Transcript:

And therefore, choosing right instead of might, choosing to be on the side of justice instead of on the side of modern capitalism, with its intermingling with socialism and communism. I stand before you tonight to warn you. Careless of what the future holds [?]. That this relief that has failed to relieve, by pounding up its taxation, by doubling its assessment upon the payrolls of the nation, by finding its way into the grocer shops where you purchase your food. This relief, that lives upon us suckers, taking from the people every penny they own, is due to crumble and fall before one year from this April. You think you know what Depression is? You people living on the WPA envelopes, WPA envelopes filled partly from the money confiscated from industry and commerce, and from the envelopes of those who are working, how long can that last? It can't last forever. There's no bottomless pit to that spending. You WPA workers and those of you who are living upon the dole system. How long can it last for this federal reserve bank to invent and issue and coin its own bogus money against the debts of a nation. And then when the bond market drops as it's dropping now, print more fresh five dollar bills to buy in its own bonds. Oh there's a law of compensation, and there's an accounting to be held, an accounting that shall make the depression of 1929 seem as a prosperity when it breaks upon you.

What sins we have committed. When the Bill of Rights was established in England, it insisted that the spending power be held in the hands of the people. It insisted that the spending power of a nation be held in its parliament or its congress. View the New Deal in 1943 and 44. Did it reveal the Bill of Rights for which men had bled and died? Oh no, it took the Bill of Rights as it's taking our Constitution today and tore it into shreds, and handed over the spending power from the purse of the people, from the purse of Congress, to the President of The United States. One step backwards, one step towards dictatorship. That may seem peculiar to you, but in doing that Congress relinquished its own liberty, and relinquished its own freedom of speech. Since that day, since the Chief Executive of the nation has the full spending power of billions of dollars, congress must bend its pregnant knee before him. Congress must become a rubber stamp congress, or else be rubbed out of existence in the line of patronage. All patronage, all partyism, save us from those things. We who once loved patriotism, we who once loved democracy, we who once proudly raised our heads, favoring justice, with a heel upon us, ready to spurn and crush every injustice.

 

Background:
During the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin's "Golden Hour of the Little Flower" was the country's most popular religious radio program, attracting as many as forty million listeners every Sunday. Coughlin, a Canadian-born Catholic of obvious Irish descent, broadcast his quasi-religious sermons from near his small parish in Royal Oak, Michigan. Railing against the political and economic sins of the nation, his fiery rhetoric was greeted heartily by Depression-era America. In the 1932 election year, he became a vocal supporter of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he hailed as the salvation of the nation. However, the politically ambitious Coughlin later grew critical of the president and his policies, and in 1936 he supported Union party presidential candidate William Lemke. Promising to go off the air if Lemke received less than nine million votes, he briefly ceased broadcasting when Lemke won less than a million. In 1937, he returned to the airwaves with a vengeance, attacking the New Deal as a Communist conspiracy and Roosevelt as a dictator. In the next year, he added anti-Semitic remarks to his diatribes and expressed sympathy for Germany and Italy's Fascist regimes. Most of his traditional supporters were alienated by this new extremism, and in 1940 his radio program was canceled. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Coughlin was ordered by his bishop to cease all political activity.