Nostalgia about the World War II era and the “Greatest Generation” often obscure the reality that the pre-World War II United States was hardly immune from the antisemitism sweeping Europe during that same period. The “Radio Priest”—Royal Oak, Michigan-based Father Charles Coughlin—regaled millions of listeners on a weekly basis throughout the 1930s, variously attacking communism, the Roosevelt Administration, and the country’s big banks using frequently antisemitic language and framing. Amid the turmoil of the Great Depression, Coughlin’s populist, anti-establishment message found willing ears—even when it deviated into open Nazi sympathies and antisemitism. Following Kristallnacht in 1938, for instance, Coughlin defended the Nazi regime’s actions and blamed Jews for the violence.
Coughlin’s influence was shockingly vast, extending from an estimated radio audience of 30 million each week, to a newspaper called Social Justice that was sold on the street corners of American cities. Coughlin supporters founded chapters of a new organization called the Christian Front around the country to fight against alleged communist influence. In 1940, 17 members of the Christian Front’s Brooklyn cell were indicted and accused of plotting to overthrow the United States government by force. All 17 were eventually acquitted of the charges—but, as historian Charles Gallagher has recently shown, the plot was real, and the Christian Front plotters did intend to carry out their bloody plans against the U.S. government.
Coughlin’s political impact extended beyond his most die-hard supporters as well. Recent research by University of Toronto economist Tianyi Wang has found that geographic areas where the stations carrying Coughlin’s broadcasts had the strongest signals recorded lower support than the mean for President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1936 election; were more likely to have branches of the nation’s most visible pro-Nazi group, the German American Bund; and less likely to buy war bonds after the U.S. entered the conflict. This latter finding is particularly significant given that Coughlin’s last radio broadcast was in May 1940, before FDR was elected to his unprecedented third term in office and more than a year before Pearl Harbor.
Powerful media voices like Coughlin helped foster an environment in 1930s America where antisemitism became a facet of the wider political discourse, though often confined to the margins. Chapters of the German American Bund sprung up across the country throughout the decade, and its summer camps hosted children and instilled them with the tenets of Nazism. Critically, the Bund and other antisemitic groups including the Silver Legion, presented themselves as patriotic, authentically American groups rather than adherents to a foreign ideology or government, despite being obvious Nazi emulators. And while neither group had a serious chance of winning a national election, it was impossible for Americans to simply ignore the organized antisemitism emerging around them.