Charles Coughlin

Charles Coughlin (1933)

Charles Edward Coughlin (born October 25, 1891 in Hamilton , Ontario , Canada , † October 27, 1979 in Birmingham , Michigan , USA ) was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church , known as Father Coughlin through his sermons on the radio and his anti-Semitic positions gained national fame.

Life

Coughlin, who came from an Irish immigrant family, was one of the first clergy to use the new medium of radio. From 1926 his sermons were broadcast weekly. As a gifted preacher he quickly became popular, at times he received up to 80,000 letters a week; it can be assumed that up to a third of the US population followed Coughlin's sermons at least occasionally. Politically, he supported against the backdrop of the Great Depression first the Democrats and the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt , but then waved to a center position between the Keynesian government policy and that of Republicans advocated laissez-faire - policy to.

By the mid-1930s, Coughlin began blaming private banks in general, and the Federal Reserve Bank and Wall Street in particular, for the US's obvious economic problems. On a political level, he founded the National Union for Social Justice and the Union Party , which, based on Coughlin's popularity , tried to target farmers in the American Midwest with their anti-banking rhetoric . However, the party failed in the elections; instead of the targeted 9 million votes, William Lemke , the presidential candidate, received only 900,000 votes, which was perceived as disappointing.

After 1936, anti-Semitic elements became increasingly prominent in Coughlin's sermons and articles. He accused the Jews of being “murderers of God” and made them responsible for capitalism , liberalism and communism . In his newspaper Social Justice he printed the minutes of the Elders of Zion and shortly after the Reichspogromnacht 1938 he described them as a result of the persecution of Christians by Jews, for which he was celebrated by the press in the Third Reich . On December 18, 1938, Coughlin organized a demonstration in New York against the admission of refugee Jews from Nazi Germany; this demonstration was followed by an anti-Semitic smear campaign that lasted for months ; According to the FBI , Coughlin received material support from German authorities. In 1938 he threatened the Jews with even harsher treatment than in Germany. A so-called Christian index should serve to identify businesses owned by Christian owners and help to boycott businesses run by Jews; the slogan used here was: “Buy Christian!”. Another project by Coughlin during this period was the Christian Front organization , which sought an authoritarian dictatorship and set up arms stores (with the aim of attacking Jewish institutions and the Federal Reserve ). When the FBI exposed these activities in 1940, the Christian Front was disbanded. Coughlin's public image was badly affected.

Coughlin also received support from isolationists on the America First Committee , such as the patriotic Jewish Chicagoer Milton Mayer . In a contribution “The Case against the Jew” to a series of articles in the “ Saturday Evening Post ” he directed himself against “the hasty and sterile attempts at assimilation of the Jews” and called for the ghettoization of the Jews in the United States . “Denouncing Coughlin will not save him (the Jew). The destruction of Hitler will not save him. All these false hopes are based on the great error of his adaptability. ” Hannah Arendt and Joseph Maier replied to Milton Mayer's article on April 3, 1942 in the emigrant newspaper“ Aufbau ”with the article“ Cui Bono? ”:

“But in order to criticize the Jewish people today, at the time of their greatest need, one must be legitimized. For legitimation it is not even enough to have never sat at a table with the enemies of his people. It can only grow out of that passionate commitment to the future of the people, who are concerned with more than the souls of isolated individuals. Self-criticism is not self-hatred. The purpose of the Jewish patriot's criticism of his own people is to better prepare the people for battle. Such rebellion can never hurt. Milton Mayer's questionable courage to half the truth only helps the cheeky lie of the anti-Semites. Anyone who, like him, wants to chase us back into the ghetto, even if it is, as always, dressed with rags from the junk room of theology, has excluded himself from the ranks of those to whom we, the people, are ready to listen. "

In 1942, due to increasing public pressure (he was banned from appearing under the Sedition Act and was no longer allowed to send his magazine via the United States Postal Service ) and a ban on speaking and writing by the Catholic Church, Coughlin had to stop his radio broadcasts and withdrew harked back to his pastor in Royal Oak , Oakland County . During his final years, Coughlin wrote against communism and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council .

literature

• Mary Christine Athans: The Coughlin-Fahey Connection: Father Charles E. Coughlin, Father Denis Fahey, CS Sp., And Religious Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1938–1954 (= American university studies: Series 7, Theology and religion, Volume 102). P. Lang, New York, Frankfurt am Main et al., 1991, ISBN 0-8204-1534-0
• Sheldon Marcus: Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower. Little Brown, Boston, 1973, ISBN 0316545961 , LCCN  73-186969 .
• Thies Schulze: Coughlin and his good shepherd. The political agitation of the radio preacher Charles Edward Coughlin and his Bishop Michael Gallagher in the mirror of Vatican sources. In: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 22 (2009), pp. 567–595.
• Donald I. Warren: Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin The Father of Hate Radio. Free Press, New York 1996, ISBN 0684824035 , LCCN  96-015519 .
• Charles E. Coughlin , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 03/1980 of January 7, 1980, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Werner Bergmann : Coughlin, Charles Edward. In: Handbook of Antisemitism . Volume 2/1, 2009, pp. 150-153.

Web links

Commons : Charles Coughlin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Robert Rafalski: Father Charles E. Coughlin. National Union for Social Justice. ( Memento of January 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Information on the Religious Movements Page of the University of Virginia as of April 17, 2001
• Newspaper article about Charles Coughlin in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .