After Clabe and Leora Wilson left tenant farming and moved to the town of Dexter, Iowa, he was sure he could find work with area farmers, enough to be able to take care of his family of seven children.
He was wrong. Even before the stock market crash of 1929, farmers were feeling the pinch of a depression in prices. Where to focus blame? Banks and railroads? They’d been supporters of William Jennings Bryan decades earlier, so had populist leanings.
In 1934 through 1936, they began to listen to a Detroit radio priest, Father Charles Couglin, who–in an Irish brogue–warned against money changers, “subversive socialism,” and said that international bankers had ruined America. Each week he lectured from his Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oaks, Michigan. “The New Deal in Christ’s Deal,” he declared, endorsing Roosevelt. He announced the formation of the National Union for Social Justice.
Father Coughlin didn’t want to oppose the president’s New Deal, he said. Just perfect it. He organized groups “To Keep America for America.” No politics, he stressed, just justice. Clabe and Leora were faithful listeners of this sermonizer from Royal Oak, Michigan.
In spite of having so little, they must have sent a small donation to the radio priest. Why else would there be a small crucifix and a Holy Ghost charm, souvenirs of the Shrine of the Little Flower, Royal Oak among their keepsakes decades later?
From Leora’s Dexter Stories: The Scarcity Years of the Great Depression.