Father Coughlin was a Leftist
Posted on December 17, 2007
A little bit of American history you won’t read in your history textbooks
As the Great Depression dragged toward the end of its first decade in 1938, Father Charles Coughlin released the latest issue of his newspaper Social Justice. It reprinted that most notorious and persistent of anti-Semitic tracts, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
Coughlin’s decision to disseminate the spurious conspiracy tale to his millions of followers was not just the same old Jew-hatred, even if part of his financing came from Henry Ford. It marked Coughlin’s transformation from an ardent New Dealer, who had coined the phrase “Roosevelt or Ruin,” to a divisive demagogue.
The through-line from Coughlin the social democrat to Coughlin the biased provocateur was populism. The same ideology that had led him earlier in his public career to attack corporate power and unmediated capitalism, to champion labor unions and activist government, also enabled him to search for a scapegoat.
The above was written by a modern-day Leftist and so pretends that antisemitism was a departure from the Leftist “New Deal” ideas of FDR but we see quite to the contrary here.
(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and TELSTRA/BIGPOND. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
» Filed Under ACLU, Communism, History, News, Socialism
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3 Responses to “Father Coughlin was a Leftist”
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So what is the point of this post? To point out a priest was in a way a anti-semite?
To say he was a leftist is a bit misleading. He hated Rosevelt. (so do I, because I’m a true conservative) Because FDR and his wife were notorious Anti-Catholics. As well as he saw the coming colapes of America, Because of BIG GOVERNMENT.
Please go read Fr. Coughlin, instead of some dirt-bag communist. I’m also assuming you aren’t Catholic
‘Father Coughlin’s influence on Depression-era America was enormous. Millions of Americans listened to his weekly radio broadcast. At the height of his popularity, one-third of the nation was tuned into his weekly broadcasts. In the early 1930s, Coughlin was, arguably, one of the most influential men in America. Although his core message was one of economic populism, his sermons also included attacks on prominent Jewish figures–attacks that many people considered evidence of anti-Semitism. His broadcasts became increasingly controversial for this reason, and in 1940 his superiors in the Catholic Church forced him to stop his broadcasts and return to his work as a parish priest.’
http://www.ssa.gov/history/cough.html
I’m Catholic. I do not know that much about him, true, but not sure I have EVER heard anything good about him.
“Splits” among Leftists are endemic but they are still Leftists