CURRENT BOOKS

States, Tillman believes that it is time for it to trade the role of passive mediator for that of active arbiter of peace. Unless Washington is willing to place greater pressure on the Israelis to make concessions, the pursuit of US. interests in the region will most likely founder. -Mohamed I. Hakki

VOICES OF PROTEST: During Franklin Roosevelt's first term , Father (1933-37), there flared up in national politics Coughlin, and the Great a bright light that transfixed millions of Depression Americans, set a storm of violent words and by Alan Brinkley lurid alarms racing through public life, then Knopf, 1982 348 pp. $18.50 suddenly winked out. Huey Long (a U.S. Senator from Louisiana) and Father Charles Coughlin (an ambitious parish priest who began his radio ministry in a Detroit suburb) held immense radio audiences rapt with their separate but complementary calls for mas- sive reforms of the nation's economic system. Widely popular and much- feared men, they urged taking swift public control of the banking and currency system, stripping all fortunes over $1 million from the wealthy, and distributing the funds to those worth less than $5,000. International bankers-evil, grasping men given to voluptuous opulence-were de- stroying the masses. Their rule must be swept away. They were driving people to the extreme of communism, that atheistic tyranny that threatened to sweep to victory in America. Long's "" campaign and Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice deeply alarmed FDR's advisers, and most histories of the period explain Roosevelt's abrupt leftward swing in 1935, his "Second New Deal," as an attempt to drain off their popular appeal. Then, in 1935, Long was assas- sinated. Coughlin's National Union Party and its presidential candidate, William Lemke, were buried in FDR's 1936 landslide victory. That sud- denly, the phenomenon dissolved. Brinkley, a young MIT historian, has done an unusual thing: He has taken this brief episode seriously. Giving us a readable narrative and judicious analysis, he makes us see deeply into American political life. Glowing even through Brinkley's modulated prose-primarily in well- selected quotations from letters to Long and Coughlin-is the passionate hatred toward plutocrats that the two demagogues released in their fol- lowers. Drawing an extended parallel with the Populist movement of the 1890s, Brinkley makes clear the almost unnoticed ideological and social shifts in American life which caused this partial revival of populist ideol- ogy to fail. He shows how the appeal of Coughlin, as the first exciting political voice in the new medium of radio, and then that of Long, could be emotionally powerful and broad, but finally shallow and vulnerable. In sum, a rich slice of what may well have been the last hurrah, not simply of Huey Long, but of ~mericanpopulism. -Robert Kelley

The Wilson QuarterlyINew Year's 1983 135