For Christ and country: The Christian Front in New York City, 1938--1951.
Item
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Title
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For Christ and country: The Christian Front in New York City, 1938--1951.
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Identifier
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AAI3214534
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identifier
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3214534
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Creator
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Fein, Gene.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard Gid Powers
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | Religion, History of
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study of the Christian Front, an organization of Catholic laity and clergy founded by Reverend Charles Coughlin, which played an important role crystallizing Catholic views on New Deal policies. The Christian Front became part of the fascist minded anticommunist movement of the late 1930s and early 1940s within the context of American Catholic anticommunism. Communism became the scapegoat for what was wrong in the United States. In an effort to fulfill their own quest to become "better" Americans, many of the immigrant and first-generation Fronters went on an all-out assault against the perceived greatest enemy of Americanism and Christianity: communism.;This thesis will focus on the New York branch of the Christian Front. In 1940, the New York unit became the focus of a conspiracy trial in which the Justice Department charged members of the Front with plotting to overthrow the government of the United States.;The Christian Front in New York offers a good case study of grassroots extremism and how extremism is useful in partisan politics. It helps us understand the complex connections between state and societal relations, local ethnic conflict, foreign policy, and international conflict on a grassroots level. By the end of 1939 the Christian Front's rhetoric and actions were imbedded in the American isolationist-interventionist debate. Through its anti-New Deal rhetoric of "act, buy, vote, and think Christian" the Christian Front helped push the isolationist position beyond the political mainstream. Their anti-Semitic views during the neutrality period allowed interventionists to label the entire isolationist movement as pro-Nazi fascists. The subsequent smear campaign perpetrated by both sides as a result of the Front's political activities was the Front's most significant impact on American history.;This thesis is based on a variety of archival sources never before used to study the Christian Front, its local leadership, and membership. Most importantly is the Organization-Christian Front file, a collection in the Fiorello LaGuardia papers which includes details and minutes of nearly three hundred New York City Christian Front meetings. Other archival sources examined included the court records of the 1940 federal trial, the Brooklyn Tablet subject files located in the Diocese of Brooklyn Archives, contemporary press accounts, and exposes of the American fascist movement of the thirties. These sources allowed me to explore the personal motivations of the most extreme members of the Front with a goal of understanding of how extremism functioned in the case of the New York branch of the Christian Front as a combination of a national ideological program and local personal ethnic resentments.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
