"Then, too, there was Father Coughlin. "I take the road of Fascism," he said in 1936, before forming the Christian Front, whose members referred to themselves as "brown shirts." His virulently anti-Semitic radio program, regularly transmitting claims from the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reached almost 30 million Americans at its height—the largest radio audience in the world at the time. Those listeners tuned in at the end of 1938 as Coughlin was justifying the violence of Kristallnacht, arguing that it was "reprisal" against Jews who had supposedly murdered more than twenty million Christians and stolen billions of dollars in "Christian property"; Nazism, he said, was a natural "defense mechanism" against the communism financed by Jewish bankers. Coughlin’s weekly newspaper, Social Justice, which had an estimated circulation of 200,000 at its height, was described by Life magazine at the time as probably the most widely read voice of "Nazi propaganda in America.""
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AntisemitesAnti-communists from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesCatholics from the United StatesClergy from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Sarah Churchwell "American Fascism: It Has Happened Here" The New York Review of Books (April 22, 2020)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin
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Charles Coughlin
Charles Edward Coughlin (October 25, 1891 – October 27, 1979), was a Canadian-American Roman Catholic priest based in the United States near Detroit. Commonly known as Father Coughlin, he was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience: during the 1930s, an estimated 30 million listeners tuned to his weekly broadcasts. He was forced off the air in 1939 because of his pro-fascist and anti-semitic rhetoric.
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