SPREADING ANTI-SEMITISM VIA THE RADIO
DURING THE 1930S AND 1940S, A VIRULENT ANTI-SEMITISM pervaded American society. Jews were unacceptable to many employers and unwelcome at many universities and social clubs. Oceanside beaches posted signs stating, “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.” More than 100 civic organizations around the country publicly blamed Jews for the nation’s economic problems. In 1939, a Roper opinion poll found that 53 percent of Americans believed restrictions against Jews were fully justified, and, three years later, in the midst of World War II, respondents to another opinion poll said the three groups representing the greatest threat to the American way of life were Germans, Japanese, and Jews.1
Such flagrant hostility toward a segment of society didn’t emerge of its own accord. The American news media helped fuel anti-Semitism, with many newspapers openly supporting the various forms of discrimination. Anti-Semitic papers such as the American Gentile, National American, and American-Ranger spewed bigotry on American street corners with headlines such as “Communism Is Jewish” and “Jews Defile Our Christmas!”2
The single most influential anti-Semitic spokesman in the country was a Roman Catholic priest who took to the radio airwaves and spread a hateful venom across America. Father Charles Coughlin had a voice like honey, but his message was pure poison. Between 1926 and 1940, his weekly Sunday afternoon radio broadcast routinely reached 15 million listeners and sometimes attracted an extraordinary 45 million—more than a third of the country’s population. Social Justice, the magazine Coughlin published, boasted a weekly circulation of 1 million, and he also reprinted his radio talks as pamphlets that he sent without charge to his followers. On both the airwaves and in print, Coughlin’s fundamental message was the same: Jews were evil, money-hungry conspirators who were destroying every value that Christians held sacred.
Emergence of the Radio Priest
Charles Coughlin was born into a middle-class family of Irish heritage in Ontario, Canada, in 1891. He was educated in Catholic schools and received his bachelor’s and divinity degrees from Toronto colleges. Ordained in 1916, he quickly earned a reputation as a dynamic orator.
In 1926, Coughlin was assigned to be pastor of a new church in a suburb of Detroit. The post was a demanding one because Royal Oak was a working-class community pockmarked with vacant lots and abandoned buildings. As an innovative means of expanding his congregation, Coughlin approached Detroit radio station WJR and asked to broadcast a weekly sermon based on the news events and issues of the day.
From the moment Father Coughlin stepped to the microphone, his experiment with the medium of radio was a glorious success. Within a few months, thousands of letters and financial contributions were flowing into Royal Oak. Detroit newsmen anointed Coughlin the “Radio Priest,” and in 1930 the young cleric signed a contract to speak nationwide on CBS radio.
Because the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, he initially concentrated his discourse on economic matters. But economics soon led him into politics. His powerful voice rose in indignation as he railed against bankers for causing the country’s fiscal woes. The week Coughlin stepped into politics by criticizing President Herbert Hoover as “the banker’s friend, the Holy Ghost of the rich, the protective angel of Wall Street,” listeners so loved the potent rhetoric that they flooded Royal Oak with 1.2 million letters.3
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
By 1932, the Radio Priest’s weekly commentary had become so popular that he was employing 100 clerks to process 80,000 letters a week, and Royal Oak had to build a post office solely to handle his mail. The young priest was riding high on a wave of public interest in the newest mass medium. By the early 1930s, 70 percent of American homes had radios, and the communication medium was hailed as the “miracle of the age.” By mid-decade, Coughlin’s weekly broadcast had become one of the most popular programs on the air.4
People crowded around their radios partly because of the oratorical quality of Coughlin’s voice, which scholars have described as “warm,” “inviting,” “mellow,” and “vibrant.” The Radio Priest’s ability to reach his audience was aided by other characteristics as well. One biographer wrote, “His success was a result of his extraordinary skills as a radio performer, his ability to make his sermons accessible, interesting, and provocative.”5
Coughlin soon learned that sprinkling his script with colloquial terms such as “swell,” “damn,” and “lousy” made his presentation more engaging. He also spiced up his talks with ringing assertions and righteous fury, coining memorable phrases—“Christ or chaos,” “the New Deal is God’s deal,” “Roosevelt or ruin.”
His simple phrasing appealed to the masses of farmers, laborers, and industrial workers who waited eagerly for Coughlin’s weekly visit into their homes. Crushed by the Depression, which had stolen their expectations of social and economic mobility, these working-class Americans responded by the millions to Coughlin’s radio magnetism. By 1933, listeners were sending $5 million a year to “the messiah of Royal Oak.” Having no desire to accumulate wealth for hedonistic purposes, Coughlin erected a mammoth new church with seating for 3,500.
But Father Coughlin generated controversy as well. Not every listener applauded his vitriolic attacks on the nation’s political leaders and economic institutions, and persons of authority began to question the priest’s tactics. Al Smith, a Catholic and former governor of New York, told the New York Times in 1933, “When a man addresses so great a number of listeners as Father Coughlin, he assumes the responsibility of not misleading them by false statements or poisoning their judgments with baseless slanders.” Opting to avoid trouble, CBS refused to renew Coughlin’s contract, and NBC declined his request to pick it up. Complaining that the networks were denying his freedom of speech, Coughlin paid for the connecting phone lines to form his own network of sixty stations stretching from Maine to Colorado.6
In 1935, Coughlin demonstrated that he could mobilize his followers to political action. He opposed a plan to create a World Court, saying the organization would only benefit the “satanic international bankers” he blamed for America’s economic woes. Coughlin urged his listeners to block the proposal, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported, by contacting their members of Congress. Coughlin’s appeal produced 200,000 telegrams bearing more than 1 million signatures. Congress was stunned by Coughlin’s power, and the World Court proposal was defeated. Both the New York Times and Roosevelt credited Coughlin with killing the plan.7
As Coughlin’s power grew, so did his dissatisfaction with Roosevelt. The solution to America’s lack of money, Coughlin said, was simply to print more of it. The president opposed the inflationary proposal as shortsighted, prompting Coughlin to call FDR a pawn of the international bankers. The radio commentator then broke from the president, coining new epithets—“The New Deal is a raw deal!” and “We can’t have a New Deal without a new deck!”
In 1936, Coughlin expanded beyond the radio and began committing his rhetoric to print by founding a weekly magazine. Social Justice published the scripts from his broadcasts along with essays and news items supporting the Radio Priest and his ideas.8
Coughlin had grown into a national political force. New Republic magazine credited him with single-handedly ousting two congressmen from Ohio. Bolstered by this success, he became the driving force behind a third political party formed to capture the White House. Ineligible for the presidency because of his Canadian birth, Coughlin chose Congressman William Lemke, a North Dakota Republican, to head the Union Party ticket. Drawing enthusiastic crowds as large as 30,000 as he campaigned from coast to coast, the Radio Priest pledged that if his party didn’t win at least 9 million votes, he’d retire from broadcasting. When Lemke pulled only about one-tenth that number, Coughlin withdrew from radio.9
But he didn’t remain silent for long. In early 1937, his golden throat again found its place on the airwaves when he created a new forty-seven-station hookup that spanned the continent. Aware that his failure in the election meant he had to find a new theme if he hoped to hold the attention of his listeners, Coughlin focused on the position that ultimately would have devastating impact on American society.
Anti-Semitism hadn’t been a mainstay of Coughlin’s early commentaries, but, during the 1936 presidential campaign, he’d spoken of the “challenge of American Jewry” and had referred to Jews as “the money-changers” and “traffickers in gold.” He’d also implied that Jews weren’t patriotic, saying, “I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does or does not believe in the principle of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’” Newsweek reported on these comments in a cover story about Coughlin.10
In 1938, the Radio Priest created the Christian Front. The all-male organization consisted of local chapters called “platoons,” with many people flinching at the concept of a clergyman using such a blatantly military term. The Christian Front excluded Jews from its membership, which was 100 percent white and 90 percent Catholic. Local chapters in dozens of American cities organized “buy Christian only” movements. Platoons attracted thousands of frustrated people to meetings, where the major activities became drinking beer while praising Coughlin and cursing the man they condemned as the unofficial leader of American Jews—Franklin Delano “Rosenfeld.”11
Coughlin reinforced his anti-Semitic views in 1938 when he reprinted the spurious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Social Justice. Originally published in Russia at the turn of the century, the forged documents purported to detail a plot by Jewish leaders to destroy Christian civilization and impose financial slavery upon the world. Coughlin’s first installment from the “Protocols” quoted the unnamed organizer of the plot as telling his fellow Jews, “We shall soon begin to establish huge monopolies, reservoirs of colossal riches, upon which even large fortunes of the goyim (gentiles) will depend to such an extent that they will go to the bottom together with the credit of all the States on the day after the political smash.”12
In his comments accompanying the material, Coughlin argued that the world Jewish community’s plans proposed in the “Protocols” had been carried out to create the Great Depression. Coughlin wrote, “The author of this document foresaw many years ago how to create want in the midst of plenty and how to agitate the thoughtless masses.” His purpose in reprinting the “Protocols,” he said, was to defend God. He stated, “The tyranny, oppression and needless poverty in the world are not of God’s devising but are the results of planning by men who hate and detest the Christian principles of brotherhood.”13
Coughlin also showed his anti-Semitism through a series of other accusations. In the first, he asserted that Jews were prime players in a global conspiracy to ensure that communism would dominate every country in the world. Then he contended that Jewish bankers had plotted and financed the 1917 revolution that had overthrown Czar Nicholas of Russia, which he characterized not as a revolt by the peasants but as a “mad slaughter of Christians.”14
Many people responded to Coughlin’s remarks with outrage. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, leader of the World Jewish Conference, said, “Coughlinism is the deadliest form of anti-Semitism in America today.” A front-page story in the Detroit Free Press bluntly called the priest’s broadcasts a “weekly attack on the Jews” and lambasted his total disregard for accuracy, saying Coughlin suffered from a “congenital inability to tell the truth.”15
Defending the Nazis
Coughlin next took a stand that was nothing short of fanatical—even for a man known for his extremism. In late 1938, the priest defended the Nazi persecution of Jews. In a broadcast, Coughlin said Jews had introduced communism into Russia, thereby propelling the Germans to devise the concept of Nazism to save Germany from this new threat. Communism, Coughlin told listeners, “was a product not of Russia, but of a group of Jews who dominated the destinies of Russia.” Repeating the word “communism” a dozen times to exploit the visceral hatred most Americans felt toward the antithesis of democracy, Coughlin argued that communism had to be stopped, regardless of the price—including committing atrocities against Jews.16
Many radio stations that had broadcast Coughlin’s shocking defense of the Nazis immediately denounced it as incendiary. WMCA in New York was the first to protest his message. Immediately after the broadcast, the station told its listeners, “Father Coughlin has uttered certain mistakes of fact.” WMCA then directed Coughlin to submit his future scripts to the station forty-eight hours before he aired them. When Coughlin refused, the station dropped him from its schedule.17
But most of Coughlin’s followers stood by him. After he defended Nazi persecution of Jews, 6,000 New Yorkers gathered outside the WMCA studio to show support for him. The crowd cheered each time Coughlin’s name was uttered and booed at every mention of Roosevelt. After the station refused to air his broadcasts, his admirers organized massive picket lines in front of the station, with 2,000 people demanding that WMCA keep their favorite radio voice on the air.
Many Catholic leaders, however, renounced him. The president of the American Bar Association, Frank J. Hogan, said, “We Catholics cannot permit men of ill will to preach bigotry and anti-Semitism without raising our voices in protest.” Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago tried to distance the Catholic Church from Coughlin. In a statement read nationwide over NBC, Mundelein said, “Father Coughlin has the right to express his personal views on current events, but he is not authorized to speak for the Catholic Church, nor does he represent the doctrine or sentiments of the Church.”18
The number of Coughlin detractors continued to grow. The Chicago Catholic Worker published an open letter to Coughlin, addressing him as “the patron of prejudice” and accusing him of having become “psychotic on the question of Jews.” The letter continued, “Your controversial Russian revolution statements justify a senseless, un-Christian attitude toward Mrs. Cohen, the delicatessen lady around the corner, and Meyer, the insurance collector.” Christian Century, a Protestant weekly, condemned Coughlin for “attempting to arouse and play upon the animus of anti-Semitism” and being “Hitlerish in outlook, in method and in the effect he produces.”19
The comparison to Adolf Hitler didn’t bother Coughlin, as the priest repeatedly—in perhaps his most radical stand of all—expressed admiration for the demonic dictator. The priest wrote, “Hitler is to be admired. He has made of Germany the defeated a new, united, great nation. He has brought back to his father-land the pride of industrial achievements and scientific improvements.” Even after Hitler invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, Coughlin continued to praise the German leader.20
“Inciting to Riot and Civil War”
In a radio commentary in July 1939, Coughlin took yet another shocking step, considering his position as a man of God, by endorsing violence as a completely appropriate response to the social ills that, according to him, Jews had instigated. He said, “The Christian way is the peaceful way until—until—all arguments have failed, there is left no other way but the way of defending ourselves against the invaders of our spiritual and national rights. And when your rights have been challenged, when all civil liberty has succumbed before the invaders, then may Christians meet force with force.”21
Members of the Christian Front translated their leader’s words into acts of intimidation and physical violence. In cities across the country, Coughlin’s followers smashed the windows of Jewish-owned stores and scrawled graffiti on the front doors of Jewish homes. Young men who called themselves “Coughlin storm troopers” pushed Jews off sidewalks, battered them with verbal insults, and baited them into Nazi-like street brawls where brass knuckles and knives were the weapons of choice. Jewish parents were afraid to send their children to school because gangs of young hooligans would beat up every Jewish boy they caught alone. Police reported hundreds of cases of lone Jewish women, children, and elderly men being beaten by groups of men who proudly identified themselves as “Father Coughlin’s brownshirts.” For Jews, American streets and subways were no longer safe.
Coughlin’s critics formed an organization called Friends of Democracy, seeking to have the priest removed from the air. They wrote the National Association of Broadcasters, saying that Coughlin’s endorsement of violence was clear evidence that he was using the airwaves “for the purpose of inciting to riot and civil war, and stirring up racial prejudice and hatred among the American people.” The letter continued, “We urge that provision be made immediately to cancel Father Coughlin’s contracts.” Coughlin’s detractors argued that his commentary wasn’t protected by the First Amendment because that document didn’t apply to acts that incite violence.22
Public opposition to Coughlin intensified. By late 1939, several large radio stations refused to air Coughlin’s program. Dozens of others waited until his contract with them expired and then opted not to renew it.23
In January 1940, FBI agents in Brooklyn arrested seventeen members of the Christian Front and charged them with conspiring to overthrow the US government. According to the FBI, the men had been plotting to murder several Jewish leaders as well as a dozen members of Congress. Instead of denouncing the arrested men, Coughlin defended them. Praising them as a “fine body of New York Christians,” he said, “I freely choose to be identified as a friend of the accused. It matters not whether they be guilty or innocent; be they ardent followers of the principles of Christianity or the betrayers of them, my place is by their side. There I take my stand.”24
By September 1940, few stations were willing to broadcast Coughlin’s hate-filled diatribes, and it was no longer economically feasible for the Radio Priest to continue to broadcast. After fourteen years on the airwaves, he left radio.25
Translating Hate Speech into Print
Coughlin didn’t, however, disappear from the scene entirely, as he continued his anti-Semitic commentary in Social Justice. In February 1942, with the United States fighting in World War II, Coughlin announced on the pages of his magazine that Jews had engineered the entire war. According to him, the momentum for war had begun in 1933 as an outgrowth of an alleged Jewish-communist alliance. Because Jews wanted the Communist Party to take over Germany, he said, they had created an anti-German propaganda campaign in the United States aimed at pushing America into the war. Social Justice stated, “A worldwide sacred war was declared on Germany not by the United States, not by Great Britain, not by France, not by any nation; but by the race of Jews.” Coughlin used this chapter of his anti-Semitic crusade to argue once again that the Nazis were fully justified in persecuting Jews.26
Coughlin’s assertion that Jews had started World War II was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Since the mid-1930s, US Attorney General Francis Biddle had been monitoring Coughlin’s activities, and by 1939 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had taken personal charge of the investigation. The findings were disturbing. The most damning piece of evidence against Coughlin was a sworn statement from a secret agent of the federal government who’d posed as an Axis agent: He claimed that Coughlin had worked for the Nazis in early 1941 to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda in the United States.27
After America entered the war, men like Coughlin who’d previously been dismissed as crackpots were no longer tolerated. Because his hate-mongering undermined the war effort, federal officials took direct action to silence him. FBI agents drove a fleet of vans up to Coughlin’s church and seized both his personal papers and his business records. In April 1942, Biddle charged Social Justice with violating the Espionage Act, and the US postmaster general barred the magazine from being sent through the mail on grounds that it was seditious.28
But it ultimately took authorities of the Catholic Church to stop Coughlin from making public statements. Biddle communicated with Detroit Archbishop Edward Mooney, saying that if Coughlin continued to speak, the federal government would charge him with sedition, which would lead to a high-profile and extremely embarrassing ordeal for the Catholic Church. In May 1942, Mooney ordered Coughlin to cease all nonreligious activities. Social Justice never appeared again, and Coughlin left the public eye.29
From 1942 until he retired in 1966, Coughlin served quietly as a parish priest in Royal Oak. Only the most persistent of news organizations succeeded in persuading him to make any statement whatsoever, such as when Life magazine managed to extract the brief quotation, “It was a horrible mistake to enter politics.” Father Coughlin died in 1979.30
Influencing the Social and Political Landscape
Although it’s not possible to establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between Father Charles Coughlin’s hate-filled rhetoric and the spread of anti-Semitism through American society, he clearly had a significant impact on the minds of the American people.
As early as 1935 and the World Court debate, Coughlin demonstrated his ability to impel millions of voters to political action. Observers of the American scene also asserted Coughlin’s far-reaching influence. Fortune magazine wrote in 1934, “Coughlin is just about the biggest thing that ever happened to radio.” The Chicago Catholic Worker said in its 1939 open letter to Coughlin, “You are the most powerful Catholic voice in the United States today. You are a definite, undeniable force on the American scene. Your opinions sway millions.”31
An audience sometimes soaring to 45 million Americans gathered around the radio to hear Coughlin each Sunday afternoon from 1926 to 1940, and at least 1 million of them made the further commitment of subscribing to Social Justice. With such a huge and fervent audience listening to his every word, Coughlin clearly had a profound impact on American society, closing the minds and hardening the hearts of many people toward the world Jewish community. As one biographer wrote, “His crisp voice, his vibrant personality, and his message were wonderfully suited to the time in which he lived and to the new medium which was sweeping the country.” More than any other man or woman of the early days of this first electronic medium, the priest perfected the formula that successfully touched his listeners. The story of how he spread anti-Semitism provides students of journalism history with a stunning example of the power of the radio to propel change—and not necessarily by appealing to the best in human nature.32
