The Bewitching Hour is Now
“O Foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”
Galatians 3:1
The problem that Paul found the Galatians suffering from was hardly kept to the First Century A.D., or to a certain former Roman province in Asia Minor.
We are approaching the 72nd anniversary of one of the greatest hoaxes in broadcasting history. At 8:00 P.M. on October 30, 1938, the CBS Radio network broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic fantasy tale The War of the Worlds. This time, the invading army of Martians were portrayed in simulated news reports as landing in Central New Jersey, and wreaking destruction at such a rapid pace that New York City had been destroyed within 20 minutes.
A Princeton University study of the audience who tuned into that program – 6,000,000 listeners across the United States and Canada – found that 1,700,000 of those listeners believed the events portrayed in the drama to actually be happening, leading 1,200,000 of them to act upon their panic across the continent. Listeners in Connecticut telephoned local police and declared they could “see the fire” the Martians were supposedly causing to their Southwest. The Kansas City bureau of The Associated Press received inquiries on the "meteors" from Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Beaumont, Texas, and St. Joseph, Missouri. A man in Pittsburgh said he returned home in the midst of the broadcast and found his wife in the bathroom, a bottle of poison in her hand, and screaming: "I'd rather die this way than like that."
Thankfully, no actual fatalities were known to have resulted from the panic. But there was talk about the U.S. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and various state and local government entities investigating CBS and the producer and star of the broadcast, Broadway theatrical director and actor Orson Welles. There was even talk of a Canadian government investigation, because one of the stations broadcasting the drama, CFRB, was located in Toronto.
But, after a few days, most of that talk died down. In part, this was due to the influential newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, who pointed out that, if anything, Welles and CBS had merely shown how open America was to being bamboozled by our own fears; just imagine, Thompson said, what could have happened if Nazi saboteurs had somehow captured a major radio station and created a similar panic.
Within a week, Welles’ radio show obtained a new sponsor, Campbell Soups, and Welles’ Mercury Theatre group got offers to move from Broadway to Hollywood, where they would make such classic films as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and MacBeth. Orson Welles became a household name across America because of a panic he hadn’t realised he was creating when he made it.
Ironically, one of the people competing with Welles at that same hour, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time on Sundays, was the Detroit-based “Radio Priest,” Fr. Charles Coughlin. Coughlin’s weekly audience was many times larger than Welles’ – 40,000,000 – but, unlike Welles, who was simply intending to tell an entertaining tale, Coughlin was intent on bewitching his audience with a fraudulent gospel.
Ten days after the Welles broadcast, on November 9-10, 1938, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi German diplomat in Paris by a German-born Polish Jew, Nazis across Germany and Austria attacked Jews on a level never before seen in German history. This round of mass destruction of synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses and the homes of German and Austrian Jews became known as Kristallnicht, or The Night of Broken Glass, and led directly to the development of Hitler’s program to exterminate European Jews.
Ten days later, on November 20, 1938, Coughlin took to the radio airwaves and claimed that Nazi rule in Germany and Austria was merely a defence against Jewish-inspired Soviet-style Communism, and that "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." The December 5, 1938, issue of Coughlin’s own magazine, ironically named Social Justice, carried a piece credited to Coughlin but clearly plagiarized from a speech by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. At a rally in the Bronx, New York, shortly afterward, Coughlin was seen giving a Nazi salute and quoted as saying, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."
On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin's followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler's persecution) into the U.S., chanting, "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" and "Wait until Hitler comes over here!"
The reaction to Coughlin’s sharp increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric was itself immediate. The utility announcer WMCA in New York used for its Coughlin broadcasts ended the November 20th broadcast by saying, “Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered mistakes of fact.” The next day, WMCA management terminated Coughlin’s contract with the station; within weeks, fellow New York station WINS also took Coughlin off their air. Other stations from Boston to Kansas City also gradually dropped his program from their schedules, to the point where even his long-time flagship station, WJR Detroit, ended its association with him, and he could only buy time to broadcast to his local audience over a Canadian station, CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. His local broadcasts continued until after the United States had entered the Second World War, by which time Coughlin had become almost universally recognised as a “sympathiser with the enemy.” On May 1, 1942, Detroit Archbishop Most Rev. Edward Rooney finally ordered Coughlin to end his broadcasting and political activities.
Sound vaguely familiar? Sound like any religious radio programs you’ve heard about lately? Or any candidate for public office who’d like to make sure your civil rights are revoked simply because of who you love? In 1944, the great radio comedian Jack Benny announced on a national program that making fun of Hitler “used to be easy, but it isn’t anymore. If you could cleanse Hitler of the blood of Europe’s millions, he’d show up as the fancy little Schickelgruber we used to laugh at before we knew better. But that blood won’t wash off.”
Are you still laughing at the wild claims some hate talkers and wannabe politicians are saying about you? Or, knowing the truth, are you refusing to be bewitched into that laughter and instead take the strongest stance you can to push back at that hatred? Paul got his response from the Galatians over nineteen centuries ago. What’s yours?
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