Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

After Father Coughlin’s failed bid to influence the 1936 presidential election, his prominence declined. By 1938, he had decided to lean into extreme antisemitism in order to fuel his political rise. He had widespread influence; he reached a quarter of the US population every week through his radio sermons. He headed an organization called the Christian Front, rallying people around his antisemitic views. A man named John F. Cassidy approached Coughlin in 1939, asking to become part of the Christian Front leadership, and Coughlin appointed him to a leadership position.

Meanwhile, General Moseley—who, according to Deatherage, had previously seemed a prime candidate for the leader of a fascist government in the US—withdrew his public support of the fascist movement after he was reminded that he would lose his army pension if he attempted to become the country’s dictator.

On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland. Despite launching a massive and unprovoked invasion, Germany claimed that Poland had been the aggressor. Right away, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Meanwhile, isolationism remained the dominant sentiment in the US.

Two famous aviators, Laura Ingalls and Charles Lindbergh, openly supported isolationism. Lindbergh explicitly drew a connection between the US and the Third Reich, expressing racist beliefs about aviation; he claimed that flight was gifted to white people as a means to dominate other races.

Around this time, a man named Denis Healy began to infiltrate the Christian Front, with FBI agents tailing his movements. The group had begun acquiring weapons and ammunition. Healy heard rumors that among these weapons were two machine guns. He witnessed some of the group members practice shooting at a firing range bearing an effigy of President Roosevelt.

After Roosevelt agreed to provide weaponry to aid France and Britain, the Christian Front members grew angry. Cassidy started to form a plan to kill a dozen congressmen.

Cassidy and 16 other members of the Christian Front were arrested in 1940. The men were charged with planning to overthrow the US government and take property of the US, namely weapons and ammunition from the US military. The press depicted the defendants as unintimidating crackpots. Those who did take the men seriously were often those supportive of their cause.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) put O. John Rogge, the head of the its criminal division, in charge of the case. Convicting the defendants on a charge of seditious conspiracy would be challenging, whereas the weapons charge was more likely to stick; the evidence regarding weapons seemed clear-cut and indisputable. The FBI had seized over 1,000 rounds of ammunition, including machine gun ammunition, from the homes of Christian Front members and had seen evidence of makeshift bombs. However, the weapons charge grew shaky after the US military refused to admit that weapons could have been taken from their facilities.

The trial commenced in Brooklyn in April 1940. The defense was more successful than the DOJ at selecting and swaying the jury in their favor. Unknown to the prosecutors, the woman who was eventually selected as jury foreman was the wife of the lead defense attorney. Moreover, the defense understood—better than Rogge—that the most effective approach in addressing the jury involved appealing to Catholic Brooklynite culture.

The jury hung; the prosecution could not secure a single guilty verdict. The Christian Front and their supporters celebrated. Afterward, one of the members announced to a cheering crowd that at least 10 members of the jury planned to join the Christian Front.

On the night of August 31, 1940, Lovettsville, Virginia was hit with a severe lightning storm. The next day, residents discovered the wreckage of a plane crash in the fields outside the town. The plane had driven straight down into the earth, and the passengers’ bodies were violently strewn across the field. One of the passengers killed in the plane crash was US Senator Ernest Lundeen, the founder and chairman of the Islands for War Debts Committee, a committee that pressured President Roosevelt to seize Caribbean island territories from Britain as a form of payment for Britain’s WWI debts.

Investigators concluded that the crash of Trip 19, the plane that had gone down in the fields of Lovettsville, was mysterious and that the cause was unknown. Drew Pearson, a reporter who questioned the senator’s staff, found out that Lundeen had appeared distraught on the morning of his flight and that a scuffle ensued before the plane took off. Pearson also found out that Lundeen had instituted a program much like Huey Long’s, in which he coerced his staff to pay him a portion of their salaries. After delving further into Lundeen’s life, Pearson published an exposé in which he revealed that Lundeen was being tailed by Justice Department employees and had received numerous visits from propogandist George Sylvester Viereck.