Stephanie Hinnershitz:
In early November of 1938, Nazi Party leaders and members of the Hitler Youth and the SS, or Storm Troopers, unleashed a wave of violent pogroms across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. They subjected Jews to brutal beatings and destroyed Jewish property, as well as sacred religious artifacts. While many expressed sympathy for Jewish victims of what would be known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, there were those right here in America who took to the airwaves to rally support for the Nazi regime's attacks. One of the most prominent voices in the late 1930s was radio host and Detroit-area priest Father Charles Coughlin. Historians believe Coughlin's radio show reached millions of Americans, perhaps as many as 30 million people every week at the peak of his popularity. And Coughlin repeatedly told his audience an unfounded conspiracy theory in the late 1930s: that Jews were associated with international communism and posed a threat to Christians in the United States. Coughlin would cite quotes from articles in an attempt to support his argument.

Charles Coughlin:
Moreover, I have before me a quotation from the periodical named the American Hebrew of September 10, 1920, which says, "The achievement, the Russian Jewish Revolution destined to figure in history as the overshadowing result of the World War was largely the outcome of Jewish thinking, of Jewish discontent, of Jewish effort to reconstruct." Let all remarks be couched in the language of charity when referring to that quotation. It was a Jewish effort to reconstruct. But in justice, we expect that results, that truth founded upon fact and experience, now, will convince all Jewish leaders worthy of the name to repudiate vigorously atheistic communism and its followers when submerges the fanged serpent of persecution.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
I'm Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, fellow with The National WWII Museum's Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. Eighty years ago this year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under pressure to do something about the plight of Europe's Jewish population, created the War Refugee Board, which began a shift in American and international policy. But the road to that point was not easy or inevitable. In this podcast series, we explore the threat posed by antisemitism and highlight those who countered it in prewar United States and throughout the war. You may hear disturbing and offensive voices, but you'll also hear the bravery of those who stood against hate and the legacy of their activism, which continues today. In this first episode, we explore Father Charles E. Coughlin, who used his regular radio broadcast to deliver sermons that charged Jews with economic and social unrest in the United States. But he was only one of many prominent voices who embraced such conspiracies and prejudice for political gain. The National WWII Museum fellow, Dr. Jason Dawsey, provides some more background on Coughlin.

Jason Dawsey:
He's probably one of the most influential figures in American history from the 1930s. So he's a Catholic priest based in the Detroit area, actually in the suburb of Royal Oak. He'd been there for several years. And he really gains notoriety because of this radio show. I know we'll talk about that a bit. In his political stances, he had not been a person terribly known for politics prior to the 1930s, really prior to the Great Depression. He was obviously a priest with a congregation that he would preach to and he looked after, but people didn't really know him as a political figure. They thought of him as, he's clergy. That's how they thought about him. And then, he goes through this transformation during the Depression where he becomes this national figure. And that's how people remember him today. So he has this radio show called The Hour of Power, and this show was, typically, you would hear it on Sundays.

And at the beginning of the show, when it really starts the mid-late 1920s, he's talking, not surprisingly, a great deal about his faith, about being a priest, about the challenges that Catholics face, et cetera. And then, when you get into 1929, 1930, he begins to speak much more about political and economic issues. And from the beginning, he acquires this reputation as someone friendly to the little guy, little gal. And that really does stick with him for much of the 1930s. I should just say it here at the outset, I know we're going to get into his message some, but Coughlin's message evolves. So if you started listening to him in 1930 and then, you somehow skip forward to 1938, ’39, you would be startled by how his message, how his politics, for that matter, even about how his theology develops over that decade. And it's quite telling that, in 1932, he's very enthusiastic about Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He really does believe that Roosevelt is going to do great things for the country. He was over the Republican Party, and Hoover, he thought, "Okay, these are just failure after failure." He's friendly to New Deal liberalism, but he has this side of him. It's there already, but it begins to become predominant in his thought. And it's really worth mentioning right here, which is that something he had inherited going back years, in terms of becoming a priest, this focus on the Catholic Church's ideas about simplicity, living a very simple non-materialistic life and a concern about finance, about banking, about speculation, a lot of attention to how money can make more money, without producing any kind of useful commodities for anyone.

And this opened up, as it did for many, not only in the Catholic Church, but outside of it, it opened up to stereotypes about Jews being associated with money, with big money, with manipulating the stock market and people involved in banking and finance and these complicated transactions that oftentimes ordinary people had a difficult time understanding. So those ideas are there. They're there in 1932, ’33, but they're not, if you will, predominant yet. And I think a lot of people, maybe they would peg him as, again, a kind of liberal, but they would have a difficult time knowing maybe where he was at on the spectrum. But obviously, as you get into the 1930s, he will move more and more to the right, in fact, extreme right.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Coughlin wasn't the only one voicing antisemitic sentiments in public. Gerald L. K. Smith was a minister who was propelled into prominence when he too took a turn into politics. Smith did not have the massive audience of Coughlin, but his far-right advocacy made its way to the airwaves and to speeches around the country.

Jason Dawsey:
So in the case of Gerald L. K. Smith, he's from Wisconsin, so he's got at least a Midwestern base. Coughlin, I don't think I mentioned, but is actually from Canada, but settled in Michigan. In Smith's case, people would later identify him with the deep south. He will become a very strong supporter of Huey Long in Louisiana during the 1930s. The Great Depression is a big event for him. And at this point, he supports Huey Long and the Share the Wealth program, which has, what would you want to call it, at least sort of socialistic overtones. And Long is assassinated in 1935, but he's really on board with Long and at least not overtly hostile to the New Deal. In fact, in many ways, during FDR's first term, you could call him someone who thinks FDR is not going far enough, that he's not bold enough, he's not radical enough.

And for both men, there's this sense that what's going on here, there are a lot of things they speak up about, starting in the mid-’30s, but that Jews dominate the economy. And FDR is not only unwilling to challenge their dominance, but you'll start seeing rhetoric from both of their, if you will, camps, their groups of supporters that FDR himself is a Jew. This starts to begin to shade into just outright craziness and just sort of open antisemitism. In the case of Coughlin and Smith, there's this real effort to challenge FDR. There'll be this party called the Union Party, that Coughlin will especially swing behind in 1936. It's a politician out of North Dakota, William Lemke and Coughlin will confidently predict that Lemke is going to get nine million votes against FDR. He gets like 900,000, so slightly less. In fact, FDR is resoundingly reelected in 1936, even by a larger margin than four years earlier.

And for someone like Smith, who had supported Huey Long, that's who he thought was going to be the challenger to FDR. So both men, in other words, are really stymied in what they're envisioning for the US in the mid-’30s. FDR is not only back, he's stronger than ever. And so, both men will move increasingly to the far right. Coughlin is far better known, however. This Hour of Power program, it's really hard, I think, for a lot of us, to imagine how popular he is, unless you're using the comparison with cable TV, something like 30 million listeners at its peak, out of a country with 130 million or so people in 1940. That's just astounding, the number that you're talking about there.

And some of his supporters will form what's called a kind of Christian Front organization, where you can already see there's this kind of fusion of nationalism and Christianity, antisemitism and Christianity. It just becomes much more formal. And Coughlin will say, "Look, I'm not a Nazi. I'm not a Fascist in the Mussolini sense." So he tries, in some ways, to keep his distance rhetorically. And yet, at the same time, you see him making more and more positive statements about both dictatorships in the late 1930s, that they had been willing to take the necessary measures, to help out the little guy, little gal, to get the economy going again, and to confront Jewish dominance in quotes. So that's there, it's also true with Gerald L. K. Smith.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
This rhetoric was creating an uneasy atmosphere for American Jews. In an interview with The National WWII Museum, Alan Moskin, a liberator of Gunskirchen [concentration camp], recalls, before the war, his father's reaction to hearing Coughlin.

Alan Moskin:
The ’30s or when Hitler started to come into power, we had wind of it. You would get stories from people that the Jews heard, but not to the extent that I realized later, that it wasn't too good. Some of the Jewish people were coming already, I think, to the States. Relatives would talk about the coming to the States. They had somebody, because they weren't happy about what rumors, what was going on. And Hitler, this is in the low or mid-’30s, again, I was, what, about 10 or 12. So I wasn't a history buff, but I just remember hearsay, hearing people talk about that it wasn't too good with Hitler in Germany.

And then, I remember there was a fellow that was on radio a lot, that you got to remember, we didn't have any television. And his name was Father Coughlin, he was a Catholic priest or somebody. He had a radio program. And I remember my father used to get so upset and say that Father Coughlin was talking about, it was antisemitism about the Jews killed Christ and stuff like that. And it was very upsetting. And I saw my father was very upset by it. And again, I was a very young boy, and I just remember these things. But apparently, even back then, there was this guy on the radio that was preaching the antisemitic stuff.

Jason Dawsey:
Both of them kind of ratchet their rhetoric up more and more, the hostility to Roosevelt, the hostility to American Jews—hostility to Jews, for that matter, everywhere—this really toxic kind of combination of nationalism and Christianity. And they begin to, especially in Coughlin's case, work with, to a limited degree, this Christian Front. Many of Coughlin's supporters there will work openly with the German-American Bund of Fritz Kuhn, that's openly pro-Nazi and is best known, I think, to American audiences for the big rally they hold in Madison Square Garden in New York City in February 1939, some 20,000 people there. There's some attempt to really link Nazism to Americanism, that's a key part of that. And there are Christian Front people that are there.

And this whole development the two of these men undergo is really remarkable. You look at a figure like Smith, he will eventually say that Jesus is not a Jew, he's a Gentile who's crucified by the Jews. And so, he begins to sound much more like these really extreme people in Nazi Germany who tried to "Aryanize Christianity." It's a small phenomenon at the start, but the Nazi regime swings behind it. And Smith begins to kind of mirror them in his own way. And so, you do have attacks on American Jews, particularly in a place like New York City, where it's much more open. It becomes a real issue for the city, for the mayor, for the police department, about these kind of open assaults. It begins to look like things that people have been seeing in the American press, in Germany and Austria, elsewhere, countries working with, allied with Hitler. So it is quite disturbing about these incidents.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Edward Field, who served in the Air Force and later became a poet, experienced this malice firsthand as a child living with his family in Long Island, New York.

Edward Field:
My parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, moving into a community that—we were Jews and really the only Jews in the neighborhood, and it was very antisemitic before the war. America has changed tremendously in that way, but it was a very difficult place to grow up in. We were despised. And the very first day in school, a teacher came into the class, not the little first grade teacher, another teacher, and said, "Who's the Jew?" And I had to raise my hand. And it simply was a nightmare growing up in that town, because I was beaten up every day going to and from school. The first thing anybody asked you when they met you was, "What is your religion?" And because I was dark, I had dark, curly hair, unusual in that town, I was always, no, I think everybody in my family was persecuted. It was simply a horrible time. In fact, it was the center, one of the centers of the German-American Bund, which was the American Nazi Party, which was quite respectable before the war. So growing up in Lindbergh was truly a nightmare.

Stephanie Hinnershitz:
Americans seeking explanations for their economic plights turned on the radios and tuned into the conspiracy-laden broadcasts of Father Coughlin and Gerald Smith, increasing the membership of antisemitic and radical organizations in the late-1930s, but a counter-movement to antisemitism was also growing. Join us next time when we discuss 1939 Nazis at Madison Square Garden.