Voices of protest Book

Who would have guessed that Alan Brinkley’s sober study of Great Depression demagogues Huey Long and the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, originally published nearly 30 years ago, would be far more relevant now? The early Reagan years, admittedly, were not without significant economic trouble and political discontent—but their problems were as nothing to the gravity of our contemporary financial upheavals and partisan hatreds. And while Sarah Palin (like Huey Long a somewhat improvisational ex-governor of a small state) and Rush Limbaugh (like Coughlin a radio rabble-rouser of no little talent) may not offer the same caliber of menace, the parallels between the two eras and their respective mouthpieces of populist rage remain striking. Alan Brinkley’s analysis of the Long and Coughlin phenomena is a careful one, and he is particularly wary of the usual reductionism perpetrated by liberal historians on Long and Coughlin, which has generally caricatured Long as a Deep South Mussolini-style fascist and Coughlin as the apoplectic anti-Semite he eventually became. Both men were more complicated than that, as were their movements and the people they appealed to, and Brinkley dispenses meticulous justice to both men and the political and ideological complexities of that great national unraveling we call the 1930s. As with our current demagogues, Long and Coughlin articulated some genuine political grievances, even if—again like their contemporary counterparts—they were much better at proffering simplistic heroes-and-villains explanations for such woes than contriving any practical solutions. It was America’s great luck in the 1930s, however, to have a leader so shrewd as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, as Brinkley chronicles, subtly and often even silently, co-opted and undercut both of his malignant adversaries. Brinkley’s tale is ultimately a rather sad story, and Voices of Protest provides another valuable if depressing case study in the problematic history of American populist movements.