What earned Coughlin his place in the era’s hall of lunatic shame was his increasingly explicit anti-Semitism. The Jews were their own worst enemy, Coughlin said in a 1935 interview: Christian America was right to be suspicious of the likes of financier Bernard Baruch, the entertainer Eddie Cantor, and the Hollywood moguls. As the Great Depression dragged on, the nasty insinuations turned more brazen and blunt. Coughlin’s Social Justice, a weekly magazine with a circulation of 1 million, was especially venomous, venting sentiments that were often coded on the airwaves. Leafing through a sampling of issues, screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. was appalled at the “pure unadulterated Jew baiting” in its pages. Social Justice was known to lift copy verbatim from Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery from czarist Russia purporting to document an international Jewish conspiracy. Coughlin denied any anti-Semitic feelings (“some of my best friends—”) and said Jews should be less sensitive to criticism.
It was the forward march of Nazism overseas that would eventually transform the priest into a pariah. The tipping-point year—for both Coughlin and Europe—was 1938. Appropriately, the sound of the Nazi goosesteps came directly into American homes over shortwave radio, live, from Vienna and Berlin: the annexation of Austria in March, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in October, and (though the sounds of the rampage were not broadcast live) the anti-Semitic pogrom now known as Kristallnacht, unleashed on the night of Nov. 9–10.
Though the domestic zeitgeist had become firmly anti-Nazi, Coughlin continued to use his radio platform to slander Jews. It was just 10 days after Kristallnacht that WMCA in New York felt compelled to call out Coughlin’s many “many misstatements of fact.”
Flamm, WMCA’s president, reminded listeners—and by implication Coughlin—that the station was compelled to take action against the airing of such purposeful untruths. Unlike today’s digital frontier, a Wild West ruled by Big Tech cattle barons answerable only to their stockholders, the broadcasting airwaves are patrolled by a posse of sheriffs, the Federal Communications Commission. Under the Communications Act of 1934, the commission is empowered to make sure that stations operate for “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Though it almost never happens, a station deemed to violate the mandate can have its broadcasting license pulled.