"The Pied Pipers" All last week the nation's attention was held fast by the performance of two politicians, a priest and a onetime plow manufacturer. No public issue of any consequence was involved. No principle was at stake. No precedent was established. No scandal was exposed. Yet the man-in-the-street watched and listened with the same fascination that would make him pause to witness a dog fight. When the fusillade of vilification, obloquy, traducement and backbiting ceased, the chief result seemed to be that Senator Huey Pierce ("Kingfish") Long had received the most thundering mass of publicity that had come to him in his whole lively career.
At the Banquet. The whole row was started by General Hugh S. Johnson. Having written the Blue Eagle's biography for the Saturday Evening Post, he was now about to launch his own in Redbook Magazine, which more than 20 years ago printed stories by Lieut. Hugh Johnson entitled "The Suffragette Sergeant" and "Fate's Fandango." As a send-off for the series, Redbook gave Autobiographer Johnson a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. The General paid for his meal with a speech.
Taking as his title "The Pied Pipers," and as his text the anti-Administration outpourings of Rev. Charles Coughlin and Senator Long, Hugh Johnson cried: "You can laugh at Father Coughlin—you can snort at Huey Long—but this country was never under a greater menace. ... It is somebody time for somebody to get up on his hind legs and howl !" Up on his hind legs was precisely where General Johnson got and howl he did at the radio pastor of Detroit's Shrine of the Little Flower: "While I do not for a moment compare Father Coughlin with Talleyrand, it is no exaggeration to say that, through the doorway of his priestly office, covered in his designs by the sanctity of the robe he wears. Father Coughlin, by the cheap strategy of appealing to the envy of those who have nothing for those who have something, has become the active political head of an active political party. ... I think that makes him another bad fish in the net of Holy Church."
As to Father Coughlin's investments in silver on behalf of his Radio League of the Little Flower while he was preaching remonetization, the General stormed: "When a priest vowed to poverty and preaching to the poor flays the faith of a people to advance a monetary interest— his own or another—you can about conclude that Judas Iscariot was just a poor piker."
Enveloping Huey Long in a verbal flank movement, the General continued: "Of recent months there has been an open alliance between the great Louisiana demagogue and this political padre. . . . These two patriots may have been reading last summer's lurid story about an American Hitler riding into Washington at the head of troops. That would be definite to Huey because he knows what part of the horse he can be. . . .
"We expect politics to make strange bedfellows, but if Father Coughlin wants to engage in political bundling with Huey Long, or any other demagogue, it is only a fair first move to take off his Roman cassock. . . .