The Ghost of Father Coughlin

The mass murder of 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue ten days ago in Pittsburgh constituted the deadliest act of anti-Semitism in American history. The atrocity reflects a chilling rise in anti-Semitism, including a 57% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017 alone. Last year also witnessed the hideous spectacle of white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” during a Nazi-inspired candlelight march at the University of Virginia. 

There is no doubt the internet has facilitated a resurgence in anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe. Just a few days before the Tree of Life attack, a study by the Anti-Defamation League documented how the internet amplifies anti-Semitic propaganda and harassment. As Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the ADL, pointed out last week in a New York Times op-ed:

“[F]ar-right extremists and the so-called alt-right have stepped up their efforts on social media to attack and intimidate Jews, and especially Jewish journalists, in the run up to the midterm elections. These radicals engaged in ‘Twitter bombing’ of Jews, barraging our community with an estimated five million highly politicized and anti-Semitic tweets per day. Social media creates its own realities for individuals, where people feed off the anonymity . . . . Anti-Semitism is being normalized in public life.”

The vile hatred spewed on the internet represents a grimly ironic development for a technology once expected to elevate the quality of public discourse.

But the internet’s dissemination of vicious bigotry is not the first time that a new communications technology has enabled the spread of anti-Semitism and other forms of hate. We have been down this road before, as the cautionary story of Father Charles Coughlin demonstrates.

The Advent of Hate Radio

Radio may seem like a quaint technology today, but it transformed communications in the early twentieth century. During the 1920s radio stations emerged across the United States and by the early 1930s two out of every three American homes had a radio.

Although the idea of radio communication in the 1930s may elicit reassuring images of FDR’s fireside chats, the new technology also provided anti-Semites and other purveyors of hate a powerful new communications tool to spread their poison.

For example, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, hailed radio as an invention of “a truly revolutionary significance.” Goebbels instructed radio station directors to indoctrinate the German people in Nazi propaganda “so thoroughly that no one can break away any more.” To that end, Adolf Hitler’s regime subsidized the manufacture and sale of radios, which saw the number of German homes with radios triple between 1932 and 1939.

The Radio Priest

Anti-Semites in the United States also embraced radio as a means to spread their messages of hate.

None was more prominent than Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious “radio priest” of the 1930s. Originally from Ontario, Coughlin was ordained at St. Basil’s Catholic Church in Toronto in 1916. [Incidentally, in the 1970s I was baptized in Toronto by a St. Basil’s parish priest named Father Coughlin, but fortunately the priest who baptized me was Fr. William Coughlin C.S.B., not Fr. Charles Coughlin].

Tellingly, Charles Coughlin did not feel at home in the Congregation of Saint Basil. The Congregation’s official history points out that when the Basilian Order required its priests to take a strict vow of poverty in the early 1920s, Charles Coughlin “exercised the option to withdraw, using the occasion to launch an acrimonious attack on the [Basilian] Community.”

Coughlin would have languished in obscurity if not for a friendship he struck up with Bishop Michael Gallagher of the Diocese of Detroit. In the 1920s Gallagher accepted Coughlin’s application for incardination into the diocese and assigned the opinionated young priest to a modest parish in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Obsessed with finding new revenue sources, Coughlin used radio broadcasts to appeal for donations. He was an immediate hit on the radio. Wallace Stegner described Coughlin’s voice as one of the “great speaking voices of the twentieth century,” and the priest’s exceptionally engaging and charismatic style attracted a rapidly growing fan base. In time Coughlin took on broader topics, such as condemning prohibition and the KKK’s anti-Catholicism. The enthusiastic response of his listeners encouraged the radio priest to branch out to political commentary.

God Hates a Hypocrite

During the depths of the Great Depression, Coughlin positioned himself as a populist, standing up for ordinary people against the rich and powerful. In 1932 he endorsed Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential campaign and called on his listeners to support the Democrats. During Roosevelt’s first term Coughlin used his radio broadcasts to promote the administration’s domestic policies. The priest even proclaimed that the “New Deal is Christ’s Deal.”  

CBS syndicated Coughlin’s radio program, which routinely exceeded 10 million listeners and sometimes reached over 30 million people, an astounding number at a time when the country’s population was only 130 million. Coughlin twice appeared on the cover of Newsweek and he received so much fan mail (as well as contributions from listeners) that the town of Royal Oak had to establish a post office to process it all. My own grandfather, an Irish Catholic immigrant in South Boston, was one of Coughlin’s listeners.

Coughlin liked to say that “God hates a hypocrite” but no one knew more about hypocrisy than Father Coughlin. At the same time that he railed against “international bankers” and “the money changers in the temple,” he reveled in the money that poured into his parish from listeners around the country. His obsession with money eventually led to his public embarrassment and a momentous break with FDR. Coughlin had used his radio platform to advocate for the remonetization of silver, which he claimed would reverse the deflationary cycle of the Great Depression. But in 1934 the Roosevelt Administration published a list of the country’s largest silver purchasers, which revealed that Coughlin (through his personal secretary) had made massive investments in silver futures. The priest thus had a secret, personal financial interest in the policies he espoused on the radio.

Not coincidentally, Coughlin turned sharply against Roosevelt, declaring the president an “anti-God” communist. Coughlin’s deep-rooted anti-Semitism also became starkly apparent. He called the New Deal the “Jew Deal” and announced that the time had come for America to “take the road of Fascism” like Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Franco’s Spain. 

In addition to his radio broadcasts, Coughlin founded Social Justice, a transparently anti-Semitic magazine. At its peak the magazine’s circulation reached one million readers in the United States. In 1935 the American Jewish Congress warned of the “Fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-democratic ideology of men like Father Coughlin.” 

The Lunatic Fringe

From early on, many Catholic and Protestant leaders condemned Coughlin. In 1932, for example, Cardinal O’Connell of Boston publicly denounced Coughlin’s broadcasts as demagogic and indefensible. Cardinal Hayes even barred Coughlin from setting foot in the Archdiocese of New York.

But Coughlin’s anti-Semitism also resonated with many American Christians, including both church leaders and ordinary parishioners. Grassroots anti-Semitism gave Coughlin a formidable power base in the 1930s and 1940s. As noted by Professor Ronald Modras in his article Father Coughlin and Anti-Semitism, surveys of public opinion revealed that nearly 50% of Americans expressed “differing shades of anti-Semitism” as late as 1943.

In Detroit Bishop Gallagher defended the hate-spewing priest and claimed that “[i]t is the voice of God that comes to you from this great orator . . . Rally behind him.” In the years afterward much of the blame for Coughlin was often placed on Gallagher, and rightfully so. Gallagher defiantly backed Coughlin, insisting that the openly anti-Semitic priest had “preached no heresy.” Here, for example, is a film clip of Gallagher defending Coughlin.

But even after Gallagher’s death in 1937, church leaders in both Detroit and Rome failed to stop Coughlin from engaging in anti-Semitic rants on the radio and in his magazine. For example, in a vile radio broadcast on November 20, 1938—10 days after the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany and Austria—Coughlin defended Germany’s persecution of the Jews as an anti-communist measure.

In response to his appalling Kristallnacht broadcast, many radio stations around the country finally refused to broadcast Coughlin’s program. But neither the Detroit Archdiocese nor the Vatican took action against Coughlin. He also retained a strong base of support around the country. As Professor David Goodman explained in his article, “Before hate speech: Charles Coughlin, free speech and listeners’ rights,” the Federal Communications Commission received many letters in defense of Coughlin as well as in condemnation of him. Those defending Coughlin frequently embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. For example, a Philadelphia priest claimed in a letter to the FCC that Coughlin’s removal from the local airwaves resulted from “Jewish and communistic control over radio.”

Although the mainstream media described Coughlin as a member of the “lunatic fringe” of American politics, his fringe had a disturbingly large number of adherents on the eve of World War II.

Coughlin and Treason

When World War II began in 1939, Coughlin adamantly opposed American intervention. In his typically cynical and vicious fashion, he asked: “Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?”

Amid the growing crisis in Europe, the Roosevelt Administration viewed Coughlin as a serious internal threat. In March 1940 U.S. Ambassador Myron Taylor delivered a letter from President Roosevelt to the Vatican Secretary of State warning that Coughlin had inspired anti-Semitic violence in American cities. Nevertheless, Archbishop Edward Mooney shrank from a confrontation with Coughlin. Mooney feared that Coughlin’s support was so deep and broad that any move against the radio priest would provoke a schism within the church.

Coughlin had a prominent ally in Charles Lindbergh, the most famous American in the world at the time. An isolationist who viewed Nazi Germany as invincible, Lindbergh gave a notorious September 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa in which he accused American Jews and the British government of trying to push the United States into war with Germany. In a chilling threat, Lindbergh warned that Jews would be “the first to feel the consequences” if America was plunged into World War II. He also declared that the Jewish people’s “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Although even many isolationists publicly condemned Lindbergh’s speech, Coughlin’s Social Justice celebrated it, hailing Lindbergh as a hero.

The tide finally turned irrevocably against Coughlin and Lindbergh when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, an event that prompted Hitler to unilaterally declare war on the United States four days later.

With the nation at war, the Roosevelt Administration took direct action against Coughlin. Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered the postmaster general to ban Social Justice from the mails on grounds that it constituted enemy propaganda and thus violated the Espionage Act of 1917. Federal prosecutors even convened a grand jury to investigate Coughlin for potential treason. Justice Frank Murphy—who was himself a lay member of the Archdiocese of Detroit—observed that “Father Coughlin is trying to work himself into jail, as [he] is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” 

The Roosevelt Administration made one last effort to persuade Archbishop Mooney to shut Coughlin up once and for all. This time the entreaties worked. Faced with the humiliating prospect of a high-profile criminal prosecution of one of his priests, Mooney finally ordered Coughlin to stop engaging in public commentary of any kind. Coughlin complied and withdrew from public life. But he remained a parish priest in the Detroit area until the mid-1960s and died in 1979 at age 88.

Progress Is Not Inevitable

The story of Father Coughlin and pre-war American anti-Semitism should not be forgotten. As Prof. Ronald Modras (a former priest in the Archdiocese of Detroit) observed in his 1989 article, Father Coughlin and Anti-Semitism:

“If the Holocaust represents a watershed in the history of Germans and Jews, it is no less so for the history of the Christian church and Western civilization. . . . There is no way of knowing how many more Jewish refugees might have been rescued, had it not been for the American anti-Semitism promoted by Charles Coughlin and his following. There is no way of knowing how American policy might have been different if Coughlin et al. had not succeeded in convincing public opinion that American interests were antithetical to the interests of European Jewry.”

The story of Coughlin’s toxic rise to national prominence underscores the fact that America has experienced periods of intense anti-Semitism, a history that popular memory has consistently downplayed and minimized. For example, when Coughlin retired from active ministry in 1966, Cardinal Cushing of Boston declared that Coughlin was “decades ahead of his time . . . the giant of his generation among committed priests,” a man who spoke out for the “disenfranchised and dispossessed.”

Cushing, ironically, was an open-minded, forward-thinking, ecumenical Cardinal who worked passionately to purge anti-Semites from the clergy and anti-Semitism from the liturgy. But his absurdly misguided praise of Coughlin reflected an entrenched habit of writing anti-Semitism out of American history. 

Half a century later, it is important to emphasize that America has made enormous progress since 1938, the year of Coughlin’s Kristallnacht broadcast. According to the ADL, the percentage of Americans with anti-Semitic propensities has fallen from 29% in 1964 to 14% in 2016. Moreover, a 2017 Pew Research Center study found that more Americans express warm feelings about Jews and Catholics than they do about any other religious groups in the country. Even more noteworthy, the Pew study found that most Americans under age 30 express warm feelings about all major religious groups, including atheists (interestingly, the study found that Buddhists are the most warmly viewed religious group among Millennials). The tolerance and compassion of the Millennial generation is a great source of hope for the future. 

But the horror in Pittsburgh is also a grim reminder that American anti-Semitism is not dead. As Professor Lila Corwin Berman observed last week in an important Washington Post op-ed, “the Jewish story in the United States is still being written, and progress is not its inevitable conclusion.” The ADL’s finding that 14% of Americans have anti-Semitic propensities translates to 45 million people, a staggering number. Compounding matters is the fact that the internet is the most powerful medium ever invented for disseminating hatred, which makes the lessons of the past especially timely and relevant. If history has taught us anything, it is that we let our guard down to anti-Semites at our peril.  

If you are interested, there is a good American Experience documentary on Coughlin called The Radio Priest. Unfortunately it is no longer available on the PBS website but it is available on YouTube here. The foremost monograph on Coughlin is Donald Warren’s book, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, Father of Hate Radio. Besides the articles I discuss above, another useful article is James Shenton, Fascism and Father Coughlin, 44 Wisconsin Magazine of History 6 (1960).

Comments

[Steve L.]

Excellent essay, Tony. Thanks for posting this.

[[M][a][c][K]]

What is remarkable is the long tolerance that the Church displayed towards Coughlin and its attitude towards Bob Drinan.

[The Law Offcies of Kavanaugh Thomas, LLC, PC, LTD, Chartered, AV Rated]

Yesterday, a diverse group of citizens, including Catholics, I would assume, voted for a Jewish governor in Illinois. Brackets^^^^ One asshole does not constitute "the Church." There are/were lots of Righteous Gentiles. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Danish....