Echoes of white supremacy
By Jim Coogan
For anyone that might believe that groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, or the Oath Keepers represent some new aspect of white supremacy in this country, one should look back to a time in the 1930s when reactionary cliques with similar grievances were recruiting throngs of disgruntled citizens who blamed minority groups for the country’s ills. Everyone is familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its long campaign of terror against black people in the South. The hate group went mainstream in the 1920s even marching triumphantly in full regalia down Pennsylvania Avenue in August of 1925. The Klan attracted people on Cape Cod as well with rallies in several towns. Here the focus was more a movement directed against Catholics.
Anti-Semitism, always an undercurrent in America, was fanned nationally via the air waves with people like the “Radio Priest,” Father Charles E. Coughlin and Kansas minister Gerald B. Winrod. Both men gained national followings whipping up anger against Jews and minorities. From his Wichita headquarters, Winrod assembled a group of fundamentalist ministers called Defenders of the Christian Faith. The group set itself against any form of modernism and claimed that the New Deal was a Jewish plot. In 1939, Coughlin’s Christian Front movement planned an insurrection against the U.S. government. Many of the plotters were former members of the armed forces and the National Guard and had access to weapons. They expected to blow up bridges, occupy power plants and to also seize the gold in Fort Knox. Another goal was “the eradication of the Jews in the United States.” The plot was foiled by the FBI.
The Silver Legion is less well known but just a much of a hate group of the period. Founded in the late 1920s by William Dudley Pelley, the goal of the organization was to “free the nation from the shackles of Jewish and communist oppression.” Pelley put together a “Christian Militia” to save the United States. Members joined from all over the country and were divided into one-hundred person cadres of armed fighters. Legionnaires marched in uniform under a white banner that read, “Life, Loyalty, and Liberation.” The loyalty was to one man – William Dudley Pelley. The liberation was freedom from what was viewed as an overreaching national government. At its height in the mid-1930s, there were chapters in as many as forty states. The legion’s members had to be white Christians and their stated goal was aimed at bringing a “Christian Commonwealth” to the United States.
Perhaps the most virulent and influential of these groups was the America First movement headed by the famous flyer Charles Lindbergh. In addition to antipathy toward President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, The America Firsters made no secret of their hatred of Jews and their appreciation for the fascist regimes in Europe. The movement echoed the feelings of many Americans that the government was moving in the wrong direction and ignoring their concerns. Lindbergh achieved almost God-like stature to his followers — a savior that the far right believed would usher in the revolution that would reverse the progressive trends of the Roosevelt administration. There was a real possibility that Lindbergh would be nominated by the Republican Party to run against Roosevelt in 1940. But as Lindbergh’s tendency to increasingly blame Jews for the possibility of war with Nazi Germany, public attitudes began to change. Many Americans started to repudiate him and the America Firsters. The entrance of the United States into World War II drove the final spike into the America First movement.
In our own time, we have seen a political party bend its knee in adoration of a demagogue whose slogan was, and ironically still is, America First. Whether this was an intentional reference to a time less than a century ago, it’s hard to say. But the same ideals – rejection of internationalism, an overemphasis on patriotism, religious fundamentalism, and undercurrents of racism and anti-Semitism echo those earlier times. And the philosophical descendants of the reactionary groups of that dark period are plainly driving that same agenda today.
Jim Coogan Lives in Sandwich, Massachusetts
Coogan's Bluff 