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Irish-American antisemitism in Boston

Boston is often considered the most Irish city outside of Ireland, and certainly in the Americas. It’s history of large-scale immigration from Ireland has permanently shaped its identity and the city still resonates with Irish people, although often the fondness now has a tinge of embarrassment, as for distant cousins with strange notions of home. By the interwar period, the city’s demographics led to large Jewish and Italian populations living alongside the Irish in the city. A strong sense of Catholicism remained a defining feature of the Irish communities at the time, along with an everlasting grudge against British imperialism, opposition to godless communism and a self-perception as the underdogs that had by then a very questionable basis in reality. Irish political power in the city by the 1930’s extended to control of City Hall, state and federal Senators and Congresspeople, the police department and many other elements of the city and state power structures.

During the depression, an Irish-American priest from Detroit (although born in Ontario) Father Charles Coughlin rose to a position of immense power and influence through his political campaigning driven by an immensely popular radio programme. Coughlin had pioneered both religious televangelism and right wing talk radio from the late 1920’s in a nationally syndicated radio program that drew millions of listeners on a weekly basis alongside huge donations. Originally a supporter of FDR, Coughlin fell out with the president and started a new political party and social movement called the National Union for Social Justice which ran as the Union Party in 1936 elections. An accompanying newspaper called Social Justice proved very popular and was used by Coughlin to spread his ideas. While Coughlin had long used antisemitic rhetoric, following Kristallnacht in 1938 the anti-Jewish rhetoric was ratcheted up to fever pitch and a full-throated endorsement of Nazi policies was spewed out in Coughlin’s radio broadcasts and print. Coughlin credited Dublin priest Father Denis Fahey with solidifying his theological hatred of Jews and strongly promoted Fahey’s work to his immense audience. Coughlin was very popular in Boston among the Irish there and his followers became wrapped up in the hateful targeting of Jewish communities.

For several years Boston became a hotspot for antisemitic attacks by Coughlin’s followers and a closer look at Boston (and New York) in this period reveals how central Irish-American activists were to the organised antisemitism of the period. The Spanish Civil War had motivated Boston Catholics to come out in support of Franco and the Nationalist cause in the name of anti-communism. High profile Boston clergy and politicians such as Cardinal William O’Connell, Congressman John McCormack and Senator David Walsh all made public campaigns in support of Franco. O’Connell, primate of Boston and New England, declared Franco a defender of the Christian civilization in Spain after his planes had bombed and killed a thousand civilians in Barcelona on 18 March 1938. These campaigns motivated Catholic groups in Boston to agitate for the nationalist cause and may have led to networks that responded to the war with Germany a few years later. Long-held antagonism towards Britain as well as local ethnic tensions led Boston-Irish to tend strongly towards isolationism. This position was also taken up by the large Boston Italian community, which left the Jewish community, painfully aware of the persecution in Europe, as the leading pro-democracy and pro-intervention voice in the city. Cardinal O’Connell made multiple anti-intervention statements including one that posited supporters of his position as ‘real’ Americans and could be seen as a pointed dig at Jewish Bostonians:

'It is hard for me to understand why some of the propagandists are allowed to cry down the normal wish of the American people for peace. What is their purpose? They cannot be real Americans, because real Americans think of their own country first. There are certain expatriates, I think you know whom I mean—who are raising their voices in loud accents with the preposterous proposition that America sink her individuality and become a sort of tail-end of a foreign empire.’

Despite facing widespread discrimination and abuse, the city’s Jewish representatives strongly cautioned against condemning the Irish or Italian communities as a whole for the activities of some of their members. The Jewish Advocate, a Boston based newspaper, cautioned against allowing investigations of Nazi and fascist groups to “to degenerate into an indiscriminate alien-baiting campaign.”

Coughlin received more electoral support in Boston than any other city and Mayor Jim Curley called it ‘the most Coughlinite in America’. Under O’Connell’s watch, Social Justice was sold outside every Catholic church in the city. This was in spite of O’Connell’s animosity towards Coughlin who he had repeatedly spoken out against since April 1932. While O’Connell thought Coughlin had gone too far in his rhetoric, they still shared many beliefs, such as anti-communism and isolationism. O’Connell had bought the local Catholic newspaper The Pilot in 1908 and turned it into the official organ of the diocese. The pages were frequently used to minimize Hitler’s actions during the 1930’s and rally support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In the 1936 elections three Democratic congressmen from strongly Irish districts ran on the Union Party ticket, and South Boston was a large base of support for Coughlin.

A New York based Catholic priest named Father Edward Lodge Curran was closely associated with Coughlin and spoke frequently at public events where he criticized Jews for involving the US in the war and praised Marshall Petain as a ‘great and noble soul’. One such event was the Evacuation Day events of 1941 which coincided with St. Patrick’s Day. Evacuation Day was a date to remember the evacuation of British troops from Boston in 1776. This was a large city-sponsored event where Curran made a speech denouncing the US entry into the war, despite the attack on Pearl Harbour. Curran was editor of the largest Catholic newspaper in the US, the Brooklyn Tablet and also wrote a column for the Gaelic-American, a Coughlinite paper in New York. The planned appearance was protested vociferously by many in the city. He was described as Frances Sweeney as a ‘mouthpiece for Coughlin’ and as a ‘fascist demagogue' and disgrace to the Catholic church by Professor Frederick L. Schuman. Despite, or perhaps partly because of the controversy, the events were a huge success with record crowds turning out to hear Curran, and his speech lambasting ‘internal enemies’ received a standing ovation. These events in 1941 led to the creation of the American-Irish Defense Association by Sweeney and other liberal Irish-Americans in Boston. Sweeney was a journalist and antifascist activist who helped to counter the anti-Jewish propaganda pumped out by Coughlin to a receptive audience.

Following Coughlin’s hard turn into antisemitism and pro-Nazism, a group called the Christian Front was formed among his supporters for the purpose of establishing a street presence and with a view to paramilitary activity. In the early years of the war the Boston Christian Front acted as a propaganda outfit for Nazi Germany, screening films and distributing official Nazi literature from its headquarters in Roxbury. The antisemitic campaign in Boston was led by the New England leader of the Christian Front, Francis P. Moran who was named as national director of the Christian Front by Coughlin in 1939. Moran made speeches blaming Jews for starting the war and accused them of conspiring to get Americans killed in the fighting. The start of the campaign was a film showing organised by Moran at the Hibernian Hall in June 1941 where the Nazi propaganda film Sieg in Westen (Victory in the West) was shown to the audience. Meetings at the hall in Roxbury, near Jewish neighbourhoods, attracted up to 500 people and started with Nazi salutes. Rumours were spread stating that Jews were avoiding the draft and engaging in war-profiteering. The fear and hatred was building to a boiling point. Long standing anti-British grievances manifested as pro-German sentiment and were endorsed by the Mayor and other city officials through Evacuation Day and St. Patrick’s Day events which sometimes ended in group attacks on Jewish people. Many of the Christian Front activists were tied up with Nazi agents operating in the US and German-American Bund members.

During the war almost daily attacks were recorded on Jewish residents of Boston’s Dorchester neighbourhood and neighbouring Roxbury and Mattapan. Most of the perpetrators were identified as young Irish-Americans from nearby neighbourhoods like South Boston and Fields Square. Gangs would go into Dorchester to go ‘Jew-hunting’, assault and intimidate Jewish residents and attack Jewish businesses and synagogues. The attacks were called a series of ‘small scale pogroms’ by The Day, a Jewish newspaper based in New York. Accusations were also levelled at the Boston police and city officials (dominated by Irish-Americans) for failing to intervene to prevent the violence by Frances Sweeney. One incident involved two Jewish boys being arrested following an attack by an Irish gang. After the cops showed up during the assault, the police detained, beat and prosecuted the two boys for complaining that the assailants were allowed to leave. An Irish Catholic judge later found the Two Jewish boys guilty of affray. Women and children were frequently targeted in the attacks and residents reported being afraid to leave their houses, even during the day.

The events were mostly ignored by the Boston press. It was not until a PM (A New York based daily newspaper) front page story in October 1943 that the violence was openly admitted and discussed among the politicians of the day, and public denouncements of the violence were voiced by civic leaders. Previously, concerns had been raised but dismissed by the mayor and others more interested in ignoring the problems. A special investigation into police brutality found several members of the Boston PD guilty of assaults on Jews and the Police Commissioner, Joseph Timilty, was fired. Despite this reaction, violent incidents did not peak until later in 1944, with Dorchester High School being one of the centres of the attacks. Irish-American city councillors refused to back any programs aimed at reducing tensions and violence among the youth of the city, seeing such things as smears on the good name of Irish communities.

Incidents tailed off after the war in the wake of the revelations of the Holocaust, but a few years later, once again grew more common as the Red Scare took hold and Jews were caught up in the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Cardinal O’Connell’s successor, Richard Cushing was more accommodating of interfaith dialogue and made efforts to include Jewish groups as part of his civic duties. His tenure represented a shift in the attitudes of the Church hierarchy in the city in relation to its Jewish inhabitants, but Cushing was still a fervent anti-communist who endorsed the John Birch Society and other conspiratorial and anti-Jewish groups under the banner of fighting communism.

After the war, another Boston Irish Catholic priest, a leading Jesuit named Leonard Feeney preached antisemitic speeches to fervent supporters in Boston Common on Sundays and attracted former Christian Front supporters to his cultish group called Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. His followers were forbidden from communicating with their parents, earning personal income or having sex. Feeney targeted Harvard students and offered recruits free room, board and tuition. A description of one of his sermons gives a flavour of his rhetoric:

‘At the center of an ever widening ring of people, without an overcoat, on a small, rough, wooden platform, stood a short plump man in the black suit of a clergyman, his arms waving in the air, his white hair tossing about above his glasses, his shrill voice carrying over the noise of traffic on nearby Charles Street.

“Brotherhood is the bunk,” cried the little clergyman, “the most absolute nonsense. You Catholics out there—do you know the Jews are trying to take over this city? And the Protestants are helping them. Why, everyone knows that. Everybody knows that to be true. The Jews run the business end, and the Protestants, the religious. And this is supposed to be a Catholic city.”

A woman's voice said something above the general murmur of the crowd. The little man in black turned to her and gasped. “How dare you say such things. You're disgraceful, I'm very much ashamed to hear you say such things.”

The woman trembled, almost cried, but repeated her remark. “Is this what our boys fight and die for, Father? Is this why Protestants and Jews fight to save all of us?”

The white-haired speaker stopped his talk. He called the woman names: “a Jew mistress ... a horrid, degenerate, sexual pervert,” and other choice epithets, ending his attack with, “you filthy man, you.” The woman almost fainted. She stayed, but said no more.’

Scuffles were commonplace between his supporters and Harvard students, including a young Bobby Kennedy, who took issue with Feeney’s preaching. Feeney was a former Boston College professor and taught theology at the Jesuit College in Weston, Massachusetts. Prior to his arrival at St. Benedict’s in Boston city centre, he had edited America, the nationwide Catholic magazine and published several volumes of poetry. He was later the editor of a magazine called The Point which frequently published antisemitic writings such as Jewish Invasion of Our Country – Our Culture Under Siege which ran in the January 1957 edition. Feeney was a fervent supporter of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, the ’no salvation outside the church’ doctrine which led him to vigorously assail all other religions, but Jews in particular. This gave rise to the term ‘Feeneyism’ which is considered heretical by the Catholic Church and also known as the ‘Boston Heresy’. Feeney was silenced by Cardinal Cushing, which he ignored and then excommunicated in 1953 for heresy. He died in 1978.

Boston remains a nexus for far-right Irish American activity today. More recent groups such as the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Club (or NSC-131 – the 131 standing for ACA or anti-communist action) have tried to develop a presence in the city and the broader New England region, latching on to St. Patrick’s Day events and courting Irish far-right groups in a bid to boost legitimacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Central to much of the rhetoric from such groups is a sense of the Irish as underdogs, undeserving of the criticisms of wider White America, and attempting to exploit the grievances of a centuries long struggle against colonialism as fuel to light fires of hatred towards minorities. This line has been broadly pushed by other American far right groups, regardless of their specific ethnic make-up or affiliation, alongside the Irish slaves myth and used to justify anti-Black hatred and discrimination. It has been heartening to see, in the spirit of Frances Sweeney, that public demonstrations by far-right in Boston have usually been strongly opposed by the city’s present day residents and long may that continue.

Sources:

Crosby, Donald F., (1971) Boston's Catholics and the Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939 The New England Quarterly , Mar., 1971, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Mar., 1971), pp. 82-100

Feldberg, Michael (2012) American Heretic: The Rise and Fall of Father Leonard Feeney, S.J. American Catholic Studies , Summer 2012, Vol. 123, No. 2 (Summer 2012), pp. 109-115

Goldstein, Jenny (2001) Transcending Boundaries: Boston’s Catholics and Jews, 1929-1965 Brandeis University Thesis

Lebowicz, Matt (2017) When Boston was America’s ‘capital’ of anti-Semitism Times of Israel 4 September 2017

Norwood, Stephen H., (2003) Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II American Jewish History , June 2003, Vol. 91, No. 2 (June 2003), pp. 233-267

Savadore, Laurence D. (1951) Father Feeney, Rebel from Church, Preaches Hate, Own Brand of Dogma to All Comers The Harvard Crimson

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

Stack, John F. (1979) International Conflict in an American City – Boston’s Irish Italians and Jews, 1935-1944 Westport: Greenwood Press

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