Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938

It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And, no, it wasn’t the 2016 Republican Party primaries and caucuses. It was the year 1938.

In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938, although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

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1968: Bobby Kennedy, described by Arthur Schlesinger as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Representative Men’ for his times

On the morning of Wednesday June 5, 1968, I was an 11-year-old nearing the end of Grade 5 at St. Christopher Separate School, as it was known then, a Catholic elementary school on  Annapolis Avenue in Oshawa, Ontario, about 30 miles east of Toronto. My mother and me had a daily ritual of listening to the 7:30 a.m. news together at the kitchen table from CKLB, Oshawa’s AM radio station, as I ate my breakfast getting ready for school.

That morning,  as the news came on, I saw the same look on my mother’s face that I had seen on my father’s just two months earlier on the evening of Thursday, April 4 when the television news bulletin interrupted regular programing: Shock, and something else; fear.

The world was turned upside down.

At 3:50 a.m. EDT on that June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. Only two months earlier, Martin Luther King had been was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Although I was only six on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, I remember well that same look on my teacher’s faces that afternoon at St. Christopher, and again on my parent’s later at home, when Bobby Kennedy’s older brother, John F. Kennedy, 46, riding in the presidential limousine, a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas around 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, and three shots rang out as the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository.

If you were born in 1957 or earlier, you have a highly detailed and exceptionally vivid flashbulb memory snapshot of that moment and where you were and what you were doing. While the memories of the Kennedy brothers and King’s assassinations were no doubt shaped by the endless news coverage we subsequently, for those of us, like myself, who were quite young in the 1960s, the flashbulb part of the memories may well be the looks we saw contemporaneous with hearing or seeing our first news coverage of the events on our parent’s or teachers’ faces. I can only speak for myself, but shock and fear were not looks I often saw on my parent’s faces: it registered. I saw similar looks at times during the summer of August 1968 during my first trip outside of Canada on a visit to the United States on both sides of the racial divide as we drove through the South Side of Chicago. “Don’t roll your windows down, don’t stop,” my uncle from Crown Point, Indiana, a long distance truck driver previously from Beamsville, Ontario, warned my dad.

America was metaphorically, if not literally at times, burning. But truth be told, I may have missed the full significance of that history unfolding, as 11-year-old Cathy Ryan, a cute Catholic girl from Crown Point, and most fortuitously, a friend of my cousin Lynne’s, the same age as me, had also caught my eye during that summer visit.

Bobby Kennedy had been the attorney general of the United States in 1963 when his brother was assassinated in Dallas. By 1968, he was a 42-year-old United States senator from New York and the presumptive heir-apparent to the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, as the incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), mired deep in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, had announced in March he would not seek re-election.

Johnson, who served as JFK’s vice-president, was also in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and just  two hours and eight minutes after Kennedy was shot, Johnson, who was riding in a car behind the president, with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, was sworn in as president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field, as the presidential plane’s four jet engines were being powered up, by Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the only woman in U.S. history to have sworn in a United States president, a task usually executed by the chief justice of the United States, using a Roman Catholic missal taken from a side table in Kennedy’s airplane cabin, which Larry O’Brien, a member of JFK’s inner circle as  special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel, is said to have mistakenly taken to be a Bible, as it was bound in calfskin and embossed with a crucifix.

A year later in 1964, as the Vietnam War was just starting to heat up, Johnson, basking in the still fresh memory of Camelot, had easily defeated Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, to be elected president.

Senator Robert Kennedy was shot at 12:50 a.m. in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by  22-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian national, born a Christian in Jerusalem under the British Mandate for Palestine, who angered by Kennedy’s support for Israel during the Six-Day War, which had begun exactly a year earlier on June 5, 1967, stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22  Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired eight rounds at Kennedy. Five bystanders were also wounded. Kennedy, mortally wounded, died almost 26 hours later the following day.

Sirhan, now 71, was convicted at trial and sentenced in April 1969 to die in California’s gas chamber for Kennedy’s assassination, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 after the Supreme Court of California’s decision in The People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, which  held the death penalty violated the California state constitution’s prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment, and further declared its decision was retroactive, thereby invalidating all prior death sentences in effect that had been imposed in California. The death penalty was later restored in California.

Sirhan is currently serving his sentence at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a medium-maximum state prison in San Diego County, California. He has been denied parole 14 times. Sirhan’s next parole hearing is scheduled for March 2, 2016 when he will have served 47 years of his life sentence.

By June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the country with his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause. After winning California’s primary, Kennedy was in position win the Democratic presidential nomination and face Richard Nixon, who won the Republican presidential nomination in Miami in August, in the November 1968 general election.

Writing a decade after Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

What if Bobby Kennedy had lived and been elected president in 1968 and Richard Nixon had remained a historical footnote?

Would the Vietnam War have ended years earlier?

Would RFK have advanced the cause of civil rights and the promise of America in a way that would have meant the 1970s would not now be remembered as the “Me Decade” after the 1960s, as novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, published by New York magazine in August 1976 referring to the 1970s and the atomized individualism that followed the communitarianism of the 1960s?

These many years later, I still can’t see a news clip of Bobby Kennedy speaking and not experience heartache at some level for the lost possibilities of what might have been. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, quite rightly warned us of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur.

We just don’t know.

Especially when it comes to 1968, which has been described by many as the year that rocked the world. Apart from the Kennedy and King assassinations in the United States, there was popular rebellion in the air across societies and cultures over disparate issues around the world in 1968, including Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France (“May 68” and the student strikes in Paris, led by Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit, a.k.a. Dany le Rouge) West Germany, Mexico and Nigeria and the civil war surrounding its oil-rich southeastern state of then secessionist Biafra, just to name a few.

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