Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front - Charles R. Gallagher
Published in 2021 by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
336 pages
ISBN: 9780674983717
Christian Nationalism is appearing to make a comeback within mainstream political discourse. Consisting of ideological beliefs such as that America was founded as a Christian nation and that “Judeo-Christian principles” should be promoted throughout the government in the face of a perceived attack on Christian values, Christian Nationalism has found a home within the MAGA branch of the Republican party. While most Americans have either never heard of Christian nationalism or have a negative opinion of it, the slim number of its advocates wield a disproportionate amount of power in local, state, and national politics, as they believe that they are the last bastion fighting against the influences of secularism. Its influence can be widely seen through restrictionist immigration policies, anti-LGBTQ legislation, and protests and rallies across the country that call for a return to “Western values.” Christian nationalism all too often serves as an ideological cover for white supremacist, xenophobic, and ethnonationalist authoritarian beliefs, frequently justifying political violence to dissolve the separation of church and state and restore America to a mythic past.
On a personal level, I was raised in a religious environment in which Christian nationalism was the norm. Especially in a post-9/11 context, I remember pledging allegiance to the American flag and the Christian flag at school and singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” at Fourth of July-themed church services. Growing up, I was taught that to be a patriotic American, one had to be a good Christian. Likewise, being a devout evangelical Christian was also seen as a prerequisite for what it meant to be a true-blooded American. Christian nationalism permeates my earliest memories of religion and politics, and it has taken many years to overcome its pernicious grip.
While I originally thought that this movement was rooted in Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority movement of the 1980s, it turns out that America’s relationship with Christian nationalism has a much longer trajectory over the twentieth century. While the current support for Christian Nationalism is largely founded in white evangelical Protestant communities, these ideas were supported by a small group of Catholics during the early decades of the twentieth century. Regularly regarded as a small footnote in the history of American religion, the Boston-based Christian Front served as a breeding ground for religious extremism, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, pro-Nazism, and domestic terrorism during the 1930s and 40s.
In his 2021 book, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front, Charles R. Gallagher (Associate Professor of History at Boston College and Jesuit priest) provides an in-depth examination of the Christian Front and its impact on its surrounding communities in New York and Boston. Tracing the militant actions and rhetoric of the Christian Front’s leader Francis Moran, his funding by influential Catholic figures like the infamous Father Coughlin, his close personal relationships and correspondences with key figures of the Nazi Party, and his surveillance by the FBI and British intelligence during the height of WWII, Gallagher shines a light on this underexamined extremist political and religious group, filling in a key piece in the history of the American far-right.
Overview:
When considering World War II, we often frame the United States’ role in overly simplistic terms. While some may know that many Americans were isolationist in their outlook toward the war before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, many of us are completely unaware that there was sizable support for the Nazis on American soil. While nearly everyone today considers the Nazis to be unequivocally evil, there were many Americans who were sympathetic to the anti-Communist and anti-Semitic outlooks of the Nazis during the 1930s and early 40s. These groups admired Hitler’s authoritarian leadership, and his strong anti-Communist stance resonated with many in the US who also sought to combat the “godless” Communists. These groups, including the German-American Bund, were actively encouraged by the Nazi German government, as they advocated to keep the United States out of the war.
As such, several American fascist groups blossomed during this period, one of which was the Christian Front. Gallaher begins the first several chapters by recounting the group’s activities in Brooklyn under the leadership of John F. Cassidy, who was personally selected by the infamous and wildly influential anti-Semite and anti-Communist Father Charles Coughlin. Seeking to combat what they perceived to be “Judeo–Bolshevism” forces, Cassidy and his men gradually amassed rifles and explosives from a National Guard depot and began shooting exercises and other militia-style drills in the woods of Pennsylvania.
Eventually, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover issued a warrant for Cassidy’s and sixteen other group members’ arrest on charges of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government. Gallagher covers the trial, as prosecutors argued that the defendants planned to throw bombs into the windows of the Cameo Theater, the Jewish Daily Forward, and the Daily Worker in order to incite the Jewish community and Communists in New York City to revolutionary action as a justification for stepping in and crushing them with the National Guard, within which they planned to infiltrate and plant Christian Front members. The case eventually disintegrated and the defendants were acquitted of all charges, and their militant actions were simply labeled as a “playful plot.”
Gallagher believes that the case fell apart for two main reasons: (1) the jury forewoman was a close cousin of one of the Christian Front’s most vital supporters and married to the lead defense attorney and (2) the prosecution was not willing to discuss the religious roots of the Christian Front, which Gallagher implicitly asserts was an attempt to shield the Catholic Church from any connection to this extremist group.
He argues that Catholic theology gave the Christian Front an intellectual foundation and popular appeal that it otherwise would not have possessed, namely its Mystical Body of Christ Theology and the Catholic Action movement, which encouraged Catholics to have a larger influence on society and politics. The Mystical Body of Christ is a Catholic theological concept that all Catholics are organically united as one body through the Holy Spirit with Christ at the head. When combined with the classic anti-Semitic notion of Jewish deicide (the belief that Jewish people are collectively responsible for the death of Jesus) and fear of Communists after they fought against Catholics and nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, Catholic leaders such as Father Coughlin could weaponize doctrine and contemporary events to villanize the Jewish community and Communists and gather widespread support for the Judeo–Bolshevism conspiracy theory. Gallagher writes, “This was not a matter as simple as distorting true Catholic teaching. Rather, the Christian Front appropriated true Catholic teachings and left them intact while grafting their own view of Catholic activism on those teachings” (41-42).
After recounting the failed plot of the Brooklyn Branch, Gallagher turns his attention to the activities of the Christian Front in Boston, focusing primarily on its idiosyncratic leader, Francis Moran. A former Franciscan seminary student who was recently fired from an insurance agency after a verbal spat with his boss (a Jewish war veteran), Moran became enraptured with Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts during the Great Depression. These broadcasts were especially popular among Boston’s Irish Catholic population, and Moran adopted Coughlin’s virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Communist perspectives. Moran decided to head the Boston chapter of the Christian Front, disseminating Nazi propaganda and giving rousing speeches defending Germany.
Soon, the German consul in Boston and Nazi spy Herbert Scholz took notice of Moran’s fiery speeches and activism. A close associate of SS Chief and primary architect of the "Final Solution" Heinrich Himmler, Scholz saw the potential to utilize Moran to ferment anger among the Irish Catholics of Boston and mobilize them against Britain and its allies. With lingering resentment against Britain for longstanding colonialism and mistreatment and a latent undercurrent of anti-Semitism already baked in, the Boston Irish Catholic community was fertile ground for the Christian Front to sow their pro-Nazi sentiments.
By 1940, Moran was recruited by Scholz and became an agent for the Nazi German government, and he stationed the main office of the Christian Front within the Copley Square Hotel in downtown Boston. In addition to giving rousing speeches, Moran would also distribute pro-Nazi pamphlets, organize screenings of pro-Nazi films (much to the delight of Joseph Goebbels), and attempt to undermine various recruitment efforts of the U.S. Army. He also once tried to entreat the Army and Marines into adopting a specific rifle because German intelligence already knew its specifications and could arm their military accordingly. He argued that fascism was the only force that could push back against what he perceived to be the dangers of Communism, which he believed was secretly run by Jews. He spread anti-Semitic ideas, including the false claim that Catholic soldiers were forced to eat meat on Fridays during Lent while Jewish soldiers were given easier jobs and had several days off for Passover, and made lavish profits from selling poisoned food to the military. Essentially, by saying that the Jewish community was receiving undeserved enjoyment while the Catholic community suffered directly as a consequence, Moran hoped to build resentment against the Jewish community, echoing similar strategies utilized by Hilter and the Nazi Party.
By this point, Gallagher argues that Moran had become a full-fledged unregistered foreign agent for the Nazi German government. This was considered a federal crime, yet the FBI and other federal agencies failed to take action against him. They surveilled his office, intercepted his mail, infiltrated several Christian Front meetings, and eventually the Boston Police Commissioner arrested him, but he was subsequently let go. Otherwise, after their failed attempt to convict Cassidy and his men in Brooklyn, the FBI never made a move against Moran or the Christian Front in Boston.
Frances Sweeney and British intelligence, however, had other plans. Only in her early thirties, Sweeney was an avid fighter against the forces of fascism and antisemitism in Boston. As an Irish Catholic herself, she was appalled by how many of her fellow Irish Catholics in Boston were so easily swept into anti-Semitic rhetoric. As the Irish were persecuted for their religious and national identity, Frances believed that they should be all the more empathetic toward racial and religious minorities. She was a fervent critic of Coughlin and his anti-Semitic rhetoric, and through her Irish American Defense Association, she worked tirelessly to fight against Moran and the Christian Front in Boston. She believed that antisemitism was inherently antithetical to the Gospel, and she utilized her Catholic faith as a wellspring for fighting alongside the marginalized and oppressed. Before passing away in at the young age of 36 in 1944, Sweeney fought tirelessly to undermine the hateful rhetoric of Moran and the Christian Front, eventually leading to its shutdown and ouster from the Copley Square Hotel in 1942 (although the Front continued to operate at a much-reduced capacity until the War ended three years later).
As it turns out, Sweeney had some help in her work, as she was covertly funded by British intelligence. While Moran was fully aware of his role as an agent for the Nazi government, Sweeney was completely unaware that she was being funded by the British government, believing instead that she was supported by her fellow Americans who likewise were appalled by the pro-Nazi Christian Front. Gallagher believes that this funding must have been funneled through someone she trusted and respected, and while he makes many inroads in discovering much about the British intelligence operations in the US, he admits that the identity of Sweeney’s contact remains elusive.
While the Front continued to operate under cover after 1942, it lost most of its momentum in the following year. Moran joined the Army in 1943, where he was placed in a squad specifically for soldiers with questionable political allegiances. After the War, he worked as a taxi driver for a time before settling down, marrying and having children, and working as a reference librarian at the Boston Public Library (ironically right next to the Copley Square Hotel) before passing away in 1971 in West Roxbury.
Commendations:
There are several notable strengths within Nazis of Copley Square. First, Gallagher has compiled a well-researched and deeply resourced examination of The Christian Front, which has been a historically under-examined group. Gallagher examines a litany of documents, including public records, FBI surveillance records, federal dossiers, and other documents obtained through multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from various historical archives. Through his meticulous use of primary sources, Gallagher reconstructs the ideological roots of the Christian Front, offering the reader a crucial insight into the formation of a far-right fascist group and their attempts to undermine and overthrow the Roosevelt administration amid the Second World War. His use of biography, primarily of Cassidy, Moran, Scholz, and Sweeney, allows us to reevaluate surveillance and counterintelligence to organize covert operations in New York and Boston during the late 30s and early 40s.
In addition, it was enlightening to consider the role that Irish-Catholic identity played in mobilizing the population to support different positions. The German government used the resentment the Irish felt toward the British (justifiably so, I might add) to promote isolationism and keep the US from joining the Allies in the War. On the other hand, progressive Irish-Catholics such as Sweeney took their Irish heritage and Catholic faith as symbols of solidarity to advocate and struggle for the dignity of other populations who were being marginalized and oppressed.
In Gallagher’s account, we witness the competing interests of both sides of the war as they utilize the demographics of two major US cities to clandestinely promote diametrically opposed ends. Both Moran and Sweeney ended up as pawns in a larger game. Scholz utilized Moran to sow the seeds of discontent and stall US involvement, but then largely abandoned the Christian Front once America joined the War. Likewise, MI6 was only interested in funding antifascist activities such as Sweeney’s to agitate Americans into supporting the war against Nazism, ending their funding after America pitched into the war effort. While Moran at this point largely stopped organizing and speaking as brazenly as before, Sweeney kept up the fight against fascism until her much-too-early death in 1944.
This dialectical nature of religion’s role in serving other ideological and material ends is also another fascinating aspect of Gallagher’s account. He carefully reconstructs the religious beliefs of the Christian Front, which combined the fervent anti-Communism that resulted from the Spanish Civil War and a virulent anti-Semitism that was espoused by religious leaders such as Father Coughlin. Instead of distancing these aspects from Catholic theology, Gallaher instead faces them head-on, pointing out how the doctrine of Jewish deicide, Mystical Body theology, and Catholic Action all were utilized to justify a militant movement. Instead of dodging or justifying the Catholic Church, Gallagher takes intellectual responsibility for how official doctrine of the time was used to justify bigotry and violence. Especially considering that he is a Jesuit priest, I found Gallagher’s intellectual honesty and self-reflection to be refreshing.
In this period, Catholics stood at an interesting crossroads in America. While Catholics had largely assimilated into major cities, especially in the North, there was still an extant anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment that pervaded much of the American landscape. While they couldn’t claim to be systematically oppressed by the 1930s, Catholics could still weaponize Mystical Body theology (essentially, an attack on one Catholic is an attack on all Catholics) to take up arms against Leftists and Jewish citizens. Boston at this point was one of the most virulently antisemitic cities in America, and when aided and abetted by the largely white Irish-Catholic police force, extremists found fertile ground in which to sow fascism on American soil. While these doctrines are no longer in vogue within mainstream Catholicism, Gallagher points out how the Catholic Church downplayed the threat of the Christian Front while attempting to distance itself from them. Through the dual examples of Moran and Sweeney, Gallagher vividly illustrates how religion can be weaponized for great evil and depravity, as well as serve as a wellspring for goodness, charity, and antifascist action.
Finally, Gallagher’s account is well worth considering in light of the resurgence of Christian nationalism in our contemporary context. While most Americans are keen to believe that the events of the 1930s and 40s could not happen here in America, Gallagher forcefully debunks this false impression. Moran had a keen ability to promote antisemitic and anti-Communist conspiracy theories while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability, a technique widely utilized by the political Right today. The FBI still utilizes surveillance techniques to monitor the activities of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, but largely does not act upon them, often protecting the rhetoric and actions of neo-fascists under the banner of “free speech.” Much like Father Coughlin did with radio in the 30s, right-wing pundits have recognized the power of social media to promulgate their ideology, as much of online discourse is filled with vitriolic bigotry toward minority groups and migrant communities. America’s rightward shift courtesy of the ratchet effect has dominated US policy over the past forty years, as the Republican party has openly embraced the most fringe elements of its electoral base while Democrats continually scold the most progressive voices within their own party. Gallagher shows us that this form of ideological warfare is nothing new, even if its consequences are no less important today than it was during the Second World War.
Critique:
Nazis of Copley Square does suffer from a few key drawbacks. While the book picks up steam by the time the narrative focuses on the ideological battle between Moran and Sweeney, much of the previous chapters are a bit of a slog to get through. Gallagher is careful to set up the context for the historical narrative he’s constructing, which means that there is a lot of discussion regarding the nuances of Catholic theology before we get to the main narrative. Despite the thrilling nature of Gallager’s account, it can often be overly dry at times, as he meticulously reconstructs events from primary sources. Too often, we are treated to page after page of small details that don’t end up adding much to the larger structure of the narrative, and Gallagher ends up repeating the same points and events again and again. While this attention to detail makes the book stronger as an academic historical text, it is not the easiest to finish unless one is incredibly interested in the subject at hand.
The other biggest weakness of this text is regarding its relevance. While Gallagher insists that the Christian Front has often been under-examined or wholly ignored despite its impact, I walked away from the book questioning just how large of an impact this group had on the larger cultural and political landscape of the era. Despite all of Scholz’s and Moran’s efforts, not much was actually accomplished despite the ineptitude of the police that surveilled them. They were able to organize several pro-Nazi events around the Boston area, but none of their actions led to concrete policy changes or widespread action in the streets. Most people, even at the time, considered them to be on the political fringe, and they were mostly rejected, even amongst their fellow Bostonians. Even though Cassidy and his men got away without a scratch for their more militant plots and actions in Brooklyn, they mostly fizzled out after these events.
While Gallagher’s account is useful in pointing out how ideologies can be flexible and adaptable and can survive years of dormancy, it would have been interesting to examine the legacy of the Christian Front in its immediate aftermath. Moran continued to live and work in Boston until his death in 1971, but there was no attempt to investigate his later life through those who knew him. Also, while his account focuses on a handful of key individuals, I would have liked to read more about those who attended Christian Front meetings or even joined them at some point in their lives. While Gallagher’s account is primarily a top-down intellectual history, future studies could be written from a bottom-up social-history perspective, emphasizing the material conditions that led to these ideological formations and the average citizen who contributed to their persistence.
Conclusion:
Overall, Nazis of Copley Square is a meticulously researched examination of the Boston and Brooklyn branches of the Christian Front during the Second World War, including its theological roots, its political impact, and how it was subverted by competing forces and antifascist action. While it can be overly dry reading at times, Gallagher’s work speaks well to our current political and social moment characterized by extreme right-wing rhetoric and the ever-closer union of religion and politics. Gallagher illustrates how faith and national identity can be utilized for pernicious and violent purposes, as well as how it can be combatted through collective action. The rhetoric and actions of the Christian Front resonate with many far-right extremist groups today, as they scapegoat religious and ethnic minorities for the social ills that are wrought by the forces of capitalism. As we’ve seen in the past several years, America is not immune to the allures of fascism and Christian Nationalism. As such, the formation and legacy of the Christian Front during the 1930s and 40s serve as an imminently important case study for anyone who seeks to fight against the forces of fascism in America today.