For four decades of its century-long history, Commonweal feuded with the Brooklyn Tablet, a diocesan newspaper with a national, right-wing audience drawn by support of 1930s radio preacher Fr. Charles Coughlin and, later, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. To the Tablet and its fiery managing editor, Patrick Scanlan, Commonweal was “masquerading” as a Catholic publication, written by elitists who catered to a secular media that was hostile to the Church. For The Commonweal—as it was known then—and its editors, Scanlan and the Tablet embodied the wrongs of the circle-the-wagons school of American Catholicism in all its combative resentment.
These battles were fought long ago, but they still resonate in the 2020s. The Christian nationalism that Fr. Coughlin advocated to tens of millions of people in his Sunday-afternoon radio addresses is akin to the ideology now spread on right-wing Catholic websites: politics as spiritual warfare. The Tablet was Coughlin’s chief media enabler, there to legitimize him with the all-in support of an official diocesan newspaper. “The best Catholic weekly in America,” as Coughlin called the Tablet, boosted the priest even when his antisemitism became obvious in the late 1930s. When the FBI arrested seventeen of Coughlin’s most rabid followers in Brooklyn in 1940 on a seditious-conspiracy charge, Scanlan took up the defendants’ cause. The case echoes today’s controversies over the seditious assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
For Commonweal, it was a difficult time to take on the powerful, popular radio preacher. The magazine, founded in 1924, was struggling financially in the late Depression years, and then a controversy over its neutrality on the Spanish Civil War threatened Commonweal’s existence by driving away donors and readers.
In Catholic establishment circles, there was only one correct opinion on the horrific civil war in Spain: to condemn the Loyalists because of the atrocities they committed against Catholic priests and religious as well as their support from the Soviet Union. It was an emotional issue, especially since most Americans supported the Loyalists, isolating Catholic opinion. But the matter was not so clear-cut to George N. Shuster, Commonweal’s erudite managing editor, who wrote in April 1937 that “evil has been done on both sides,” and that the insurgent nationalists, led by Gen. Francisco Franco, were closely connected to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
The backlash that followed this article in the Catholic world stunned Shuster; he soon left Commonweal, where he’d been a mainstay since 1925. (He moved on to a career that included twenty years as president of Hunter College.)
Commonweal’s editor Michael Williams reversed course on the civil war—which also dismayed readers. Much like Coughlin and Scanlan, he campaigned against what he said was biased coverage of the war in the secular press. He brought issues of Commonweal into a pro-Franco rally held at Madison Square Garden. And in a lengthy article in the June 1, 1937, issue of the Forum magazine, he described Scanlan as “a true journalist because he respects truth and seeks it zealously.” (“Flattered!” Scanlan responded in his own column.) Ten days later, Commonweal’s board decided that Williams’s services as editor were no longer needed.
Commonweal editors adopted a new position of “positive neutrality” on the Spanish Civil War, as announced in a June 24, 1938, editorial, pleasing no one. The Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, a prominent Brooklyn priest who was close to Coughlin and Scanlan, accused Commonweal of taking a position of “cowardly pacifism,” and called for a “boycott by every Catholic reader and advertiser worthy of the name.” Many other Catholic publications, including America (“Franco never was a Fascist, and I judge that he never will be,” editor Fr. Francis X. Talbot wrote) and the Denver Catholic Register, condemned Commonweal. It was only the “muddled minds of some groups of ‘willing-to-be-liberal’ Catholics who insisted that there could be two sides to the Spanish affair,” the Tablet said. Coughlin likened Commonweal to Pontius Pilate for refusing to take sides.
“Perhaps, too, we may soon be told by the self-appointed mentors, contrary to the position of our Bishops, to be neutral on ‘birth control,’ and similar questions,” Scanlan opined. “Neutrality sometimes is treason.”
Commonweal’s circulation plummeted 20 percent in a year, with priest subscribers falling from 2,500 to 900.
In that weakened state, Commonweal’s editors had to decide whether to take on the powerful Coughlin, whose antisemitism became blatant during the summer of 1938. Bishops were mostly mute, as was the Catholic press, with the exception of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker. Coughlin began devoting his weekly column in his newspaper Social Justice to publishing chapters of the notorious and—even at the time—obviously phony Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly a Jewish cabal’s master plan for world domination.
“Everyone who mentions the Protocols is listed immediately as a Jew-baiter. That is very poor logic,” Coughlin wrote in his July 18 column, declaring that the book revealed a plan “to destroy civilization” and to “create want in the midst of plenty” to prompt revolution. That is, he was claiming that Jewish bankers conspired with Communists to create the Great Depression. In subsequent columns, Coughlin admitted that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion may well have been a forgery—but insisted that it didn’t matter because even if fictitious, its “prophecy” about a Jewish “plot against Christian civilization” was being carried out.
It took five months for Commonweal to address this, responding only after Coughlin’s notorious November 20, 1938, radio address, in which he shockingly blamed the victims for the Nazis’ nationwide Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews on November 9–10. At that point, the editors threw down the gauntlet with both Coughlin and the Tablet in a pointed editorial. A prescient article in the same December 9, 1938, issue asked the question, “Shall the Jews Perish?” Fr. Gregory Feige wrote that the Jews of Germany were “aware of the fact that they faced, not so much a persecution or oppression, as a deliberate wholesale extermination.” Commonweal urged that immigration rules be relaxed to accept more refugees.
Weeks later, Commonweal ran an article by Msgr. John A. Ryan, head of the Catholic bishops’ social-action department, which exposed the falsehoods in Coughlin’s conspiratorial claims about Jews and communism. “Father Coughlin is eager, or at least willing, to promote anti-Semitism in the United States,” he wrote. In the same issue, Shuster returned to gently dissect Coughlin’s false claims that “international Jewry” was responsible for the Bolshevist revolution.
At that point, it was open season on Commonweal for both the Tablet and Coughlin’s Social Justice. “More ‘Common’ than ‘Weal,’” Social Justice headlined. The Tablet carried numerous letters, often both long and vitriolic, attacking Commonweal, Ryan, Shuster, and others who spoke out against Coughlin. Scanlan wrote that Commonweal “merely represents that ‘forward-looking’ viewpoint which oft-times saves its bricks for Catholics and its bouquets for enemies of the Church.” In the same weekly column, he boasted about new subscriptions from across the country, carped about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointment of Justice Felix Frankfurter because it gave the Supreme Court “two Hebrews,” and complained about the number of German Jewish refugees who were working as doctors in New York. It was unfair, he wrote, that “these Europeans float in, exhibit a certificate, and are set up in a position that it takes Americans years upon years of difficult work to climb into.”
I digress, but I should say that there is a personal element to this story for me. My grandfather, Samuel Moses, was one of those refugee doctors. He arrived in New York Harbor with my grandmother and their two teenage sons on September 13, 1938, and settled in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They said little about their experience as Jews under Nazism, but research I’ve done in recent years documented how the snare closed in around them. SS men were stationed in front of my grandfather’s medical practice in Lörrach, a small city just across the Swiss border from Basel, in 1933. It became illegal to patronize any doctor who was Jewish if “Aryan” doctors were available. (A Catholic man who continued going to my grandfather received a threatening rejection letter from his insurance company that concluded, “Heil, Hitler!”) My grandfather was dismissed as medical director of an orphanage he founded after returning home from his service on both fronts in the Great War, “with the thanks of the City Council” on which he’d once served.
In Brooklyn, Coughlin’s supporters pushed a “Buy Christian” campaign, essentially a boycott of Jewish businesses. New York and Massachusetts were the only states where medical societies were unable to block refugee doctors like my grandfather from getting licensed to practice medicine—which my grandfather achieved, but only after passing the medical examination in English. He was proud to have done that at the age of fifty-five, and was still making house calls in his eighties. I later learned that twenty or more of his relatives, including a sister, had been murdered in the Holocaust.
As a seven-year-old Catholic schoolboy, I found out to my astonishment that my grandparents were Jewish. (My father was a convert to Catholicism.) I became alert to the anti-Jewish bias that was all around. For example: the graffiti on a candy store a block from my house, located on an avenue dividing an overwhelmingly Jewish garden-apartment complex and an almost-all-Catholic section of small, one-family homes. There were swastikas, crosses, and scribblings of that terrible phrase, “Christ killers.” There was not any fuss about it in those days.
At school, the elderly laywoman who taught my second-grade class filled us with apocalyptic tales of the coming world war between communism and religion. Years later, I noticed how the teacher’s ranting sounded like Fr. Coughlin’s radio addresses.
Brooklyn’s fabled Flatbush section, just to the north of my neighborhood, was the hotbed for Coughlinism. There were large Jewish and Irish-Catholic populations in Flatbush during the 1930s and intense competition during the Depression for middle-class jobs as teachers, health-care workers, and government employees. Historian Patrick McNamara, formerly Brooklyn diocesan archivist, writes that Scanlan’s relations with his Jewish neighbors “were marked more by socioeconomic rather than theological tensions.” Scanlan, who was the son of an Irish immigrant, “expressed the resentment that many Irish New Yorkers felt at what they perceived to be Jewish affluence.”
Coughlin’s radio addresses, printed in full and promoted in the Tablet, landed in Flatbush like Molotov cocktails. As I read about this in historian Ronald Bayor’s book Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941, it dawned on me that some of the people who taught me in the early 1960s had come of age in that inflammatory world. Coughlinism was part of my Catholic education.
On June 20, 1938, Coughlin’s Social Justice newspaper announced the creation of a militia-in-waiting called the Christian Front, composed of twenty-five-person “platoons.” There was a hint of apocalyptic violence to come: “It is gratifying to learn that so many persons are interested in making arrangement for the establishment of platoons ‘against the day’ when they will be needed,” he wrote. “The day is not far distant—perhaps a matter of two years.”
The Christian Front soon found its most extreme supporters in Flatbush, led by John F. Cassidy, a law-school graduate who floundered after failing to pass the bar exam. And, as the FBI learned, by the following year, Cassidy’s group began building bombs, training in the woods on assault tactics, and learning to use powerful weapons such as the Browning machine gun. An investigation commenced when the FBI learned from a National Guard sergeant that the Flatbush Fronters had tried to persuade him to pass them weapons from the armory.
In January 1940, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover announced the arrest of Cassidy and sixteen other men, including three National Guard soldiers, on charges of seditious conspiracy. Hoover asserted that the defendants—ten were from Flatbush—intended to install a dictatorship “similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany.”
The alleged plot struck many people as unlikely and ridiculous. But Charles Gallagher, a historian at Boston College and a Jesuit priest, used newly disclosed FBI records to uncover the seriousness of the Fronters’ plans in his 2021 book, Nazis of Copley Square. “Their strategy was to bomb Communist and Jewish institutions in order to incite an uprising among these groups, which were, according to the Judeo-Bolshevist idea, one and the same,” Gallagher wrote, based on memos recounting FBI interviews with the key informant. “Then the conspirators would lead the National Guard in suppressing the rebellion and install themselves as heroic leaders of an America renewed.” The Fronters believed that National Guard members sympathized with their cause and would follow their lead.
It was obvious that the men were acting on the religious ideology that Coughlin instilled in them, but this was whitewashed in Catholic media—the allegations were presented as an anomaly, and the defendants as “victims of their own excessive patriotism,” as the Tablet editorialized. Commonweal was alone in holding Coughlin—and the Tablet—accountable. “Father Coughlin, the Brooklyn Tablet, Social Justice and their many abettors and sympathizers must bear direct responsibility for the plight of these seventeen young men,” Commonweal editorialized, calling the defendants “hypnotized men.” The editorial was quoted in newspapers across the country, sometimes reprinted in full. This was what incensed Scanlan about the little magazine: he believed Catholic opinion should be united, and Commonweal spoiled that by being quoted in secular media as a Catholic source.
Scanlan was up for the battle. In his weekly column, he assailed Commonweal’s “savage” attack, saying the magazine “argues not unlike those who chose Barrabas [sic] in preference to Our Saviour.” He boasted of having the pick of nearly a hundred anti-Commonweal letters to the editor; one of those published, from John Hickey in the Bronx, said, “I had been a reader of ‘The Commonweal’ but its so-called liberalism nauseated me…. Long after the ‘Commonweal’ has gone out of existence, I still hope, I know, I shall still be able to rely on The Tablet for the true side of any news that affects the welfare of our Church.”
Ultimately, the violent plans that the defendants spilled to an FBI informant turned out to be too fantastic and vague for a federal jury in Brooklyn to convict on the difficult-to-prove seditious-conspiracy charge; nine defendants were acquitted and charges were dropped against the rest. It didn’t hurt that the jury forewoman turned out to be the cousin of a Brooklyn priest, Edward Brophy, who was an outspoken supporter of Coughlin in public rallies and author of a fifty-six-page pamphlet praising the Christian Front.
Scanlan triumphantly called on Commonweal to apologize to the defendants. He’d not only used the church newspaper to rally support and money for the defendants—behind the scenes, he also provided the defense with information he’d dug up on the supposed instigators of the arrests, according to research that Fordham University administrator Gene Fein did for his doctoral thesis on the Christian Front.
Fein examined Tablet records that were in the Diocese of Brooklyn archive (but since removed to storage), including Scanlan’s personal notes and correspondence on the Christian Front. Various readers sent him dubious information that supposedly showed that the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League were responsible for instigating the arrests. Scanlan provided it to the defense, which used it to argue to the jury that a Jewish businessman and a rabbi with Communist ties had concocted a “conspiracy to smear and to destroy the Christian Front” because the group opposed American involvement in the war in Europe.
Even after America entered World War II, the two publications steadily abused each other. Former editor Williams, still a Commonweal columnist, lamented that he was familiar with the Tablet “to the point of anger”; it was “a paper which was strikingly unfair in its treatment of the people and the movements it presumed to criticise.” Editor Edward Skillin denounced the Tablet during a speaking appearance as “disgraceful,” among other things, according to a Tablet letter-writer. For its part, the paper printed blistering letters, including one from a priest canceling his Commonweal subscription.
In 1944, the Tablet published a lengthy letter from John Cort, a Commonweal associate editor, questioning some of the newspaper’s assertions. For example: Why did the Tablet contend that Commonweal “masqueraded” as an official Catholic publication? From its start in 1924, it was always clear that it was lay-run, and not trying to speak for the Church. But, Scanlan replied, newspaper and political figures kept calling it an authentic Catholic publication, which greatly irritated him.
In 1947, Skillin published a light column that derided the Tablet for negativity and a fixation, as he saw it, on communism. Scanlan responded that “the trouble with ‘The Commonweal’” was that it failed to stress loyalty to the pope. “Instead, they are comma-chasing, superficially overeducated, and always waving the banner of ‘constructive’ and ‘positive,’ just as others proudly hide behind the banner of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism.’"
McCarthyism gave the two publications more to fight about. A June 2, 1950, editorial in Commonweal called the Wisconsin senator a “reckless, irresponsible bogey-man.” Meanwhile, the Catholic Press Association gave McCarthy a standing ovation after Scanlan introduced him as the courageous victim of a smear campaign.
In 1955, Scanlan commented in his column that “although the ‘Commonweal’ with considerable regularity attacks the Tablet in a sophomoric fashion we pay no attention and, frankly, we have heard of a very few who do.”
But he did indeed pay attention. He was piqued by an “ungallant and uncharitable” Commonweal house ad in 1962 that noted the magazine had “opposed Franco and other dictators abroad, Father Coughlin and McCarthy at home.” To Scanlan, Franco “defeated the Reds and saved Christian civilization in Spain.” McCarthy had been buried “with all the honors of the Church.” And Coughlin remained “one of the outstanding priests in the Catholic church today.”
The maneuvering didn’t really cease until Scanlan retired in 1968, concluding his fifty-year career at a time when the Second Vatican Council had cast a shadow on his combative style, especially in interreligious relations. The next editor, Don Zirkel, was a liberal Catholic filled with Vatican II optimism, as was the new bishop, Francis Mugavero.
As Commonweal prepared for its fiftieth anniversary in 1974, the Tablet said that while its relations with the magazine once amounted to “open warfare,” it could now “rejoice that the once-popular distinction between ‘Commonweal Catholics’ and ‘Tablet Catholics’ is no longer heard throughout the land.” Commonweal welcomed the kind words from the Tablet, “once a Commonweal baiter (though we did a bit of baiting ourselves, come to think of it).”
But, as Commonweal reaches its hundredth anniversary, its history of rivalry with the Tablet and Coughlin’s media machine echoes in divisive new controversies.
American bishops remain mostly acquiescent to the conspiracy theories rife in the far-right Catholic media sphere, which was the case in the Coughlin era. “Of greatest aid to the Front is the absence of a disapproving word from official, authoritative spokesmen of the Catholic Church,” lamented the author of the booklet Inside the Christian Front, published in March 1940.
The scheming of the Brooklyn contingent of the Christian Front no longer looks so fantastical in light of the seditious-conspiracy convictions in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. Some right-wing Catholic “news” outlets cheered on the riot and continue to promote narratives that would have pleased Coughlin.
They’re heirs to Scanlan, who, I believe, was heir to a bare-knuckle tradition in American Catholic journalism that began with James McMaster, an aggressively outspoken Episcopalian convert who bought New York bishop John Hughes’s New York Freeman’s Journal in 1848. McMaster and Scanlan differ from their journalistic descendants such as LifeSiteNews.com or the former ChurchMilitant.com, however, in being deferential to Church authority. But the tradition of belligerent Catholic journalism—more appropriate in McMaster’s era, when sharpshooters were posted to protect Catholic churches from riots—lives on.
So does Commonweal.
