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Birkhead Hits Coughlin As ‘vendor of Lies’

February 27, 1939
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Addressing a convention of the Progressive Education Association here yesterday afternoon, Dr. L.M. Birkhead, Kansas City Unitarian minister and national director of the Friends of Democracy, assailed Father Charles E. Coughlin as a “vendor of lies and misinformation.”

Analyzing the radio priest’s transition from a soft-spoken preacher in 1936 to his present efforts to become the “people’s tribune,” Dr. Birkhead called Father Coughlin a “typical anti-Democratic radio propagandist” and branded his propaganda methods as the “American version” of the campaign which proved all too successful in Germany.

Dr. Clyde Miller, director of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, who presided at the session, expressed opposition to taking Father Coughlin off the air but insisted that other should have the opportunity to speak on the same program to answer his charges. Other speakers at the convention urged a militant stand by educators in defense of democracy.

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