Terror in the City of Champions (21 page)

Coughlin’s rebuttal had been equally harsh. He described Johnson as a “comic-opera, cream-puff general” and “a political corpse whose ghost has returned to haunt us.” Johnson responded by labeling Coughlin and Long “political termites.”

Coughlin was too powerful to ignore. The fear that he would align with Long and create a third party coursed through political circles. Coughlin commanded a motivated audience. His broadcasts elicited literally tons of letters, 80,000 on an average week and up to one million on occasion. He received more mail than anyone in the country. A post office had been erected in Royal Oak to handle the influx. Coughlin’s own office staff exceeded one hundred employees. Many of the letters they handled included donations. The money was funding construction of Coughlin’s new, larger limestone church, Shrine of the Little Flower. Already erected on the site was the seven-story art deco Charity Crucifixion Tower. It featured a twenty-eight-foot relief of Christ on the cross, and it glowed at night within a confluence of floodlight beams.

When Coughlin began his National Union for Social Justice, he outlined sixteen principles. Among them were that every citizen willing to work receive “a just, living, annual wage,” that the Federal Reserve be abolished, and that farmers be ensured a “fair profit.” It was a remedy cheered by his backers.

Coughlin was one of the most famous men in America. Everybody knew of him, including the Black Legion. Early on Dayton Dean began going to meetings of Coughlin’s National Union. Dean was sent as a spy, but he found Coughlin’s words, spoken in his rolling, booming voice, alluring. Dean felt that Coughlin, religion aside, supported working men like himself. One night at a local church meeting, Coughlin startled Dean during his talk. “There are men in this audience tonight who would like to get rid of me,” he said. Coughlin looked at Dean. Their eyes connected. “But I’m not afraid. I’m going to speak the truth.” Dean told his wife that he thought Coughlin was addressing him directly.

When he spoke, Coughlin held his notes in his left hand and waved and jerked his right arm as if angrily conducting Stravinsky’s
The
Rite of Spring
. His hand was balled into a fist. He hammered his pulpit with it. His head bobbed as he made his points. At Olympia, sweat streaming down his face, Coughlin proclaimed that he would organize auto workers into one bargaining unit. “For years the laboring man has endeavored to obtain a just and living wage in Michigan, and for forty years he has failed to organize his bargaining power. . . . The du Ponts and General Motors and Ford, Packard, and Chrysler—I am not afraid of them,” Coughlin said.

Indeed in 1930, appearing before a congressional committee, Coughlin had predicted that within three years there would be a communist revolution in America—and that Henry Ford would be to blame because he had falsely advertised the need for new workers. “As a result of that statement, many more than the 30,000 flocked to Detroit. . . . [But] there were no jobs for them and the only redress was to have the fire hose turned on them,” Coughlin testified. Such treatment had driven the men toward the communist party, he said. The discord between Coughlin and Ford would not last. Three years later Coughlin reached out to Ford, bidding him Easter greetings. He also mailed him a copy of his book,
The New Deal in Money
.

Earlier in the evening at Olympia, Rabbi Ferdinand M. Isserman of St. Louis had addressed the crowd. Isserman had visited Nazi Germany in 1933 and warned of what was transpiring there. His presence at the Coughlin event was in support of social justice, but it played as a response to critics of the priest. Isserman gently nudged Coughlin, encouraging his union to be “animated not with malice but mercy, not with hate but with love, not with frenzy but with reason.” Coughlin lately had been drawing fire for statements seen as anti-Jewish. Beginning in mid-1937, Coughlin would veer harshly into the world of antisemitism, becoming a dark, unambiguous presence. But his words in 1935 were more shaded. He talked of international bankers and money changers. He referenced “Jewish gold” and chastised various figures whose names—Morgenthau, Warburg, Rothschild, Kuhn, Loeb—left little doubt to their roots. His gauzy attacks prompted New York rabbi Stephen Wise to appeal publicly to Coughlin to choose words that would not “feed and fan flames of anti-Jewish feeling.” Wise based his mild reproach on the premise that Coughlin’s offenses had been unintentional.

Others thought not. In Los Angeles, speaking to a thousand people at a B’nai B’rith meeting, entertainer Eddie Cantor described Coughlin as lacking “an atom of sincerity in his entire system.” He added, “Free speech is a wonderful thing, but through the radio we are permitting many like him to address millions. We are living in precarious times. You know the situation in Europe, as far as our Jews are concerned, but I doubt if any of you know how close to the same situation we are here in America. We must recognize the facts. We must stand united.”

In 1935 Henry Ford was still the Detroit region’s most prominent antisemite. Ford’s prejudices were no secret. He was “bigoted about Jews, and just as much so about Roman Catholics,” Harry Bennett would say later. Over the decades Ford had built a notorious reputation and his long record spoke louder than the apologies engineered by underlings. He had published the weekly
Dearborn Independent
, which regularly castigated Jews. Typical was this banner headline from May 22, 1920: T
HE
I
NTERNATIONAL
J
EW—
T
HE
W
ORLD’S
P
ROBLEM
. Venomous stories from the
Independent
were gathered into a book,
The International Jew
, which was translated into sixteen languages and distributed worldwide. Among its admirers was Adolf Hitler, whose waiting room had a table featuring multiple copies of the release. In 1938 Ford and Coughlin would become allies in their dislike of Jews, discussing such issues during regular lunch meetings.

Standing in their brown robes, the Capuchin friars of St. Bonaventure Monastery were among the more noticeable attendees at Olympia. Coughlin was friends with several of them, especially Father Solanus Casey, a gray-bearded and bespectacled man two decades older than he. Aside from their faith and their Irish ancestry, Coughlin and Casey shared a joyous love for baseball and the Tigers. Coughlin had played with the St. Basil College team in Waco, Texas, while a young faculty member at the seminary. In one game St. Basil upset Baylor, a Baptist university, with Tris Speaker reportedly in uniform under an alias. The Catholic vs. Baptist confrontation ended violently with Coughlin suffering “the worst physical beating of my life. But it was worth it,” he said. “We showed them that Catholics could beat Baptists.”

In Michigan in the 1920s, Coughlin was assigned to start a parish in Royal Oak near a Klan stronghold. After he built the church, the Klan torched a cross outside the chapel. As he was growing his community, Coughlin became friends with Wish Egan, one of the Tigers’ Catholic scouts. He asked for Egan’s help with a fund-raiser, and one day when the Yankees were in town Babe Ruth and teammate Joe Dugan, as well as Tiger Harry Heilmann, convened at the church doors. They collected donations from the throngs who had heard they would be there. “No change today!” Ruth called out. “No change today!”

Solanus Casey wasn’t a promoter. He was quiet and reserved. Born Bernard Casey in rural Wisconsin, Barney was one of sixteen children. Their large family had a baseball team, the Casey All-Brothers Nine, for which Barney served as catcher. Though older than his seminary classmates, Casey continued to catch, stubbornly refusing a mask, content to protect himself with a blessing. Like Coughlin, Casey ended up in Detroit in the 1920s. Late in the decade, after the market crashed, poverty and hunger overwhelmed the city. The Capuchins never turned away those in need of a meal. But as the crowds grew, their informal feeding of the poor became unsustainable. So the Capuchins, with Casey playing a key role, founded a soup kitchen. During the dire days of the Depression, the kitchen served up to 2,000 people per day.

Casey, who did not go to college, admired Coughlin and fell into the political sway of his better-educated friend. He came to agree with Coughlin’s opposition to Roosevelt, describing the president in a letter to his sister as “simply of the bankers” and noting that “my enthusiasm for him is almost—or fast becoming—ancient history.” In one letter he referred to Coughlin as a “prophet.” Biographer Michael Crosby said that in political matters Casey had a “gullibility [that] . . . was able to be exploited. . . . While Solanus might have intuitions about matters of the Lord, they were not always paralleled in his social analysis.” But matters of politics rarely entered into his official role.

As the monastery porter, Father Casey was becoming known throughout Detroit. Numerous Catholics, as well as an occasional Protestant or Jew, came to meet with him at his desk, which sat to the right of the door, plainly in public view. A conviction was strengthening among believers that his intercession and prayers could bring relief and healing. Those who consulted him ranged from the meek to the powerful, including a Detroit mayor, Frank Murphy, and a governor, Alex Groesbeck. Father Casey’s growing popularity and unhurried manners meant his waiting room was often filled with visitors who might be in line for two or three hours. One who came in 1935 was eighty-nine-year-old French Canadian brother André Bessette, a future saint. He had traveled from Montreal. Each knelt before the other to receive a blessing.

After his Olympia appearance, Coughlin held rallies of the National Union in Cleveland, where 25,000 turned out, and in New York at a packed Madison Square Garden. He railed against Roosevelt, whose mere name elicited boos. He also tore into the “kept press” for siding with financiers and suppressing “the voice of the people.” Such raucous displays upset some Catholic leaders. “All these disturbing voices . . . the shouting, yelling, and screaming are so unbecoming,” said Boston cardinal William O’Connell. “They are hysterical. And no priest of God, no teacher of the Christian Church, ever permits himself to be hysterical.”

The Killing of Silas Coleman

For some time Harvey Davis had been wondering what it would feel like to kill a black man. Promoted over co-worker Dayton Dean to colonel of the third regiment, Davis intended to find out. He hated blacks. He opposed any movement toward integration. He did not want blacks in his neighborhood and he did not want black children in his children’s schools. He preferred blacks not be in his world at all.

As a teenager in Kentucky, Davis had had small run-ins with the law. He spent a month in a reformatory after tricking a dim farmer out of six dollars in 1913. (He used the money for a picnic of sodas and candy for friends.) In 1917 he stole a horse from a black livery worker. Just adolescent skylarking, he explained.

Eighteen years on, Davis had a wife, Ruth, and four daughters, from three months to fourteen years old. He and Ruth hoped to move to a bigger home, where his mother could have her own room, but illnesses and unexpected bills disrupted their plans. When they could get away, they liked to spend weekends at a multicolor shingled cottage along Rush Lake near Pinckney. A friend owned the place but allowed Davis frequent use of his cabin.

For some men the Black Legion’s appeal centered on politics. They hoped to elect like-minded, fiercely anti-communist candidates and to crush their enemies. For others the legion’s hatred of Jews and Catholics provided the attraction. For Davis it was mostly about race. Davis had gotten a taste of blood in February 1935 when he, Dean, and Charles Rouse went to Ecorse in search of a political opponent. Failing to find him, Davis decided to target one of the man’s black supporters, Clarence Oliver. They intended to kill Oliver but couldn’t locate him either. Davis wasn’t ready to leave though.

“I want to shoot a nigger,” he said. They drove up and down nearby streets, seeking a black man, any black man. It was winter and dark already. Edward Armour was returning home from his job at Ford. Rouse stopped the car. From down the street Armour saw the headlights dim. As he neared the vehicle, he could see the silhouettes of three men.

Davis called to Armour from the car.

“Hey, Sid,” he said. “Hey, Sid.”

Armour ignored him and kept walking. Davis and Dean leapt from the car as Armour ran toward his home. On the porch Armour banged on the door and waited for Louise, his wife, to let him inside. Davis took aim and shot. The bullet went through Armour’s metal lunch box and into his side near his spine.