blackisthelight

Father Charles Coughlin – the voice of Irish-American hatred

Father Charles Coughlin’s family connections to Ireland were somewhat distant, his great-grandfather had moved to the USA in the 1820’s, finding work with the gangs of navigators building the Erie Canal. Coughlin himself was born in Ontario in 1891, the son of a sexton, Thomas Coughlin, at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Kingston. Thomas’s wife, Amelia Mahoney, a seamstress, was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and the two met after Thomas had landed in Ontario from his job on a Great Lakes steamboat for a spell in a hospital. Coughlin was a strong student, steeped in Irish American Catholicism and after completing a degree at the University of Toronto, he joined a seminary run by the Basilian Fathers, an order imbued in the new spirit of social activism that was being encouraged from Rome. Coughlin completed his studies and became a priest, ordained in 1916. He gained a reputation for public speaking and worked as a teacher of psychology, English and logic for several years in Windsor and Detroit before taking up a position in St. Leo’s Cathedral in Detroit.

After impressing the bishop, Michael Gallagher, with his sermons and his work at several short-term postings, Coughlin was rewarded with a special task in the new Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan. Arriving in 1926, Coughlin oversaw the building of a large new church dedicated to Saint Thérèse of Liseux, the Little Flower. The church was much larger than the local congregation could support, so Coughlin fundraised in inventive ways, including radio broadcasts, to raise money for the building costs. The Ku Klux Klan were active in the area and hostile to Catholics and Coughlin later recalled being targeted by them during this period but no corroborating accounts of this have been found.

Coughlin formed lucrative friendships with wealthy businessmen in Detroit, perhaps most importantly with George A. ‘Dick’ Richards, owner of a radio station called WJR (part of the CBS network) along with a car dealership, the Detroit Lions football team and other interests. Richards used his radio stations to promote his right-wing and antisemitic views and Coughlin fit in perfectly to these requirements. Coughlin’s friend Leo Fitzpatrick was the manager at the station and gave Coughlin his break into broadcasting. In October 1926, Coughlin began broadcasting his Golden Hour show live from the pulpit of the church in Royal Oak. Coughlin broadcast Catholic masses and sermons and the flat plains of the Midwest ensured his show reached far and wide. He had a talent for drawing his audience in with his oratory and mastered the art of radio quickly, breaking through the Catholic audience and resonating with Protestant audiences too. Prior to the stock market crash of 1929 Coughlin kept to religious matters but afterwards he entered into the field of politics and public influence. By 1931 these topics had already earned a rebuke from CBS who warned him to tone down his broadcasts. He responded defiantly and his show became one of the first ‘free speech’ controversies in radio. His show was dropped by CBS but he quickly built up a network of stations happy to broadcast a wildly successful show. Coughlin pioneered the new fields of televangelism and political talk radio to what would become millions of weekly listeners. At his height, up to 30 million tuned in, making him by far the largest radio personality in the world, and possibly the most influential person outside of government officials in the US during the Depression years.

Coughlin went on the attack against Herbert Hoover and his administration for their handling of the economic crisis and was rewarded with a massive outpouring of support. Eighty thousand letters a week regularly came to the church and after one sermon in 1932 over a million letters were sent to support Coughlin. Donations flooded in, making Coughlin wealthy and powerful. By 1936 he had replaced the wooden church with an even larger marble building and a huge carved stone tower with a broadcasting studio. The church became a major tourist attraction, replete with tacky souvenir shops, and a gas station.

Coughlin’s sermons were politically charged and railed against the modern world, its corruption by mysterious wealthy forces and the dangers of radical social movements. The stock market crash of 1929 precipitated a drop in living standards for most Americans. Part of Coughlin’s strategy was to provide simple choices to his audience such as ‘Christ or chaos’ and to make his attacks personal, naming bankers and politicians instead of large impersonal systems of commerce and power. Coughlin provided answers and scapegoats to his audience to explain the unprecedented economic conditions, while simultaneously profiting hugely from stock investments and manipulation. He used his secretaries to set up a series of dummy corporations and non-profits to keep his business dealings separate from church funds. One of his scams was to secretly buy over fourteen tonnes of silver, then promote silver investing to his listeners and reap the profits from a pump and dump scheme. His targets were many but fell into two broad, and predictable, groups – left wing activists and predatory international financiers. To Coughlin, both groups were attempting to destroy the fabric of traditional families and communities and had to be stopped at all costs. Attacks on communists took a coded antisemitic direction, and the stock market crash was blamed on the ideas of ‘Karl Marx, a Hebrew’. Grand international conspiracies linking the crash, the rise of left wing movements and the League of Nations were teased out on the airwaves and proved immensely popular. By 1931 the radio show was employing nearly one hundred people, and at its height approximately one quarter of Americans were listening to the weekly broadcast. The scale of Coughlin’s media reach was unprecedented and has rarely been replicated since. This volume of listeners soon connected Coughlin to important advertisers and businessmen. Coughlin and Henry Ford would have a long-running acquaintance, with the two Detroit based Irish-American Catholics bonding over a shared hatred of Jewish people and leftists. Coughlin got involved in union busting at Ford plants, helping to set up a controlled union to rival the CIO, who Coughlin accused of being controlled by Jews. His targeted audience consisted of various groups – Irish, Italian, German and Polish Catholics in urban areas, mid-western farmers, and others who were at the sharp end of the brutal Depression era-economics. He successfully crafted groups of enemies to target their anger and revenge fantasies against – east coast elites, bankers and politicians with international connections, and portrayed his supporters as being justifiably ‘more American’ and therefore more righteous.

Coughlin threw his support behind FDR during the 1932 presidential campaign, even speaking at the Democratic Party Convention, and helping pen his inaugural speech. Roosevelt had adopted some of the same principles that drove the Catholic Action movement and others following Pope Pius XI’s encyclical of 1931, Quadragesimo Anno, which urged a path between unrestricted capitalism and socialist revolution. Coughlin and Roosevelt met frequently and appeared close, but the relationship soured after Roosevelt had entered the White House. Roosevelt’s administration was the first to contain several Jewish members in prominent positions such as former Supreme Court Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter among others. Feeling slighted, Coughlin set up his own political organisation in November 1934 called the National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ) whose platform might be described as populist and isolationist. At this point, Coughlin was willing to invite Jews into the organisation, something he would soon be unwilling to countenance following his political defeat in 1936. Coughlin installed himself firmly at the top of the group and his enormous popularity soon turned into political heft. A 1936 convention in Cleveland drew ten thousand rabid followers and had giant portraits of Coughlin adorning the hall. The attendees adopted a resolution to endorse everything Coughlin did, and when a lone delegate voted against a proposal, Coughlin had the man removed from the hall amid a chorus of jeers and insults. The NUSJ claimed up to five million members but this may have been closer to one million. The party railed against both main parties as servants of the ‘money-changers’ and ‘unseen rulers of the financial world’.

After the assassination of Huey Long in 1935, Coughlin was the main ‘outsider’ in the American political system. Teaming up with Long’s principal successor, a pastor named Gerald L.K. Smith and another populist leader named Dr. Francis E. Townsend, they founded the Union Party in 1935 which drew together various groups. Coughlin himself was unable to run as a candidate due to being a naturalized citizen and Congressman William Lemke from North Dakota was nominated for the ticket. The campaign attacked FDR repeatedly as a communist stooge and proposed a range of populist economic policies designed to facilitate the creation of ‘cheap money’. The party gained media attention but despite some impressively large rallies, failed to impact the election at the polls, gaining less than two per cent of the national votes, and the party floundered afterwards. Most of the party’s policies had been taken from the NUSJ program with additional contributions from the other factions. Townsend had made a name for himself in California campaigning for pensioners and Lemke represented disillusioned farmers in the mid-west and prairies. Lemke’s running mate was a NUSJ man from Boston, Thomas Charles O’Brien who was hand-picked by Coughlin. Coughlin’s campaign speeches for the party were littered with threats of violence as he assailed FDR and the New Deal, proclaiming the end of America at the hands of a communist cabal. Towards the end of the campaign he told one reporter:

“We are at the crossroads. One road leads towards fascism, the other towards Communism. I choose fascism.”

By the time the campaign had run its course, Coughlin had wound up on the wrong side of the church hierarchy who were embarrassed by his full-scale entry into national politics and made some efforts to rein him in. Coughlin disbanded the Union Party and made a half-hearted effort at retiring after the poor election results.

Coughlin’s remedies for the economic problems of the Depression changed from time to time, but his diagnosis of the problems always referred back to international bankers on Wall Street and in Europe and the politicians that supported them, describing them frequently as satanic and devil-like. Coughlin was interested in the economic ideas of the Social Credit movement and maintained contact with William ‘Bible Bill’ Aberhart who successfully led the Alberta Social Credit Party to government in Alberta between 1935 and 1943. Aberhart’s religious views were evangelical, and he had made his name as a preacher in the prairies during the 1920’s but he increasingly became interested in British Israelism later in life. Coughlin was also involved in a correspondence with Ezra Pound around this period with the poet offering him support for his fight against ‘the machinations of international bankers’. When Pound started his radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini during the war, he took Coughlin’s work as inspiration. Hilaire Belloc, a prominent Franco-English Catholic writer and noted antisemite was another associate of Coughlin. Belloc had written a book in 1922 called The Jews which pondered ‘the Jewish Question’ and argued that Jews were a separate race, incapable of assimilation into European societies. He was invited to write a weekly column for Coughlin’s paper, Social Justice, which had weekly sales of over a million copies. Coughlin was also acquainted with GK Chesterton, a close associate of Belloc who shared many of his antisemitic views and cast Jews as the main agitators in the destruction of western civilization. The two were leading figures in the British interwar literary scene and remain frequent sources for modern day Catholic antisemitism. Coughlin used an invented Jewish writer with the pen name of Ben Marcin to write some of the most antisemitic articles for Social Justice, and used this fictional accomplice to defend Coughlin and as a source to confirm the validity of the infamous and fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

After the first world war, antisemitism saw a dramatic rise in the US, corresponding with the second Ku Klux Klan and nascent fascist street movements and their propagandists. Many of these groups took the form of anti-communist activism, reacting to the events in Russia and ongoing labour struggles throughout the 20s and 30s. The anti-union material the groups produced led them to be funded by wealthy industrialists fearful of the growing labour movement. Detroit and Chicago were hotbeds for anti-communist groups and Coughlin was well placed to feed into this movement. Accusations of Jewish control of left wing groups was common practice. Coughlin’s sermons did not become overtly antisemitic until after the 1936 election but it is possible his views had merely become more public to reflect growing acceptance of race hatred and bigotry. Previously couched in the language of ‘international bankers’, usurers’, and references to Rothschilds and the Illuminati, more overtly antisemitic language became commonplace. It is also plausible that his defeat and exclusion from the two party system led him to see conspiracies against him and became more focused on imagined Jewish plots to stymie his ambitions. Two of the more influential characters in this line of thinking were Gertrude Coogan and Fr. Denis Fahey.

Coogan was a popular public speaker who wrote an antisemitic book regarding finance called The Money Creators published in 1935. The book, once again, blamed the Illuminati and the Rothschilds as part of invisible forces destroying the economy. Her ‘research’ included discovering Alexander Hamilton’s real surname was Levine and that the Rotschild’s had financed both sides of the American Revolution. Coogan became a financial advisor to Coughlin and also involved in the ‘Ham and Eggs’ pension movement in California. Coogan’s cousin, a priest, described her as ‘the most violent and hysterical Jew-hater I have ever known and said that she had indoctrinated Coughlin with her antisemitism.’ She ghost-wrote Coughlin’s own book on economics, Money! Questions and Answers but the pair fell out when Coughlin refused to share the profits from its sales or even cover expenses. Coogan’s books and ideas have remained in circulation as part of the right wing anti-federal reserve milieu.

Coughlin discovered Denis Fahey’s writings around 1936 and seized upon them as important intellectual and theological proof of antisemitic theories. He reprinted several pages of Fahey’s The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World in both Social Justice and the transcripts of his radio speeches and praised him as ‘one of the most outstanding scholars in Ireland’. Fahey was the only writer beside Coughlin himself to receive such praise and promotion in the pages of the paper. Whole columns of Coughlin’s writings were given over to reproducing Fahey’s writings and quotations were plentiful through the pages of Social Justice, and Coughlin came to rely on Fahey’s work to a large degree. Fahey’s work and its influence on Coughlin should not be understated. His intellectual credibility, having earned two doctorates and been appointed as a leading professor of theology in Ireland lent huge weight to his theories of Supernaturalism and the depiction of Jews as literal devils intent on destroying God’s work on Earth. Fahey’s writings seem to have supercharged Coughlin’s hatred for Jews and his rhetoric took a notable turn for the worse after he had read Fahey’s books. The two enjoyed a lengthy correspondence.

As tensions grew in Europe, Coughlin’s antisemitism became more and more pronounced, tied up with the idea that Jewish bankers were promoting conflict. By July 1938 Coughlin was even printing his own version of the Protocols, churning out the material over an extended period, following in Henry Ford’s footsteps. Indeed, the same man, a German-American Nazi supporter named Ernest Liebold employed by Ford to investigate the Protocols may have provided material for both versions. Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, which generated a great deal of coverage in the US, Coughlin went on the attack, defending the Nazi position. He blamed Jews for being aggressive and dominating media outlets, and promoted the idea that Jews were responsible for German humiliation through the Treaty of Versailles. Some of Coughlin’s claims were word for word repetitions of nazi Ministry of Propaganda statements. He further described Nazism as a defence against Russian Communism that was dominated by Jewish people intent on destroying western Europe. Coughlin tended to couch his antisemitism in terms of dividing between ‘good Jews’ who were religiously observant and apolitical, and ‘bad Jews’ who were secular and politically involved.

His show the following week was cancelled by WMCA radio station in New York for promoting religious hatred, and Coughlin became a cause célèbre in Nazi Germany where commentators accused ‘Jewish controlled media’ of censoring the truth. In response to the cancellation a crowd of thousands picketed the radio station in Manhattan chanting ‘Down with Jews!’ and other antisemitic slogans. The protests continued as weekly gatherings, sometimes targeting Jewish businesses that advertised on the radio station. Copies of Social Justice were sold and passers-by assumed to be Jewish were insulted and sometimes assaulted by the protesters. One witness described the end of one of the protests:

“The mob crowds into the subway, along with the Social Justice salesman, and heads for Times Square. They run up and down the subway cars insulting any passenger who looks at all Jewish, and create a considerable amount of terror.”

Counter-protesters began showing up and disorder and fistfights became commonplace. This period saw the formation of the Christian Front groups from the ranks of Coughlin’s supporters. Irish and German-American neighbourhoods were prime targets for recruitment and members were involved in street brawls in New York, Boston and elsewhere. In January 1940 thirteen members of the Brooklyn group were arrested and charged with an ambitious plan to initiate terrorist attacks and overthrow the government, information passed on to the FBI by on an informant, but the prosecution failed to garner convictions at the subsequent trial. Another tactic of Coughlin’s was the formation of the Social Justice Unit of the National Legion of Mothers, set up in 1939 to gather women into protest groups who performed public stunts to try and pressure politicians to advocate against intervention on behalf of ‘our boys’.

Following the Kristallnacht broadcast, Coughlin claimed he had taken his information for the Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik revolution from Fr. Denis Fahey. Coughlin’s broadcasts after this period often concentrated on blaming Jews for trying to involve the US in a European conflict for selfish reasons of self-preservation and profiteering. The comments were predictably stereotypical such as describing Jews as a ‘certain class which has persisted in making a den of thieves of this world by exploiting the masses of every nation’ or involved ‘naming the Jew’, listing prominent Jewish business people and exaggerating their power. His admiration for Coughlin was clear in the prominence he gave to this book The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World displayed prominently at the gift shop in Royal Oak, and glowingly promoted by Coughlin who saw his chance to make some money selling Fahey to his followers:

“It is because I am so anxious that my listeners will not be deceived that I am making it a point to urge them to supplement the broadcasts by reading The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World by Rev. Denis Fahey. For the convenience of those who desire to possess this most valuable book, I have arranged for a limited quantity to be shipped to me from abroad. This volume, beautifully bound, is priced at $2.50.”

Another letter stated:

“If I could afford it, I would gladly present you with a gift copy of two of Father Denis Fancy's works. Inasmuch as I am unable financially to do this, I have ordered a limited supply of these books from abroad to have them available for prompt delivery to those persons, like yourself, who are genuinely interested in the real forces at work in the world today.”

Fahey was the most quoted theologian in Coughlin’s newspaper after the popes and Thomas Aquinas. Backlash against his broadcasts resulted in Coughlin doubling down, sometimes claiming he was acting under the guise of anti-communism, not antisemitism, but also claiming religious reasons for his antagonism. Coughlin campaigned against allowing Jewish refugees from Nazi controlled areas into the US, claiming that many were communists and “it was intolerable to permit these aliens to raise their voices in America”.

In the mounting anxiety of a coming European conflict, Coughlin’s advice was for people to arm themselves and be prepared to resist communism in their communities. The German American Bund held a huge rally in Madison Square garden where mass support for Coughlin was on display, and support overlapped between the Bund and the Christian Front. Twenty thousand attended and a twelve hundred strong colour party of uniformed Brownshirts represented the Nazi party in the huge arena. The Bund leader, Fritz Kuhn, recommended Coughlin’s paper to his members and some attempts at co-operation between the groups appears to have taken place. One Bund member, William Wernecke, claimed to have had a meeting with Coughlin and others, during which Coughlin laughingly approved of murdering hundreds of Chicago area Jews. The poet and Nazi agent, George Sylvester Viereck wrote a number of articles for Social Justice in 1938. Viereck was also involved in a 1940 scheme to pay Congress member’s to give Nazi propaganda speeches in the House of Representatives and then distribute the speeches in millions of leaflets using the Congress postal facilities.

In January 1939 Coughlin sent his head of publicity for Social Justice, Leo Reardon, to Berlin to meet with Goebbels and Von Ribbentrop. Von Ribbentrop told Reardon he held Coughlin in high regard, and Goebbels used Coughlin’s approach to claim that antisemitism in the US was far more widespread than admitted. Nazi propaganda was eager to report on the anti-Jewish demonstrations by Coughlin’s supporters. As war grew nearer, Coughlin used his platform to denounce any attempt at US military or financial intervention in Europe, and parroted Nazi excuses for aggression. Huge volumes of mail from his supporters urged federal politicians not to support aid to the Allies.

In international matters, Coughlin, unsurprisingly, supported Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War and opposed any attempt to provide aid to the Republican government. Huge volumes of mail from his supporters urged Congress not to provide aid, and he viewed this as a major victory. Coughlin was also a vocal supporter of Mussolini, encouraged by his strong leadership and accommodation with the Catholic church. After the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, with mounting condemnation of Il Duce in the United States, Coughlin criticised the British condemnation of the war as hypocritical considering their history in Ireland. As the Italian Fascist government introduced race laws in 1938, he offered Mussolini space in the Social Justice newspaper to clarify his ‘attitude towards the Jews’. Coughlin met and corresponded with Oswald Mosely and hired his friend Major J.S. Barnes to write articles on the ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Jewish Problem’ for Social Justice. Mussolini was declared Man of the Year in an issue of Social Justice from spring of 1940.

Coughlin’s star finally faded with the US entry into the war. For years he had been supported by his immediate superior, Bishop Michael Gallagher of Detroit, another Irish-American, like so many in the church hierarchy. Gallagher had trained in Ireland and supported Coughlin throughout his many controversies and scandals, before his death in January 1937. His successor, Edward Mooney, tried to put the brakes on Coughlin’s political activism but was outwitted by the priest and his supporters, and became concerned that Coughlin might leave the church and take his supporters and their money with him. Private reprimands concerning his antisemitic broadcasts were politely forwarded to the priest. His newspaper was privately printed and therefore beyond the reach of the Church censor. As Coughlin’s antisemitism reached fever pitch in 1938, no censure was forthcoming from the church hierarchy until after the Kristallnacht broadcast. Many lay Catholics urged for greater action, and broadcasters began dropping the show from their airwaves. Greater broadcasting restrictions came into place after the start of the war and by May 1940 Coughlin had effectively lost his radio platform, and Mooney demanded Coughlin cease his role in Social Justice around the same time. The paper continued to publish pro-German and anti-Jewish articles after the start of the war. Headlines blamed Jews for starting the war and profiteering from the conflict. Coughlin was investigated by the FBI for seditious behaviour. His church was raided and witnesses interviewed by a grand jury but Coughlin was never charged. After Coughlin publicly admitted running the paper for two years after Mooney’s request to stop, Mooney finally officially censured Coughlin and threatened him with suspension from his priesthood if he continued publishing without explicit approval. The last issue of the paper was printed in April 1942. As the America First Committee gained ground in 1940-41 it attracted many Christian Front and Coughlinite supporters into its ranks. One official of the Committee estimated eighty percent of the members to be Coughlinites.

After the war, Coughlin remained mostly in Royal Oak, a wealthy man with a large estate and plentiful supporters. He ruled the roost in Royal Oak but remained cut off from politics and media. He retired in 1966 and began publishing articles again, attacking communism and the Vatican II reforms. Charles Coughlin died in 1979 aged eighty eight. His life and work have since been championed by a long list of far right groups.

References:

Athans, Mary Christine (1987) A New Perspective on Father Charles E. Coughlin Church History , Jun., 1987, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 224-235

Athans, Mary Christine (1991) The Coughlin – Fahey Connection New York: Peter Lang

Bennet, David H. (1969) Demagogues in the Depression – American Radicals and the Union Party 1936-1936 New Jersey: Rutgers University Press

Brinkley, Alan (1983) Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression New York: Vintage Books

Carlson, John Roy (1943) Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America New York: E.P. Dutton

Mitchell, Daniel J.B., (2000). The Lessons of Ham and Eggs: California's 1938 and 1939 Pension Ballot Propositions Southern California Quarterly , Summer 2000, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Summer 2000), pp. 193-218

Modras, Ronald (1989) Father Coughlin and Anti-Semitism: Fifty Years Later Journal of Church and State , Spring 1989, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 231-247

North, Gary, (2010). Gertrude Coogan’s Bluff. Auburn: Ludwig Van Mises Institute

Rennie, Bradford J. (ed.).(2004) Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina.

Spivak, John L. (1940) Shrine of the Silver Dollar New York: Modern Age Books

Warren, Donald (1996) Radio Priest – Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio New York: The Free Press