Despite
the setback of the Union Party's election results, Father Coughlin
continued his radio messages, where the
content largely emphasized the distribution of wealth in a Robin Hood
fashion, and how to do otherwise was a sin against all that is God. His
populist voice, however, did have a dark side, and it was this dark
side that led to the downfall of his radio time, and ultimately his
political
career. This dark side largely revolved around his obsession with
ridding the US of Communism and with a supposed Jewish-Bolshevik
conspiracy (Holocaust 1). The result was an unintended association with
German-American Nazi-sympathizers, the Friends of the New Germany
(commonly known as the German-American
Bund, or simply, the Bund) through his distrust of the "international
Jew," a distaste for communism (which led to his initial support of
Hitler's and
Mussolini's squelching of communism), and his connection to the
Christian Front.
Even as early as 1930-31, Father Coughlin was denouncing communism on
the airwaves and at his public speaking engagements.
Communism was no
friend of the Catholic Church, and thus
no friend of Coughlin's. He stated his view in a radio broadcast from
that period:
But I have studied
it long enough
to understand that men do not become communists because of its atheism,
its hatred of their country, or their desire to see their wives and
children and themselves reduced to public property in a militaristic
state. Communists are merely men as you and I, but soured and
leaderless, generated by the protected injustice which withholds from
them their bread and butter and their piece of mind (Sweat 107).
 It
was the sentiment of this message that led the German-American
Bund to proclaim the name and message of Father Coughlin. With 25,00
members including 8,000 uniformed Storm Troopers, they were a highly
organized group under the command of Fritz Kuhn, a man known in 1939 to
be the highest-ranking anti-Semite in the U.S. (Holocaust 2). The
Bund, under Kuhn's propaganda, saw the leaderless man that Coughlin
refers to as well as the distribution of wealth, as exactly what Adolf
Hitler and Benito Mussolini were fighting in Europe. An article in
Coughlin's Social
Justice
praising Hitler's and Mussolini's squashing of
communism also fueled
the Bund and their anti-Semitic views (Tull 206). Father Coughlin's
denouncing of the "international Jew" as the source of banking and
economic woes, thus the cause of the Great Depression added more fuel
for the
Bund fire. Coughlin never claimed official association with the Bund,
and while he casually disassociated himself from their activities, he
did share some of their common vision including their belief in an
historically discredited document called the Protocols
of the (Learned)
Elders of Zion  ,
a document that was supposedly created as the minutes of a meeting of
world Jewish leaders bent on taking over the world (Tull 193).
|
