On the Sunday afternoon of November 20, 1938, millions of Americans tuned their radio sets to one of the country’s most popular weekend programs. The sounds of a church organ and a choir followed. Soon a familiar and sonorous voice came to the airwaves. It was that of Detroit priest Father Charles E. Coughlin, one of the country’s most popular and controversial media figures. For years Coughlin had courted controversy with increasingly political statements and criticism of the Roosevelt administration. Today’s address would be his most provocative public utterance yet.1
Coughlin quickly launched into a startling defense of Nazi Germany’s policies toward the country’s Jewish population, which had culminated in the recent violence of the Kristallnacht pogrom that left nearly a hundred people dead and shopwindows smashed across the Reich. Claiming to oppose persecution against all religions, Coughlin insisted that Nazism was merely a natural response to the threat posed by communism. Picking up a Nazi publication, Coughlin listed twenty-four Jews he claimed had been integrally involved in the Russian Revolution. “I speak these words, holding no brief for Germany or for Nazism,” he said. “Simply as a student of history, endeavoring to analyze the reasons for the growth of the idea in the minds of the Nazi party that Communism and Judaism are too closely woven for the national health of Germany, do I make these references.”2 Nazi violence against Jews was therefore the result of “the fact that the Jews through their native ability have risen to such high places in radio, press and finance.” The Jews might be a minority in Germany, Coughlin continued, “but a closely woven minority in their racial tendencies; a powerful minority in their influence; an aggressive minority which has carried their sons to the pinnacle of success in journalism, radio and finance.” He went on to blame Jewish bankers for financing the Russian Revolution, naming the financial firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co. as a specific offender. He concluded by supporting President Roosevelt’s recent decision to withdraw the American ambassador from Berlin to protest recent anti-Semitic violence, but added, “If we are sincere we’ll call all ambassadors and ministers from communist countries.”3
By now, Coughlin was used to the controversy his fiery radio speeches generated. He often managed to use such storms to raise money. Yet the obvious affinity between his remarks in November 1938 and Nazi ideology generated the largest conflagration yet. New York station WMCA, which had surreptitiously managed to obtain an advance copy of the speech, programmed an immediate follow-up broadcast by the director of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. A cascade of angry calls and telegrams poured into Detroit station WJR. The chancellor of the Roman Catholic diocese of Detroit was quoted in the press the next day saying “Coughlin spoke for himself, not for the church.” Detroit Jewish leaders were outraged, with one denouncing Coughlin’s address as “one of the most vicious talks that I have listened to in a long time.”4 There was soon a backlash against the backlash, however. When WMCA announced that it would no longer carry Coughlin’s program due to the “religious and racial hatred and dissension” he was stirring, two thousand Coughlin supporters descended on the station to demand his reinstatement. For months afterward, protestors carrying pro-Coughlin and occasionally anti-Semitic slogans showed up at the station doors on Sunday afternoons to keep up the pressure.5
Coughlin was in many ways a pioneer in American mass communication history. For years he had used increasing fame to build one of the first multifaceted media empires. Through the emerging technology of radio, he quickly built a following of supporters who not only tuned into his program on a regular basis but were willing to support their belief in the “Radio Priest” with real-world action. Coughlin expanded into publishing a newspaper, Social Justice, with a circulation of more than two hundred thousand in 1940, though he claimed it to be closer to one million.6 In many ways, Coughlin established the model for the indignant, belligerent, no-holds-barred talk show hosts that hit the airwaves in every American city in the late twentieth century. Glenn Beck’s rants during the Barack Obama years about cabals of shadowy global elites, later illustrated with chalkboard flowcharts on his Fox News television program, could have been pulled directly from Coughlin’s playbook. Yet Coughlin himself was far more successful than any of his future emulators. A December 1938 Gallup poll found that a full 22 percent of Americans reported listening to Coughlin’s radio program in the previous month. A majority of those said they had listened to him two times or more in that period. This figure translates into an estimated monthly audience of nearly twenty-nine million listeners, with nearly fifteen million listening more than once a month.7 These are astonishing numbers, especially given that Coughlin’s broadcasts that year were only carried by forty-six independent stations, with no network backing, on the East Coast. No stations west of Kansas or in the South carried his program.8 Historians have estimated that his audience was the largest in the world and far surpassed that of every major radio star of the era, and was possibly the largest of all time.9 By comparison, the most successful talk show host of later years, Rush Limbaugh, commanded a peak audience of more than twenty million in the 1990s. Limbaugh loudly proclaimed himself to have “talent on loan from God,” but his religious predecessor would have had a better claim to a divinely delivered audience.10
What made Coughlin’s voice uniquely resonant for millions of Americans was fundamentally his religious message. He was, after all, an ordained and practicing priest who had instant credibility with Catholic listeners. Much of his popularity lay with Irish and German immigrants on the East Coast who had been badly hurt by the Depression. He referred to himself as “your spokesman” and presented himself as standing up for the common man against vested interests ranging from international banks to the Roosevelt administration. Coughlin’s radio talks were “flowery, emotional, and misleading,” historian David H. Bennett has written. “He knew all the tricks of the propagandist, from name calling to glittering generality.”11 Propagandist or not, by 1938 Coughlin had convinced millions of Americans that he understood their problems as no one else could and was giving them a voice.
For all his appeal and success, however, Coughlin’s influence was intrinsically limited by several factors. First, he was a Catholic priest in a country where serious anti-Catholic sentiment still existed. While the shared experience of anti-Catholic prejudice no doubt heightened his appeal among his Catholic listeners, those outside the fold had a harder time accepting the word of a priest—or worse. Coughlin himself had crosses burned on his lawn by local Ku Klux Klan members when he first arrived in Michigan.12 His audience undoubtedly included Protestants, but the influence of any Catholic on the national level would have an upper limit. Second, Coughlin was not originally American at all, having been born in the Canadian province of Ontario. This might have been trivial for his radio listeners, but it made him constitutionally ineligible for the presidency. This would become a major issue in 1936.
These limitations also meant that no matter how popular he became, Coughlin would always face rivals peddling similar messages. Throughout the 1930s, a series of demagogic leaders rose to national prominence with religiously based, anti-Roosevelt messages of economic equality and, later, nonintervention in the European war. Dynamic Kansas minister Gerald B. Winrod ingratiated himself to midwestern Protestants and then took his message nationwide with a series of lectures and radio broadcasts. By the late 1930s he joined Coughlin in defending Nazi Germany and denouncing the Jews. Winrod no doubt hoped to position himself as a Protestant Coughlin, but fell short in his ambitions. Crowding the stage further was Gerald L. K. Smith, a veteran political organizer who worked closely with Louisiana demagogue Huey Long and then took his show on the road after Long was assassinated in 1935. Smith’s message had been honed and battle tested in the Louisiana swamps. Like Long, he was a populist firebrand who railed against economic and political elites while simultaneously denouncing communism and throwing in a mixture of anti-Semitism and old-time religion. He was such a fiery and charismatic speaker that he would overshadow even Coughlin during public appearances.13
What these men shared was not only rhetorical style but similar messages. All three promised radical economic change. They identified similar, if not identical, causes of the Great Depression: economic elites, politicians, and Jews (ironically, both Coughlin and Smith were heavily influenced by Henry Ford, arguably the most important economic elite in the country but himself a well-known anti-Semite). Each became a staunch opponent of Roosevelt and, similarly, all three fell into becoming a friend of the Third Reich. By 1941, each man had voiced admiration for the New Germany and expressed support for Hitler’s anti-Semitic worldview. There is evidence that the German government in turn recognized the potential significance of these religious demagogues in shaping American public opinion.
What made these men uniquely resonant for many Americans was their use of religion. The United States of the 1930s was still a deeply religious nation, though denominational affiliation and participation in churches dropped significantly during the Great Depression. Hearing pro-Hitler sentiments seemingly supported by quotations from the New Testament had a powerful influence on many of the faithful, who responded by opening their pocketbooks and donating their hard-earned cash to the cause. Hitler’s friends thus used the deep-seated religious devotion of Americans to further their political aims and spread anti-Semitic prejudice and pro-Nazi views at a critical moment in the country’s history.
Much like the modern-day “religious right,” Coughlin and his associates were not content to exercise their authority in the spiritual realm alone. The Radio Priest was political from nearly his first day on the airwaves and directly entered politics during the 1936 presidential election. Winrod ran for the US Senate as a Republican in his home state of Kansas on a platform that was widely denounced as having more in common with the Nazi Party than the GOP. Smith was fundamentally a political organizer who used religious rhetoric to frame his messages. Ironically, with the possible exception of Hitler’s agent on Capitol Hill, the Führer’s religious friends were the most directly active in American electoral politics. The US government was slow to realize the unique threat they posed to national security, but once the danger became clear it responded with overwhelming force. The ultimate fear was that the Coughlin, Winrod, and Smith factions might manage to unite their forces and join with the German American Bund or, later, America First to create a broad far-right coalition that would include demagogic leaders with fanatical followers and an armed paramilitary wing. As with the Bund and its fellow far-right groups, however, a combination of egos and philosophical differences prevented such an alliance from forming. The United States government would never have to face the full threat these groups might have been able to pose.14 Of the three men, Coughlin was the most likely candidate to fit the bill of future American Führer. He made a major push toward political power that was only derailed by his own missteps and, ultimately, the church hierarchy.
Charles Edward Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, to working-class parents of Irish ancestry in 1891. The young Coughlin was raised as a devout Catholic and entered the seminary in Toronto. He was seen as an outstanding student. After a few years teaching in Catholic schools and colleges, Coughlin was sent to the Detroit diocese. In 1926, Bishop Michael Gallagher, who would become the most important figure in Coughlin’s career, decided to establish a shrine in the suburb of Royal Oak, then about a dozen miles north of the city. There were only a few Catholic families in the area, and the anti-Catholic Klan was prominent. Local KKK members welcomed Coughlin and his new church, the Shrine of the Little Flower, by burning a cross on its front lawn two weeks after it opened.15
Coughlin decided the best response was to make the shrine glamorous and exciting for the public. He convinced a sympathetic local baseball scout to bring some big-name players to the shrine to increase its public profile. Impressively, the scout not only delivered appearances by Detroit Tigers players but also set up visits by New York Yankees stars, including Babe Ruth, the following summer. Thousands turned out to see the Yankees legends, who collected money from starstruck visitors at the door. Coughlin netted $10,000 from the stunt and, more important, established a public profile as a celebrity man of the cloth. A 1928 story in the Detroit Free Press published during the World Series referred to Coughlin as “a rabid baseball fan himself and a close personal friend of Babe Ruth, Harry Heilman[n] and other famous players.”16 (Ruth and his Yankees swept the Series that year, making Coughlin’s alleged friendship with the Bambino all the more impressive).
Coughlin’s big break came in September 1926 when he sat down for a meeting with the station manager of Detroit radio station WJR. The priest’s initial pitch was for a religious program that would raise awareness of his church and help combat Klan prejudice. The station manager agreed to give him the time for free, but Coughlin insisted on paying for it. Bishop Gallagher gave his own blessing to the idea. The Radio Priest’s first broadcast was on October 17, 1926, just days before his thirty-fifth birthday. He was an immediate hit. As one sympathetic biographer has written, “His voice registered well over the radio and his enunciation was unusually pleasing. First there was a musical program and then he spoke. He was a knockout, ‘radio-ically’ speaking.”17 This was the same basic format Coughlin would use throughout his radio career, and his on-air presence would only improve with practice.
Visitors from all over the country—and later the world—began converging on the Shrine of the Little Flower to see Coughlin preach in person. His weekly congregation steadily grew. So too did the donations, which soon came pouring in through the mail from all over the country and even overseas as his fame spread. Coughlin hired an army of female clerks to deal with all the correspondence and the money flowing into his coffers. To give his followers a sense of identity and encourage their continued support, Coughlin created the Radio League of the Little Flower. Membership cost $1 a year (about $15 in 2018 terms), putting it within reach for all but the most impoverished listeners.18 All the proceeds were considered charitable contributions and were therefore tax free under federal law.19 By 1928, Coughlin was meeting with New York architects to plan the construction of a grand new church in Royal Oak, including a huge tower with a crucifix emblazoned on each side that would include his personal office.20 It would become the center of his national radio empire.
Coughlin now expanded his radio presence in part to help raise the cash needed to build this monumental edifice. He bought time on stations in Cincinnati and Chicago, augmenting his weekly reach dramatically. The timing was impeccable. In late 1929 the stock market crashed, plunging the country into the Great Depression. Coughlin’s popularity had always lain with the poor and the working classes of the country’s big cities. These groups quickly felt the brunt of the downturn as jobs disappeared, savings accounts vanished, and homes were lost to foreclosure in astronomical numbers. The Radio Priest suddenly found himself not only providing spiritual council to his audience but also voicing and shaping their political responses to the turmoil. In early 1930, Coughlin changed tactics to move away from biblical teachings and focus on denouncing “socialism, communism, and kindred fallacious social and economic theories.”21 It was a fateful decision. In fall 1930, Coughlin negotiated an agreement with the CBS radio network to put him on sixteen stations across the country. This gave him a potential weekly audience of forty million. Coughlin’s political views were now heard nationwide. The level of fan mail arriving in Royal Oak skyrocketed, as did donations. Coughlin had gone from being an obscure Michigan priest to becoming a household name across the country in under five years.
This was a dangerous road to be walking in the early 1930s, however. Loudly denouncing socialism and communism could attract a radio audience and donations, but it increasingly drew Coughlin into the purely political realm. In early 1931 Coughlin planned to use his time on CBS to denounce the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I, and the “international bankers” supposedly profiting from it. This was a commonly understood code for Jews. CBS got wind of the plan in advance and asked Coughlin to tone down the remarks, and he accordingly offered to focus on a completely different topic entirely. When Sunday afternoon came around, however, CBS executives tuned in to hear Coughlin denouncing their own network for their attempted intervention. Over the weeks to come, Coughlin attacked the “bankers” repeatedly. This was an act of astounding arrogance that understandably upset the network’s leaders. CBS announced that it would be pulling the plug on Coughlin at the end of the current season, with no chance of renewal. Coughlin then approached rival network NBC, but its leaders similarly refused to let him to buy time.22
This might have been the end for Coughlin’s radio career had it not been for Bishop Gallagher. Rather than order the priest into silence or ask him to tone down his rhetoric, Gallagher encouraged him to find an alternative outlet to spread his views. Coughlin subsequently pieced together a plan to buy time on eleven stations. This eventually grew to twenty-seven across the nation. The expensive arrangement cost him $14,000 a week (nearly $300,000 in 2018 dollars), all of which was covered by donations from listeners.23 Coughlin was now free from the content restrictions imposed by CBS. His voice would continue to be heard across the country as long as individual stations would allow him to purchase time. In 1931, Coughlin used his newfound freedom to level direct attacks on President Herbert Hoover. Coughlin argued that Hoover’s plans to alleviate the Depression were inadequate and inhumane, no doubt echoing the sentiments of millions. The following year, Coughlin met Democratic nominee Franklin Roosevelt personally and endorsed him at the Democratic National Convention. In January 1933, President-elect Roosevelt met with Coughlin again. The priest reportedly offered advice for Roosevelt’s upcoming inaugural address, much of which was probably ignored.24
It was perhaps inevitable under these circumstances that Coughlin would turn his personal interest and radio program to an extended discussion of economics. After all, his endorsement of Roosevelt had been based on the hope for new policies to combat unemployment. “It is Roosevelt or ruin,” he told anyone who would listen during the campaign.25 Once in office, the new president’s policies quickly disabused the priest of any hope that radical economic measures were on the horizon. Coughlin argued that the president should quickly begin minting money and back it with a combination of gold and silver. This would in turn create rapid inflation that Coughlin believed would eliminate debt, reduce employment, and improve agricultural output. (Similar policies were advocated by British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and American fascist intellectual Lawrence Dennis, discussed later.)26
The notion of dramatically inflating the dollar flew in the face of economic orthodoxy and was swiftly rejected by banking leaders and the Treasury Department. Stung by the administration’s rejection of his ideas, Coughlin began to harden his views toward Roosevelt and the bankers he increasingly believed were pulling the president’s strings. The administration did not take this criticism lying down. In 1934 the Treasury Department dramatically revealed that Coughlin’s secretary personally owned 500,000 ounces of silver, making her the largest individual silver holder in Michigan. It later emerged that the Radio League of the Little Flower had partially funded this huge purchase. Any increase in the price of silver by using it to mint coinage would thus have resulted in a massive profit for Coughlin’s church and his associates.27
Angered by Roosevelt’s rejection of his ideas, Coughlin now threw his lot directly into the political ring. In late 1934 he announced the foundation of the National Union for Social Justice, an interfaith political organization designed to bring social change while resisting communism and socialism. He drafted a sixteen-point manifesto that called for the nationalization of public resources and abolition of the Federal Reserve. He later laid out a plan calling for the government to make massive investment in roads, dam-building, and reforestation efforts. This was in effect a much larger and more radical version of the economic recovery plans the Roosevelt administration itself was proposing.28 One important difference, however, was that Coughlin believed this all might be achieved quickly if the interference of bankers could be circumvented. The country’s financial establishment, he increasingly believed, was standing in the way of recovery for the average American. Late in the year, Coughlin took this message further and shocked listeners by telling them that there was little hope for the future of capitalism and democracy in the United States. The only chance to avoid falling into communism or fascism, he told them, was through adopting his social justice platform.29
This was a radical move. Coughlin was now effectively calling for the US government to be replaced with a new regime of his own design that would take radical steps to end the Depression. The analogues with Hitler’s economic policies were obvious. Since taking power in 1933, the Nazis had poured huge amounts of money into military spending and infrastructure projects (along with reintroducing military conscription for men). The result was that by mid-1936 unemployment had all but disappeared in the Third Reich.30 In March 1935 the former head of the National Recovery Administration, General Hugh S. Johnson, made the Hitler-Coughlin comparison in searing terms on national radio. “Someone sent me a parallel of what both you and Adolf Hitler proposed and preached and they are as alike as peas in a pod,” Johnson told Coughlin. “As a foreign-born you could not be president but you could become a Reichsführer—just as the Austrian Adolf became a dictator of Germany.”31
These barbs did little to staunch public support for Coughlin. National Union for Social Justice meetings attracted thousands of supporters. Branches sprung up across the country. By late 1935, Coughlin claimed to have more than 8.5 million supporters signed on to his sixteen-point agenda. Months later he announced that another 5 million people had joined the National Union. Historian David H. Bennett has estimated the organization’s membership at “well over one million” but lower than Coughlin’s estimates.32 However many people actually signed up for membership, the priest’s influence was undeniable. A 1936 Gallup poll found that a full 7 percent of Americans—around 9 million people—would be more likely to vote for a political candidate simply because Coughlin had offered an endorsement (20 percent said they would be less likely).33 This was substantial influence to wield for a man who had never held political office. “He has become dangerously important,” a biographer wrote in 1935. “He has become a mob leader and all such leaders are sources of worry to the more sedate and conservative minds of a people.… Sober economists may scoff at the anti-capitalist, anti-banking, anti–international league views of Father Coughlin, but they cannot laugh off easily the acceptance by millions of his home-spun doctrines, political, economic and social.”34
Coughlin now sailed directly into the headwinds of national politics. He was far from the only voice promising radical economic and social change. In Louisiana, Governor (later senator) Huey Long had become a national figure by promising to “share the wealth” and give every American $5,000 a year. Long’s populist slogan was “Every man a king,” and he was widely seen as a potential rival to Roosevelt in the 1936 election. By late 1934 there were dark whisperings in Washington that he and Coughlin were planning to strike some kind of pact to combine their movements. It was not to be. Long’s career was dramatically ended by an assassin’s bullets on the steps of the Louisiana State Capitol in September 1935, but his message and tactics lived on.35
Long’s most prominent successor was Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith, a former midwestern preacher who moved to Louisiana and turned his attention to politics during the Depression. Smith was an outstanding speaker who could reputedly hold congregations and audiences in rapt attention.36 He gradually fell in with Long’s organization and became “the apostle who converted masses to Longism,” in the words of one historian.37 Long was regarded as a very good public speaker; Smith was seen as outstanding and frequently overshadowed his boss. After Long’s assassination, Smith delivered a moving graveside eulogy before making a power grab for “the reins of the Long empire,” as the FBI put it. He was unsuccessful and forced out of Louisiana by rival claimants to Long’s crown.38 Smith then took his show on the road, traveling the country to heap scorn on Roosevelt and dub the First Lady “that female Rasputin.” He eventually began working with Francis E. Townsend, a retired physician who had built a national following by pledging to pay out large monthly pensions to the elderly on the condition that every penny had to be spent in the following month. This economic stimulus would supposedly end the Depression and net huge tax revenues for the government at the same time.39
The “Townsend Plan” was clearly outlandish, but the idea of extending old-age pensions and generating economic stimulus sat well with Coughlin’s wider political program. Townsend and Coughlin agreed to an alliance in late 1935 to create an anti-Roosevelt, anti–Wall Street political coalition. Months later, a Coughlin representative approached Smith and asked him to join the combined movement. Smith agreed, hoping to use the opportunity to further his own political career and potentially even launch his own bid for the presidency.40 Critically, he agreed to appear and speak at the national convention of the Union Party, a new political organization Coughlin would shortly be launching to put his agenda in the national spotlight. Coughlin believed that by combining his supporters with Townsend’s and Smith’s factions he would be able to influence up to twenty million votes in the 1936 presidential election.41 It would not be enough to win the presidency outright, but it would make Coughlin one of the biggest power brokers in the country.
Coughlin accordingly launched the Union Party in summer 1936. Its platform was nearly identical to that of the National Union for Social Justice, though Coughlin toned down some of the more socialist-sounding proposals. The new party faced two immediate and crippling challenges. The first was finding a viable presidential candidate to stand in the election that was just months away. Coughlin’s birth in Canada made him ineligible for the office. He also would have faced an uphill climb as a Catholic, especially in states with heavy Klan influence.42 Asserting control of the party with a dictatorial fist, Coughlin decreed that its nominee would be North Dakota congressman William Lemke. Coughlin liked the Republican because he had introduced a radical agricultural relief bill that called for the Farm Credit Administration to buy up the mortgages of foreclosed farms and reissue the debt at much lower rates.43 The Roosevelt administration viewed the proposal as dangerous economic meddling and ensured its defeat in Congress. The embittered Lemke now threw his hat in with Coughlin and Townsend. No one seems to have believed that the Union Party could actually win the election outright, but by combining their forces its leaders hoped they might be able to ensure Roosevelt’s defeat or even deadlock the Electoral College and send the election to the House of Representatives. Even if victory in 1936 was out of reach, there was still 1940 to think about too.44
These rosy predictions would prove naive, largely because of the second problem the Union Party’s leaders encountered. This was the inevitable clash of personalities and egos within its leadership. Coughlin and Smith were the first to fall out. Weeks before the Union Party’s national convention, both men addressed a gathering of Townsend’s followers in an effort to enlist their support. Smith spoke first, pulling out a Bible and unleashing a tirade of vitriol while he flailed both arms wildly in the air. The crowd was thrilled and vocally cheered his applause lines. “The lunatic fringe is about to take over the government,” Smith proclaimed proudly.45
Coughlin addressed the gathering the next day. Following Smith was an unenviable task for even the best public speaker, and even at his personal best Coughlin was more effective behind a microphone than in front of a live audience. His speech fell flat. Two weeks later, both men spoke again at the Union Party convention (in an odd twist, one of the invitees was Congressman Martin Dies Jr., whom Coughlin offered to endorse at the convention. It does not appear Dies accepted.).46 Smith whipped the crowd into a frenzy, stripped down to his shirt sleeves and, with sweat pouring down his face, viciously denounced the Roosevelt administration as “a slimy group of men culled from the pink campuses of America with a friendly gaze fixed on Russia.” The crowd roared its approval.47 Coughlin’s speech could once again hardly hold a candle in comparison. Outdone at his own event, Coughlin vowed he would never again appear on the same stage of Smith.48
The wider country viewed these developments with a mixture of incredulity and concern. Left-wing columnist Dorothy Thompson condemned the Union Party as proto-fascist. “Lemke, Coughlin and Smith attack the moneyed interests of Wall Street, the gold standard, and the ‘reactionaries, Socialists, Communists, and radicals,’ but they reserve their greatest vituperation for advanced liberalism which they lump with socialism,” Thompson wrote. “So did Mr. Hitler.”49 In October 1936, Smith fully embraced the label of antidemocrat by announcing that the Union Party was no longer sufficiently radical for his tastes. He proclaimed that he now intended to directly seize control of the country by unspecified means. He was expelled from the Union Party and assaulted days later in New Orleans by unknown attackers. He began to hint publicly that there was an assassination plot against him, evoking the specter of Long’s death years before.50 An FBI informant reported that Smith was simply “an extreme egoist and is definitely out to benefit himself only” who would “give public speeches in favor of any group which will support him financially.” Another reported that Smith was “very fond of liquor” and “aspired to be a dictator … he admires Hitler’s cause and has made the statement that when he gets in power, he will set up a system of storm troopers in the United States to take care of the Jews.”51 Whatever chances the Union Party might have had evaporated with Smith’s antics. Roosevelt won reelection easily. His Republican opponent, Alf Landon, received just 36 percent of the vote and won two states. Lemke received 892,000 votes and carried no states. Coughlin was devastated and wept in his church office as the results came in. In the following days, he disbanded the Union Party and announced he would no longer broadcast his ideas to a seemingly ungrateful nation.52 Privately, he blamed Smith for the loss and denounced him as a “viper” and a “leech.”53
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Coughlin’s radio silence would be short-lived. On January 1, 1937, he put out a New Year’s Day message stating that he was willing to resume his program if there was public demand. Weeks later his protector and patron, Bishop Gallagher, died. Gallagher’s dying wish was reportedly that Coughlin should resume his broadcasts. The priest accordingly did so, but a new dynamic had emerged in the church hierarchy. Gallagher’s successor, Bishop Edward Mooney, was far less sympathetic to Coughlin’s activities and saw it necessary to denounce him in print when the broadcasts resumed. Coughlin continued to publish his more outspoken views in Social Justice, but even that was becoming tricky. Coughlin’s audience was changing at the same time. His listeners before 1936 included disaffected Protestants and even some Jews who were attracted to his economic populism. Many of these listeners tuned out after the Union Party fiasco, leaving him with primarily Catholic audiences on the East Coast and in the upper Midwest.54
Coughlin also faced increasing competition from imitators who realized that his message could be used to build similar and equally fanatical followings. The most prominent of these emulators would be Gerald Burton Winrod, a pale imitation of Coughlin who would nonetheless make a name for himself as one of Hitler’s top American fans. Coughlin and Winrod were similar in many ways. Both were men of the cloth who used the language of religion to build their support. Both took a direct interest in politics and sought political power. By the late 1930s, both were using anti-Semitism to further their political agendas. At the same time, Winrod was in many ways everything Coughlin was not. Unlike the Detroit priest, Winrod was an entirely self-educated fundamentalist Protestant who built his following in America’s rural heartland. This made him both a potential ally to Coughlin and a rival simultaneously. The similarities were obvious to thoughtful observers. Winrod started out with a purely religious message, but “Suddenly he achieved an interest in politics and started after the new deal with somewhat the same appeal as that adopted by Father Coughlin in his latter period,” as one Kansas newspaper put it in 1938.55
Winrod was born in 1900 as the son of a hard-drinking Wichita saloon owner. The elder Winrod—piously named John Wesley Winrod—had been compelled to flee his native Missouri after a drunken brawl and settled in Kansas. He calmed down slightly when he married in 1899 but still enjoyed carousing. The Wichita saloon he tended was so notorious that it reputedly became the first establishment targeted by militant temperance campaigner Carrie Nation, who joined her followers in kneeling to pray before smashing up the venue with hatchets. The experience was evidently enough for Winrod to abandon not only selling alcohol but also his own consumption habits. He turned to religion instead.56
A decade later, the young Gerald’s mother was stricken by cancer and underwent a crude double mastectomy. Facing almost certain death in the era before antibiotics and modern chemotherapy, she soon developed a severe morphine addiction and became increasingly withdrawn from the world. Their lives changed one evening as her now devout husband prayed over her and, he claimed, some form of divine intervention occurred, whereupon she was cured of both her drug addiction and her cancer instantly. Whatever the truth of the story, the elder Winrod committed his life to the ministry a few years later, and his son would harbor a lifelong suspicion of doctors. Now convinced that divine intervention was the only way to be healed, the family refused to even have medicine in their home, let alone consult physicians.57
Gerald soon demonstrated an even stronger religious devotion than his parents. He left school as a teenager to become a traveling minister and was wildly successful as a public speaker. By twenty-one he was reportedly being sought after by churches all over the Midwest, but decided to settle back in Wichita. In 1925, he assembled a group of fellow fundamentalist ministers to form Defenders of the Christian Faith, a group composed of ministers and congregations who saw themselves engaged in a war against “evolution, atheism, intemperance, and that theological monstrosity so terribly misnamed modernism.”58 The organization’s official newspaper, the Defender, would become the platform for Winrod’s ideas. Crowds at his sermons began to swell, and his trademark look—a well-groomed moustache, balding head, and dark suit—made him instantly recognizable. His powerful diatribes in favor of Prohibition and against the theory of evolution made him a regional celebrity. By 1932, more than sixty thousand people had purchased subscriptions to the Defender, and Winrod had expanded to publishing short books.59
Like Coughlin, Winrod began to dabble in politics as the Great Depression unfolded. At some point he stumbled across the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, one of the most notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of all time. The Protocols purported to reveal the existence of an international Jewish plot to control finance and politics by spreading discord throughout the Gentile world. Its American fans included Henry Ford, who subsidized mass distribution of the text. Like many anti-Semites, Winrod now believed the text had predicted the Depression and revealed that Jews were responsible for it. While Coughlin had only dabbled with this message before 1936 in his rants about bankers, Winrod embraced it head-on. For the Kansas preacher, Roosevelt’s failure to smash up the international banks became proof of his connections to the Jewish conspiracy. The New Deal was also a Jewish plot. Winrod soon established a second publication—the Revealer—that was loaded with purely political commentary and “revealing” Jewish machinations.60
Winrod’s discovery of the Protocols started him down the road to becoming one of Hitler’s key American friends. By the mid-1930s he was expressing admiration for the Führer in print and proclaimed that the Nazi regime was protecting Christian churches from Jewish and communist threats. In 1935, Winrod traveled to Germany for a three-month stay and met representatives of the German government that included Nazi ideologue and propaganda publisher Julius Streicher. The trip was arranged in part by a Nazi agent in the United States who recognized Winrod’s potential to help the German cause.61 Returning to the United States, Winrod embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to talk up Hitler’s government. The Führer was, Winrod claimed, “a leader … law-abiding, living quietly in a Christian way that not even his enemies can find fault with.… He is a true man’s man, and the worst that can be said of him is when he sets himself about a task he does it most thoroughly and conscientiously.” Germany, he continued, “is today the best country in Europe.”62 Months later, Winrod favorably compared Hitler to Reformation leader Martin Luther.63 Both the Defender and the Revealer soon took on a heavily anti-communist, pro-German slant. Defender circulation soared to more than one hundred thousand by 1937. States with the highest number of subscribers included California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, illustrating Winrod’s nationwide appeal.64 This was still about half of Coughlin’s Social Justice following, but Winrod’s increasingly pro-Nazi remarks were quickly gaining him a national following.
Winrod was far from shy about his connections to the Third Reich. He frequently received Nazi propaganda material and published translated versions of Nazi propaganda. In return, the German press began quoting Winrod as a leading American anti-Semite. One German newspaper went so far as to brand him “The American Streicher.”65 Relishing his newfound fame, Winrod started to plan how he could translate this success into political power. First, though, he would have to solidify his status with the Germans to ensure their continued support. The most obvious obstacle was that Winrod himself did not speak German. To overcome this hurdle, he quietly secured the services of John J. Kroeker, an anti-Semitic Kansas Mennonite who spoke fluent German in addition to Russian and several other languages. Kroeker was a refugee from the czarist empire who had fled the Russian civil war through Berlin in 1920. His personal obsession with the Third Reich would eventually lead him to abandon his family in Kansas and return to Hitler’s Germany.66 In mid-1937, Kroeker began contributing articles to the Defender under the pen name John Jacob.67 Much of his work was oriented toward exposing the “Jewish” origins of communist revolutions using secret “sources.”68 Kroeker thus provided Winrod with critical material to support his growing anti-Semitic campaign.
As Coughlin’s political movement temporarily crashed and burned after the 1936 election, Winrod saw an opportunity to pick up the pieces for his own benefit. One of Kansas’s two Senate seats was coming up for reelection in 1938. It was held by weak incumbent Democrat George McGill, who was expected to lose as the state was swinging to the GOP (at the time of writing, no Democrat has been elected senator in Kansas since McGill). Winrod’s plan was to secure the Republican nomination and ride the GOP electoral wave into the Senate. From there, he would have almost certainly been eyeing the presidency in 1940 or 1944. It was not a bad plan, and Winrod initially seemed to have the upper hand in the campaign.
Pulling another card from Coughlin’s playbook, Winrod now developed a regional radio presence to spread his political message. He regularly bought time and appeared on WIBW (Topeka) and KCKN (Kansas City), among other stations. In March 1938, Winrod delivered a series of strident radio addresses denouncing the country’s economic system in his usual conspiratorial language (“Perhaps you have thought the United States Congress controls the Nation’s money. This most decidedly is not the case”). He denounced Roosevelt for criticizing Italy, Japan, and Germany without attacking the Soviet Union equally. Opposition to fascism and supposed support for communism, he warned, meant that “Every conceivable attempt will be made, in coming months, to pull us into another holocaust.… ‘War never pays.’”69 By the time the election rolled around, Winrod was addressing voters over the radio twice a day. Crowds flocked to his speeches and rallies as he barnstormed around the state.70
Winrod also showed political shrewdness by moderating his anti-Semitism on the campaign trail, though his comments about groups exerting secret control over the economy were a dog whistle for anti-Semites.71 Yet his past views and statements still caught up with him. In 1937, a longtime opponent, Reverend Leon M. Birkhead of Kansas City, Missouri, founded a group called Friends of Democracy to fight fascist influence and quickly made Winrod one of his primary targets. By 1938, Birkhead and his allies were publicly accusing Winrod of being a Nazi sympathizer and receiving campaign funds from Germany. Birkhead even claimed to have personally seen Winrod’s name on a list of Americans expected to help the Nazis in the event of war during a visit to Germany.72
The unfolding political fiasco in Kansas soon gained the attention of Washington’s power brokers. With the August GOP primary approaching, Roosevelt made a personal inquiry into the race. Writing to Progressive leader and Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White, Roosevelt asked whether it was true that Winrod “is openly a fascist and in addition to that is showing KKK tendencies.”73 Proclaiming himself to have been “afraid of Winrod for several years,” White reported that the preacher had been “selling Jew-baiting literature” and had “all the money he needs for the radio, which is expensive.” In addition, “He speaks well, either on the radio or to an audience, and is a strapping, handsome, smooth-talking man much like a medicine vendor or a soap-peddler.” Barring a dramatic intervention from within the Republican Party, White predicted, “he will win in the primary” and probably end up in the Senate.74
The national media now got wind of the “Nazi” who might end up in Washington. References to Winrod running on a “straight Fascist ticket” started to show up in newspapers around the country.75 In early July, the Chicago Times headlined a story about Winrod by describing him as an “arch-fascist” and lamented that Republican leaders had not intervened in the race.76 The New York Times described Winrod as an “authentic voice” of “religious, racial and social bigotry” and called for his defeat in the hope that it would “discourage Winrodism from coast to coast.”77 By election day, the Times was reporting that Winrod had been branded as the “Kansas Nazi.”78 Pressure began mounting on GOP leaders to do something. Weeks after the press frenzy began, Republican National Committee chairman John D. Hamilton, a former Kansan himself, denounced Winrod in an open letter to supporters. A Winrod victory, he wrote, would encourage “intolerance” in Kansas that was reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’s heyday in the 1920s. “We have all been shocked by the manifestations of intolerance growing in the world elsewhere and should be more than shocked at its appearance on our very doorstep and therefore doubly vigilant,” he wrote. If this was not enough, he concluded, “May I ask them to consider the possible disastrous effects which his nomination would have upon the entire State and local Republican tickets in November.”79
The Kansas GOP now found the political will to unite against Winrod. Mainstream Republicans convinced former governor Clyde Reed to enter the race, and coalesced around his candidacy. He went on to win the primary and the general election handily. Winrod received a mere fifty-three thousand votes in the primary, putting him in humiliating third place. The Times reported that the six counties he won (out of 105 total) “were centers of Ku Klux Klan activities when the Klan made an unsuccessful effort to gain dominance in this State [in the 1920s].”80 Winrod blamed the defeat on “an organized conspiracy, a dastardly program of persecution and falsehood, engineered by the very interests which are now carrying us toward war.”81 In other words, he thought the Jews were responsible.
Winrod’s bid for the Senate was the closest any of Hitler’s American friends would come to a direct electoral mandate. Without the intervention of the Kansas GOP, it is likely he would have won the primary and potentially gone on to win the seat. This was far further than the machinations of the German American Bund or the Silver Legion had ever propelled their chosen candidates. It also gave Winrod national notoriety. In November, the Kansan was scheduled to give a series of sermons at evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s famous Angelus Temple in Los Angeles. The announcement of his visit to California was greeted not with the adulatory crowds he had found in the past but instead with protests and threats of violence. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League contacted McPherson directly to protest the appearance of an “advocate of Fascist dictatorship.” Bomb threats were phoned to the temple on the day of Winrod’s first appearance but failed to deter the 4,500 attendees who turned up for the event. “I know that I am not a Nazi,” he told the crowd. “I know that I have never received a single dollar from Germany.” No doubt to the relief of many, Winrod announced shortly after that he was canceling his remaining sermons at the temple, and quietly slunk out of California.82
By mid-1938, anti-Semitism was increasing across the country, no doubt fanned in part by the antics of Winrod, Smith and their fellow travelers. A Fortune poll in August 1938 found that 32 percent of respondents believed there was growing hostility toward Jews.83 In March 1939, that number had grown to 45 percent in a nationwide Gallup poll.84 Four months later, a full 32 percent of Americans told Fortune that the government should take steps to “Prevent Jews from getting too much power in the business world” and 10 percent said Jews should be deported outright “to some new homeland as fast as it can be done without inhumanity.” This latter number meant roughly thirteen million Americans believed Jews should be removed from the United States.85 Always the showman, Father Coughlin decided to jump directly on this bandwagon of prejudice. In early 1938, he launched a new series of broadcasts in which he leveled attacks on Wall Street bankers and other targets who all had Jewish last names. Social Justice began publishing excerpts from the Protocols and translated speeches by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Coughlin was now modeling his actions on Winrod’s activities.86
Things only grew darker from there. In January 1938, Coughlin announced the formation of two new political organizations to spread his message. The first, called the Million League, fell flat almost immediately. The second, the Christian Front, would soon make Coughlin even more notorious. The Front was organized into local chapters and was tasked with fighting the spread of communism and the “insidious enemy” in the United States. Jews were excluded from membership, and local chapters began organizing “buy Christian only” campaigns to intimidate the patrons of Jewish shops. Members began arming themselves, and practiced shooting at gun ranges and sports clubs. Christian Front followers became known for beating up Jews on the streets of American cities and proclaimed themselves to be “Father Coughlin’s brownshirts.” In April 1939, hundreds of people attacked newsboys selling Social Justice on the streets of New York, leading to a brawl with Christian Front thugs who came to their aid. Whispers began to spread around the city that Irish-American Catholics in the New York City Police Department were deliberately letting the violence unfold and refused to take action against the Christian Front. Coughlin himself remained silent as the violence grew, but continued to voice general support for the organization.87 Critics began acidly referring to his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower, as the Shrine of the Little Führer.88
Predictably, Coughlin’s relationship with the Nazis only grew stronger as a result of these developments. The anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer praised Coughlin as one of the only Americans with the courage “to speak his conviction that National Socialism is right.”89 German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop reportedly asked a Coughlin aide in 1939 to “Give my regards to Father Coughlin. I have a high regard for him.” Other Nazi officials later reported that Coughlin was discussed “with extraordinary frequency” in the Foreign Ministry.90 The priest even attained popularity with the German public. An American student studying in the Reich later recalled a beer hall patron remarking that Coughlin “would make a good pope” following the death of Pius XI in 1939. The young American and his friends quickly dropped the subject rather than risk a barroom brawl.91
Despite his growing popularity in both the United States and the Reich, the German embassy in Washington deliberately kept Coughlin at arm’s length. As former embassy first secretary and spymaster Heribert von Strempel told postwar interrogators, “I was very much against the Embassy having any relation with Father Coughlin, because such relations would have been used to smear him in order to destroy his integrity. I believed he would be more effective to be left alone.”92 There was some evidence of collusion, however. Nazi propaganda agent George Sylvester Viereck, discussed later, contributed several pieces to Social Justice and met Coughlin in New York.93 The priest was effectively doing business directly with the Third Reich, though both sides were careful to keep their arrangement quiet.
Winrod had been once again overshadowed by Coughlin after the creation of the Christian Front. Still commanding a substantial audience, however, the Kansas preacher tried to mobilize his followers in a similar direction. In early 1939 he tasked John Kroeker with researching and preparing articles exploring “the question of Jewish influence on Germany’s religious developments.”94 Sensing the direction wider events were taking, Kroeker began to push Winrod to take a stand not just in favor of Germany, but also against US intervention in a future war. He told Winrod the Defender should be used to soften American feelings toward Germany in an effort to subvert a future war effort. “If you’ll raise the flag against bloodshed now, and high, you’ll launch the greatest battle you ever did,” Kroeker told Winrod in April 1939. “It’s a battle for Christ’s kingdom, even if we do talk mostly about lives, wives, and money.” The benefit of a dedicated peace effort, he continued, might not be felt until a conflict actually began: “If we are late, the campaign will considerably shorten the war because people will enter it with doubts in the backs of their minds.… If we warn the people before a war is on, the struggle for control at home, afterwards, will be half won!”95 The materials Kroeker proposed using included Mein Kampf and information provided directly by the office of Ernst Bohle, the British-born head of the Foreign Organization of the Nazi Party.96
This arguably subversive piece would never be written. The following month, Kroeker told Winrod that he was going to Germany on a “scholarship” provided by the Association for German Cultural Relations Abroad. This was theoretically a cultural education organization that helped Germans abroad reconnect with their heritage. In reality, it was a recruiting mechanism for potential spies who could be returned to their home countries.97 The Reich had clearly identified Kroeker as a potential agent they could return to the United States at a future date.98 Kroeker quietly left Kansas for the Reich, where he would remain until the end of the war. Winrod seems to have hardly missed the departure of his collaborator and continued to push the antiwar, pro-German line. When war broke out in September 1939, Winrod encouraged prayer from his followers and warned of “sinister agencies” and a “Hidden Hand” that was trying to “pull us into the European holocaust.”99
Coughlin and Winrod now both turned their attention to encouraging American nonintervention in the European war. Coughlin argued that the war was a clash of competing capitalist interests, not a fight to save Europe from the barbarism of Nazi domination. He praised Hitler openly and attacked Roosevelt.100 Winrod’s message was similar. Less than a month before Pearl Harbor, he was still arguing that the European war was raging because “a reaction has developed in the old world, against Jewish Communism and Jewish Capitalism. International Jewry is in a state of great perplexity. And it so happens that we have an Administration at Washington, which is pro-Communist, and Jewish-dominated.”101 The war, he claimed, was therefore the fault of Europe’s Jews and communists, and the United States should play no role.
Coughlin and Winrod were both becoming increasingly difficult for the US government to ignore. Martin Dies Jr. was roundly criticized by a fellow congressman in 1942 for not having called Coughlin or Winrod to testify. Dies retorted that it was too dangerous to subpoena clergy because if they refused to testify, they would be held in contempt and “from all over the country there would have arisen an outcry denouncing us as being against certain religions.” Instead, Dies claimed that his Committee had gathered information on Winrod and Coughlin “using other methods.”102 There was an element of truth to this: As it turned out, the Dies Committee had quietly dispatched investigators to Kansas during the 1938 Senate campaign. Winrod himself was interviewed and refused to answer questions except through his attorney. The investigation did reveal a number of interesting facts, however. A Wichita bank president reported that the KKK was backing Winrod behind the scenes. This was potentially interesting, but not the investigators’ main focus. Their primary objective was to establish whether Winrod was receiving large donations that could be traced to Germany. They uncovered nothing particularly suspicious in this regard, and discovered that local opposition to Winrod was greater than had been assumed. A local radio station manager even told the detectives that he was personally opposed to Winrod’s politics, but felt he had no choice but to sell him airtime because there was no legal way to prevent him from doing so. The manager had received so much negative mail from irate listeners that he was considering using static interference to make the broadcasts unlistenable.103 While this investigation turned up little, Winrod was certainly on the government’s radar, and, unlike Coughlin, his legal troubles would only grow. In 1940, a book entitled The Fifth Column Is Here listed Winrod by name as one of the Americans working to “break down our psychological defenses against Hitler and Mussolini.”104 Winrod’s days of freedom were numbered.
Coughlin was also on the government’s radar but was taking careful steps to cover his tracks. Christian Front violence was spreading, and in July 1939 Coughlin told listeners that he was “neither the organizer nor the sponsor of the Christian Front; and moreover, that it is not becoming for me to identify myself with this organization or any other organization.”105 This was a clever rhetorical dodge, but it fooled no one since Coughlin had founded the group. Ill-advisedly, Coughlin now began appearing at German American Bund meetings while paperboys distributed copies of Social Justice outside the venues.106 The priest was forced to deny rumors in the press that the Christian Front and the Bund—then in the midst of its final collapse—would soon be merging.107 In January 1940, this delicate situation boiled over. On January 7, Coughlin delivered a radio speech in which he questioned whether democracy was actually a worse political system than dictatorship, because democracy “has failed so long to function advantageously for the nation.” In his mind, dictatorship would presumably do better.108
Less than a week later, FBI agents led personally by Director J. Edgar Hoover launched raids to arrest eighteen members of the Christian Front’s Brooklyn chapter. Press reports the next day revealed that the men had allegedly been planning “the overthrow of the Government of the United States,” as the New York Times front page put it. It was a startling plot. Most of the men had served in the armed forces or the New York National Guard and therefore had experience with weapons. Over the past few months they had managed to acquire explosives, a dozen Springfield rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and other small arms. Hoover dramatically announced to the press that the men had been planning to blow up bridges, seize power plants and telephone networks, and then take control of the Federal Reserve gold supply. “Plans were discussed … for the wholesale sabotage and blowing up of all these institutions so that a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany, seizing the reins of government in this country as Hitler did in Germany,” Hoover told stunned reporters. “Their scheme was to spread a reign of terrorism so that the authorities would become thoroughly demoralized.” The group also aimed for “the eradication of the Jews of the United States,” he added. “The fantastic notion of a program of such size being carried out by eighteen men with twelve rifles and eighteen bombs—in a city with 18,000 well-equipped police and several regiments of United States Army regulars handy—was apparently no part of their thought,” the Times remarked.109
Regardless of how outlandish the plan may have been, the revelation sent shock waves around the country. Left-wing critics jumped on the discovery as proof that Coughlin was a national security threat. “The terrible danger of the arrests … is not so much the disclosal [sic] that Coughlin’s followers are caching rifles and cordite, but that millions of unemployed, millions of those on starvation wages, millions of desperate youth who see nothing but a hopeless blank future under capitalism … will turn to Father Coughlin as the only one who offers them a way out,” Trotskyite leader Joseph Hansen told his followers.110 Coughlin himself quickly disavowed the plotters, unconvincingly claiming that he had advocated “a Christian front” rather than “the ‘specific’ Christian Front involved in the conspiracy charges.”111 Embarrassingly, it only took reporters a few days to find articles in past issues of Social Justice praising the plot leader by name.112
Worried a larger plot might exist, US Attorney General Robert H. Jackson believed the government should make an example of the Christian Fronters. He dispatched one of the government’s top investigators, Assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge, to oversee the inquiries and eventual prosecutions. Rogge, who went by his first initial and middle name, was well on his way to becoming a Justice Department legend. After graduating from Harvard Law School at twenty-one, he was appointed head of the department’s criminal division. In that role he was responsible for breaking up the remains of Huey Long’s political machine in Louisiana after its leader’s assassination. Among the men Rogge sent to prison on corruption charges was Governor Richard W. Leche, Long’s direct successor.113 Rogge now turned his considerable talents to investigating Hitler’s American friends, and the Christian Front would be only his first target among many.114 Coughlin now made the situation even worse with a serious misstep. On January 21, he made a broadcast supporting the accused men, saying that as a fellow Christian he had no choice but to support them “until they are released or convicted.”115 He now branded himself a “friend of the accused” who was willing to “take my stand beside the Christian Fronters.”116
The eventual trial of the “Brooklyn Boys,” as the press dubbed the Christian Front plotters, was a circus. The prosecution case relied heavily on the testimony of an FBI informant who had infiltrated the gang and recorded key conversations on the inside of his shirt sleeves, along with some audio recordings.117 The Boys’ defense attorney, a former Brooklyn judge, portrayed the prosecution as an attack on Catholicism. He claimed the recorded conversations were merely a form of youthful bragging, not a serious plot. A friendly crowd cheered the defendants as they entered the courtroom each day. The entire proceeding ended in disaster for the government. Three defendants were released early through lack of evidence and another, bizarrely, committed suicide, apparently distraught that if convicted he might not be able to travel to Europe and fight for Hitler. After forty-seven hours of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty against nine defendants, and a mistrial against the other five.118
Coughlin was overjoyed, but the victory was short-lived. The Catholic Church was increasingly worried about the impact of his activities, and the death of Bishop Gallagher had robbed Coughlin of his key supporter in the church hierarchy. Now the knives were coming out for him in earnest. In late 1938 Coughlin’s superior, Bishop Mooney, warned Coughlin that his activities might be in violation of Vatican regulations.119 Despite the increasing pressure, Coughlin kept broadcasting throughout the 1939–1940 season ending in May of that year. He simultaneously kept feeling out the limits of Mooney’s tolerance with inflammatory Social Justice articles. The archbishop was not pleased, and resolved to keep Coughlin from engaging in politics as he had in 1936.
In late 1940 it was rumored in the press that Coughlin might attempt to intervene in the upcoming presidential election by returning to the airwaves. Mooney quickly outmaneuvered him by demanding that Coughlin submit his radio scripts in advance to a church board for possible censorship. Mooney had already used this power to prevent Coughlin from delivering an anti-Semitic diatribe in February 1940, and now he threatened the priest with official church sanctions if he submitted undesirable scripts. At the same time, Coughlin’s radio stations were balking under public pressure to drop his program due to its controversial content. Faced with pressure from both the public and the church, Coughlin had little choice but to abandon his broadcasting plans. Social Justice would henceforth be his only public voice.120
The US government now stepped in on this front. In March 1941, Social Justice was banned on military bases as a potentially subversive publication. It was a sensible move. Even the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of that year did not change the Coughlinite party line, which now vocally blamed Roosevelt and the Jews for precipitating the attack.121 Winrod took a similar stance in his own writings. “There would be no brutal Nazism today, had it not been for savage Communism, shackled upon the nations by Jewish Money Power,” he wrote in early 1942.122 The last straw for the government came in early 1942, when State Department official Adolf A. Berle requested a full FBI investigation of Social Justice. The inquiry quickly turned to whether Coughlin was giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States. In March 1942, Coughlin had foolishly declared in a Social Justice article that the war had been caused by “the race of Jews” rather than German aggression.123 The following month, the postmaster general suspended the distribution of Social Justice on the grounds that it might harm military morale. Coughlin was not technically the publisher of the newspaper and therefore could not face criminal sanctions, but he quickly offered to testify before a grand jury if distribution of the newspaper resumed. Creating a martyr of Coughlin and potentially alienating millions of Catholics was seen as too great a risk in the middle of a war, so the government declined the offer.124 Still, Social Justice and Coughlin were finished. Mooney sent Coughlin a letter of rebuke for violating his past promises to abstain from politics. The Radio Priest dropped out of the public eye and resumed his career as a parish priest, though there were dark rumors about his past activities and future plans that would follow him for the rest of his life.125
Coughlin’s forced silencing by Mooney and the US government likely saved him from a worse fate. Since May 1941, a federal grand jury had been quietly investigating Hitler’s American friends to determine the scope of their activities and ambitions. Coughlin’s departure from the political scene, and his status as a Catholic priest, insulated him from what was to come, but Winrod was less fortunate. In early 1942, the Dies Committee concluded that Winrod had been among the men who were intended to be part of a “‘united Fascist movement’ which never got going,” and the claim was widely reported in the press.126 In July, the grand jury issued indictments against twenty-eight people believed to be seditious and seeking to “interfere with, impair and influence the loyalty, morale and discipline” of American servicemen. Winrod’s name was first on the indictment list.127 He turned himself in to federal authorities four days later. Rather than be arrested at home, the Kansas preacher paid his own train fare to Washington. The legal proceedings against him would last until well after the end of the war.
While Coughlin and Winrod had captured the bulk of the public’s attention, Gerald L. K. Smith was quietly biding his time. Chastened by his break with Coughlin and Townsend, he founded a group called the Committee of One Million to oppose Roosevelt and the New Deal. His fiery rhetoric as he traveled the country increasingly focused on the threat of communism and labor unions. He personally met Henry Ford in 1937 and claimed the industrialist convinced him that the real threat to the United States came from Jews. Smith’s rhetoric now turned heavily anti-Semitic.128 In 1939 he moved to Detroit to be closer to the business donors who now were bankrolling his operations, allegedly including Ford. By 1941 he had made the move to nonintervention campaigning, adopting the America First label in addition to his usual anti-Roosevelt politicking.129 The following year he announced a run for the US Senate in Michigan on the Republican ticket. His campaign platform was “the Bible and America First,” and he openly called for his supporters to back Father Coughlin’s ideas. The Republican Party eventually united to bury him in the GOP primary, as it had with Winrod. Smith then foolishly decided to run as a write-in candidate, and received a few thousand votes in the general election. The fiasco was a major blow to his political prestige, but unlike Coughlin and Winrod, Smith would survive to became a major player in the postwar far right.130 For now, however, all three demagogues were out of business.
Hitler’s religious friends had been particularly effective at communicating with America’s most disaffected citizens. While groups like the Bund and the Silver Legion were based on shared cultural heritage and bizarre mysticism, Coughlin, Winrod, and Smith rooted their messages in old-time religion and the suffering millions of Americans experienced in the Depression. Polls consistently found that Coughlin’s supporters were largely drawn from the urban poor in the Northeast and the upper Midwest.131 The priest’s message of radical economic leveling and political revolution naturally appealed to people who had lost everything and were seemingly being left behind by the government’s relief measures. Similarly, Winrod’s supporters were mostly farmers and rural Americans who had likewise been devastated. Winrod was essentially the Protestant repackaging of Coughlin’s message with an added element of homespun midwestern appeal.132 Smith was an amalgamation of both messages. His experience with Huey Long gave him unparalleled insight into how to connect with rural audiences, but he could make the transition to urban settings as well. As the most powerful speaker of the three, Smith had the best potential to make the move into mainstream politics after the war.
All three men turned to Nazi sympathies for similar reasons. Winrod thought Hitler was a Christian bulwark against Jewish communism. Coughlin believed there was an international Jewish conspiracy running the banks and the Roosevelt administration. Smith shared both views and developed a seething hatred of the president. Remarkably, Winrod and Coughlin proved to be the most politically successful of Hitler’s American friends. Coughlin was a force to be reckoned with in 1936 and after, though his star was tarnished by the disastrous Lemke presidential campaign. Winrod would have likely ended up in the US Senate if the Kansas Republican Party had not united against him. The United States narrowly escaped having a Nazi sympathizer elected to high office due to a combination of luck and the consciences of key power brokers in the Republican party. In the search for an American Führer, both Coughlin and Winrod had their moment in the sun, only to be brought down by their inability to work together; and, ultimately, by the diligence of the US government.
Regardless of their failure to achieve power, Hitler’s religious friends held a special influence over millions of Americans. There are few forces more powerful than religion, and these men used their authority to convert Americans to a prejudicial and hateful ideology. It is telling that the German government viewed these men as key propaganda assets in the United States and were reluctant to give them direct aid only because it might make them less effective in spreading pro-Nazi ideas. There were obvious consequences for these actions. Coughlin’s superiors in the Catholic Church were outraged by his conduct and ensured he never again entered the political realm. He would live out his days in a strange combination of obscurity and infamy. Unshackled from church hierarchy, but also less protected, Winrod would be less fortunate. It would be left to Smith to carry the torch of Hitler’s religious friends into the postwar world, and this he would do with enthusiasm.