"Doremus Jessup can never die."

Be a Corpo! Kick the crap out of somebody.
Now, if you have read the stage adaptation of It Can't Happen Here, you have most likely not read the one which was performed by the Federal Theatre Project as part of a cross-country effort to open the same show on the same night - October 27, 1936. That version was co-authored in great haste by Sinclair Lewis and John C. Moffitt. Lewis was unhappy with the outcome, and revised the script for publication.

Lewis' 1938 version (available from Dramatists Play Service) has sixteen characters, performed in six scenes spread across three acts.

The original 1936 version, presented in Cleveland at the Carter Theatre, features no fewer than 27 names characters as well as numerous extras, performed in fifteen scenes - most of them entirely different sets.

It is this version, one entirely impractical to stage as a full-production but entirely within our means as a staged reading, that we will present on Monday, October 24 beginning at 7 PM at the Cleveland Public Theatre.

At first I thought, what the hell, just do the later version. It is a tighter script, no doubt. But there are several strong artistic and practical reasons to stage the original version.

First of all, what a unique experience! An historic occasion deserves a little reach.

Second, it doesn't matter that there are more actors, a staged reading is easily double-cast.

Third, the revised edition streamlines the course of events, but leaves out a great deal of outrageous detail, including the decent into madness of President "Buzz" Windrip, and the fate of Pastor Paul Peter Prang, a character loosely-based on (or entirely meant to represent) Father Coughlin.

SPOILER ALERT
But the real selling point for me is the ending. The 1938 edit leaves Doremus Jessup and Eppingham Swan face to face, each certain to die very shortly, but a shining ray of hope hanging over the proceedings as his daughter and grandson safely pass into Canada. The original version was much more dire, with Jessup escaping a concentration camp to an unknown fate while the imprisoned Prang prays over the dying form of a fellow inmate, while at the same time its Jessup's daughter Mary who holds the gun on Swan, allowing her boy to escape.

The 1938 revision is more Hollywood. The original 1936 version is much more interesting, inspiring, and non-traditional, and by that I mean less obvious macho bullshit. The original script is a big, beautiful, sprawling mess. And I think it's better that way. And that's what we're going to do.

Sources:
All images from one of the New York City productions of "It Can't Happen Here," 1936.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum

"A second Boston Tea Party!"

The following play script is by David Hansen © 2010.


UNION PARTY CONVENTION

MAYOR BURTON steps forward.

MAYOR BURTON
Cleveland in her Centennial Year warmly welcomes the Convention of the National Union for Social Justice! We cordially invite everyone attending your convention to attend the Great Lakes Exposition. We invite you to share the inspiration of a rapidly growing community confident of its own future and of that of the country under the control of popular government.

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
Citizens from around the nation, Forty-thousand strong have come to Municipal Stadium to hear the fighting radio priest, Father Charles E. Coughlin give the keynote address at this first Union Party convention, throwing the weight of his ten million listeners behind the candidacy of North Dakota Representative William Lemke. Some sporting patriotic costumes!

Enter CONVENTIONEER in a feathered "Red
Indian" headband, war paint and modern, floral
patterned dress.

CONVENTIONEER
You remember the Bostonians dressed up like Indians when they threw that high-priced British tea overboard? Well, we don't like the high-priced tea we're getting from Washington, and we don't like taxation without representation, so we're going to throw it overboard. We represent a second Boston Tea Party!

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
What if your man doesn't win the election this November?

CONVENTIONEER
These feathers stand for peace. That means we will use peaceful methods -- Not bullets, but ballots.

VOICE OF THE LIVING NEWSPAPER
Here comes the man himself, as thousands rise to their feet in the sweltering summer heat!

FATHER COUGHLIN, a stocky, ruddy
cheeked man in a frock coat and collar, with
round wire-rimmed spectacles, walks through the
audience to the rostrum at center.

CROWD
(goes wild)

FATHER COUGHLIN
Mr. Chairman, Rev. Dr. Gerald Smith, Congressman Lemke, ladies and gentlemen from every State in the Union. It is my happy privilege to be here today.

That great betrayer and liar, Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt, promised to drive the money-changers from the temple, and succeeded in driving farmers from their homesteads. He built up the greatest debt in all history, which he permitted the bankers the right to spend, and you and your children shall repay with seventy billion hours of labor.

My friends, the hand of Moscow backs the Communist leaders in America, and aims to pledge their support for Roosevelt. We are wholly opposed to the Roosevelt taxes, dole, and to the propaganda that has been spread through this land. We are opposed, sympathetically, to the Republican candidate, poor Mr. Alfred Landon. Holy Mackerel, Andy! He doesn't know whether he is going or coming.

Is it Democracy for the President to browbeat the Congress and insist this legislation "must" be passed? Is that democracy?

FATHER COUGHLIN waits for a reply from
the audience. If he does not receive one, he asks
"Is that Democracy?" Even more ferociously.

FATHER COUGHLIN (CON'T.)
Is it Democracy for the president to say, "pass this legislation whether it is Constitutional or not"? Is that Democracy? Is it Democracy to have our country filled with bureaucrats and their banks filled with unpayable debts, save for their bankers? Is that Democracy? Why should there be want in the midst of plenty simply to satisfy the Rothschilds, the international financiers, the Jews?

We are Christians. We believe in Christ's principle of love your neighbor as yourself. I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it. The better class of Jews are willing to accept this basic principle of Christianity. When men become so prideful that they believe they can rewrite the eternal law of God - when ballots have proved useless - then as one American, imbued with the tradition of Washington, I shall not disdain using bullets for the preservation of liberty!

FATHER COUGHLIN takes off his coat.

FATHER COUGHLIN (CON'T.)
It is not pleasant for me who coined the phrase "Roosevelt or ruin" - a phrase based upon promises - to voice such passionate words. But I must admit that "Roosevelt AND ruin is the order of the day. New Deal policy is Un-Christian! It is anti-God! It is downright asinine!

FATHER COUGHLIN undoes and removes his
clerical collar.

FATHER COUGHLIN (CON'T.)
If I don't deliver nine million votes for William Lemke, I'm through with radio forever! I am willing to die in this struggle to liberate America from the money changers!

FATHER COUGHLIN swoons, steps back,
mops his brow, regathers himself and gasps:

FATHER COUGHLIN (CON'T.)
I AM SICK!

FATHER COUGHLIN is helped away from the
rostrum.


This fictionalized speech was created using quotations from Charles E. Coughlin at rallies in Cleveland and Philadelphia, and from the following sources:
The New York Times
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Cleveland Press
Social Justice
Father Coughlin's radio broadcast
Additional thanks to Karen Ketchaver and Donald Warren's biography of Coughlin.

The "tea party" conventioneer's quotation is documented, and not a product of the playwright's imagination. Really. For real.

Radio Priest (book)

I think I have some kind of stomach virus. I have been up since 4 am with a roiling stomach, which was not alleviated by choosing to take this time to finish reading Donald Warren's biography of Charles Coughlin, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio.

The book refers to Coughlin as a "footnote" in American history, but I am coming to believe he is more of a blind-spot. There are two Jewish members of a certain age in the Playwrights' Unit, and when I brought in a scene making passing reference to this radio priest, one of my peers needed me to explain who he was, while the other was all too aware of his history.

Warren's book details the interesting life of this narcissistic and hateful Catholic priest, though I have to admit I was more interested in the earlier, pre-WWII history, after which it gets bogged down in the question of whether or not Coughlin received direct monetary compensation from the Nazis. This is not unimportant information, but there were an awful lot of names and unanswered questions and a great many specious claims as to make the author sound almost as conspiratorily-minded as his subject.

Published in the mid 1990s, Radio Priest attempts at the outset to trace Coughlin's brand of right-wing, bellicose wailing to the then-present day polititainers like Rush Limbaugh. The book is well-overdue for a reprint with a new forward.

Anything clever I might say comparing Father Coughlin to the likes of Glenn Beck was already done in a much more professional manner in the September 13 issue of The Onion in the article Nation Once Again Comes Under Sway Of Pink-Faced Half-Wit:

Dr. David Snider, a media historian and author of the book "Frothing, Shouting Dim-Bulbs: An American Tradition", said that the current porcine loudmouth is the latest in a long line of pink-faced half-wits that began in the 1930s with the incendiary radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a pink-faced half-wit Roman Catholic priest.

According to Snider, this original pink-faced half-wit exploited the Great Depression to foment his message of virulent anti-Semitism—a tactic of shamelessly preying upon American misery and misfortune that has since been employed by nearly every pink-faced, intellectually corrupt piece of shit asshole to open his fat, disgusting pig mouth since.

Radio Priest opened my eyes to the finer points of anti-Semitism, and the more recent defense of anti-Semitism practiced by those who hold it dear, namely blaming only bad Jews for all the evil which befalls the rest of us - good Christians and good Jews alike.

The good Father taught us that in the olden days, because of true anti-Semitism, Jews could not own land, nor were they tolerated to stay anywhere for any length of time. As a result, Jews put all of their savings into GOLD, which they carried from place to place. And they learned to create more gold by lending gold for interest - an act, children repeat after me, call usury - something Christians were forbidden to practice because it goes against God's law (see: Shakespeare's: The Merchant of Venice.)

Flash-forward to the 20th Century, or at least to 1936 which concerns us most, and Coughlin has made it clear that what threatens our world the most is the Jew-backed, Communist world conspiracy, made possible by "international financiers" - this being the term Coughlin more commonly used early in his career before coming right out and saying "Jews".

The year 1936 was the high point in Coughlin's political career. And remember, we are talking about a parish priest from Detroit. He supposedly answers to the Catholic Church, and Warren's book is loaded with documented missives and direct quotations from interviews detailing the back and forth between bishops, cardinals, federal agents and the like, describing the thoughts of Church superiors and how they might deal with a person who had gained an historically unprecedented amount of influence and power due strictly to the power of mass media - the radio.

The story ends with a whimper, not a bang. Warren would have us outraged that the Catholic Church did very little to reign in a figure who increasingly (especially after his own party's humbling in the 1936 Presidential election) hateful rhetoric led directly or indirectly to hate crimes and which was arguably "lending aid and comfort to our enemies" during the war with Germany. Since his book has been published, accounts of child abuse by priests too numerous to tally left this reader unsurprised at the Church's inaction.

Now, if I may offer my own opinion: What is distressing to me is no longer that individuals such as Coughlin can miseducate so many people. It is the extent to which so many people actually prefer to think in a paranoid and fearful manner. It is the only explanation. Just recently Glenn Beck dedicated three hours to bête noire of the right, George Soros. Granted, Beck was doing a hatchet job on a single individual, not an entire race, but he did attempt to distance himself from accusations of anti-Semitism by - ta-dah! - accusing the Jew Soros of being anti-Semitic.

Remember what the good Father taught us - Jews are not the enemy, Bad Jews are the enemy. An important distinction. Let us continue. From The New Yorker, November 29, 2010:

Beck pictured Soros as a deeply evil figure, a shadowy manipulator whose marionettes include unions, the Democratic Party, the media, and the President; a rapacious financier who seeks to subvert and destroy the American republic in order to satisfy his own greed for money and advance his plot to establish an all-powerful global, state under his control. As it happens, these tropes correspond uncannily to those of classical anti-Semitism.

I happened to read this article the same morning I finished Warren's book. Hmn.

Unlike Beck, who has the support of his Gentile oligarch Rupert Murdoch, Coughlin relied on independent radio stations which became increasingly unhappy with his rhetoric to carry his message across the country and his radio broadcasts were suppressed by the late 1930s, and with is a major source of his revenue. Around the same time, however, his weekly paper Social Justice gained a higher-quality look, which different color inks to make it pop and higher quality photographs. There is evidence that this funding came straight from Berlin. It is without a doubt that several articles in the paper were direct transcriptions of speeches from the office of Joseph Goebbels. Eventually he was pressured to cease publication as a case was being created against him as a disseminator of seditious materials.

Source:
Radio Priest, Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio
The Onion
The New Yorker

Social Justice

Social Justice Vol. 2 No. 6
August 31, 1936

The issue featured above includes continuing coverage of the Union Party Convention held in Cleveland in August, 1936.

* * *
My blog posts have slowed a bit in the past week as I have been reading the biography of a man who:

- Was backed by shadowy, right-wing finances.

- Communicated to his audience through mass-media and grand, public, staged events.

- Appealed to base instincts and fear.

- Made educating the people about the impending threat of Communist world-domination the centerpiece of his message.

- Detailed wildly complex and paranoid conspiracy theories.

- Fomented race-hatred in millions of his economically-challenged followers.

- Had an obsession regarding the possession of gold.

... Tomorrow we'll talk about Father Coughlin.

Drum fill. Happy Thanksgiving!

Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) is the famous bald architect with the big, round glasses.

Born in Cleveland, Johnson's ancestry is Dutch. He is descended from Jacques Cortelyou who mapped out the town plan for New Amsterdam for Peter Stuyvestant. Studying philosophy and history at Harvard, he took several long breaks to tour Europe where he developed his passion for architecture and fascism.

With fellow travelers he championed the modern style of architecture, creating the earthshaking show The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 at the Museum of Modern Art. However, he resigned his post at MOMA in the 1930s to dabble in journalism and criticize the "failure" of the fledgling welfare state. He became a foreign correspondent for Father Coughlin's magazine, Social Justice.

He was "enthralled" by Hitler, and became a disciple of Lawrence Dennis, who predicted that Capitalism was doomed, and that fascism was America's only bulwark against Communism. In 1934 he and some friends formed the National party, though it attracted little interest. He went to Louisiana to work for Huey Long, and after that man was assassinated, found his way to Coughlin's headquarters in Royal Oak, Michigan. In addition to the writing gig, the radio priest tapped Johnson for political organizing for his National Union party.

For ten years, Philip Johnson espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric until he followed the Nazi army into the invasion of Poland as a correspondent. He returned to the United States and enlisted in the Army.

In 1983 he designed the big, ugly extension of the Cleveland Play House and the big, dumb Bolton Theatre.

Sources: Wikipedia
Journal of Architectural Education
The Washington Post
Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio

Franklin Delano Rosenfeld

Roosevelt is Jewish. Rosenfeld was the first name and he wasn’t regarded as one of the first founders of Jewry in this country, either. I have a book out there with the pedigree of all the Jews in it written by a Jew which I can show you ...some of them more famous Jews than he.
- Charles Coughlin, 1970

Since the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 this country has been educated to a new phase in government … Or shall we say that which it is? It is assuredly “Freedom and planning” adapted to the United States … Stripped of all its commouflage, it is a guild form of government … The guild form of government is directly the opposite of the constitutional form of government, It is the Jewish plan of a world estate.
- Louis McFadden, U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania, 1934

President Roosevelt intends to repeat the “Pax Judaica” of Woodrow Wilson who led the United States into the World War because he acted on behalf of Morgenthau, Warburg, Jacob Schiff, Louis Brandeis, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., all Jewish bankers of New York and masters of the world. President Wilson was able to put across his cheme because 20 percent of America’s population was Jewish then, but it is easier now, because the number of Jews number 40 percent of the total population today and because Roosevelt himself is a Jew.
- from a Roman newspaper, 1940

From the viewpoint of eugenics, it [FDR’s Jewish background] explains his natural bent toward radicalism … and proves unmistakably, that the Roosevelt administration offers a biological, as well as a political problem. It is therefore as natural to him to be radical as it is for others to be true Americans … HE IS NOT ONE OF US!”
- Gerald Winrod, Defender magazine, 1935

All I know about the origins of the Roosevelt family in this country is that all branches bearing the name are apparently descended from Claes Martenseene Van Roosevelt, who came from Holland sometime before 1648. In the dim distant past they may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants - what I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God - I hope they were both.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1935

Source: Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio (Donald Warren, 1996)

Meeting of the minds

"Demagoguery and stupidity are the natural enemies of democracy."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Democracy is doomed. This is our last election. What will happen? It is Fascism or Communism. We are at a crossroads. I take the road to Fascism."
- Father Charles Coughlin

Father Coughlin

And while we're on the subject ...
Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a Canadian-born priest, and once a supporter of FDR's, famously turned against him and campaigned against him in 1936. On July 16 he was the final speaker before a convention at Public Hall. What began as a calm, reserved speech escalated into a feverish screed, where he had to undo his clerical collar and take off his jacket. He denounced the money-changers of the Federal Reserve, and the crowd of ten thousand stood in admiration as he championed his own National Union for Social Justice:

As far as the National Union is concerned, no candidate who is endorsed for Congress can campaign, go electioneering for, or support the great betrayer and liar, Franklin D. Roosevelt....I ask you to purge the man who claims to be a democrat from the Democratic Party—I mean Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.

The culmination of the first convention of the NUSJ was held before 42,000 supporters at Municipal Stadium. Following his speech, where he called FDR a Communist (I mean, come on) he collapsed from exhaustion.

His Union Party nominated William Lemke for President, and after the 1936 election he descended further into Anti-Semetic rhetoric, expressing sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini, and championing American isolationism from World War II.

Sources:
-David H. Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969)
-Karen G. Ketchaver, Father Charles E. Coughlin—The “Radio Priest” of the 1930
-WIkipedia

Governor Alfred M. Landon

May 18, 1936

The Republican convention in Cleveland that June reflected the divide within the party: The most rousing speech came from ex-president Herbert Hoover, who told the delegates that Roosevelt's second term would result in the "violence and outrage by which European despotisms have crushed all liberalism and all freedom." 

The Hoover speech, reported the Times the next day, produced "wild and uncontrollable bursts of frenzy" in the partisan audience.

But the Republican nominee, Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, did not share Hoover's apocalyptic vision or his ability to whip up the crowd. Alf Landon, a forty-eight year-old oilman who had built his reputation on fiscal austerity, was the only Republican governor to win election in the West in 1932, and he repeated the feat two years later. 

He planned to attack the Roosevelt administration for overspending. But Landon was a bland candidate in every respect: a man of medium height with gray eyes behind rimless glasses. Although he was privately charming, his speech was flat and drawling and he had no gift for oratory. 

Father Coughlin, who should know, once described Landon as "a most honest man but the most colorless candidate in the history of the United States." 

- "Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times" p. 129-130

It should be noted that, in an attempt not to appear like a demigod, Landon accepted the nomination of his party in absentia on 11 June. Does this mean he was not even in Cleveland, at all, for the convention?