Business & Finance: Coughlin on Detroit et al.

Henry Ford, Herbert Hoover, President Roosevelt, Senator James Couzens, the banks’ officials, the Depression and J. Pierpont Morgan have all, individually and in sundry paradoxical combinations, been blamed for Detroit’s banking troubles (TIME, Aug. 28 et ante). Last week Detroit was amazed to hear that a highly successful 18th Century London stockbroker whose father was a Dutch Jew was really responsible.

“The banks . . . were wrecked by the philosophy that money in the hands of the masses was a menace,” shouted Detroit’s spellbinding radio priest, Father Charles Edward Coughlin, testifying before Judge Harry B. Keidan, the one-man grand jury. “These white-carnation bankers and stockmarket gamblers were not to blame. They had been brought up in the school of Ricardo*; and John Stuart Mill and more latterly, Mr. Herbert Hoover.” Father Coughlin was putting on a one-man show for the one-man jury. Much to the delight of a hot pack of Detroiters who squeezed into the courtroom, he thumped, ranted and deplored for two full days. He discoursed at length on the subject of gold; he sketched the history of money; he traced the origins of the War; he debated Karl Marx with Michigan’s Attorney General O’Brien, boomed for Inflation, attacked Alfred Emanuel Smith, defended President Roosevelt and Pope Leo XIII. Occasionally he touched on Detroit banking. Dicta of Father Coughlin:

“The United States is no Jesus Christ. It cannot go down into a graveyard and raise a stinking Lazarus. God Almighty could not raise the First National [Bank]. “It is not a crime but an honor to be a capitalist. There is nothing un-Christian about it.”

Father Coughlin’s bitterest vitriol was reserved for Edward Douglas Stair, former president of Detroit Bankers Co., one of the two holding companies-“Detroit Looters’ Co.” to Father Coughlin. Also publisher of the Free Press, Mr. Stair directs a running editorial barrage against Father Coughlin. “Insull was a piker to E. D. Stair,” yelled the priest of the Shrine of the Little Flower, who in October will resume his Sunday broadcasts over 27 stations, and who plans to expand his “Children’s Hour” to seven stations.

Father Coughlin hurled charge after charge of corruption, deceit and deliberate falsifying of books at the officials of the defunct banks. Furthermore, he fumed, it was doubtful if three of them would escape Federal indictment-Banker-Publisher Stair, former Chairman Wilson W. Mills of First National (“a broken-down lawyer who swapped his profession for the fleshpots of Egypt”) and Peter J. Monaghan, a director of Detroit Bankers and its attorney. Special U. S. Assistant Attorney General Pratt, who is also probing the Detroit situation, slyly observed: “Father Coughlin must know more about it than I do.”

*Stockbroker David Ricardo retired from the London Stock Exchange in 1797 with a fat fortune, devoted himself to economics, wrote Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock, is chiefly famed for transmitting Adam Smith’s laisscz fairc philosophy to John Stuart Mill.