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Christian Front

After 1936, Coughlin began supporting an organization called the Christian Front, which claimed him as an inspiration. In January 1940, a New York City unit of the Christian Front was raided by the FBI for plotting to overthrow the government. Coughlin had never been a member but his reputation suffered a fatal decline.[25]

Coughlin was a giant in the history of radio, both the prototypical televangelist (he raked in the bucks) and the first political loudmouth with a mass following: He drew 40 million listeners in the early thirties to his Sunday afternoon program, double the 20 million that Rush Limbaugh has claimed for his audience. But he didn’t just talk; he urged action—illegal and terrifying. By1938, increasingly unhinged and openly anti-Semitic, Coughlin was using his radio pulpit and his 200,000-circulation newspaper, Social Justice, to advocate for the creation of a violent hate group, the Christian Front. The group soon boasted members numbering in the thousands throughout the cities of Northeast. It has largely been forgotten that Coughlin’s “platoons,” as he called them, were responsible for a months-long campaign of low-level mayhem in New York City: They attacked Jews with fists and sometimes knifes. They boycotted Jewish-owned businesses (guided by a “Christian index” of shopkeepers) and sometimes smashed their windows in the German fashion. This ugly episode culminated when 17 Coughlinites were arrested by the FBI in January 1940 and charged with planning acts of terrorism against Jewish individuals and institutions (and those deemed their allies).

Alone among Coughlin’s more than 60 affiliates—the priest had an audience of about 15 million listeners at this point in his career, author Donald Warren has estimated—WMCA in New York had heard enough. Management canceled his show after Coughlin refused to allow them to alter his scripts before he delivered them. (A Newark station promptly offered him airtime.) Coughlin’s militia—he had called for “a virile, closely woven Christian Front” to serve as “defense mechanism against Red activities and as a protector of Christianity and Americanism” and many chapters had formed throughout the five boroughs and in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and other cities—was outraged. Hundreds began picketing the WMCA station in midtown Manhattan every Sunday, shouting anti-Semitic slogans, stopping traffic, and instigating fights with passing Jews (or those who seemed to the thugs to be Jews). The CF held street-corner rallies throughout the city, often at highly trafficked intersections in communities populated by Jews and Irish. (“Most members of the Front were Irish Catholics,” wrote scholar Ronald H. Bayor). In July 1939, James Wechsler wrote in The Nation of “several stabbings, a multitude of street fights, deepening tension in mixed neighborhoods … [which is] almost uniformly ignored by the press, partly because it fears to tread on Catholic toes and partly because it still believes in the silent treatment for anti-Semitism.”