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Coughlin himself, who two years ago claimed he had severed all connections with Social Justice, was at first "not available." But a few days later he made a surprise confession. "... I do here and now publicly state that I, Father Charles E. Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower, alone am responsible for and do control the magazine, its policies and contents."
Meanwhile no responsible editor went to the defense of the anglophobic, antiSemitic, rabble-rousing weekly. But Columnist David Lawrence did raise the question whether the Government was doing the right thing in the wrong way: by barring Social Justice from the mails before it was brought to trial.
Story of an Ad
From the New York Times came a curt note saying merely that the advertisement submitted for publication was "not acceptable." The New York Herald Tribune's Publisher Helen Reid, after many a mental seesaw, also turned it down. No, said she to the ad's sponsors, it would be unseemly for the Herald Tribune to accept an ad dealing so harshly in personalities. The sponsors reminded her that the Herald Tribune's editorial page had recently dealt little less harshly in the same personalities: "appeasolationist" Publishers Hearst, Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, Captain Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News. Mrs. Reid smiled ruefully : that was different, she said.
This week the ad was printed — but not in New York City. The San Francisco Chronicle slapped it on a conspicuous full-page, over the signature of Friends of Democracy, Inc., one of the earliest and most effective of the "democracy" groups. The ad was as skillful a lashing, in deft, fighting-mad language, as any yet administered to the Hearst-McCormick-Patterson press. Under pictures of the three publishers the ad demanded: "AND WHAT DO YOU CALL 'AIDING THE ENEMY,' GENTLEMEN?" Said the text, after carping quotations from each of the three:
"You three merely call all this constructive criticism, and free speech and a free press? And the ceaseless drip of poison day after day. . . . 'Churchill remains in power . . . because he has succeeded in dragging the U.S. into England's European entanglements' (Hearst). . . . 'We cannot attack Germany in any effective way' (McCormick). . . . 'What any [American troops] were doing in Java and what they were fighting for makes an interesting question. . . .' (Patterson)
"Drip, drip, drip. Day after day after day.. . .
"So millions of this nation's men and women ask you three what you are up to now — today — with your endless carping, your spreading of unease, your constant spittle of suspicion of our Government and allies? These millions know the difference between all that and sincere criticism.
"So what are you doing? Not 'aiding the enemy.' Of course not. You are patriotic men. Hurrah for the Red, White and Blue."
A conspicuous anti-libel note explained that the phrase "aiding the enemy" was not used "in its legalistic sense," but in the sense "of the man in the street."