(Jewish Group) Social Justice in Detroit

In the early 1920s, the automobile magnate Henry Ford began publishing a series of articles in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” This was called the “most systematic campaign of hatred against a people in American history.” Although Ford issued a retraction and an apology in 1927, he kept his interest in the Jews alive by supporting the radio priest Charles Coughlin and his National Union for Social Justice (NUSJ).

Charles Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1891. He started out as a small-town Canadian parochial school teacher before he was granted his own parish in Michigan during the 1920s. In 1926 he was assigned to the Royal Oak parish just outside of Detroit. His church there became known as the Shrine of the Little Flower. When a local radio station gave him broadcast time on Sunday evenings to boost church attendance, it became the start of his hugely successful career in radio, the new media of the Roaring ’20s.

Coughlin’s populist style and Irish brogue were a hit in the new medium. Soon his show had many listeners and he made sufficient money to purchase radio time in other cities. He called his show the Radio League of the Little Flower. In no time, he became a national figure, broadcasting to 16 stations over the CBS radio network. At the outset, his shows were aimed at children, and featured lessons in religion with rudimentary politics and economics. However, as his fame increased, he began to assail bankers, communists, and capitalist greed.

During the first years of the Roosevelt administration Coughlin supported the president, labeling the New Deal “God’s Deal.” But he soon turned on Roosevelt, becoming convinced that Jews controlled the White House. By 1935 Coughlin’s network, extreme views, and influence reached an audience of 20 million listeners. Detroiter Grant Silverfarb remembered listening to Coughlin’s Sunday night radio broadcasts. “He scared the hell out of me,” he said. “He sounded like Hitler in his attacks on the Jews. I worried that what happened in Germany might also happen in the United States. After his broadcasts, I always found it hard to fall asleep.”

Coughlin claimed that capitalism was doomed and not worth saving. He believed that Roosevelt, who he privately referred to as “Rosenfeld,” was secretly a Jew. He began to speak out against the New Deal and proposed a set of controls that he labeled “Social Justice.” In order to spread his views, he created a monthly magazine under the title Social Justice. The magazine eventually achieved a circulation of more than a million copies. After his split from Roosevelt, and with the rise of fascism and National Socialism in Europe, Coughlin attacked Jews explicitly in his radio broadcasts. From early attacks on Jewish bankers, he moved on to attacking Jewish communists.

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