“Anti-Semitism Is a Communist Baby,” March 1939
“Anti-Semitism Is a Communist Baby,” Social Justice, March 20, 1939,
This cartoon/ad that ran in Father Coughlin's publication, Social Justice, combines anti-semitism, anti-Communism, and Catholic Americanism.
Here is the Coughlin strain crystallized in one image.
On March 20, 1939, four months after the windows of Jewish shops across Germany had been smashed, Father Coughlin's Social Justice ran a cartoon on page nineteen.
Stalin cradles an infant in a bassinet labeled ANTI-SEMITISM. Uncle Sam recoils in the doorway, mouth open, palm raised.
The caption holds the whole argument: “Anti-Semitism Is a Communist Baby.” The text underneath supplies the syllogism.
Communism was “Jewry's scheme to gain control of the world,” so the German people, defending themselves against Red Moscow, “rallied round Hitler.”
Note that verb: rallied. The persecution is not caused so much as excused. It becomes self-defense, and the people who were being persecuted become the ones who started it. The equation doing all this work, Jews equals Communism, is never argued anywhere on the page. It is simply set down like a fact and built upon, and the reader is carried past it before there is time to ask.
The baby is telling. Call a thing an infant and no one is to blame for it, since it only did what infants do, which is arrive.
Hatred stops being a choice and becomes offspring, and because the parent is Stalin, coded Jewish by the equation above, the picture manages to say that Jews gave birth to the hatred aimed at Jews.
Uncle Sam, meanwhile, is not rescuing the child and not rejecting it. He is backing away, and his horror is the point, because the text redirects it.
The “remedy for anti-Semitism,” it turns out, is to stamp out Communism, and the bottom third of the page is a coupon asking for one hundred thousand dollars to keep Coughlin on the air.
The recoil is not conscience, it's an alibi. It certifies America as the innocent to whose doorstep a foreign thing was delivered, lets the reader keep every ounce of the prejudice, and converts the fear into a pledge of one, two, five, or fifty dollars, on or before the twenty-fifth of the month.
References/noates
1. Social Justice, March 20, 1939, p. 19. Catholic University Archives, The Catholic University of America.