Coughlin's Argument
Now to Coughlin himself, because this broadcast is a key here, and because it shows the machinery running.Coughlin begins by promising to add his voice to those protesting the persecution. Then he asks a question that pretends to be neutral. “Let us pause to inquire,” he says, why Nazism is so hostile to Jewry and how the Nazi policy of persecution “can be liquidated.” The word to watch is liquidated. He has turned the persecution into a problem to be managed rather than a crime to be condemned, and he has already made the Jews its cause.
The answer he gives is the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, delivered in the cadence of a lecture.
He tells his listeners it is “the belief, be it well or ill-founded, of the present German government” that the Jews were responsible for the economic and social ruin of Germany since the Treaty of Versailles. He launders the claim through the phrase be it well or ill-founded, so that he can broadcast it without owning it.
Then he narrates the rise of Hitler as self-defense. Since 1923, he says, as communism advanced through Germany, a group of Germans under an “Austrian-born war veteran, Adolf Hitler by name” organized to overthrow a government under which communism was gaining, and “to rid the fatherland of communists whose leaders, unfortunately, they identified with the Jewish race.”
Then the sentence the whole talk turns on:
“Thus, Nazism was conceived as a political defense mechanism against communism and was ushered into existence as a result of communism.”
So Nazism is not an aggressor. It is a defense mechanism. It was not chosen, it was ushered into existence by communism, and communism, he adds, was itself the work of a group of Jews.
The Jews cause communism, communism causes Nazism, and Nazism, regrettably, must defend itself against the Jews. The persecution the November 16 broadcasters had gathered to condemn becomes, four days later, the reasonable last step in a chain the Jews began.
Three things are worth noting here, because each one comes back later.
First, the argument never proves its premise. That the Jews are communism is simply asserted, in Coughlin's authoritative radio voice, and the authority does the work that evidence would. This is why Gerber's distinction matters. Coughlin is broadcasting the extraordinary claim in the reassuring tone of the ordinary.
Second, the persecution is reframed as self-defense, which means Coughlin never has to ask his listeners to hate anyone. He asks them only to understand. That posture — sympathy for the Christian and the Jew, understanding for the persecutor — is what makes the broadcast more dangerous than a plain slur. It lets a decent person keep the prejudice and feel fair minded while holding it.
Third, this is Catholic material, not imported wholesale from Berlin. Coughlin's strain drew on an older Catholic theological contempt, the view of Judaism as a religion superseded and displaced, and married it to the economic conspiracy and the fear of communism. The Brooklyn Tablet carried it in print. The Christian Front would carry it into the street.
That is the setup. Four days in November 1938 give us the two Americanisms in their own words, and give us Coughlin building, on the air, the exact argument the rest of this collection follows.
In March 1939, Social Justice drew it as a cartoon — a baby in a bassinet labeled anti-Semitism — and it is worth looking closely at that image.
From there the defensive strain goes underground after the Christian Front is shut down, into Francis Moran's Friday Group and the covert life Professor Gallagher has traced. And the other Americanism, the pluralist one that lost the radio war in 1938, does its slow work through the Social Action Department and George Higgins all the way to the Second Vatican Council, where the church that once let Coughlin broadcast would declare, in Nostra Aetate, that the Jews are not cursed and that antisemitism is to be condemned. The two voices from November 1938 do not stop arguing. It takes the church until 1965 to answer.
References/Notes
1. All Coughlin quotations on this page, and the Brooklyn Tablet / Scanlan / Christian Front claim: “Persecution — Jewish and Christian,” November 20, 1938, ACUA / CUA transcript; Mazzenga, Toward and American Catholic Response to the Holocaust in Religious Responses to the Holocaust, pp. 89–90.
