Anti-Semitism

Father Charles Coughlin at the National Union of Social Justice convention in Cleveland in 1936, attacking Roosevelt’s social agenda and its Jewish supporters.

National opinion polls taken during the 1930s indicated that over one-third of American citizens held negative opinions about Jews and 75 percent were opposed to Jewish immigration. Although American anti-Semitism never approached the intensity generated by the Nazis in Germany, it was openly expressed in academia, business, churches, social organizations and the job market. Anti-Semitic statements made by members of Congress were not rare.

Father Charles Coughlin at the National Union of Social Justice convention in Cleveland in 1936, attacking Roosevelt’s social agenda and its Jewish supporters.

A prominent voice of anti-Semitism in the United States was Father Charles Coughlin whose weekly broadcasts reached an estimated 30 million people. His newspaper, The Social Justice Weekly, was distributed to hundreds of thousands of American homes. Gerald L.K. Smith, a minister turned politician, also had a large following. He published The Cross and the Flag, a newspaper that was both anti-Jewish and anti-Black.

There were approximately 100 anti-Jewish organizations in the country, among them the German American Bund, a group of ethnic Germans with strong ties to Nazi Germany. The America First Committee, a major isolationist group that sought to forestall American involvement in European affairs, did not officially espouse anti- Semitism, but many of the country’s most ardent anti-Semites were among its influential members.