Before hate speech: Charles Coughlin, free speech and listeners’ rights

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs radio priest Father Charles Coughlin became more openly antisemitic and pro-fascist in the late 1930s, his broadcasts became increasingly divisive—more and more distressing to some listeners and more and more celebrated by others—and inevitably provoked debate about freedom of speech. Goodman analyses letters from Coughlin listeners, and compares them with the more familiar policy history of free speech regulation. Pro-Coughlin listeners attempted to make a civil rights issue of the refusal of some stations to sell time to Coughlin, talking of his right to broadcast and their right to hear him. Anti-Coughlin listeners documented the hurt and harm that the broadcasts caused and argued that limits had to be placed on Coughlin's right to broadcast in order to protect the rights of listeners. In making this case, in addition to ‘clear and present danger’ arguments about possible social disturbance, Coughlin opponents were proffering arguments about the harms caused by hateful speech that would only achieve widespread currency and provoke debate decades later, in the 1990s. Goodman argues that we need new histories of free speech that in this way juxtapose the views of Supreme Court justices and legal scholars with discussion of the same issues by ordinary people. This has the potential to change our sense of the chronology of free speech history.