Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange
Abstract
Vol. 1A, no. 7; Joseph P. Kennedy image on front page; 19 pages
Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Father Charles Coughlin was a Canadian-American Catholic priest known in the 1930s and 1940s for his virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Communist tirades, employed to great effect on his radio program (Hour of Power), and in his magazine Social Justice. His confused mix of free market capitalism and socialist ideas of income guarantees and wealth redistribution, increasingly gave way to inveighing against both capitalism and communism, and aligning himself with the fascist demagogues Hitler and Mussolini. Jews, Coughlin believed, were behind the Communist revolution, Jewish financiers were secretly attempting to control world government and politics, and Jews in general exerted a corrupting influence on culture and politics. Indeed, Marxist atheism was, in Coughlin’s mind, a Jewish plot against the United States. His belief in Jewish world domination was bolstered by the discredited forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a version of which was reprinted in Social Justice. Coughlin became an isolationist along with the staunch Anti-Semites and unabashed Hitler admirers Charles Lindberg and Joseph Kennedy. America, he believed, should not intervene in a European war which was ultimately instigated by the Jews.https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/2435/thumbnail.jp
