Forgetting American Terror: The Christian Front
Last updated on: March 6, 2017 at 8:26 am by Philip Jenkins
for PATHEOS/ANXIOUS BENCH
Imagine American cities under siege by extreme Right-wing movements and paramilitary groups calling for armed violence, and actually attacking Jews and other minorities in the streets. You might think that such horrors would be hard to conceal, and the resulting soul-searching would give abundant material to later historians. But here is a mystery. The situation I am describing actually happened in the late 1930s and early 1940s, on a national scale, and the crisis lasted for some years before it was resolved. Yet in contrast to other incidents of ethnic violence – such as lynching – this particular wave of violence and extremist agitation features remarkably little in the media at the time, and in consequence it has received little coverage in subsequent decades. Understanding this silence gives a powerful and quite surprising insight into American religious politics, and specifically the religious influence on the workings of the mass media.
From the late 1930s, extremist movements of various kinds were very active in US cities. Communists boomed on the Left, while various ethnic movements appealed on the Right. German Rightists could join the pro-Nazi Bund, and Italian Fascism exercised an enormous appeal to people of that national origin. Many Irish Catholics followed the extremist anti-Jewish and anti-Communist rhetoric of the radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin. By 1938, the most extreme of these Irish activists had formed into the powerful and widespread Christian Front, which looked to the militaristic anti-Communism of Spain’s General Franco as a model. (Other Irish joined the Bund, which was far less German in composition than we might assume).
From 1939, all these movements became deeply involved in attempts to prevent US involvement in war with Hitler and the Axis.
As Theodore Irwin wrote in Inside the Christian Front (1940)
In New York, where it reached the most advanced stage, the new anti-Semitism has been a domestic storm-troop mob running amuck, spewing racial hatred, fomenting violence, staging street scenes never before witnessed in the city’s history. Composed chiefly of admirers of Charles E. Coughlin and sundry hoodlums, crackpots, misguided patriots, and Bundsters, the Christian Front and its shenanigans have taken on startling resemblances to early Naziism.
At its fountainhead, New Yorkers for more than a year have been subjected each week to an average of forty or fifty turbulent and vituperative Christian Front street meetings, at which crowds have been exhorted to liquidate the Jews in America. Bands of rowdies have roamed subways and streets insulting and assaulting Semitic-appearing men and women; abusive stickers have been slapped on widows of Jewish shops; a “Christian Index” has been compiled for an organized boycott; and brawls have ended in close to 250 arrests and 120 convictions. Men were recruited for a private army. Unfriendly radio stations and sponsoring Jewish merchants were raucously picketed. Affection for Hitler and his policies was outspoken. Christian Front propaganda penetrated even the public schools, and several Jewish children were severely beaten by small-fry Streichers.
By way of background, Irwin was the author of the once-famous 1935 novel Strange Passage, about “undesirable” illegal immigrants being transported across the US by a “Deportation Special” train, to be shipped back to their European homelands. This is apparently the first use of that particular theme in English language fiction, and it is timely stuff.
Street violence against Jews was particularly serious in Boston, where it persisted long after the outbreak of war, and some of the worst violence occurred in 1943. Philadelphia was another storm center, but so in their different ways were Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and all the major urban areas. Across the nation, Christian Front activists drilled, sought out weapons, and organized under the cover of their rifle clubs.
As to what members heard from the leaders of this would-be “private army,” journalist Arthur Derounian reported a meeting he had infiltrated of a Front-allied group at a New York “sporting club.” The militants reportedly mapped “every arsenal, subway station, power house, police and gasoline station, public building” in preparation for a rising. The club leader dreamed of the day of action: “I’d like to be able to pick up the paper someday and read ‘Grand Central Station Bombed,’ ‘The White House Blown to Bits,’ or ‘Queen Mary Sunk at her Dock’. . . . Terror! Terror! Terror! That is our watchword from now on.” Fortunately, it all remained a fantasy – but it still scared the FBI enough to arrest the Christian Front leadership in January 1940, on charges of planning just such a rising. (Let me make clear, I am not necessarily claiming that the Christian Front was ever close to an actual armed outbreak, but their rhetoric was terrifying).
Besides the egregious violence, Rightists in the 1939-41 period distributed thousands of anti-war leaflets and handbills by throwing them from high buildings, or even from low flying aircraft. The object lesson for the readers, of course, was how easy it would be for enemy forces to reach the cities with actual bombs rather than leaflets, so they should think very carefully before risking entry into war. All told, it would have been impossible for a city dweller in that era not to have had some encounter with the extremism bubbling up on the streets.
I cannot write about this in more detail here (because my knowledge is strictly limited), but I just note some intriguing ongoing work by Fr. Charles Gallagher on German intelligence’s recruitment of Boston’s Christian Front militants in the 1939-41 period. There is an excellent account here. I will follow this research with huge interest!
At this moment, even historically well-informed readers might find themselves startled by these observations. Dozens of fascist and anti-Semitic street meetings every week? “Kill the Jews” slogans? The Nazis sponsoring terrorism and hate movements on US soil? Why don’t we hear more about this? Well, some historians certainly have covered the phenomenon, and Stephen Norwood has an excellent Boston-focused article entitled “Marauding Youth and the Christian Front” (American Jewish History, 2003: do read it!). Other scholars have described different local communities, and the Philadelphia story was the focus of my own 1997 book Hoods and Shirts. But these events really have not loomed large in public consciousness, amazingly so given that, as Norwood says, “The pervasive anti-Jewish violence in Boston and New York during World War II suggests that anti-Semitism in the United States, at least in some locales, was much more deeply entrenched than most scholars have acknowledged.” That is an appalling conclusion.
So how do we explain the silence? The crucial factor was that the main perpetrators were Irish, Catholic, and looked as their leader to a Roman Catholic priest, Father Coughlin. Now, the Catholic hierarchy was deeply divided over Coughlin, and a good number of bishops viewed him as a loathsome insect, whose views they detested. However, the church’s traditions were very powerfully directed against any public attacks that might be construed as anti-Catholic, and they rallied to prevent negative coverage. And they were immensely well equipped to do so.
As George Seldes wrote in 1938, the Catholic church was “one of the most important forces in American life, and the only one about which secrecy is generally maintained, no newspaper being brave enough to discuss it, although all fear it and believe that the problem should be dragged into the open and made publicly known”. For the media, the consequences of non-compliance could be painful, and Seldes claimed that “To criticize the Catholic church is to invite a boycott, the withdrawal of advertising, loss in circulation and in revenue.” That censorship extended to international affairs, and woe betide the US urban newspaper that criticized General Franco, or even – God forbid – labeled him a Fascist.
In consequence, you can look carefully through all the newspapers of the time – and each major city had several at this time – and find strikingly little about the street violence, and the racist paramilitary mobs. When violence is discussed, it is virtually never attributed to the true culprits.
Look for instance at Philadelphia, where J. David Stern owned the Philadelphia Record, and ran it in the interests of progressive liberalism and the New Deal. Throughout the 1930s, the Record was the only paper in the city and sometimes the state that would publish stories seen as too difficult by other proprietors. He actually said bad things about General Franco (and it took a year for the Record‘s circulation to recover). But even Stern found the Catholic church too difficult an enemy to challenge.
Treatment of Catholic anti-Semitism was complicated by the structure of the Philadelphia press, in which both the major chains were dominated by Jewish magnates, respectively Moe Annenberg of the Inquirer and Stern of the Record. While both were sensitive to the growth of anti-Semitic activism, neither publisher could risk charges that their papers’ editorial views reflected the interests of a Jewish media conspiracy or cartel. In this context, any confrontation with the Catholic church would be uniquely perilous.
At the height of anti-Semitic agitation and violence by Irish Catholic Coughlin supporters in 1939, even the Record reported and denounced the incidents as fully as it dared, though normally without noting the religious or ethnic identity of the culprits, who are generally characterized as “Nazis” or “Bund supporters.” They are rarely acknowledged as Irish or Catholic. The only exceptions came when some local “Nazi” leader got himself arrested in a fracas, so that his name could finally appear in print, and it was Gallagher or Moran rather than Schmidt.
In Boston, out-of-control street violence against Jews raged until in 1943 the leftist New York paper PM addressed the “organized campaign of terrorism” and suggested, successfully, that the area’s Catholic priests should preach for peace. They did so, and the attacks subsided. Hitherto, the Boston press had basically left the whole matter uncovered, for fear of inviting boycotts from the immensely powerful Catholic Archdiocese. (The Christian Science Monitor also played an honorable role in this affair).
For a remarkable insight into the era, go to youtube and watch the short 1945 film, The House I Live In, a plea for tolerance using the person who was then the coolest of all urban idols, Frank Sinatra. In one scene, Sinatra stops a young street gang beating up another boy, and teaches them lessons in tolerance as the core of the American Way. If your dad was wounded at the front, he asks, wouldn’t you want him to have the blood he needed, from a person of whatever religion? Only a Nazi thinks different. The film does not explicitly focus on anti-Semitism, but obviously that is its whole point. Sinatra’s Italian Catholic background gave him unique credibility to an urban audience.
I should add that the Catholic Church was not the only culprit in this silence. In cities like New York and Boston, the New Deal rested on an alliance of Catholics and Jews, and public tensions between the two key Democratic Party factions had to be minimized. Any news stories of Catholic-Jewish violence would be a propaganda gift to the Germans.
So without newspapers or news media coverage, what is the historian to do? Obviously, part of the answer lies in unearthing confidential intelligence files, as Fr. Charles Gallagher is now doing. But there are other paths of entry.
The gap can also be remedied by oral history, but the whole crisis is actually covered in remarkable detail by several fine novels, which give a wonderful sense of the era. Arthur Miller covers the Christian Front under a pseudonym in his 1945 novel Focus, and Norman Mailer touches on the group’s mob violence in The Naked and the Dead (1948). Harry Sylvester’s 1947 novel Moon Gaffney likewise exposes the anti-Semitic and Coughlinite leanings of some New York Catholic clergy. One of the best sources is Lewis Browne’s 1943 novel See What I Mean, a detailed account of life in the Los Angeles far Right subculture of the era.
So the sources are there, but they require research skills quite different from more “mainstream” history, where we can rely on the news media. The whole sad story is a powerful lesson in the means by which we can know history, and the constraints and prejudices that can prevent us ever knowing the full story.
In historical terms, no news is emphatically not good news.
Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC
The Nazis of Copley Square: the Forgotten Story of the Christian Front
Q&A with Rev. Charles R. Gallagher, S.J.
ByIACS Staff September 28, 2021
Spycraft. Nazis. The Vatican.
In his latest book, Vatican diplomacy expert Rev. Charles R. Gallagher, S.J. casts his glance stateside and takes an in-depth look at terrorism, Catholic theology and the mysterious world of espionage during World War II.
In “The Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front,” Fr. Gallagher spotlights a forgotten history of the American far right by detailing, through previously classified FBI documents, a clandestine plan by Catholic extremists to overthrow the U.S. government.
An expert on Catholicism, diplomacy and international relations, Fr. Gallagher examines the role of the U.S. counterintelligence and the Catholic Church prior to and during World War II to stop the rise of the Christian Front, a paramilitary group of lay Catholics who viewed themselves as crusaders fighting against Communism for the spiritual purification of the nation. Inspired by Nazism and guided by their religious beliefs, the Christian Front sought to incite a revolution and install a temporary dictatorship in the U.S.
Released on September 28, 2021, Nazis of Copley Square is available from Harvard University Press.
IACS spoke to Fr. Gallagher about his new book.
IACS: How did you find the topic and why did you write this book?
Fr. Gallagher: When I was a sophomore in college I took a class on U.S. national security history and my professor was a historian of the FBI. During my research for the class, I found newspaper coverage of a group of Catholics who tried to overthrow the government in 1940. I had never heard of Catholics trying to overthrow any government, let alone the U.S. government. Growing up, I had always been taught to be a patriotic Catholic.
At the time, I wanted to write a paper on this group of “fringe crazies.” But my professor said I couldn’t, simply because there wasn’t anything to write about. He was right — at least, that was the perception for 70 years among historians. The case brought by the U.S. government against the group, called the Christian Front, had faltered, and then World War II arrived. As the larger scope of the war consumed news headlines, everyone forgot about the Christian Front.
When working toward my doctorate at Marquette University, my dissertation was a biography on the first American to be named a diplomat at the Vatican. In the diplomat’s diary, he mentions this group.
The Vatican hierarchy — and even the Pope himself — was concerned about this issue and taking it seriously. They saw the rise of the Christian Front as something that needed to be examined and figured out. That’s when I knew I needed to investigate further.
What challenges did you face when researching and writing?
Fr. Gallagher: I like using intelligence documents to write church history — to see what those agencies are writing about religious actors and religious institutions. Getting these documents declassified is the first thing I have to do. Writing the “Nazis of Copley Square” required getting 4,200 pages of documents declassified by the FBI — a process that stretched six years, requiring a lot of patience and persistence. In the background, I was doing extra research, snooping around and trying to find scraps of documents with information. I consulted between 50 to 60 archives. It takes a lot of time – but the benefit is that you’re the first person seeing this declassified material. I had a jaw dropping moment in just about every chapter I wrote.
Where did the name of the book come from?
Fr. Gallagher: The Christian Front’s headquarters were located at the Copley Square Hotel in downtown Boston, and the organization’s leader was in direct secret meetings with a Nazi SS officer.
Why did it happen in Boston? The city has an interesting history with religious, racial and ethnic tension.
Fr. Gallagher: The Christian Front flourished in Boston because it positioned itself as an organization of lay working class Catholic intellectuals. Boston is unique because of its heightened sense of intellectual fervor, along with the intellectual marketplace happening in the city. The Christian Front was deeply theological in their political organization and political positions. But they were also deeply antisemitic, and their anti-Semitism was religiously rooted in the theology of the day. That’s the sad part of this book — these people were theologically astute and inquisitive, and they applied anti-Semitism in a way that paralleled Nazis, while still being able to call themselves authentically Catholic.
After World War II, the Church began reforming itself, leading to the Second Vatican Council, and a formal condemnation of anti-Semitism.
How did the rise of the Christian Front happen?
Fr. Gallagher: When I approached my editors at Harvard with the book idea, I told them I was researching three different spy rings involving Catholics in Boston. But I wasn’t writing a spy story. Rather, it was a story about religion and theology. One of the Christian Front’s theological impulses I identified in my research was the Mystical Body of Christ, which was dominant in the 1930s – the way that climate change, Laudato si’ and ecological stewardship dominates the Catholic theological discourse today. Mystical Body of Christ theology was transnational, Christo-centric and broke down borders spiritually. When Catholics were persecuted by Communists in one part of the world, Church members across the globe could identify with that pain. The fire-bombing of churches in Barcelona had impact – through Christ’s mystical body – in Boston.
The other pillar of theology that supported the group’s ascendancy was what was then known as Catholic Action. Sponsored by Pope Pius XI in 1922, it was meant to be a global program designed to promote social justice at the parish level, organized by priests and conducted by lay people. Due to Communist persecutions of Catholics in Mexico and Spain, anti-Communism became an unofficial theme of Catholic Action. The Christian Front was led by devout lay Catholics who were supported by several priests. Because they had clergy support, the Christian Front could legitimately claim they were doing “Catholic Action.”
How close did they get to achieving their goal?
Fr. Gallagher: I show in the book how the Christian Front was a serious national security threat from two perspectives: propaganda and paramilitary. It’s a difficult question to answer, because the answer lies within these classified documents – the government didn’t want to tell us how successful they were in their espionage and how close the Christian Front was to reaching their goals. But the fact is that the government viewed them as a serious threat to national security.
What lessons can we learn from the rise of the Christian Front?
Fr. Gallagher: Catholic leadership needs to pay attention to the fringe in order to govern effectively. The proclivity of an institution is to dismiss the fringe as inconsequential, but I think it’s more important for Catholic leaders, rather than dismiss the fringe within the church, to try to come to an understanding on what their motivations and their grievances are so they can be effectively addressed.
Did the Christian Front have a lasting impact on western Catholicism?
Fr. Gallagher: They became a link in the chain of what is far-right extremism today. They became progenitors of many of the impulses still present – they kept breathing above water with many of these ideas embraced by the American far-right. In doing so, the Christian Front allowed these ideas to maintain life on the political spectrum. Their ideas informed the anti-Semitic Christian Nationalism of the 1950s, the American Nazi Party of the 1960s, the Christian Identity Movement of the 1990s and impulses found in some areas of the far-right today.
Editor’s Note: Charles R. Gallagher is an associate professor of History at Boston College. His book “Vatican Secret Diplomacy” won the John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association.
