The Christian Front on the Force: Catholic Fascism in the NYPD through the eyes of the Yiddish and African American Press, 1939-1954

In the summer of 1939, dozens of concerned citizens wrote to New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia expressing their suspicions that the New York Police Department had a Christian Front problem. In violent confrontations between supporters of Father Coughlin, the celebrity right-wing “radio priest,” and his critics, the police seemed to favor the “Coughlinites.” The Christian Front was a nominally ecumenical, but mostly Catholic, political formation inspired by Coughlin’s antisemitic vision of “social justice.” Coughlin’s idea of “social justice” (the title of his weekly newspaper) included purging the United States of leftists, bankers, and other perceived Jewish influences. In January 1940, after the FBI arrested eighteen Brooklyn-based Christian Front paramilitary members for insurrection, an internal NYPD survey revealed that 407 NYPD officers self-identified as members of the Christian Front – almost certainly an undercount, given the survey methods and the ongoing prosecution of Christian Front insurrectionists. 

This period of rising Catholic fascism embedded within organs of state power such as the NYPD carries important lessons for 21st century US politics, and for our contemporary analyses of police violence, white Christian nationalism, and fascist visions of purging the nation of racial and religious others. In particular, the under-studied analyses of those directly targeted by Christian fascism, especially Jews and African Americans writing for the Yiddish and Black press in New York City, offer nuanced real-time investigations of Catholicism and policing with clear relevance for contemporary conversations about Christianity and state power. This presentation focuses on Yiddish-language and Black press coverage of Catholic fascism in the NYPD at the outbreak of World War Two, in order to 1) argue that Yiddish and African American media sources offer much more perceptive analyses of Christianity and politics in this period than the white-dominanted English language press, and 2) show how Catholic fascism endures both through and beyond the Christian Front, facilitated by multifaceted ties between the police and the Church. The white Christian nationalist paramilitaries of the mid-century may have ceased to exist as specific organizations, but the alignments they reinforced between police, far-right politics, and white Christianity have been far more durable than any individual party, periodical, or brotherhood.

Throughout the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, the New York Yiddish press, including the social-democratic Forverts, the communist Morgen Freiheit, and the anarchist Frayer Arbeter Shtimme, printed extensive coverage of Christian nationalism and the NYPD, including investigative series and editorials that interpreted the nexus of Catholicism, policing, and right-wing politics for their readers. This presentation draws on Yiddish journalism as a critical resource for the study of white Christianity, foregrounding the perspective of those targeted by Coughlin and the Christian Front. One of the Front’s most ardent clerical supporters, Father Edward F. Brophy, once joked to a crowd in Boston that “I come from New York. I don’t know Yiddish yet, but suppose I’ll have to learn it.” Yiddish thus functions in this historical moment not only as a language spoken and read by a sizable portion of New Yorkers, including Mayor La Guardia, but also as a symbol for those on the right of the dangers of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Yiddish-language journalists used the threat of the Christian Front as an opportunity to educate their readers about Catholic history and sociology, continuing the Jewish tradition of producing reliable representations of Gentile communities in New York City for the purpose of navigating dangerous terrain. While not minimizing the threat of Christian nationalist antisemitism, these journalists were keen to underscore that Father Coughlin did not speak for all Catholics, and to offer an empirically grounded representation of mid-century white Christianity in New York City. In their reporting, white Catholics are represented as friendly, persuadable, but deeply naive and vulnerable to antisemitic propaganda.

At the same time, Black periodicals such as the Amsterdam News, the New York Age, and the communist Crusader Press Agency followed cases of anti-Black violence that seemed to trace back to the Christian Front and other white nationalist paramilitaries, and argued for increased hiring of Black police to combat racism within the force. Black journalists analyzed Coughlin’s racism in relation to their simultaneous coverage of the invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy, and protests against imperialism in multiple African contexts. They also situated Coughlin in a longstanding critique of the New York Archdiocese for its disregard for racial oppression in the city, while refusing to treat Coughlin as the legitimate representative of the Church as a whole. In his column for the Amsterdam News, W.E.B Du Bois referred to Coughlin’s paramilitaries as “The Un-Christian Front.” Like their Yiddish counterparts, Black journalists were keen to understand and cover fascist and racist Catholic figures while reinforcing their distance from the views of most white Catholics.

The story of the Christian Front and the NYPD represents both continuity and rupture in the police’s relationship with the far right. Then, as now, it remains difficult for the police to deal with far-right recruitment in their ranks. At the same time, church support for policing remains strong even as the power and influence of institutional Christianity has waned, as both clerics and cops are portrayed as pillars of a traditional moral order. This presentation demonstrates the significance of the imbrication of white Christian nationalists and police institutions and practices in mid 20th century New York, drawn from the critical perspectives of community periodicals serving marginalized groups. I underscore the importance of this history for understanding the ongoing relationships between religion, race, and state violence that endure in the present day, and the lessons of this period for contemporary resistance to far-right understandings of white Christianity and state power.