Changes

There is a fine line between biography and history, and Alan Brinkley walked it well in Voices of Protest. Noting the difficulties in joining the story of human life with broader analysis, Brinkley called the book “comparative biography as political history,” an attempt to use the lives of several people to illuminate larger trends of society and power. Following this formula, he devoted the first half of Voices of Protest to the origins first of Huey Long and then of Charles Coughlin. The reader sees a bossy and dominating young boy emerge from a middling home in Winn Parish, a county on the outer fringe of both Louisiana and the state’s politics. The outlines of a vague populism become discernible in Huey Long’s early crusades as a lawyer, an outlook he eventually hammered into a rhetorical steamroller that took him from the state Railroad Commission to the Senate and, he hoped, the White House. One soon meets “The Radio Priest,” a boy groomed for the clergy since infancy and trained in a school of Catholic thought that emphasized social activism. Brinkley highlighted politically relevant details along the way but held a more thoroughgoing analysis at bay until the stage was fully set and both of his characters had been introduced.

All this accomplished, Brinkley then treated Coughlin and Long as a pair, examining their ideology, such as it was, and the mechanics of their movements. For targets of populist wrath and reform, Long emphasized maldistribution of wealth and Coughlin focused on the international banking system, but Brinkley found a common thread between the two in hostility toward distant, centralizing institutions. He characterized their ideology as a preference for the small-scale and familiar, which would favor the local merchant over the impersonal chain stores spawned by corporate capitalism. Brinkley aligned Long and Coughlin with the agrarian radicals of the late nineteenth century, who also saw the remote powers of finance and industry as enemies.

Alan Brinkley knows a thing or two about people tilting at windmills. He has written several books on the difficulties of that long-suffering institution of American political culture, liberalism, and his work on Coughlin and Long has earned him a reputation as an expert on populism. During the 1996 presidential campaign, for instance, Brinkley was often consulted by the media for his insights into the phenomenon of Patrick Buchanan, the fiery Republican who railed against free trade and cultural decadence.

Although Buchanan sometimes compared himself to Huey Long – which his critics were also happy to do – Brinkley pointed out that Buchanan may have had more in common with a fellow Catholic dissident, Father Coughlin. Much of the coverage on Buchanan characterized him as a reactionary in the fullest sense – someone who pined for a bygone era not just in culture and politics, but also in economics. Buchanan decried the human cost of the American manufacturing sector’s decline in an age of globalization and “Third World” industrialization, and observers grouped this critique with the original Populists’ crusade for the American farmer as well as Long and Coughlin’s movements against centralized power. In short, the media called upon Alan Brinkley to analyze a man whose ideology was considered at best irrelevant, at worst delusional – largely by the book he wrote about Huey Long and Father Coughlin.

[http://videri.org/index.php?title=Guide_to_the_Literature Check out other great articles at Videri.org.]