Underground: The Christian Front's Afterlife
The defensive strain goes underground, but does not disappear.
The public machinery came apart quickly, as Charles Gallagher recounts in his book, The Nazis of Copley Square. The Brooklyn cell of the Christian Front was arrested in January 1940 on charges of plotting sedition, and though the case collapsed in court, the name was now poison. In April 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle shut down Coughlin's Social Justice under the Espionage Act, and Coughlin himself was silenced by his own archbishop. By the standard account, this is where the story ends, with the Front broken and the radio priest muzzled.
It is not where the story ends. Charles Gallagher has followed one of these men into the years after, and what he found is that the Front did not die so much as disperse. In Boston, its organizer, Francis Moran, had been thinking about going to ground since at least the spring of 1941, and when the police came he told them plainly what he meant to do. “If they are foolish enough not to lock me up,” he said, “I'll continue to work personally.” He had already warned his followers that “the Christian Front will go on, even undercover if necessary.” He meant it.
What replaced the rallies was smaller and harder to see. Moran began holding weekly meetings in private homes with his most committed people, a group they called the Friday Group. It was, in Gallagher's account, a remnant cell of the Christian Front, an advanced workshop in antisemitism where, out of public view, Moran refined a more extreme version of the ideology than he had ever put on a stage. And he was not the only one carrying it. A late 1942 report by the Office of Strategic Services concluded that the front had “metastasized,” that it “continues to act in Irish associations by controlling key positions,” and that in Moran's stead Father Edward Lodge Curran was keeping front-like meetings going.
When a movement loses its platform, we tend to assume it has lost. Moran shows the other possibility. The platform is only the visible part. Take it away and the belief can go on in a living room on a Friday night, refined rather than abandoned, waiting.
There is a second afterlife, quieter and harder to document, worth naming carefully. The energy of the defensive strain, its certainty about a communist enemy, flowed after the war into a respectable Cold War anticommunism that no longer needed the Jew to name its enemy. That is a different fate from Moran's. His was the antisemitism itself, kept alive underground. The other was the same fear given a more acceptable object, which is why it became invisible while Moran's did not. You can watch it happen in the Brooklyn Tablet, which carried Coughlin's line in the thirties and became a respectable Cold War anticommunist organ in the fifties, the same enemy with the Jew removed. Keep the two apart, and you can see both the persistence and the disappearance in the same postwar decade.
References/notes
On the January 1940 arrests of the Brooklyn Christian Front, the April 1942 suppression of Social Justice under the Espionage Act, and Coughlin's silencing by Archbishop Edward Mooney, see Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), Moran's statements to the police and to his followers on continuing “undercover,” see page 215.