WJR Radio Transmitting Building
Southwest corner of Sibley and Grange Roads in Riverview, Michigan
This is one of the more surprising buildings
that you will discover in metropolitan Detroit. It is also one of the most
interesting
examples of
Art Deco design. By the early 1930s, WJR was perhaps Detroit’s most
powerful radio station. I presume they were able to purchase land for their
transmitter in this remote and sparsely populated location for low cost.
They then had architect, Cyril Schley, design this structure in the zigzag
style. Colorful ceramic tiles were used throughout this stunning building;
The doors appear to be in bronze. Notice the very dramatic zigzag arch above
those doors. The entire building has a jagged Art Deco silhouette, especially
the uneven rooflines. What is so remarkable about this building is that it
is in the middle of a large open field. There are no other structures around
to distract you. It is as if a beautiful small Art Deco structure was placed
in the midst of a huge farm field. As of the early 21st Century,
suburban sprawl had not reached this corner of metropolitan Detroit. Alas,
there is a very large fence surrounding the structure so you cannot get close
to the building. You are forced to appreciate from quite a distance.
WJR played a unique role in the nation’s history. The Detroit News
and the Detroit Free Press were revivals. In 1920, the Detroit News established
radio station WWJ when the industry was new and very few households had receivers.
To keep up, the Detroit Free Press established station WCX in 1922. By the
mid-1920s, radio was becoming increasingly popular and spreading across the
nation. Signal strengths were improving and the cost of radios coming down,
making them a common household item. In 1925, the Jewett Radio and Photographic
Company of Pontiac purchased WCX from the Detroit Free Press, installed a massive
5,000-watt transmitter and changed the call letters to WJR—W Jewett
Radio.
WJR broadcast the triumphant return of Detroit native Charles Lindberg to the
United States after his solo flight to Paris. Lindberg apparently had friends
at the radio station, and similar to other stations, they needed to fill air
time. In the 1920s, stations did not play loops of recorded music, nor were
there call-in shows or endless arrays of opinionated talking heads. Lindberg
apparently brought an articulate Detroit priest—Charles Coughlin—to
the attention of the station’s managers and encouraged WJR to broadcast
his preaching. Father Coughlin first spoke on WJR on October 3, 1926 and originally
targeted children, but soon switched his presentation to adults.
Father Coughlin rapidly gained a local reputation for his speaking and then
developed a national audience as CBS, in about 1930, broadcast his show weekly
to a national audience of millions. He was the first clergyman to become a
popular preacher using the airways. and so he earned the sobriquet Radio
Priest.
Father Coughlin had been strongly influenced by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891
encyclical, “On the Condition of the Working Class.” Father
Coughlin certainly did not preach on narrow dogmatic Roman Catholic themes.
That would
have reached few ears. Rather, he preached in favor of social justice using
non-sectarian, and at first, non-political themes. Eventually, he became a
right wing populist. By the early 1930s, he received as many as 80,000 letters
a week from his listeners.
The election of 1932 gave Father Coughlin an opportunity to become a powerful
political activist. Wealth and jobs disappeared rapidly after the Depression
began in October, 1929. President Hoover and his Republican colleagues appeared
unable to get the country out of its most severe economic crisis. They could
only offer the hope that the economic situation would greatly improve in the
near future, but that never happened. Father Coughlin strongly and frequently
spoke in favor of the election of Franklin Roosevelt who, in turn, actively
sought the support of the nation’s most popular radio personality. After
the election, Father Coughlin took personal credit for the election of President
Roosevelt. Originally, Father Coughlin strongly supported Roosevelt’s
policies and declared that “the New Deal is Christ’s Deal.”
By November, 1934, the situation changed and Father Coughlin ceased to support
President Roosevelt and the New Deal. It is possible that Father Coughlin was
surprised that the president consulted him infrequently and took little of
his advice about policies. Unlike Father Coughlin, President Roosevelt was
not a right wing populist. Father Coughlin, at the end of 1934, called for
the organization of a National Union of Social Justice. This organization,
he believed, would be a populist reformist movement, but one that was similar
to a political party; indeed, he expected them to elect a president to boot
Franklin Roosevelt out of office in 1936. At some point, Father Coughlin may
have considered running for president in 1936, but it is likely that his preferred
candidate was the extreme populist, Senator Huey Long from Louisiana. Unfortunately,
Huey Long was assassinated in September, 1935. In the 1930s, there were no
scientific election polls, so the possibility that Father Coughlin or someone
he named
might be elected president seemed very reasonable. Apparently, President Roosevelt
and his advisor feared that this would happen. By this time, Father Coughlin
was receiving 400,000 letters a week from his audience, so he seemed to be
extremely popular and influential. Father Coughlin, in 1936, selected North
Dakota Senator,
William Lemke, as his candidate for president, but his movement was waning
and Lemke ended up getting just fewer than one million votes for president
in contrast
to 27 million for Franklin Roosevelt. Nevertheless, this was probably a high
water mark for right wing populists in this nation.
Father Coughlin’s political views shifted to the right in the late 1930s,
although he was neither a philosopher nor a political scientist, so his ideas
were not rooted in any consistent perspective. Increasingly, he was thought
to be an anti-Semite, although this was not such a damaging charge at that
time. Indeed, he often argued that he was not an anti-Semite. He, along with
many
others, endorsed the view that Jewish bankers were responsible for some or
many of the problems of the Depression. He also believed that Marxism and the
Communist government of Russia were the outcome of a Jewish plot. Gradually,
he came to give support to the idea that Nazis in Germany and the Fascists
in Italy should be lauded since they were an alternative to the Communists
in Russia.
By the end of the 1930s and into the early 1940s, President Roosevelt and governmental
officials in Washington increasingly viewed Father Coughlin as edging toward
treason. To them, his statements suggested that he was a supporter of Adolph
Hitler and Bonito Mussolini. Washington officials knew that the United States
would likely engage in a European war against the nations and movements that
Father Coughlin seemed to endorse. There are various stories about the pressures
that the Roosevelt Administration used to get the Catholic hierarchy to silence
Father Coughlin. Presumably, Archbishop Gallagher in Detroit had been under
pressure from others in the Catholic hierarchy to silence Father Charles Coughlin,
but did nothing. After Archbishop Coughlin was replaced, Detroit Archbishop
Mooney took his time, but ordered Father Coughlin to cease his radio broadcasts
and stop his publications early in 1942.
There is no evidence that Father Coughlin personally benefited from the monies
that must have been sent to him throughout the 1930s. After 1931 he had to
pay the Columbian Broadcasting System for air time, so much of what he collected
from his many contributors may have paid his bills. He did construct the magnificent
religious campus known as the Shrine of the Little Flower at Twelve Mile Road
and Woodward in Royal Oak. He served as pastor there until his retirement in
1966. Because he was such a central political figure for the crucial years
of the Depression and in the era just before World War II, historians sought
him out frequently to discern his views. However, he revealed very little about
his career during the thirteen years that passed between 1966 and his death
in 1979. If Father Coughlin had not moved toward supporting Germany’s
Adolph Hitler and Italy’s Bonito Mussolini in the late 1930s, I suspect
he would have been known as key figure in the unsuccessful effort to get a
populist reform of the American political system; indeed, to get such a change
at a time when it was most needed. However, I think that he is now often thought
of as an anti-Semite. Indeed, Father Coughlin, in the late 1930s, apparently
believed that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were accurate and published
them in his magazine, Social Justice, just as Henry Ford has published them
in his magazine twenty years earlier.
Cyril Edward Schley—the distinguished architect who designed the fascinating
building you see—apprenticed with Detroit’s leading theater architect,
C. Howard Crane, before working on his own. Schley, in 1935, designed the Rio
Theater located at 7714 West Vernor in Detroit. I believe this building has
been remodeled and may now be a furniture store. Schley designed, in 1942,
a strikingly modernistic Art Deco style Telenews Theater at 1540 Woodward in
Detroit. This building was also remodeled and lost many of its Art Deco elements.
Dozens of new nightclubs, restaurants and bars have opened in downtown Detroit
since the opening of Comerica Park, Ford
Field and the three casinos. Schley’s
Telenews Theater Building is now the Blue Room Experience Night Club.
Architect: Cyril Edward Schley
Date of Construction: 1934
Architectural style: Zigzag art deco
State of Michigan Register of Historic Sites: Not listed
National Register of Historic Places: Not listed
Use in 2007: Radio transmitting facility
Photo: Ren Farley; February, 2004
Description prepared: October, 2007