The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany into the U.S.” and fifty two percent were
opposed to contributing “money to help Jewish and Catholic exiles from Germany settle
in other lands.” 35 Eighty three percent stated in a 1939 poll that if they were elected to the
Congress they would oppose any legislation that would allow “more European refugees”
to enter the country. 36
Roman Catholic Father Charles E. Coughlin, an initial FDR supporter but later a
vocal, high profile and passionate foe of the Administration’s New Deal, was one of the
most outspoken anti-Semites of the 1930’s who actively made use of the press and
broadcast media. His rhetoric increasingly conjoined economic turmoil and an unstable
banking system with world Jewry and Communism. He called for the creation of a
“corporative state” in America in which political parties would be abolished and each
social “class” would have its own Congressional representative. Selection of the
President would be through a House vote rather than popular election. 37
Utilizing his
magazine, Social Justice, and his organization, The National Union for Social Justice,
plus an association with the Christian Front, Coughlin maintained that he held “no
animosity towards the Jews [but] did distinguish most carefully between good Jews and
bad Jews as well as I do between the good gentiles and bad gentiles.” He asserted that
his primary focus lay on the “atheistic Jew and gentile, the communistic Jew and gentile
who have been responsible…for the discriminations and the persecutions inflicted upon
the Jews as a body.” He believed that Jewish renunciation of and active opposition to
35 Robert Edwin Herzstein, Roosevelt and Hitler: Prelude to War (NY: Paragon House, 1989), 256.
36 Harwood, “American Public Opinion,” 202.
37 Daily Worker, March 14, 1938, 1. Coughlin (1891-1979) became a Catholic priest in 1923 and pastor
of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1926.
130