communism financed by Jewish bankers. Coughlin’s weekly newspaper, Social Justice, which had an estimated circulation of 200,000 at its height, was described by Life magazine at the time as probably the most widely read voice of "Nazi propaganda in America."