Publisher's Synopsis
Note this is written by an Episcopalian and reprinted in the interest of history. And so it came to pass that the inflated demagogues in America became deflated demagogues. They threatened American democracy and they failed. Father Coughlin, as one example, reached his peak in 1936 when the events of that year proved to be his undoing and he disappeared for a while. Later, as the ghost of Royal Oak, he tried to make a come-back, this time with an attack upon democracy, patterned in the Hitler style, full of anti-Semitism and a booming glorification of Fascism as the defense against Communism. But time and events caught up with him again when Hitler and Stalin signed their friendship pact and when both Catholics and Protestants denounced anti-Semitism as alien to Christianity and our democracy. That is typical of the course that all the deflated demagogues have run. They inflate themselves. They fill the air "with sound and fury, signifying nothing." Then the little prick of the needle, and the air goes out of them. Father Coughlin was the symbol-the symbol of danger to America. But there were others, not so well known, to be sure, but just as eager to enlarge themselves by inflating themselves. They came to naught. Just the same, these merchants of malice must be watched not because most Americans will be deceived by their assumed importance, but because there are those in America who, in times of stress, have not the courage to be strong, and who grasp desperately at almost any straw-even the straw of dictatorship. Our deflated demagogues knew this and they built their hopes of destroying democracy upon it.
