blackisthelight

Irish-American antisemitism in New York

One of the major precursors the primes a group for violence against minorities is a sense of losing social position, and the Irish in New York often had a sense of losing ground to other ethnic groups, particularly Italians and Jews, during the 1920s and 30s. The election of the first Italian-American mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, symbolised a shift in the city’s power structure, and resulted in a sense of loss of influence for Tammany Hall and their Irish affiliates.

Organised antisemitic activity occurred in New York City during the late 30s and early 40s, with the Father Coughlin inspired Christian Front being front and centre of the violence, using anti-communism as their main excuse. The Front’s New York leader, Jack Cassidy, a young law school graduate was, predictably, Irish American as were the large majority of its members. The Christian Front had come out of Brooklyn based anti-communist organizations organising in Irish-Jewish neighbourhoods like Flatbush, and held its first meeting in July 1938 at the Church of St. Paul in Manhattan. Coughlin had printed a call for organizing in his paper Social Justice on 23rd of May calling for groups of no more than 25 to be formed and to recruit more into the movement. Coughlin had in turn been inspired by the earlier proposal by Pope Pius XI for laity to take up the cause of Catholic Action and organise for a more Catholic society. The group quickly settled on anti-Jewish activities as its main course of defending Christianity. The organisation grew quickly and formed numerous cells and branches acting independently of each other but overseen by Coughlin. One of the off-shoots of the Christian Front was called the Christian Labor Front which aimed to oust Jews and communists from labour unions.

An official Nazi ‘Gau’ had been set up in New York around 1931 and the city was the headquarters of the party in the US until it was dissolved in 1933. There were also branches of the Friends of Germany/Friends of the New Germany which became the American German Bund operating in New York throughout the 1930s, claiming up to 8,000 members in the city. The Christian Front took part in a large Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939 led by the German American Bund and a campaign of attacks on Jews across the city began soon afterwards. Irish communities were often anti-interventionist as historical animosity towards Britain, and in particular its military, led many, if not most, to view assisting Britain in a war as tantamount to treason. There was also a widespread dislike and distrust of the Soviet Union and its communist government, and the result was a strong contingent in the north-eastern US which opposed US entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Coughlin and his supporters tried to turn this isolationist view into an antisemitic one by painting Jews as the primary supporters of military intervention against Nazi Germany.

Newspapers played their part in inciting aggression. The Irish World and the long-running Catholic newpaper The Tablet printed stories questioning the extent of antisemitic persecution in Europe and asking why more was not being said about anti-Christian persecution there and in Mexico. The Tablet went further, suggesting Jews were responsible for attacks on Christians and that antisemitism was being exaggerated to cover for communist crimes. Both papers took strong pro-Coughlin stances when he had been taken off air by WMCA and defended his post-Kristallnacht comments that justified the Nazi campaign against Jews. In February 1939, at the height of Coughlin’s attacks on Jews, The Tablet (then operating as The Brooklyn Tablet) praised Coughlin in an editorial by Patrick Scanlon:

Fr. Coughlin has fearlessly and courageously discussed the Jewish problem that others would pass by in cowardly silence…. [No Catholic can honestly criticize] Fr. Coughlin’s very temperate reference to the part that a Jewish Weltanschauung contributed to the untoward world conditions.

Support for Coughlin was not uniform across Catholic America, and some papers like the Catholic Worker and hierarchy like Cardinal Hayes of New York pushed back against him. Sales pitches of Social Justice were used by Christian Front supporters to attack Jews. One seller in Times Square described his technique as insulting anyone who looked half-Jewish and hoping for a response that could be counteracted by a waiting group of supporters. There were large German and Italian communities in the city but it was Irish American gangs who attacked Jews in Queens and Brooklyn, damaging synagogues and boycotting businesses. Aslon J. Smith, writing in The Christian Century, described the gangs in New York as being ‘almost entirely Irish and Catholic’. The Jewish neighbourhoods targeted – Washington Heights, South Bronx and Flatbush were located near Irish neighbourhoods and Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Near nightly gatherings by these and similar groups to denounce Jewish people and incite violence against Jewish communities were occurring in various parts of the city during the war. The overlap between the Christian Front and the NYPD, another group heavily represented by Irish Americans (the force was 66% Irish American) was notable, and an FBI investigation revealed 1500 NYPD members had tried to join the Christian Front.

A smaller faction, the Christian Mobilizers, led by Joe McWilliams (nicknamed Handsome Joe McNazi) appeared in July 1939 as a breakaway from the Christian Front and wanted to pursue these attacks further. McWilliams came originally from Oklahoma and claimed not to be a Catholic at a later court trial. He had been a strong communist supporter and friendly with many Jews up until the late 30’s. The Mobilizers recruited mainly from Irish Catholics and claimed to have former IRA members in their ranks. McWilliams boasted at the inaugural meeting to 500 local toughs:

I'm gathering around me the meanest, the toughest, the most ornery bunch of German soldiers, Italian veterans and Irish I.R.A. men in the country. I'm going to have the greatest collection of strong-arm men in the city. And if anybody tries to stop us . . . they'll think lightning hit them.

McWilliams played up the anti-interventionist card, stating at one meeting in 1940 that ‘the Jews want to destroy Hitler to the last Irishman’.

It's a revolution against the Jew first, then against Democracy, then against the Republican and Democratic parties. Both are rotten. Both useless. We are going to drive them both out and we are going to run this country with an iron hand, the way Hitler runs Germany.

McWilliams assembled goon squads from a motley collection of petty criminals and staged rallies urging attendees to acquire guns and ammunition and to train in small cells to fight a coming race war. McWilliams was busy, holding up to 20 protests and rallies a week throughout the city, and his gangs assaulted people on a nightly basis. He was equally at home in the gutters as he was on Park Avenue, moving seamlessly across the class divide and set up a political party called the American Destiny Party as a vehicle for publicity. The group worked closely with the Bund and an official merger was discussed but this idea was dropped after the leader of the Bund, Fritz Kuhn was arrested.

After his Kristallnacht-era broadcasts had elicited protests, groups sprung up to aid Coughlin and his messaging. Prominent defenders of Coughlin have been linked with Nazi agents, such as George Von Nosdall in New York, head of the Crusaders for Americanism who praised Fritz Kuhn as the ‘greatest living Christian American in the country’. Von Nosdall made a speech in defence of Coughlin in the Bronx where he addressed a crowd with the Nazi salute and said:

When we get through with the Jews in America they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing… Judaistic gore will soon flow in the streets of New York City!

Edward James Smythe was another New York Christian Front organiser with ties to Nazi Germany through Kurt Mertig and the Bund. The American National Party was active in New York and surrounding states and held meetings of several hundred in support of Coughlin, urging members to kill Jews and Communists, while other groups such as the Citizens Protective League or American Patriots, Inc. appealed to different demographics. Sporting clubs such as the Iron Guard or American Phalanx were established to act as underground paramilitary training groups to teach members in sabotage, street-fighting and guerrilla warfare, with some of the groups claiming IRA experience and membership. Practice runs consisted of vandalizing Jewish businesses and beating up anyone that interfered.

In January 1940, seventeen Christian Front members from Brooklyn were arrested and weapons seized as part of an FBI investigation, eleven of them came from Irish backgrounds. The defendants were charged with seditious conspiracy and the alleged plot involved bombing Jewish centres and left-wing offices and assassinating Jewish congressmen in the hope of sparking a race war. The jurors in the trial were sympathetic and the prosecution had a hard time proving such a large-scale plot would be carried out with a small amount of weapons. No verdict was returned, and The Tablet suggested that the only thing they were guilty of was ‘excessive patriotism’.

Antisemitic violence in the city peaked in 1943 but 1944 saw a further wave of incidents in New York with Irish gangs once again involved. Washington Heights in upper Manhattan saw the worst of the conflict, an area of the city with large numbers of Irish and Jewish residents. Demonstrations against Jewish businesses and refugees took place led by the Christian Front and Christian Mobilizers. Despite the crackdown on the Christian Front in 1940, antisemitic incidents increased after the US entry into the war with vandalism against synagogues, swastika graffiti and taunts of ‘Kill the Jews’ being shouted at worshippers. Often teenagers led the way, beating up Jewish boys and throwing stones at windows, acting on anti-Jewish sentiments they were being exposed to in the Irish community. Two gangs, the Amsterdams and the Shamrocks were prominent in this period. The appeals for police protection often fell on deaf ears, similar to the situation in Boston. It took intervention from Mayor La Guardia to instigate some attempts at de-escalation in the city. The local Catholic church was very reluctant to condemn the incidents. During the worst of the antisemitic violence during the war, Francis McIntyre, auxiliary bishop of New York, minimised the attacks on Jewish property and claimed that ‘the chalk doodlings of children have been used by paid publicity agents to conjure up the phantom of antisemitic hate to injure the Catholic population of New York’. It was not until January 1944 that a cross-community committee started to work together to rein in the gangs. In 1944, Joe McWilliams and 29 others were put on trial for seditious conspiracy under the Smith Act. McWilliams was the principal defendant, but the death of the judge caused a mistrial and the case was not prosecuted again.

In the South Bronx, a similar pattern played out. Christian Mobilizers and German American Bund co-operated in the neighbourhood and led street protests against Jewish targets. This then led to vandalism and the emergence of teenage gangs and assaults on Jews, which went on long after the main groups had been disbanded by the authorities. Posters calling for the elimination of the Jews appeared in the area. Jews fought back against the assaults and tensions simmered throughout the war. This was also a pattern in other neighbourhoods across the city. As the war wound down, so did the inter-ethnic conflict. The defeat of the Nazis and the revelations of the Holocaust may have tempered some of the animosity from Irish quarters, and allowed a renewed focus on Soviet communism as the major international threat. Locally, neighbourhoods may have gotten more accustomed to changing demographics and the economics of the war helped to end the Depression and the accompanying general dense of stagnation and frustration.

References

Bayor, Ronald H. (1988) Neighbours in Conflict – The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941 2nd Ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

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

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

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

Weitzman, Mark (2013) “Artisans … for Antichrist”: Jews, Radical Catholic Traditionalists, and the Extreme Right pp 265-282 from Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity Edited by Charles Asher Small, Leiden: Brill