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and Hungary and Poland—yes, by thunder, and even in Japan—we probably will have to lick those Little Yellow Men some day, to
keep them from pinching our vested and rightful interests in China,
but don’tlet that keep us from grabbing off any smart ideas that
those cute little beggars have worked out!
    “I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly
holler right out that we’ve got to change our system a lot, maybe
even change the whole Constitution (but change it legally, and not
by violence) to bring it up from the horseback-and-corduroy-road
epoch to the automobile-and-cement-highwayperiod of today. The
Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in
an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer
congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.
But
—and it’s a But as big as Deacon Checkerboard’s hay-barn back
home—these new economic changes are only a means to an End, and
that End is and must be, fundamentally,the same principles of
Liberty, Equality, and Justice that were advocated by the Founding
Fathers of this great land back in 1776!”
    The most confusing thing about the whole campaign of 1936 was the
relationship of the two leading parties. Old-Guard Republicans
complained that their proud party was begging for office, hat in
hand; veteran Democrats that their traditional Covered Wagons were
jammedwith college professors, city slickers, and yachtsmen.
    The rival to Senator Windrip in public reverence was a political
titan who seemed to have no itch for office—the Reverend Paul
Peter Prang, of Persepolis, Indiana, Bishop of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, a man perhaps ten years older than Windrip. His
weekly radio address, at 2 P.M. every Saturday, was to millions the
very oracle of God.So supernatural was this voice from the air
that for it men delayed their golf, and women even postponed their
Saturday afternoon contract bridge.
    It was Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit, who had first thought
out the device of freeing himself from any censorship of his
political sermons on the Mount by “buying his own time on the air”—it being only in the twentieth century that mankind hasbeen able
to buy Time as it buys soap and gasoline. This invention was
almost equal, in its effect on all American life and thought, to
Henry Ford’s early conception of selling cars cheap to millions of
people, instead of selling a few as luxuries.
    But to the pioneer Father Coughlin, Bishop Paul Peter Prang was as
the Ford V-8 to the Model A.
    Prang was more sentimental than Coughlin; he shoutedmore; he
agonized more; he reviled more enemies by name, and rather
scandalously; he told more funny stories, and ever so many more
tragic stories about the repentant deathbeds of bankers, atheists,
and Communists. His voice was more nasally native, and he was pure
Middle West, with a New England Protestant Scotch-English ancestry,
where Coughlin was always a little suspect, in the Sears-Roebuckregions, as a Roman Catholic with an agreeable Irish accent.
    No man in history has ever had such an audience as Bishop Prang,
nor so much apparent power. When he demanded that his auditors
telegraph their congressmen to vote on a bill as he, Prang, ex
cathedra and alone, without any college of cardinals, had been
inspired to believe they ought to vote, then fifty thousand people
would telephone,or drive through back-hill mud, to the nearest
telegraph office and in His name give their commands to the
government. Thus, by the magic of electricity, Prang made the
position of any king in history look a little absurd and tinseled.
    To millions of League members he sent mimeographed letters with
facsimile signature, and with the salutation so craftily typed in
that they rejoiced in a personalgreeting from the Founder.
    Doremus Jessup, up in the provincial hills, could never quite
figure out just what political gospel it was that Bishop Prang
thundered from his Sinai