#Father Charles E. Coughlin

[thepopculturearchivist]

MOTION PICTURE HERALD, December 9, 1933

[azspot]

Limbaugh was followed by others in radio and television and online who became his peers in partisan shock-jock “infotainment.” But it is a mistake to consider him the originator of the genre or style. He had his forebears, too, first among them the notorious “radio priest” of the 1930s and 1940s, the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin.

To read Father Coughlin’s articles and the transcripts of his radio broadcasts is to find tropes that have become all too familiar in recent years: a not-always-subtle anti-Semitism; a nativism combined with alarm in response to foreign invaders; open praise for dictators; “both-sides” arguments designed to excuse the policies of genocidal strongmen; the rhetoric of victimization served up to an audience of millions of whites; dog-whistles encouraging sedition and vigilantism; identification of Christianity as the true American religion; and, of course, histrionic claims of censorship when entities, both public and private, cut off his access to his public.

[chiseler]

Downward Christian Soldiers

Father Charles Coughlin, 1930s

On January 14 1940, the FBI arrested 18 men in New York City accused of plotting the overthrow of the U.S. government. Fourteen were snatched up in their homes in Brooklyn, the others in The Bronx and Queens. Searches yielded more than a dozen Springfield rifles, a shotgun, some handguns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and the materials for homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover said they were plotting a terrorist campaign targeting transportation, power, and communications facilities; their goal was to rouse the military into staging a coup, placing a strong dictator like Hitler or Mussolini in power, and cleansing the country of Jews.  

The men were mostly of German or Irish descent, and ranged in age from 18 to 38. If employed (a few weren’t), they held low-end jobs, including an elevator mechanic, a telephone lineman, a chauffeur, a couple of salesmen, a couple of office clerks. The 18-year-old was a student. Most troubling was the fact that six of them were National Guardsmen.

They were all followers of a Father Coughlin-inspired movement called the Christian Front. In his mid-1930s heyday, Coughlin was arguably the most powerful pro-Fascist voice in America. An Irish Catholic originally from Canada, he had first turned to radio in the 1920s simply as a way to expand his ministry beyond his tiny congregation in Royal Oaks. He had a strong radio voice, and when CBS started syndicating his weekly sermons in 1929 it was an instant success. The crash and start of the Depression politicized him. His condemnations of Wall Street and President Hoover brought him tens of thousands of fan letters a week, and his high praises for Hoover’s opponent FDR surely had an impact on the 1932 elections. Then, when the invitation he craved to sit among President Roosevelt’s circle of advisors didn’t come, he turned bitter as a jilted lover. He began denouncing Roosevelt, his New Deal, his Jew York advisors, and his friends in the labor movement as all facets of an international Jewish-Communist conspiracy to destroy Christianity and democracy. He also praised Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler for defending their people against this spreading evil.

Coughlin’s call for a “Christian Front” to combat the Communists’ mid-1930s Popular Front coalition with other groups on the left resonated with the Depression-driven anger and paranoia of many Americans, especially in cities like Boston and New York with large communities of lower- and lower-middle class Irish Catholics, who tended to be shut out of other right-wing movements precisely because they were Irish and Catholic. At his peak, Coughlin had tens of millions of listeners to his Sunday radio sermons, a million readers of his weekly magazine Social Justice, and received millions of dollars in small donations.

By 1938, rabid anti-Semitism had become the centerpiece of Coughlin’s message. That year, at a Christian Front rally in The Bronx, he allegedly gave the Nazi salute and declared, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” In Social Justice he reprinted the anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which also topped Henry Ford’s list of favorite reading. In the autumn of 1938, when Coughlin said the Jews had brought Kristallnacht on themselves, radio stations, including WMCA in New York, dropped him. Several thousand Fronters “picketed the station, its advertisers, and Jewish-owned stores throughout the city,” historian Robert A. Rosenbaum writes. “The pickets returned every Sunday afternoon for many months. In the meantime, gangs of Christian Fronters roamed the streets and subways, peddling copies of Social Justice, distributing anti-Semitic leaflets, and orating on street corners, while harassing and assaulting people they took to be Jewish.” The city’s police force, which was nearly two-thirds Irish, turned a blind eye; some number of them were Christian Frontiers themselves.

The Front thrived in parishes in all of New York City’s boroughs. Some of the first Front meetings took place in a church hall near Columbus Circle, and some of the most frequent and well-attended were in The Bronx. In Brooklyn, Father Francis Joseph Healy, the pastor of the St. Joseph’s parish in Prospect Heights, was also the editor of the Brooklyn diocese’s weekly paper, The Tablet, which he made a platform for extremely anti-Communist, pro-Fascist, and pro-Coughlin thought. After Father Healy’s death in 1940, his managing editor Patrick Scanlan continued the paper’s reactionary slant. Scanlan ran Coughlin’s rants on the front page. Healy’s successor at St. Joseph’s, Father Edward Curran, was also a major supporter of Father Coughlin and other pro-Fascist and isolationist groups. During the war in Spain Father Curran wrote dozens of pro-Franco columns for arch-conservative publications around the country.

By 1939 small cells of Fronters in Manhattan and Brooklyn were calling themselves “sports clubs,” though the only sport they practiced was target shooting at rifle ranges. The Guardsmen in the group evidently pilfered the rifles and ammo from their posts, and trained other Frontiers in how to use them. 


Along with the cops and Guardsmen, the Front cells were also peppered with spies. The FBI had informants keeping tabs on them. Two independent investigators would write very successful books in which they claimed to have infiltrated the Front as well, and dozens of other underground hate groups. Richard Rollins’ I Find Treason would be published by William Morrow in 1941; John Roy Carlson’s similar Under Cover would be a runaway bestseller for E. P. Dutton two years later, galloping through 16 printings in its first six months. Both writers used pseudonyms. Carlson was actually Arthur Derounian, an Armenian immigrant. Rollins was apparently Isidore Rothberg, an investigator for Congressman Samuel Dickstein of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Partly because the writers used pseudonyms while naming scores of individuals they claimed were pro-Hitler and pro-Fascist, both books were widely denounced on the right as fabrications and smear campaigns.


Derounian wrote that he was riding the subway one day in 1938 when he picked up a leaflet of “bitterly anti-Semitic quotations” published by something called the Nationalist Press Association on East 116th Street in Italian East Harlem. He decided to research, and found himself exploring a vast underground world of wannabe Hitlers and Mussolinis, society matron super-patriots, racists, Anglophobes, White Russians, and assorted conspiracy theorists and kooks.
 Born in 1909, Derounian had grown up in another world of hate. After struggling to stay alive as Armenians in Greece at a time of chaos and slaughter in the Balkans, his family fled to New York in 1921. Arthur learned English and earned a degree in journalism at NYU in 1926. In 1933 he learned that the turmoil in the Balkans had followed him across the ocean, when the archbishop of New York’s Armenian Orthodox Catholics, while serving Christmas Mass in his Washington Heights church, was stabbed to death by radical Armenian nationalists opposed to his politics.

So when Derounian read that hate sheet on the subway in 1938, he was primed to follow up. The 116th Street address was an old tenement with a barber shop on the ground floor. The Nationalist Press “office” was a dingy back room stacked to the stained ceiling with right-wing books, newspapers and pamphlets. Poking around in the gloom were a few Italian men and Peter Stahrenberg, a tall blond Aryan type “with blunt features and a coarse-lipped, brutal mouth,” who wore a khaki shirt and a black tie with a pearl-studded swastika tie tack. Stahrenberg was the publisher of the National American, a pro-Hitler newspaper whose striking logo was an American Indian giving the Nazi salute before a large swastika. He was also the head of the American National-Socialist Party. Derounian, calling himself George Pagnanelli and expressing interest in the “patriotic movement,” wormed his way into Stahrenberg’s confidence.

As he explored Stahrenberg’s twilight world, Derounian claimed, he found pro-Nazis and pro-Fascists all over New York City, holding meetings and rallies in every borough. It was a topsy-turvy world where street thugs from the city’s poorest neighborhoods mingled with wealthy Park Avenue crackpots, and Irish Catholic Fronters convinced that Communism was an international Jewish plot sat in the same meetings with Protestant zealots convinced that the Vatican was a Jewish front. He met rabidly anti-Communist D.A.R. socialites, and retired military officers who were certain that FDR and the Jew Dealers were leading the nation to ruin. He met the prominent conservative organizer Catherine Curtis, introducing himself as George Pagnanelli; she kept calling him Mr. Pagliacci. He even found black pro-Nazis in Harlem. Some were attracted by Hitler’s anti-Semitism; others simply cheered the idea of a white man making trouble for other whites.

When the Christian Front clique was arraigned in Brooklyn’s federal courthouse in February, they all pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy and theft of government property. The lawyer for 12 of them was Leo Healy – Father Healy’s brother. A crowd jeered and booed as they were perp-walked into the courthouse. Winchell and La Guardia both derided them as “bums,” La Guardia adding that if they were the best the enemies of democracy could muster, no one need lose any sleep. But the defendants also had their sympathizers. Father Curran was the keynote speaker at a large rally in Prospect Hall to express support for them.  

Fourteen defendants were left when the trial began in April; one of the original 18 had committed suicide, and charges against three others were dropped. As the trial sputtered along through May, it began to appear that the FBI and prosecutors hadn’t built a very strong case. When the proceedings stumbled to a close on Monday June 24, the jury acquitted nine of the defendants and pronounced themselves hung on the other five.


It was a major embarrassment for Hoover. The Front and their supporters cheered it as a great victory, and would continue to spread hate and violence well into the war years. Through 1942 and 1943 there would be numerous reports in the press of roving gangs of young men, mostly identified as Irish and affiliated with the Front, beating and sometimes even knifing Jews in neighborhoods like Flatbush, Washington Heights and the South Bronx, where Irish and Jewish communities abutted. Many shops, synagogues and cemeteries were vandalized. Jewish leaders pleaded with Mayor La Guardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, but they took little action.

Coughlin would rant on into 1942, when the federal government shut down Social Justice as a seditious publication, and the Archbishop of Detroit finally ordered him to stop all political activity. Father Curran, however, continued undeterred, making anti-Semitic, anti-war speeches to Frontiers and others through the entire war.

by John Strausbaugh

[hazardous-waste-containment]

“The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod’s openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (the initials “SS” were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a host of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, seemed even more “un-American” after the great anti-Nazi war. 

Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti–Wall Street, pro–soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-thewealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the “Judeo-Communist conspiracy” and had a real impact. Today a “politics of resentment” rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same “internal enemies” once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.

Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and “degenerate” artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany or the Italian Arditi, and attack the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had “stabbed them in the back.” Fortunately I was wrong (so far). Since September 11, 2001, however, civil liberties have been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists. 

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.”

— Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

[girlactionfigure]

Superman: From Cleveland to Krypton

The Man of Steel's Jewish roots

Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself. —The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the two ordinary young men who created an extraordinary hero, lived 12 blocks apart from each other in Cleveland. The pair collaborated on stories for their high school newspaper and shared a passion for science fiction and pulp comics. It was the 1930s, and comic book publishing was in its infancy. Like many young Jews with artistic aspirations, Siegel and Shuster yearned to break into this fledgling industry. Comic book publishers actively hired Jews, who were largely excluded from more “legitimate” illustration work.

The 1930s were also, arguably, the most anti-Semitic period in American history. Nazi sympathizer Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund led legions of rabid followers on marches through many cities, including Siegel and Shuster’s hometown. Radio superstar Father Charles E. Coughlin of the pro-fascist Christian Front was one of the nation’s most powerful men. And Ivy League colleges kept the number of Jewish students to a minimum, while country clubs and even entire neighborhoods barred Jews altogether.

So Siegel and Shuster began submitting treatments under the pseudonym Bernard J. Kenton, just to be on the safe side. Throughout the Great Depression, the two boys scraped together every penny they could just to cover postage. Shuster sketched on cheap brown wrapping paper.

From these humble beginnings, Shuster and Siegel carved out a character that embodied their adolescent frustrations, served as a mouthpiece of the oppressed, and became an American icon. Many years later, Jerry Siegel recalled the birth of Superman:

The story would begin with you as a child on far-off planet Krypton. Like the others of that world, you had super-powers. The child’s scientist-father was mocked and denounced by the Science Council. They did not believe his claim that Krypton would soon explode from internal stresses. Convinced that his prediction was valid, the boy’s father had been constructing a model rocket ship. As the planet began to perish, the baby’s parents knew its end was close. There was not space enough for three people in the small model craft. They put the baby into it. The mother chose to remain on the doomed planet with the man she loved, and die with him. Tearfully, hoping that their baby boy would survive, they launched the craft toward the planet Earth. Shortly, Krypton exploded and its millions of inhabitants were destroyed.

The idea of for this new superhero came to them in 1934. It would take another four years before Superman would be transformed from a feverish dream to a full-fledged hero. In 1938, Detective Comics, Inc., was looking for a character to launch its new magazine, Action Comics. They paid young Siegel and Shuster $130 for the first 13 pages of Superman. Action Comics #1 came out in June of that year. The issue sold out, and a star was drawn.

In a brilliant stroke, Shuster and Siegel gave their superhuman hero a secret identity, that of an all-too human reporter, the meekly mannered Clark Kent. Practically speaking, this notion of “double identity” allowed for almost endless storyline twists and thematic depth. On another level, it added considerably to the “mythology” that would eventually accrue around this fictional crime fighter. Clark’s shyness undermines his courtship of his co-worker, the gutsy Lois Lane. Siegel and Shuster later admitted that the shy Clark struggling for a date reflected their own social challenges.

Superman #1 was published in the summer of 1939. Across the Atlantic, in Germany, Adolph Hitler was exploiting his nation’s economic and social ills by scapegoating Jews. Living in a country that had stripped them of their citizenship yet perversely obstructed their exit, German Jews resorted to desperate measures. Just as the baby Superman was sent away from Krypton to avoid the mass destruction of his people, many Jewish children were sent on the Kindertransports to seek safety with families in England.

After the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America entered World War II, and so did Superman. In Siegel and Shuster’s comic, Clark Kent tries to enlist in the Armed Forces, but he fails the routine medical examination,. Clark accidentally uses his X-ray vision to read the next room’s eye chart. Distraught, he muses, “I’ve got the most perfect body the world has ever known, and through a sad trick of fate, the army turns me down as hopeless!” This feeling of desperation and despondency was felt across the country. As news of the Nazis’ murderous Holocaust plan emerged, American Jews felt utterly powerless to help their European brethren.

Word of Superman and his ethnic undertones did not escape the enemy’s notice in real life. Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, denounced Superman as a Jew. In April 1940, Das Schwarze Korps, the weekly newspaper of the Nazi S.S., attacked the comic and its Jewish writers:

Jerry Siegel, an intellectually and physically circumcised chap who has his headquarters in New York. . . The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and underdeveloped mind “Superman..

Here were Nazis wringing their hands over a cartoon character cooked up by a couple of boys across the sea. Yet this ideologically driven rant actually touched on something vital–the importance of Shuster and Siegel’s Jewish heritage.

Superman #1 begins with a brief synopsis of the hero’s escape from Krypton, which draws heavily on Jewish sources. Superman’s journey closely reflects the story of Moses. Like the people of Krypton who faced total annihilation, the Israelites of biblical Egypt faced the murder of their male offspring. To ensure her son’s survival, Jochebed places Moses in a reed basket and sets him afloat on the Nile. Her desperate decision is clearly echoed by Superman’s father, Jor-El, who launches the little rocket ship containing his son into outer space.

Moses and Superman are eventually discovered and raised in foreign cultures. Baby Moses is found by Batya, the daughter of Pharaoh, and raised in the royal palace. Superman is found by Jonathan and Martha Kent in a Midwestern cornfield and given the name Clark. From the onset, both Batya and the Kents realize that these foundling boys are extraordinary. Superman leads a double life as the stuttering, spectacle-wearing reporter whose true identity no one suspects. In the same way, for his own safety, Moses kept his Israelite roots hidden for a time.

Superman’s original name on Krypton also reveals biblical underpinnings. Superman is named Kal-El and his father Jor-El. The suffix “El” is one of the ancient names for God, used throughout the Bible. It is also found in the names of great prophets like Samuel and Daniel and angels such as Michael and Gabriel. We may never know whether Siegel and Shuster were aware of these precise Hebrew translations; nevertheless, the name could not be more apt.

While the invincible Superman may have stood the test of time, the lives of his creators were not as triumphant. From the beginning, Siegel and Shuster were so busy they had to hire assistants, but while DC Comics was making millions, Superman’s creators weren’t sharing the wealth. The two men were paid a salary, but their initial payment back in 1938 had included all rights. They had sold their percentage of a goldmine for $130 and were eventually fired from their own creation.

Lawsuits followed. None were successful. Siegel and Shuster tried and failed to create new characters. Their names were familiar only to comic book aficionados. Then, rumors began to circulate in the early 1970s that a big budget Superman movie was in the works. DC Comics received $3 million for the rights to film Superman. Once again, Siegel and Shuster were left out of the equation.

This time, the two men tried a new approach. They bypassed their lawyers and went straight to the media. Newspapers across the world picked up the story of Siegel and Shuster, the poor boys who’d created an American icon, made DC Comics rich — and were now penniless and forgotten. That Shuster was now going blind added to the story’s poignancy.

Legally, DC Comics owed Siegel and Shuster nothing, but bad publicity was costing the company dearly. A financial settlement was reached, and the names “Siegel and Shuster” appeared in Superman comics once more. In 2006, Superman returned to the big screen, and not a moment too soon–in today’s world, we need a hero more than ever.

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week #100 (!)

Yi Yi, my first acclaimed film by Edward Yang. An epic and universal 3-hour story about a middle class family in Teipei. Full of sensitive and profound details, quiet beauty and emotional intensity. (Photo Above).

10/10.  

🍿   

2 films about father-daughter relationships by new Scottish director Charlotte Wells:

🍿 Being a sucker for heartbreaking stories about divorced fathers and their young daughters, Aftersun was right up my alley. Not much is happening in this tender, little film where a woman remembers a Turkish resort vacation that her young father had taken her 20 years earlier. 11-year-old Frankie Cori was tremendous and reminded me of someone... 7/10. 

🍿 I liked Charlotte Wells‘s 2015 Tuesday even more. In this 11-minute short she tells a similar story about a 16-year-old who spend every Tuesday at her divorced father apartment. It’s a nothing story: she goes to his place after school, he’s not there, and she sits around, rummages through his things and goes back to her mom. Sad and delicate. 9/10.

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April Story, my first romantic story by Shunji Iwai. A slight and lovely film about a young woman from Hokkaidō who enrolls in Tokyo University. 4/10.

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Why is Anna Kendrick’s twisted suspense comedy A simple favor such an enjoyable watching for me, so much so that I’ve seen it half a dozen times in the last couple of years? It’s one of those movies that every time I remember it, I give it another swing?

The script follows an unpredictable route and every 15 minutes changes genre and direction. Also noted this time: The score (by Theodore Shapiro, who also did ‘Severance’) is subtle and sublime. 10/10.

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Martin Scorsese Presents: Now that Scorsese‘s 1973 lost film ‘Goncharov’ had become tumblr’s top trending new meme, I finally watched Gomorrah, My first mafia saga by Matteo Garrone. It had been on my film list since I covered half a dozen of Toni Servillo’s films last year. Both films are brutal descriptions of lives caught in the crossfire when two crime families in Napoli starts a deadly feud. Unapologetic violent, nihilistically gory. 6/10.

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More Than I Want to Remember is a simple animated short about Mugeni Ornella, a 14-year-old Congolese girl whose village was burnt down by rebels one night making her a sudden refugee. Told supposedly by the girl herself, it is a poetic, straight-forward and tragic tale. 8/10.

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Another Agatha Christie adaptation, Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express, with an all-star cast, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark and more. Albert Finney is the detective with his ridiculous mustache and the atrocious accent.

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21 old Lumiere films from 1895 to 1902 colorized and up-scaled in 60 fps, with sound. They run 22 minutes, with the first 4m33s describing the enhancing process by the Russian editor. Not historically accurate.

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My first podcast (ever?): Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra. I loved listening to her during W clusterfuck years as she exposed his administration’s grift, graft and malfeasance. But her MO stayed the same, and the times had become darker and worst. In this series, she details the well-documented but somehow-neglected "Mass Sedition Trial" of 1944. The attempts by right-wing American Nazis to overthrow the government, during Hitler’s rise to power: The story of William Dudley Pelley, Earnest Lundeen, Father Charles E. Coughlin and their fellow Republican traitors and Insurrectionists.

However, her specific form of conspiratorial storytelling is grating. After a few minutes of the first episode, I quickly switched to just reading the transcripts. Also it could use a heartless editor: Instead of the nearly 8 hours listen, you’d better read 5 page Wikipedia summery.

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(My complete movie list is here)

[safetyphoto]

Father Charles E. Coughlin speaks at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio,... http://bit.ly/2G2cRyr

[aiiaiiiyo]

Father Charles E. Coughlin speaks at a rally in Cleveland, Ohio, May 1936. [1000x779] Check this blog!

[mindhost]

The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. (...) Much more dangerous [than movements like the American Nazi Party, which utilize already established tenants and creeds from Europe] are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent antisemitism, and spread to the cities of the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around anti-communist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and – after 1938 – anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. (...) Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights. Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emergence after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and "degenerate" artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany and Italian Arditi, and attack youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had "stabbed them in the back". Fortunately, I was wrong (so far). (...) The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascism were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans. (...) No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitation of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (x)

[azspot]

In terms of his breadth of reach as a political propagandist, he has no real parallel in American history. The closest might be the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, known to his radio audience of the 1920s and ‘30s as "Father Coughlin." Coughlin started out as an anti-communist firebrand, and by 1930, his weekly broadcasts reached an audience estimated at 45 million. (Limbaugh claims a weekly audience of 20 million.) He was a major supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, but turned on FDR shortly afterward and became a severe critic of the administration through most of its tenure.

[chiseler]

DOWNWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Father Charles Coughlin, 1930s

On January 14 1940, the FBI arrested 18 men in New York City accused of plotting the overthrow of the U.S. government. Fourteen were snatched up in their homes in Brooklyn, the others in The Bronx and Queens. Searches yielded more than a dozen Springfield rifles, a shotgun, some handguns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and the materials for homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover said they were plotting a terrorist campaign targeting transportation, power, and communications facilities; their goal was to rouse the military into staging a coup, placing a strong dictator like Hitler or Mussolini in power, and cleansing the country of Jews.  

The men were mostly of German or Irish descent, and ranged in age from 18 to 38. If employed (a few weren't), they held low-end jobs, including an elevator mechanic, a telephone lineman, a chauffeur, a couple of salesmen, a couple of office clerks. The 18-year-old was a student. Most troubling was the fact that six of them were National Guardsmen.

They were all followers of a Father Coughlin-inspired movement called the Christian Front. In his mid-1930s heyday, Coughlin was arguably the most powerful pro-Fascist voice in America. An Irish Catholic originally from Canada, he had first turned to radio in the 1920s simply as a way to expand his ministry beyond his tiny congregation in Royal Oaks. He had a strong radio voice, and when CBS started syndicating his weekly sermons in 1929 it was an instant success. The crash and start of the Depression politicized him. His condemnations of Wall Street and President Hoover brought him tens of thousands of fan letters a week, and his high praises for Hoover’s opponent FDR surely had an impact on the 1932 elections. Then, when the invitation he craved to sit among President Roosevelt’s circle of advisors didn’t come, he turned bitter as a jilted lover. He began denouncing Roosevelt, his New Deal, his Jew York advisors, and his friends in the labor movement as all facets of an international Jewish-Communist conspiracy to destroy Christianity and democracy. He also praised Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler for defending their people against this spreading evil.

Coughlin’s call for a “Christian Front” to combat the Communists’ mid-1930s Popular Front coalition with other groups on the left resonated with the Depression-driven anger and paranoia of many Americans, especially in cities like Boston and New York with large communities of lower- and lower-middle class Irish Catholics, who tended to be shut out of other right-wing movements precisely because they were Irish and Catholic. At his peak, Coughlin had tens of millions of listeners to his Sunday radio sermons, a million readers of his weekly magazine Social Justice, and received millions of dollars in small donations.

By 1938, rabid anti-Semitism had become the centerpiece of Coughlin’s message. That year, at a Christian Front rally in The Bronx, he allegedly gave the Nazi salute and declared, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing." In Social Justice he reprinted the anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which also topped Henry Ford’s list of favorite reading. In the autumn of 1938, when Coughlin said the Jews had brought Kristallnacht on themselves, radio stations, including WMCA in New York, dropped him. Several thousand Fronters “picketed the station, its advertisers, and Jewish-owned stores throughout the city,” historian Robert A. Rosenbaum writes. “The pickets returned every Sunday afternoon for many months. In the meantime, gangs of Christian Fronters roamed the streets and subways, peddling copies of Social Justice, distributing anti-Semitic leaflets, and orating on street corners, while harassing and assaulting people they took to be Jewish.” The city’s police force, which was nearly two-thirds Irish, turned a blind eye; some number of them were Christian Frontiers themselves.

The Front thrived in parishes in all of New York City’s boroughs. Some of the first Front meetings took place in a church hall near Columbus Circle, and some of the most frequent and well-attended were in The Bronx. In Brooklyn, Father Francis Joseph Healy, the pastor of the St. Joseph's parish in Prospect Heights, was also the editor of the Brooklyn diocese's weekly paper, The Tablet, which he made a platform for extremely anti-Communist, pro-Fascist, and pro-Coughlin thought. After Father Healy's death in 1940, his managing editor Patrick Scanlan continued the paper's reactionary slant. Scanlan ran Coughlin’s rants on the front page. Healy’s successor at St. Joseph’s, Father Edward Curran, was also a major supporter of Father Coughlin and other pro-Fascist and isolationist groups. During the war in Spain Father Curran wrote dozens of pro-Franco columns for arch-conservative publications around the country.

By 1939 small cells of Fronters in Manhattan and Brooklyn were calling themselves “sports clubs,” though the only sport they practiced was target shooting at rifle ranges. The Guardsmen in the group evidently pilfered the rifles and ammo from their posts, and trained other Frontiers in how to use them. 

Along with the cops and Guardsmen, the Front cells were also peppered with spies. The FBI had informants keeping tabs on them. Two independent investigators would write very successful books in which they claimed to have infiltrated the Front as well, and dozens of other underground hate groups. Richard Rollins’ I Find Treason would be published by William Morrow in 1941; John Roy Carlson’s similar Under Cover would be a runaway bestseller for E. P. Dutton two years later, galloping through 16 printings in its first six months. Both writers used pseudonyms. Carlson was actually Arthur Derounian, an Armenian immigrant. Rollins was apparently Isidore Rothberg, an investigator for Congressman Samuel Dickstein of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Partly because the writers used pseudonyms while naming scores of individuals they claimed were pro-Hitler and pro-Fascist, both books were widely denounced on the right as fabrications and smear campaigns.

John Roy Carlson

Derounian wrote that he was riding the subway one day in 1938 when he picked up a leaflet of "bitterly anti-Semitic quotations" published by something called the Nationalist Press Association on East 116th Street in Italian East Harlem. He decided to research, and found himself exploring a vast underground world of wannabe Hitlers and Mussolinis, society matron super-patriots, racists, Anglophobes, White Russians, and assorted conspiracy theorists and kooks.

Born in 1909, Derounian had grown up in another world of hate. After struggling to stay alive as Armenians in Greece at a time of chaos and slaughter in the Balkans, his family fled to New York in 1921. Arthur learned English and earned a degree in journalism at NYU in 1926. In 1933 he learned that the turmoil in the Balkans had followed him across the ocean, when the archbishop of New York's Armenian Orthodox Catholics, while serving Christmas Mass in his Washington Heights church, was stabbed to death by radical Armenian nationalists opposed to his politics.

So when Derounian read that hate sheet on the subway in 1938, he was primed to follow up. The 116th Street address was an old tenement with a barber shop on the ground floor. The Nationalist Press "office" was a dingy back room stacked to the stained ceiling with right-wing books, newspapers and pamphlets. Poking around in the gloom were a few Italian men and Peter Stahrenberg, a tall blond Aryan type "with blunt features and a coarse-lipped, brutal mouth," who wore a khaki shirt and a black tie with a pearl-studded swastika tie tack. Stahrenberg was the publisher of the National American, a pro-Hitler newspaper whose striking logo was an American Indian giving the Nazi salute before a large swastika. He was also the head of the American National-Socialist Party. Derounian, calling himself George Pagnanelli and expressing interest in the "patriotic movement," wormed his way into Stahrenberg's confidence.

As he explored Stahrenberg's twilight world, Derounian claimed, he found pro-Nazis and pro-Fascists all over New York City, holding meetings and rallies in every borough. It was a topsy-turvy world where street thugs from the city's poorest neighborhoods mingled with wealthy Park Avenue crackpots, and Irish Catholic Fronters convinced that Communism was an international Jewish plot sat in the same meetings with Protestant zealots convinced that the Vatican was a Jewish front. He met rabidly anti-Communist D.A.R. socialites, and retired military officers who were certain that FDR and the Jew Dealers were leading the nation to ruin. He met the prominent conservative organizer Catherine Curtis, introducing himself as George Pagnanelli; she kept calling him Mr. Pagliacci. He even found black pro-Nazis in Harlem. Some were attracted by Hitler's anti-Semitism; others simply cheered the idea of a white man making trouble for other whites.

When the Christian Front clique was arraigned in Brooklyn’s federal courthouse in February, they all pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy and theft of government property. The lawyer for 12 of them was Leo Healy – Father Healy’s brother. A crowd jeered and booed as they were perp-walked into the courthouse. Winchell and La Guardia both derided them as “bums,” La Guardia adding that if they were the best the enemies of democracy could muster, no one need lose any sleep. But the defendants also had their sympathizers. Father Curran was the keynote speaker at a large rally in Prospect Hall to express support for them.  

Fourteen defendants were left when the trial began in April; one of the original 18 had committed suicide, and charges against three others were dropped. As the trial sputtered along through May, it began to appear that the FBI and prosecutors hadn’t built a very strong case. When the proceedings stumbled to a close on Monday June 24, the jury acquitted nine of the defendants and pronounced themselves hung on the other five.

It was a major embarrassment for Hoover. The Front and their supporters cheered it as a great victory, and would continue to spread hate and violence well into the war years. Through 1942 and 1943 there would be numerous reports in the press of roving gangs of young men, mostly identified as Irish and affiliated with the Front, beating and sometimes even knifing Jews in neighborhoods like Flatbush, Washington Heights and the South Bronx, where Irish and Jewish communities abutted. Many shops, synagogues and cemeteries were vandalized. Jewish leaders pleaded with Mayor La Guardia and Police Commissioner Valentine, but they took little action.

Coughlin would rant on into 1942, when the federal government shut down Social Justice as a seditious publication, and the Archbishop of Detroit finally ordered him to stop all political activity. Father Curran, however, continued undeterred, making anti-Semitic, anti-war speeches to Frontiers and others through the entire war.

by John Strausbaugh

[biofunmy]

Alan Brinkley, Leading Historian of 20th-Century America, Dies at 70

Alan Brinkley, one of the pre-eminent historians of his generation, with a specialty in 20th-century American political history, died on Sunday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 70.

The cause was complications of frontotemporal dementia, a neurological disorder, his daughter, Elly Brinkley, said.

Mr. Brinkley’s work spanned the full spectrum of the last century’s seminal events and influential characters, including the Great Depression and World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

His “Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression” (1983) won the National Book Award. And his high school and college history textbooks “American History” and “The Unfinished Nation” were best sellers and frequently updated.

“For the 20th century, Alan set the agenda for most political historians, especially about the New Deal,” Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent magazine, said in a telephone interview.

But his interests ranged widely, and he was devoted to teaching. He received teaching awards at both Harvard and Columbia and held the rare distinction for an American historian of teaching at both Oxford and Cambridge in England.

Eric Foner, a fellow historian at Columbia, wrote in a foreword to “Alan Brinkley: A Life in History” (2019), a collection of essays written in tribute, that the central themes of Mr. Brinkley’s scholarship were “the strengths, limits and vulnerabilities of the 20th-century American liberal tradition; the challenges to it, both internal and external; the connections between popular movements and partisan politics,” as well as the New Deal’s legacies.

Mr. Brinkley grew up in Washington, a son of David Brinkley, the longtime NBC News anchor, who died in 2003. His brother Joel was a reporter and editor for The New York Times and died in 2014; his brother John is a writer at Forbes.

Although journalism was the family business, Alan was less comfortable in that world than his brothers were and toyed with alternatives. After graduating from Princeton, he applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted, but his father’s loathing of lawyers intimidated him and he abandoned that plan.

Alan did not escape journalism entirely. He became a singularly public kind of historian, someone who reached out beyond his academic scholarship and engaged with the world at large through the media in an accessible style.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a historian and later dean at Princeton who was Mr. Brinkley’s adviser on his senior thesis, said he had written with a grace and flair unusual for an undergraduate.

“Even then, he had an uncanny feel for language — a sense of pace, style, composition and felicitous phrasing all too rare among historians in general, let alone history students,” she wrote in the tribute book.

Mr. Brinkley wrote his senior thesis on the Louisiana politician Huey P. Long. He once described the thrill he felt doing research with primary documents.

“I’ll never forget the feeling of opening, for the first time, a box of papers, and holding in my hand a letter that Franklin Roosevelt had written and signed,” he wrote after his first trip to the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y.

Touching that letter, he added, gave him “the sense of being a part of the great tradition of historians who have built their work around this exposure to the immediate product of the minds of the great figures, and not so great figures, of our history.”

His senior thesis became his Harvard dissertation and, later, his first book, “Voices of Protest.” He was fascinated by how both Long and the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, the chief subjects of that book, had used the radio in the 1930s to mobilize their supporters.

“The thread that ran through Alan’s work — that American political history was made as much by popular figures wielding cultural influence as by officeholders and policymakers — was fully developed in this magisterial rendering of Luce’s life,” Lizabeth Cohen, a friend and Harvard history professor, wrote. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Being attuned to contemporary journalism perhaps allowed Mr. Brinkley to be one of the first historians to see the rise of the conservative movement in American politics.

“Very few historians were writing about conservatives, but he had his eyes open,” Mr. Kazin said. “They were changing the political dialogue, and he wanted to understand it. It’s become a major theme in American political history.”

Alan Brinkley was born on June 2, 1949, in Washington. His mother was Ann (Fischer) Brinkley. He was born in the same hospital room on the same day as Frank Rich, the future New York Times chief theater critic and opinion columnist, now a television producer and writer for New York magazine.

Their mothers were good friends, both part of a relatively small enclave of Jewish families in Chevy Chase, Md. The boys remained close friends. Together they watched the first installment of “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” the nightly news program co-anchored by David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, from the Brinkleys’ living room couch in 1956.

Alan attended Landon, a private boys’ school in Bethesda. He graduated from Princeton with a degree in public policy in 1971 and earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1979.

He taught history at M.I.T. before returning to Harvard in 1982 as an assistant professor. He was a popular teacher, with classes so oversubscribed that admittance was determined by lottery, and he won the prestigious Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize.

After just a few years, the history department recommended him for tenure. To the astonishment of many, it was denied.

Mr. Brinkley, who was then in his late 30s, was apparently deemed by senior faculty members too young to deserve tenure, Jonathan Alter, a journalist and former student of his at Harvard, wrote in the tribute book.

“And rumor had it,” Mr. Alter added of those who denied him tenure, “that his popularity — including occasional television appearances — rendered him suspiciously unrigorous in their jealous eyes.”

The denial of tenure to a popular professor became a cause célèbre on campus and renewed debate over the role that teaching ability, rather than scholarship alone, should play in the selection of senior faculty.

In any case, Mr. Brinkley was snapped up by the City University of New York, where he taught before being recruited by Columbia in 1991. He served as chairman of the history department there from 2000 to 2003 and as provost from 2003 to 2009. He retired in 2018.

In 1989 he married Evangeline Morphos, a theater and television producer who held a doctorate in 18th-century English literature and taught theater and film at Columbia.

In addition to his wife, daughter and brother, Mr. Brinkley is survived by a half sister, Alexis Brinkley Collins.

Mr. Brinkley stood up for academic freedom. He refused a university order to dissuade graduate teaching assistants from organizing a union, saying his students could think for themselves. And when faculty members came under attack from partisan outside groups for their teaching, he refused to yield to demands to monitor their classroom statements; to do so, he said, would violate their academic freedom.

Among Mr. Brinkley’s other books were “John F. Kennedy” (2012), “Franklin D. Roosevelt” (2009), “Liberalism and Its Discontents” (1998) and “The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War” (1995).

He also helped his father research and write “Washington Goes to War,” David Brinkley’s memoir of being a young reporter covering Roosevelt and the capital as it prepared for World War II.

“There’s no better portrait of Washington in any era,” Frank Rich wrote in the tribute book, “and in its piquant and touching narrative, you can find a father’s and a son’s droll voices collaborating to enchanting and insightful effect.”

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