The Nazis of Copley Square, with Professor Charles R Gallagher (episode 258)

Transcript

Music

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to hub history, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of boston, the hub of the universe.
This is episode 2 58 the Nazis of Copley Square with Professor Charles Gallagher.
Hi, I’m jake in just a few minutes. I’m gonna be joined by Professor Charles Gallagher, author of the recent book The Nazis of Copley Square, the forgotten story of the christian front.
The book is an in depth accounting of an organization that was wildly popular in boston and beyond.
In the years before the U. S. Entered World War two, the christian front was deeply rooted in catholic doctrines, but the value at its core was a form of anti communism that members treated as interchangeable with antisemitism.
Professor Gallagher will tell us how the group was founded and how the doctrines of catholic action and the mystical body of christ theory enabled their hateful ideology.
He’ll also introduce the intellectual leaders of the group, the street fighters who led it down the primrose path to paramilitarism and the Nazi spy Master returned the group toward treason.

[1:17] But before I talk to Professor Gallagher, I just want to pause and say thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon.
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[2:21] I’m joined now by professor Charles R Gallagher. Professor Gallagher is a member of the Society of Jesus who teaches in the history department at boston College where he studies the history of right wing movements, the intersection of intelligence and religion,
american Catholicism, papal diplomacy, international relations and the history of the holocaust.
His previous book of Vatican secret diplomacy won the john gill mary shea prize from the American Catholic Historical Association.
Professor Gallagher. Welcome to the show.
Professor Gallagher, Welcome to the show.

Charles R Gallagher:
[2:56] Thank you very much for having me jake.

Jake:
[2:58] So your book is the Nazis of Copley square and it’s subtitled The forgotten story of the christian front and the christian front is mostly forgotten today, but our listeners,
might well remember one of the key organizers and propagandists who was deeply involved with the christian front.
Can you remind our listeners who father Charles Coughlin was?

Charles R Gallagher:
[3:21] I argue that father Charles Coughlin was the first celebrity priest of the 20th century.
He was a brilliant tech savvy, Canadian catholic priest who immigrated to the United states,
and set up a radio show in the late 19 twenties which became one of the most listened to weekly programs from the early thirties into the early 19 forties.

[3:49] It’s estimated that he had about 30 million listeners every week on his Sunday radio broadcast.
And to put that into perspective The highest rated network television show, which is usually is one of those shows like America’s got talent or something like that.
Those shows usually get about 12 million viewers per week. And this priest who had a show that combined politics and religion, had a radio show of vast audiences.
And it eventually by the mid 1930s developed into him creating his own political party.
He had a surrogate run for president because he was born in Canada. He couldn’t run for president himself.
But it it kind of creates this really interesting question about what if he were an american, would do you, would he have forsaken his collar or tried to combine his roman collar with uh with the presidency.
And he was extremely controversial because during the course of his radio career, he became increasingly anti Semitic in his broadcasts.

Jake:
[4:58] Well, yeah, it seems like antisemitism and anti communism and sort of the the interplay between those two things were really the pillars of his personal ideology. How did he get that way? How did he embrace those two philosophies?

Charles R Gallagher:
[5:12] He was extremely upset by the Soviet Revolution, the Russian Revolution 1917,
where he viewed the aftermath of that revolution, which most Americans forget about.
There was a civil war in Russia between 1917 1920 which the u. S. Actually sent troops over to Siberia into Archangel u. S. Troops and.

[5:42] And the orthodox christians were being,
put under the under the bayonets of Trotsky is new Red Army and the white Russians and the, and the Red Army,
were fighting it out in Russia for the next three years after that leninist revolution and many christians who viewed that civil war believed that the Red Army,
because the, the whites or the white armies that,
were more czarist in their, in their allegiances, many members of the Orthodox christian churches were what they called, then persecuted, but it was really a bloody bloody persecution.
You either you either had to recant your faith, your christian faith and and join the Communist party or else, you know, you received either a bullet or a bayonet in most cases.
And so so, uh, Father Coughlin along with other protestant, this is the other thing, another lot of evangelical protestant american observers were finding the same thing.
And so in the 19 twenties, you have this kind of first coalescence of Catholics and Protestants viewing a political event halfway around the world and finding.

[7:08] Significance for the existence of Christianity within that politics that was playing out basically communism versus Christianity.
And um, it’s something historians I think have neglected that, that there seems to be what I mentioned in the book as kind of an ecumenical anti communism that emerges really over the over the issue of the Russian revolution.
This original kind of anti Christianity,
connection to red revolution picks up again in the 19 twenties, in Mexico to Father Coughlin, who’s observing,
because even though the mexican revolution situation is, is connected more to socialism, you know Coughlin is not gonna split hairs between what’s a socialist and,
communist, but there’s a there’s a massive movement of people and there is.

[8:00] Direct persecution.
So they didn’t have the word genocide yet because that word is not coined until after 1945 by a guy named Raphael Lemkin.
So they’re calling it persecution. But what it’s really amounting to is in many cases a direct bloody purge of anyone who still connect themselves to the institutional church, Christian churches.
In other words, you either have to align yourself with the government or its a bloody response on the part of either the socialist or the communist in Mexico.
And then in the mid-1930s, the Spanish civil war kind of kind of heightens the entire situation.
And that really the Spanish civil war becomes the final,
credible experience for Father Coughlin in connection to communist displacement of Christianity.
And he sees he’s finally come to his own conclusion.

[9:01] That both Lennon and particularly Marx Marx and Lenin were jewish and so that this,
this new political ideology in the face of the earth,
which is expanding rapidly, is in effect a secular Judaism which has as its goal, the erratic eradication of global Christianity.
And it’s um and it all comes to a head And this vortex of the 1930s.

Jake:
[9:31] And it’s through the spanish civil war that the, the the term christian front is coined that Coughlin and embraces. We associate him with that name, but he didn’t actually originate. It comes out of the spanish civil war, if I understand correctly.

Charles R Gallagher:
[9:43] Yeah, that’s correct. That was one of the things I wanted to do with the book was kind of figure out where that term came from.
And originally it was Contrived in Britain by a theologian named Arnold Loon, who most people would know about, but he was,
a methodist, father was a methodist leader in Britain, he converted to Roman Catholicism,
in 1933 when he was studying at Oxford and he wanted to use anti communism as a way to mend or bridge the divisions within the Christian churches since the time of the reformation.
And so he created this concept that would be a moral bulwark against communism.
Uh, so that christians of,
all, both catholic and protestant persuasions could come together,
and present a moral front against expansion, what they saw as expansionist red communism and face it.

[10:48] As a as a moral problem rather than a military problem.
Um however, once Father Coughlin in Detroit gets wind of this rather benign,
con concept, grounded in in kind of a moral philosophy of righteousness, Coughlin decides that he’s gonna take that term and use it towards his own ends,
And gives it gives it a weaponization he actually, he,
he weaponize is that term and the Christian front actually becomes para militarized as I show in the book by 1939 and into 1941.

Jake:
[11:30] Louis himself helped to get the Christian front of foothold here in Boston, right. He he gave an address, I believe it at BC, at your institution there in 1937 to help popularize the idea of forming a Christian front in America.

Charles R Gallagher:
[11:45] Yeah, correct. Uh this is one of one of the rare times when a professor from Notre Dame was welcomed at Boston College and in 1937 in 1937, he came to.

Jake:
[11:52] Was welcome.

Charles R Gallagher:
[11:58] Boston and gave a couple of speeches actually at Boston College about his experience,
in the in the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent, one lone ended up over in Madrid as a correspondent for some Catholic magazines and newspapers.
And his speeches at boston College were extremely anti Communistic and he doesn’t utter the words Christian front yet, but he’s about to there on the tip of his tongue.
And by 1938 he really solidifies that that term.
But it’s his speeches at Boston College that really flesh out publicly how he wants to proceed in his own anti communism.
And so he’s in his speeches in Boston, he was riling up by.

[12:48] Offering this laundry list, this litany of,
of really brutal actions that the communist government or the socialist government, the Popular front government in spain, which was the left wing government was meeting out against Catholics.
And so he part of, part of the idea of the christian front was that the left leaning spanish government time was known as the Popular Front Government.
He wanted to create a christian front, that again, would be a moral force against the Popular front government.
But then when father Coughlin figured out that that concept had resonance with his listeners, he he militarized and para militarized it.

Jake:
[13:30] That militarization happened over the course of a handful of years.
It sounds like sort of from 1937 to 39 40 ISH.
I guess, In the midst of all that, that’s happening in parallel with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Charles R Gallagher:
[13:40] Correct.

Jake:
[13:46] And there’s what seems to be like a watershed moment when Coughlin gives this radio address right after Kristallnacht in 1938.
Can you describe for the listener how he turned that night of these terrible attacks on german jews into an argument for the victimization of Catholics or christians, and, more generally?

Charles R Gallagher:
[14:09] Coughlin has always been very critical of the US government’s position on,
the spanish civil war, that the Roosevelt administration never condemned the popular front government,
uh flat out and over 6000 priests, nuns, and seminarians were executed during the 18 month phase of the spanish civil war.
And and he says, you know, he he noticed that the U. S. Government never made any protest internationally.
And um when he sees what happens at Kristallnacht, he creates his own grievance claim.
Because the The outcry of both the Roosevelt administration and the American press is immediate and it’s worldwide and it’s a it’s a it’s a banging gong against the Nazis.
And so he fashions this radio address,
on November 21 of 1938, where he blames the Jews for their own persecution.
If you can imagine, he talks about the godlessness of many jews who have become irreligious in his words.
In other words, they’ve stopped practicing the pie artistic practices of yeah, culturally jewish, they’ve they’ve stopped going to synagogue and and they have moved away from practice practical.

Jake:
[15:32] People who would consider culturally jewish today.

Charles R Gallagher:
[15:43] So he makes a distinction between practical jews and secular jews.
He calls them secular jews, and he finds that the secular jews of all become communists.
They’ve been seduced in his words by the by the social justice impulse within what Marxism leninism is for him.
And it’s it’s these it’s these jews who have brought upon themselves their own perdition in the Kristallnacht.
And so this speech is about uh you know, five minutes into the speech of an hour long speech.
He’s talking about how jews need to reject communism and come back to the faith of Abraham.
And and it it’s just a horribly insidious speech from the levels from all political levels and also religious levels.
And it it really poisons the listener ship against the jews. And in many ways fashions his first real pro nazi statements.
I mean, it becomes clear that he views fascism and nazism as the, as the main bulwarks now against the continued expansion of international communism.

Jake:
[17:09] What did that do for his broadcast career? Was that a boost? Did it drag him down? Was he subject to investigation? I have to imagine it didn’t pass unremarked on in the US.

Charles R Gallagher:
[17:22] The speech itself created a maelstrom of backlash and all sorts of publicity about this speech.

Jake:
[17:27] Mhm.

Charles R Gallagher:
[17:33] It was front page news for many days in late 19 1938.
The thing about father Coughlin is he was extremely shrewd and astute, but he was also untrustworthy.
And so he deliberately pulled himself off the air.
The his his largest audience was in new york city.
He broadcast out of W. M. C. A. In new york city and as as your listeners, I’m sure no, there was no television. Then radio was the medium of the day.
And so these thousands and thousands of listeners were very important but they were all radio listeners.
So he he pulls himself off the air but then claims that W. M. C. A. Was shutting him down.
This then becomes what he wants to create is a First Amendment issue, a free speech issue.

Jake:
[18:27] Mhm.

Charles R Gallagher:
[18:29] And I think the thing that he understands or the thing that he knows,
is that way back 30 years earlier in 1909, there was a catholic priest in new york named Edward McGlynn who was censored in his pulpit by the church.
I believe he was preaching in ST Patrick’s Cathedral.

[18:50] And he was pulled out of the pulpit by the by his religious superiors and,
100,000 people marched on Fifth avenue in protest for violation First Amendment violations on the part of the church.
100,000 Catholics. So this McGlynn situation was an explosion 30 years earlier. Now, most historians Um have kind of seen it as a blip on the radar and they don’t even mention it in the context of the 30s or 40s.
But Coughlin, who would have been living at that time and had studied the church history, modern church history would have known about the McGlynn situation.
And so I think he wanted to create his own, you know, 100,000 person March down Fifth Avenue.
And so he creates himself as a victim. And and so what it does is he he really amps up his listener ship through his Uh kind of Crafty style of creating himself as a victim.
And from 1938 until he’s taken off the air in 1942, he does play the role of the victim, even though he’s got one of the largest listening audiences in the United States, he continues to claim victimhood.

Jake:
[20:04] As he’s playing the victim card, that sort of creates an opportunity for for us to meet another player in this story, because a man named john Cassidy springs to Cochran’s defense.
Can you tell us a little bit about who Cassidy was and how he went from sort of this unemployed wannabe FBI agent to the head of anti communist organization?

Charles R Gallagher:
[20:28] Yeah, these are the sorts of people I really like digging around in archives to figure out who they are when I was going into this project, I always thought, you know, the thing that I didn’t want to do was write another book on Father Coughlin.
I actually thought we don’t need another book on Father Coughlin.
I was more interested in who these ground level street level, what I call foot soldiers were up to because those are the people that are getting it done at the grassroots level.
For Father Coughlin again, if you read the standard histories, you wouldn’t know that,
Father Coughlin had a massive street level grassroots organized operation going on, john Cassidy is a very devout catholic.
He was a graduate of ST john’s University law school, he tried three times to pass the new york city bar and was unsuccessful at that.
And by 1935 he’s wandering around trying to find a job for himself.
I actually found that he, he applied to the FBI to become an FBI agent and uh, his psychological profile was done by the FBI.
They rejected him of course. And so he’s stuck with, he’s stuck with these kind of visions where he wants to be a person who’s connected to larger worldly events and and control of them.

[21:53] But he also, he’s also this devout catholic.
And so when the Coughlin movement decides to organize,
in new york city as an anti communist movement, he presents himself as a charismatic figure who in Koblenz eyes is quite well educated.
Most Catholics were not university educated at that time.
So he was impressive, impressive to Coughlin. He was in fact a very excellent,
organizer, He was a charismatic figure, but he was not in any way a thinker or a person of ideas, he was pretty reactive to situations, but he was,
also very uh antagonistic, very militaristic and he would be the one who would put in place the paramilitary cells within the christian front organization.
I should explain to your listeners that the christian front organization at one point, the FBI suggested that they had about 100,000 members.
And so these would have been Catholics with card carrying documents indicating that they were members of the christian front.

[23:03] The para militarization that we’re talking about is that on each membership card, the candidate was asked to put whether they had military service activity or not.
And so those people, if you indicated you had prior service in the military, you were picked out by Cassidy to populate what he called the action committees,
Which were these units of between 12 and 17 men, who would be trained in weapons and tactics,
within the Christian front and that the other members, the other thousands of members who were public facing, would never know that these paramilitary selves even existed within the Christian Front Organization itself.

Jake:
[23:56] Yeah, you mentioned that these would be card carrying members of the christian front. It seems like it was very important to Coughlin that there would be this public declaration of membership and that that they would be literal membership cards.
If the goal was to organize something like a paramilitary organization, Why wasn’t the christian front of secret societies, like the freemasons or the KKK?

Charles R Gallagher:
[24:18] That’s an excellent question, and I believe that the reason is that in 1810, the American bishops outlawed Catholics to be members,
of secret societies, there are particular bishops are particularly thinking of the freemasons, although later on, groups like the molly Maguires will emerge.
And so what’s happening with the Christian front is that,
this is this was the very intriguing piece to me about the christian front, is that they always aim to be devout Catholics, they always aim for kind of moral permission to do what they do.
And so by issuing membership cards, they’re making a statement not only to the public, but to the church, that they are not a secret society.
They don’t intend to be like the freemasons, they want to be an authentic upfront catholic religious organization.
And so that’s why they have their membership cards. But interestingly enough, as time goes on and the FBI starts to get closer and closer to shutting them down,
The first thing that they do is not warn their members of a potential FBI raid.
The first thing they do is go gather the membership cards and move them to an offsite space that the FBI will not be able to track down.
And so in fact, those those membership cards that were so dear to never were found by the FBI, they outfoxed the FBI and getting that material away from them.

Jake:
[25:47] So we don’t know how many of our grandparents belong to the christian front.

Charles R Gallagher:
[25:50] That’s true, actually, we don’t we don’t have the membership cards.

Jake:
[25:55] Well you mentioned how important it was to Coughlin and the front to be a group in good standing with the church also.
And I don’t know quite how to ask this question. But in the book you you point out that there are two principles or doctrines of Catholicism that were popular at the time and maybe have fallen by the wayside.
Since then that Coughlin was able to I guess exploit in a way I don’t come from a catholic background so I’m hoping that you can help me introduce the listener to the mystical body of christ theory or doctrine.

Charles R Gallagher:
[26:24] Keep in mind that the catholic church is centered in the neighborhoods, in the local parishes and it’s almost kind of a ghetto ized singular,
mentality which takes over in those in those neighborhoods and streets of the local parish and what the pope was promoting.

[26:49] From the mid 19 twenties really through the 19 fifties was this theology which he called the mystical body of christ theology.
It was the theology aimed at unity within the catholic church centered in christ’s body as being mystical.
What that means is he the pope, this is Pope pious the 11th at this point, he’s centering this theology,
in the letters of Saint paul, which talks about anything that happens to the part has impact on the whole christ,
as the head of the church, has impact on who we are, as the members of christ’s body,
the members of christ that make up christ body are all baptized Catholics throughout the world.
And so what I view as happening is that that theology,
breaks down borders, breaks down national borders and it becomes transnational, what it means is that if Catholics are being put up against the walls and executed in Barcelona.

[28:04] That has impact on Catholics, in boston, they feel that pain, this is a theology which was dominant and gave Catholics in the United States,
a share in the tribulations of there.
And this is another word you don’t hear these days, but they used it, their co religionists on the other side of the globe or over in europe, they felt they felt that they too were being persecuted.
And so this is another, this is a way they, that Coughlin really,
is able to spread his grievance claims against jews and communists and bring,
these devout Catholics to undertake a para militarization because they feel that they’re going to have a moral permissibility to do that.

Jake:
[28:53] Part of that is the in group out group boundary being drawn by baptism, right? The baptized become our brothers in christ that we won’t go to war against and everybody else is sort of on the outside and more permissible to be an opponent.

Charles R Gallagher:
[29:07] Yeah, that’s the other thing I wanted to do as a historian is to kind of remind people,
that in the 1960s, that script,
got flipped and now there’s a greater emphasis on Christian solidarity grounded in in a common humanity, not necessarily in baptism, but what I had to kind of,
indicate to the readership of my book was that those,
Equations didn’t apply in the 1930s, it was separate, it was distinct, it was, as you say, in group out group and Coughlin was extremely adept at aggravating those delineations.

Jake:
[29:47] And then the other doctrine that what was catholic action and sort of how did it provide cover for the front when they were scrutinized from within the church?

Charles R Gallagher:
[29:57] Without these two theologies, this group probably would never have survived and been able to do what they did.
Catholic action was a wonderful concept devised in the early 19 twenties by Pope pius the 11th for social uplift,
help of the poor literacy movements within the catholic church,
uplift of the downtrodden, trying to figure out how to adjust to the economic depression of 1929 catholic action meant,
running soup kitchens, but what it did was it de linked,
the Papacy itself from,
the actual activity of Catholicism at the street level and it kind of diffused the authority of the church down into the parishes.
So what was going on was the pope said, if you as a catholic, do anything with even.

[30:59] A token blessing of your local parish priest or of the local church, you are doing catholic action, you are doing what the Papacy wants you to do.
And so what it provides is a very vigorous new outlet for lay Catholics and by that, I mean Catholics who aren’t ordained clara.

[31:21] To go out and start soup kitchens, start literacy reading groups,
start labor organizations for Catholics,
start all sorts of social movements and what this and then they they say because your parish, if your parish priests give their okay or if your local bishop doesn’t say anything against it,
then that’s catholic action and you’re doing the work of the church, you’re kind of in accordance with the teachings of the scriptures and of of the Papacy.
And so that’s precisely what the christian front did. They were able to form themselves as a group of lay people.
They their leaders were not priests, they were ordinary lay Catholics, non ordained Catholics and this also was rather revolutionary for the time, that was not usually done in the catholic church.
And so when the christian front comes on the scene, they say, well, you know, we’re doing catholic action, we’re bringing Catholics together to talk about religious issues.
They have well attended meetings where this kind of melding of politics and religion is done and motivation is done motivation towards action.
Um although more and more as the.

[32:36] As the organization gets going, what becomes their activity is anti Semitic activity,
anti Semitic and anti Communistic activity because if you’re they feel that if you’re sufficiently anti communist what you’re doing is catholic action.
If you’re sufficiently anti Semitic in their minds, then what you’re doing is nothing more than than catholic action.

Jake:
[33:00] With these doctrines of these ideologies in place, the Christian front,
is growing quickly, and then within that Cassidy’s sort of subset, the military militaristic subset is also not only growing quickly, but it seems like their activities are escalating really quickly.
How did Cassidy’s paramilitary group go from sort of alternating between church service and the rifle range in the summer of 1939, to just a handful of months later trying to get their hands on military grade machine guns.

Charles R Gallagher:
[33:31] Yes, so there are a couple of different aspects to this that had never been looked at before, and the first was that Cassidy’s idea was to infiltrate local National Guard units at the street level.

Jake:
[33:44] So he’s operating out of Brooklyn, right? He’s the Brooklyn unit, So this would be the new york National Guard.

Charles R Gallagher:
[33:48] He’s operating out of Brooklyn. So when when those young men fill out their membership cards, he takes notice of who’s a member of the National Guard and who isn’t,
you’ve got shades of kind of january 6th here because I think this issue came up like in the days after with the response to january 6th, there was some,
chatter about that actually, it wasn’t chatter, it was national news reporting and I kind of like almost fell off my chair kind of visions of 1940 happening.
This is all taking place in 1939 1940.
So he says he’s gonna so by infiltration of the National Guard, what he wants to do is he wants to place christian front paramilitaries, the members of those action committee,
committees, he wants to place them in the National Guard because he concocts a plan that at the time of the revolution, which is going to be a revolution of the christian fronts, choosing,
because they’re gonna they’re gonna create a diversion tactic to start the revolution.
He wants to have members of the front within each National Guard unit, particularly in new york, to push the National Guard towards putting down the revolution that they feel will be started.
They will try to start and then move alongside the National Guard to put down an american revolution that they feel is sponsored by jews and communists.

[35:11] The members of the christian front who are not in the National Guard are also outfitted with military grade weaponry, usually lee Enfield rifles,
and on a couple of occasions browning automatic rifles.
The way that the non National Guard members which is a considerable number of men were outfitted militarily was through a loophole in the U. S.
Army code that apparently either john Cassidy found out about my hunch is.
And this is only a hunch. Although I’m discussing this with other scholars is that german intelligence, nazi intelligence in the United States put Cassidy onto this codicil within the U.
S. Army code which allowed for members of the National Rifle Association,
Which is free to join in the 1930s, members of the National Rifle Association could send their identity number two.
A department within the Department of War called the office of civilian marksmanship.

[36:26] And you could purchase for $7.50 a military grade battle weapon rifle, usually an M. 19 lee Enfield rifle. Sometimes they call it the Springfield rifle.
Um It was a brutal weapon. It was, it was a five clip stripper clip bolt action rifle that saw action all throughout the Western Front in World War One.
And um you could get that if you’re a member of the N.
R. A. You could get that sent from Washington to your local armory. And then if you paid an extra dollar 50 they would mail that right, that military grade rifle to your doorstep.
And so that’s how these cats were cashing weapons.
And then they were also buying, you could also do this, you could buy unused shells from World War One cannons,
and they took the cordite powder out of the out of the shells and made bombs.
And very descriptive. They had they had bomb making workshops in the basement of their apartments in in Brooklyn,
and prior to me kind of snooping around to find all this stuff out. Nobody knew this stuff.

Jake:
[37:48] From your description, it sounds like what we today consider a classic pipe bomb.

Charles R Gallagher:
[37:52] Let me put it this way, the anarchist cookbook is like a Betty Crocker cookbook compared to this is child’s play. They these cats were extremely efficient at making bombs.
I was shocked when I was,
coming to understand the lethality of what these folks were trying to do because the journalists at the time and the historian sense had completely dismissed this group,
and I looked at them and I I said, man, they are holding lee Enfield rifles.
That is a weapon of war.
And uh it shoots for example, it shoots a 30 aught six bullet, which most people wouldn’t know about, but it’s about three inch long bullet, full metal jacket.
One of those bullets will go through a brick wall.
And what one of those bullets from back in 1940 all those 30 odd six bullet is a more lethal bullet than what NATO carries today.
The NATO round is only being carried um because they can carry more of them.
The 30 odd six was just a huge bullet. And um it could do massive destruction destruction in my view.
So that’s why I think that was like, wow, what, what the heck is going on here? Why are people dismissing these, these folks as as clowns? And when, when they’re actually holding pretty serious weaponry.

Jake:
[39:19] How did the FBI go from dismissing them as clowns to seeking warrants to arrest john Cassidy and a number of the other members of the action Committee?
There had to be some sort of intelligence that that tipped them off that something untoward was happening with the front.

Charles R Gallagher:
[39:35] A member of the christian front that was a member of the National Guard in new york,
approached a gentleman named Denis healey who was also in the guard,
Dennis Healy was an instructor on a browning automatic machine gun and the christian front member asked Healy if he could.

[40:00] Instruct members of his local marksmanship group.
He didn’t name them, uh and how to use a browning automatic machine gun, basically. This is the sort of gun that you would see in europe in World War Two.
And so this other guardsmen who had been approached by the christian front member who was very cagey about why he wanted Healy to instruct his friends and how to use this.
He he went directly to the FBI field office,
and he made this report and the FBI took that report,
pretty seriously and the FBI continued to do their own digging and they were able to recruit Healy as an informant and Healy agreed to infiltrate,
The Christian Front.
And when Healy Healey’s reports were declassified in 2011, and as I was reading them, they’re just absolutely chilling.

Jake:
[41:07] Just remind our listeners what the conspiracy was that Healy and probably others infiltrated? What what were they plotting to do in uh, I guess January or February 1940.

Charles R Gallagher:
[41:20] I think most people at the time wanted to do away with the religious aspects of the case and looking at it 75 years later, I said,
I’ve got to put religion back into this because it only makes sense if you view it religiously John Cassidy came up with what I call the false flag defensive counter attack doctrine.
And it’s grounded in the theological principle that communists are infiltrating the U. S. Government.
And so whatever is done offensively against communists is philosophically defensive in nature.
And so when you defend your country, when you defend yourself against tyranny and it has to be tyranny and they consider communists and,
communism is a symbiotic term with Judaism.
So when Communists are infiltrating the government, it’s permissible morally for you to defend yourself by taking up arms.
And so what Cassidy decides to do in a in a very cockeyed way.

[42:38] Is to set off a bombing campaign, he wants to bomb jewish and communist businesses and organizations.
And, you know, interestingly enough, the Communist Party had paramilitaries.
Um and so what he was trying to do was to,
kind of uh instigate a response from the american communists, where they themselves would engage their more para militaristic side.
And those groups would come to the defense of these of these businesses and organizations that had been bombed.
And then Cassidy was gonna push the button and have Governor Lehman call out the National Guard, like persuade his Guard members that had infiltrated the Guard.
We’re gonna push for a full deployment of the National Guard for what they saw and what they would claim was a Communist revolution happening right under their nose in new york city.
And that these christian front paramilitary paramilitaries would then march alongside their brethren,
in the National Guard, fighting the Communists, putting down the insurrection and allowing for the christian commonwealth to be reinstated.

Jake:
[44:00] And as part of that, installing a temporary these patriotic americans, So they’re very much wrapped in the american flag. They want to install a temporary dictator.

Charles R Gallagher:
[44:08] Yes. Just temporary, though. Yeah, right.

Jake:
[44:10] Of course, aren’t all dictators temporary when they start out.
So along with the Missteps that Healey made, you had 70 plus years of hindsight to look back on the case against the front.
How much of a factor did the church hierarchy play in whitewashing the image of the front who had been arrested, sort of playing up the patriotic anti communism and down the violent antisemitism.
How much reputational work did the church do for the accused there?

Charles R Gallagher:
[44:44] The church was able to insinuate itself into,
Influencing the hierarchy of the national security apparatus in the US your listeners should be aware that this case when it broke,
on January 14 and January 15 of 1940 was coast to coast headline news all above the fold, huge reporting.
It was reported as an interaction. It was reported as a revolution.
Uh christian J. Edgar Hoover described the christian front as as terrorists.
Uh they had reported the language that the Christian front used about simultaneous assassination of 12 members of Congress.
These were 12 men who had helped pass the embargo act, which benefited Britain sometimes months earlier.
So there was the media coverage on this was quite spectacular.
So most Americans knew about this case in January of 1940.

[45:55] I was able to find in the archives at the Library of Congress um in the archives of the Attorney Attorney General robert H Jackson,
a single letter, he only had one file on the christian front case and it was a single letter reporting that there prior to the trial because the FBI arrested,
17 members of the christian front ultimately ended up putting 15 of them on trial.
Trial was covered with great spectacle throughout the spring and summer of 1940.
There was a letter in was a single letter that indicated to it was written by J.
Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI to the Attorney General, indicating that this is a letter that indicated this about three weeks after the conclusion of the trial.
This confidential source had indicated that prior to the trial, the trial judge.

[46:56] Had met with the bishop of Brooklyn Archbishop molloy and another priest, a priest who was the kind of theological consult er to the christian front.
And they had had a a secret kind of meeting about how the trial was going to proceed.
This idea of a trial judge actually meeting with a bishop and a priest prior to adjudicating a case that would be put before him is extraordinary.
I’m not a lawyer nor do I play one on tv but I’m presuming it’s illegal for.

Jake:
[47:42] Yeah, one would think that’s grounds for recusal at the very least right.

Charles R Gallagher:
[47:44] Yeah. Yeah. And then when they picked the jury, the woman,
who was the four person of the jury was actually the cousin, the first cousin of the priest that had met secretly with with the judge and the bishop.
I mean you can’t make this stuff up, it’s just it’s just pretty wild. And so then then the the case itself was adjudicated and really kind of roller coaster fashion.

Jake:
[48:14] And what’s the outcome for the front who was the 15 who stood trial?

Charles R Gallagher:
[48:18] So the outcome is acquittal, you know, tech technically it’s no lo process, but it’s it’s essentially an acquittal because here’s the deal.

[48:29] The criminal division of the Justice Department using the information from the FBI was convinced that they would they could.

[48:41] Wrap this case up with the weapons charge, stealing a weapon from an armory for each count is a 35 year offense.
Right? So these dudes, they had they had these rifles everywhere. And the FBI had no idea that if you were a member of the National Rifle Association, you could get these guns for peanuts.
So so they went to trial kind of seeking the gun charges, kind of knowing what we’re gonna get them on the gun charges. And then they put the sedition charge.
See, it’s really difficult to prove a sedition that an overthrow of the government, if you’re cashing cashing weapons and making bombs in new york. Right?
So anyway, um they were convinced they were gonna get them on the weapons theft charge.
And then that just folded, uh, that crumbled because, you know, J. Edgar hoover was, you know, fell out of his chair when he found out about, he had no idea that about the N. R. A. Loophole as I call it.
And then the sedition charge just didn’t stick. And then thirdly, that meeting,
between the bishop and the judge, one of the results, which we know about at the trial, which was true was that the state decided not to have religion enter into the discussion.

[50:01] They were worried about creating religious divisions.
They were also worried about First Amendment issues in connection to the,
religious expression clause, because the christian front set itself up as, as a religious organization.
So the state that the prosecutor from the Department of Justice decided not to mention religion,
on a case that was adjudicating a crimes related to a group that called themselves the christian front.
It’s absolutely bizarre. And, and so they one and then john Cassidy.
The moment that the judge put the gavel down, john Cassidy Cassidy, rushed up to the to the judge and asked for his guns back and he was given them and walked.
He walked out of the courthouse with his uh, Enfield rifles are a load of military weapons.

Jake:
[51:00] Armload of rifles. That’s something.

Charles R Gallagher:
[51:03] Unbelievable.

Jake:
[51:05] Well, you you point out in the book that for most observers at the time it was contemporary observers.
The Christian front basically ceased to exist after that 1940 trial.
But through your research and sort of on the less public facing side of the front, they just moved to boston. They just came north.
And that gives us a chance to introduce another key key player here, because here in boston, Cassidy was less,
of an influence and instead deal with Francis Moran, can you tell us a little bit about him and what the sort of the world of the boston irish that he grew up in was like, that helped shape the man he became?

Charles R Gallagher:
[51:46] Yeah, I think you’re right, as many of your listeners might might know, there was that world of the boston irish that was so susceptible to father Coughlin message.
It was a world that itself was parochial. It was imbued with roman Catholicism.
It was a world of authority based in religion and it was um culturally irish and italian and extremely piety stick.
And this is the world of Francis Moran. He is john Cassidy with less affinity for weaponry,
and more affinity for cerebral lee trying to advance the message, the goals of the christian front.
He is, I refer to him as a working class intellectual, he’s a dropout from the Franciscan seminary.

Jake:
[52:47] He’s a seminarian.

Charles R Gallagher:
[52:52] He tried to study for the priesthood.
It worked out well until he was about to take his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and then he rethought things and and left.

[53:09] One of the main takeaways from my research was that the seminary he went to was actually staffed by german speaking Franciscans.
It was in upstate new york and they had been kicked. Those Franciscans had,
been kicked out by bismarck during the culture com they ended up in upstate new york and Francis Moran ends up becoming fluent in german and kind of aligning himself with,
kind of german nationalism of away, I can’t, I can’t pinpoint any real antisemitism at that point, but it’s clearly an affinity for for rising uh german nationalism.
Um and then the theology that would have been taught in that seminary was anti communist in its in its foundations and it was also,
um your listeners may find this strange, but it was also a very rigorous intellectual environment because.

[54:14] They’re dealing with ideas and and,
and my my research into that particular seminary was that, um,
their their faculty kind of prided themselves and their students prided themselves as being kind of a cut above intellectually, and in fact they end up becoming,
men who deal in ideas both theological and in maranz case now theological and political.
So Moran is and Moran and his mother listen every week over their radio in dorchester to none other than Father Coughlin.

Jake:
[54:52] How does he actually come to be within the orbit or the sort of the inner circle of father-coughlin?
I know. He grew up more or less listening to the radio addresses, but then starting in 1936 or so, he becomes acquainted with with the radio priest. How did that come to be?

Charles R Gallagher:
[55:09] Yeah. So um as early as 1930 for Coughlin had been dabbling with,
electoral politics and he started a kind of an ephemeral movement, uh, the Union Party back in 1930 for and Moran.

[55:27] Moran got involved with that political movement, which didn’t amount to anything.
But by 1936 Moran is completely imbued with Koblenz worldview.
And Father Coughlin visits boston with a lot of fanfare. He actually meets with Mayor curley.
It’s it’s it’s covered in the, in the press. And Moran has a meeting scheduled with Father Coughlin to talk about who is going to lead now.
Not yet the christian front, but who’s going to lead his political apparatus in boston.
And so he has a long meeting with this Francis Moran at that time.
And Moran tells him that you know this, we’ve asked this person and they won’t do it.
They Father Coughlin asked about other people, they dimmer.
And then miran just says, you know, what about me?
Why not just make me your boston contact for your political aspirations.
And so in 1936 Coughlin, who had not, he had not intended, he wanted a more high profile contact for his political person in boston, but he kind of.

[56:41] Kind of reluctantly um and by default made this Francis Moran and and Moran won the job because of his credentials as a former seminarian.
He also was a really bright Young man, he was extremely articulate.
He um, you know, for example by 1938,
he is a maestro leading public conventions at the, at the Boston arena of 10,000 people at a time.
You know, how do you, how do you get as a young person, how do you get a stage presence to go up in front of 10,000 people?
And all of a sudden he’s just this ringmaster and charismatic figure, this is Moran, I’m talking about,
he, he was an extremely talented young man, you know, all for the wrong ends of course, but I’m the type of historian where you know, I called,
balls and strikes, I mean he was charismatic, he could,
he could, he could attract people to his movement, he was a terrific organizer, he was astute with logic, he could beat people at their own game was rather insidious.
And as you’ll probably want to talk about, he was doing a lot of other very interesting things as well.

Jake:
[58:08] He seems almost like a public intellectual of grievance politics in a way, you know, he organizes these huge, star studded rallies, he bringing in well known folks.
He’s Scotland’s point man in boston.
But then at the same time, things like browning automatic rifles go missing from an armory in waltham around the same time.
What was he involved in the sort of militant aspects of the front? That Cassidy was also, or was he, was that more coincidental to the boston front?

Charles R Gallagher:
[58:40] Yes. So there is a rivalry that’s emerging 1938, between Cassidy and Moran, mainly because of their leadership styles.
In the fall of 1938 Cassidy comes to boston to speak,
at one of the rallies of 10,000 that Moran organizes,
at the same time to browning automatic rifles, as you mentioned, go missing from the arsenal, the, the armory, I should say the National Guard armory in in waltham.
And if your, if your listeners don’t know what a browning automatic rifle is, it’s a automatic and semi automatic rifle that was designed to clear the trenches.
In World War One, it is a massively destructive weapon of war, meant only to be used in a forward advance on the battlefields of europe,
and two of those were stolen and no one was able to say anything about it.
In my view, because if the boston police had found out that those weapons were missing, they possibly could have gone on strike because they had no counter weapon.

Jake:
[59:58] Well, at the same time, there’s a courtship happening in boston involving Francis Moran.
Eventually, it will end up with the christian front being sort of or less subsumed into actual nazism. But it doesn’t start out that way without going too far into the rabbit hole of like the internal politics of Weimar Germany.
Can you introduce the agent who ended up recruiting Francis Moran to spy for Germany, who was Herbert Schulz?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:00:29] At the same time, Moran is coming into his own as leader of the Christian Front, a Nazi SS Officer Lands in Boston in November of 1938.

Jake:
[1:00:42] And this is not just any, this is somebody who’s forged in the same fires as Hess and Himmler.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:00:47] Yes, he, he fits into the pantheon of, of Nazi henchmen of Hitler.
The interesting thing for me was no one had studied any of this, like no one knew about Moran, no one knew about scholes.
I mean what was known about shoals was kind of what was out there on World War Two chat boards and things like that.
There was no so these folks completely lost to history and what you find is the person who gets sent to boston for the Nazis is a is a man who was a protege of ernst Rohm,
who with Adolf Hitler established the brownshirts, this stir mob Thailand.

[1:01:32] He then worked for Rome for a number of years and then was poached from the brownshirts personally by Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the holocaust,
and trained up by Himmler within the Nazi party headquarters where where he had an office.
This guy shoals had an office where for two years he worked as the aid to camp as kind of the secretary to a guy named Rudolf Hess who would become the deputy fuhrer.
Right, so Himmler and Hess and Hitler formed this guy scholes who nobody knows about really to to become this heavyweight,
and they sent him to the United States to turn the screws on all of the german diplomats in America who aren’t quite towing the nazi line as as heavily as they would want them to.

[1:02:30] After Kristallnacht.
Uh there’s a professor at Harvard named Heinrich bruning, he’s a professor of politics and he was previously the chancellor of Germany.
He was the kind of the longest serving chancellor of Weimar Germany.
He had to quickly leave Germany in the dead of night because the gestapo,
was after him and he ends up teaching politics at Harvard,
and after Kristallnacht, his conscience was moved to start making anti Hitler speeches and consequently this guy Herbert scholes, this protege of the pantheon of Nazi henchmen,
shows up in boston under diplomatic cover as the console, the german consul in boston,
and he’s an amazing spy master and it’s only a matter of time before,
scholes is able to take view of the landscape and hit upon Francis Moran as a potential target for his recruitment.

Jake:
[1:03:38] How did Schultz come to to target more and what what made him the perfect recruit?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:03:43] Maran’s anti Semitic, anti british and anti communist, which although at the time, the nazis were allied by a pact with the soviet union shows could work around that.
And use shows always kind of used maran’s anti communism to work more towards Judeo bolshevism, that symbiotic relationship between communism and Judaism.
That’s a myth that Charles was able to use and and soon enough, the two of them were meeting secretly.
They were speaking in german, Moran was given a code name, a friendship emerged that was,
Very, very tight, basically, Moran placed himself into scholes’s protection and did his did his bidding.
And we have documentation of that fact that starts in July of 1940.
But we see the contours of that relationship showing some some effect as early as late 1939 in Boston.

Jake:
[1:04:52] It seems like his self image as a patriotic american and a deeply convicted catholic would conflict with the values of the Nazi party.
Do you have any sense of how Moran was able to reconcile his patriotism and his religious conviction with his slow embrace of Nazism?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:05:15] Again, it’s kind of religiously based as well. There’s,
a section of ST thomas, Aquinas is suma theological which would have been the dominant,
theological construction at the time, which,
indicates that it’s permissible for forced to be used if the leadership of a state is tyrannical.
And what I’ve noticed in my discussion of how Moran places Roosevelt franklin.
Delano Roosevelt into the context for his,
audience is that he keeps referring to Roosevelt and the Roosevelt administration as a tyrant and tyrannical and that’s not simply just language that’s pulled from out of thin air,
it’s language that is theologically based.

[1:06:15] Because for Catholics, although violence is never preferred in Aquinas is just war theory.
If the leadership is tyrannical, it’s permissible for the tyrant to be removed or deposed as Aquinas says.
And so he I think Moran feels that with the backing of the Reich, he’s found a friend who can help him.

[1:06:48] Depose the Roosevelt administration, which is filled with communists and jews, which is the same thing that Cassidy believed when he was,
making bombs in his basement to try to get the National Guard to get Roosevelt out of office and his jewish cabinet, as he would say, it’s really, really amazing stuff. Yeah.

Jake:
[1:07:10] As more and starts to align himself behind SchulZ and get drawn deeper and deeper into the embrace of nazism, it changes the boston front.
How does that translate? How does Moran’s transitions start to change the organization that he’s he’s running here in boston.
And how does it, how does it change how he addresses the public?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:07:34] Socials convinces Moran that the old Cassidy way of doing things isn’t the way that they should proceed.
They’re not gonna be able to, to make inroads using what she calls calls terrorism. He says not, we’re not gonna use terrorism, but we’re gonna use propaganda.
That’s what she says to Moran. But what what he means is, and what in fact happens is that they use espionage.
And so for souls, one of the primary functions of Moran as an agent is to propagate the Nazi line in terms of publicity.
And so I track how Maran’s speeches to his christian front audiences.
And keep in mind he was meeting at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury.

[1:08:25] He was getting sold out meetings. Now this is, you know, anywhere from 500 to 1500 people coming two nights a week.
Um, and basically all Moran did was he read the newspaper headlines of the day,
and then read the read the missile at, from the local church and basically applied Christian principles to what he was reading in the, in the newspapers.
And he would stand up on the stage and Hibernian hall and just pack them in.
Which is, which is rather extraordinary because you couldn’t, you know, I’m not sure you’re getting that many people in church on sunday, but here’s Moran.
And and his his speeches become more and more pro Nazi over time, more and more pro Hitler more and more anti US military.
He’s breaking laws all over the place. For example, In one speech, Moran asks all the mothers present to write letters to their sons who are in the army or the navy,
to have them put down their guns because the german,
Wehrmacht, is never going to be able to be defeated.

Jake:
[1:09:37] So he’s trying to influence morale. He’s talking about the terrible conditions on military bases in massachusetts.
He’s eventually he’s sort of defending saboteurs almost.
It sounds like he takes a really hard right turn until he eventually gets the attention of the federal government, wonders, is he an unregistered foreign agent?
How does he manage to escape prosecution there?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:10:05] This is the maddening piece of the entire puzzle.
Not only was Moran not convicted, he was not even detected.
So, so what I’m kind of arguing is that the relationship between Moran and Shoals is one of the most significant espionage relationships of World War Two, particularly in the US,
and the FBI, the O. S. S.
The Office of Naval Intelligence, the boston police, the boston police, Radical Division, the military intelligence were all surveilling the christian front and none of those agencies picked up,
that Moran was an agent of shoals.
I think that the national security apparatus at the time, particularly the F.
B. I. Was in disbelief that an american citizen that a natural born american citizen would ever fall into the arms of the nazis to do espionage work,
coupled with the religious camouflage that Moran was using.
They simply didn’t see the spy in front of them.
In fact, except for there was one kind of flaky FBI agent who listened to a Moran speech and wrote in his report.

[1:11:30] Something into the effect of gosh, if you didn’t know this guy was irish, you’d think he was german.

Jake:
[1:11:41] Well, it’s funny because the remains unprosecuted and basically undetected by the Feds.
But on the local level the B. P. D. Does decide to take some sort of action. What did they do? What did the B. P. D. Do when they learned that Moran was distributing what what they considered banned nazi propaganda?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:11:59] The boston police made a big mistake because Moran was distributing pamphlets which you allude to, which were presumed by the police to be banned in boston if I could use that term.
Um, so he was, he was distributing literature from a publishing house in New Jersey that was controlled by a Nazi agent.
The problem is when the boston police moved in to take down Moran for such distribution, the Nazi agent in question had only been indicted and had not been convicted.
And so under the First Amendment, all of that literature that he was distributing was fully protected under the First Amendment because because it wasn’t deemed being having been produced by a foreign agent.
And so the boston police move in, they don’t arrest Moran, but they detain him.

[1:13:02] And this infuriates both the local FBI in boston.
The FBI J Edgar hoover in Washington goes ballistic and the attorney general of massachusetts is furious because what it does is it takes, it takes Moran off the public scene,
and it doesn’t allow them to actually be able to monitor him above ground and perhaps kind of put some charges together.
Um, in other words, if he makes a misstep or mistake legally, then then they can, they can do something about him. But frankly, he had not made a legal mistake.
I don’t say this in my, in my riding, but I think he had a huge case against the boston police department just for his detention.
Um, that he probably could have won, particularly since they didn’t know he was not like nobody knew this guy was a Nazi spy.
He was again, he’s like the biggest Nazi spy in America World War Two was actually domestic and You know, nobody knows.
He goes to his like nobody knew this until basically, the book was published in 2021.

Jake:
[1:14:17] And so it’s not the Mass attorney general pushing this investigation into more, and it’s not the Suffolk County D.
A. It’s not the FBI who is pushing investigation into into Moran in the front as basically a Nazi front corporation.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:14:34] It’s a neighborhood watch organization made up of local citizens which calls themselves the irish american defense Association.
So I did what every good historian does I go to google books and I type in irish american Defense association and I came up with the one book published in 1998 that actually mentioned the group,
a book called desperate deception by thomas mel.
That book doesn’t get any credit, but it’s a great book. So I check it out from the library and I read through and in the footnotes, thomas mel, the author says,
basically says you know, I can’t prove it because the files for this organization are still classified in in the british archives.
But my hunch is that the irish american Defense Association in downtown boston is actually a front organization of british intelligence M I six.
So so I read the footnote and I write a letter to the british National Archives and come to find out,
In 2017 they decide to declassify the files of the Irish American Defense Association.

[1:15:51] So I make a beeline over to London and I put in my request.

[1:15:57] And they bring out this whole cartload huge cartload of files of this group and it’s all filled with top secret documents from boston.
I was like oh my so basically this group and again they recruited a leader who’s kind of in the book become,
kind of the hero or heroine heroine, Francis Sweeney,
she’s a she’s recruited by a secret british agent,
who she doesn’t so a cut out if you will and the tradecraft speak the british have an american who’s actually working for them, who recruits this woman from Somerville named Francis Sweeney to,
become their public face,
of this irish american defense association.
And it’s supposed to be again, this kind of like neighborhood watch organization against fascists and pro nazis and all bad folk like that.
And uh, and she’s a dynamo and she leads the charge and she has her own motivations. And so she now becomes the foil to Moran.
So, maranz, basically, Moran is being run by the nazis. Nazi intelligence.
Sweeney is being run by british intelligence. The FBI knows nothing about any of this and and neither does anybody else in the intelligence community in the United States.

Jake:
[1:17:22] Right.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:17:24] And so these two entities start going at it in South boston.

Jake:
[1:17:28] And and Sweeney is lauded as a genuine anti fascist.
So it’s interesting to see that much like Moran’s double identity, that that genuine conviction, which also came from her deep religious convictions, that it that that can live alongside her utilization by british intelligence.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:17:46] Well, we shall see, right, because the secret life of Francis Sweeney is hardly ever alluded to.
I actually felt bad about kind of uncovering this because she is an icon of kind of 20th century liberalism, anti fascism.
She also, you know, she’s a devout catholic and she’s motivated to take down the christian front because she believes that anti Semitism is a sin,
in 1940 a position that the church won’t get to officially until 1965.
So she’s, you know, she’s a woman ahead of her time, as I say, you know, when I got the top secret documents released,
and found that she was an unwitting agent of british intelligence, you know, it was it was a bit um deflating, right?
Because she was this kind of anti fascist icon and no one had known this about her.
Um but the other thing is, you know, as a historian, I gotta call balls and strikes and um I gotta call it like I see it and how I find it in the archives and what the documents tell me Francis Moran was breaking the Foreign agents registration act.

[1:18:57] So was Francis Sweeney, I was giving a talk once in a,
very high ranking member of the british military and a general officer in the british military was very upset by this news,
and asked me, you know, how do you know that she was actually working for the british and I said, I’ve got the pay stubs, you know, like we have her paychecks, you know, we know how much she was getting paid by M I six to do the work she was doing.
So it’s you know, it’s fascinating but it’s also morally very difficult to navigate.
And as a historian you always have to keep in mind that the anxieties of wartime may not have the story be written in straight lines.
People become different when they’re affected by global forces at the neighborhood level, right at the street level.
And that’s what I thought was so great about this work. Was I was getting to the heart of the matter right at the at the neighborhood level in in Somerville and Mauldin and Roxbury,
and that, you know, the nazis were there, the british were there the Russians come in later on. It’s wild.

Jake:
[1:20:13] Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t think about the all the spies and counter spies that are happening on the home front. You think of that as something that happens in you know back alley in Vienna or something and not.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:20:23] Right? Exactly. And and the the great the thing for me is because I’m I love doing religious history.
Is that the focus of it all is religion.
That and then that’s that’s the camouflage that you have to be able to kind of peel away in order to see the the nitty gritty of the of the activity.

Jake:
[1:20:35] Right.

[1:20:46] Well for Moran. And the front so much of what they were doing was trying to influence Americans to stay out of the war.
But then in December 7, 1941 War comes. So how long does the Christian front last after the United States enters the war?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:21:06] The boston police move against Moran happened in The first week of January of 1942.
By the way that Takedown was orchestrated by Francis Sweeney and what it did was precisely what I thought it would do.
And it sent Moran underground and the christian front becomes a self structure.
It goes underground from 1942 to 1945, it becomes much more extermination ist in other words, Moran becomes.

[1:21:41] Obsessed with the killing of jews and he wants to recruit.

[1:21:48] Returning veterans who he feels are now sufficiently trained in firearms to do that work. I mean, it’s really, really chilling.
That was the second part of the FBI file that I had to get released. There were two parts of the boston file, one was the above ground.
The other which was much harder to get was when they went into their cell structure and they had informants inside the cell structure and they were about to convict to take down Moran.
But their informant who to this day is unidentifiable. She just goes, I know she’s a woman, she went by the code name informant.
T one informant. T one refused to publicly take the chair in a court of law because she was afraid she would be killed if she did so.
And this happens again and again in connection to the,
christian front and with shoals, the people who actually could put them away and identify them,
as who they are, are definitely afraid of being killed in both cases, in shoals case and in maran’s case and so there that prosecution,
never takes place.
And and by 1944, Moran is more obsessed, probably more dangerous, uh, than he ever has been.

Jake:
[1:23:12] Moran actually joins the service.
He ends up enlisting in the U. S. Army, but he gets assigned to the 620th Engineer General Service Company. What what did his unit do during the war? What was that unit all about?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:23:28] There’s a bit of murkiness about this because perhaps some of your listeners would know in 1976, the National Archives in ST louis burned down in a fire.
Uh and that held all of the army personnel records of most of the servicemen in World War Two.
So what I was able to piece together is that he was assigned to a unit for disloyal americans who were suspected of either espionage or subversion.
And he was sent out west to Arizona to build the buildings that japanese internees would eventually live in.
He’s not allowed to have any correspondence with with anyone on the outside except his family.
He is basically put under surveillance within the U. S. Army.

[1:24:23] Interestingly enough, this in the same division is assigned a a student from Harvard who’s convicted of, of espionage and was charged with treason.
And and and the the judgment was that he was to be hanged, A guy named Dale Maple and he was recruited by shoals.
This guy Maple was recruited by Schultz when he was a student at, at Harvard and to be a Nazi agent.
But Moran is uh his time in the army is time and basically a penal unit and he,
becomes, you know, if you could imagine him being more against the world and disgruntled,
um he becomes even more pro nazi and pro fascist, even as the, even as the war is concluding and eventually leaves the army by by 1945 and is back in boston.

Jake:
[1:25:20] Around the same time, he’s enlisting in the army, there’s a lot of anti Semitic violence in the streets of boston and,
sort of late 1942 especially 1943 in neighborhoods where jewish communities and irish catholic communities, mixed places like Grove Hall, Mattapan.
Do you have any sense whether that violence was directed or inspired by Moran or the front or whether it was just sort of independent action by wilding youths?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:25:50] Here’s what I’ve been able to do. I’ve been tracking Maran’s enlistment in the army.
He keeps delaying his enlistment in the army, he’s actually drafted.
But in fact he puts on his draft card that he makes a voluntary statement that he will refuse to follow the orders of of any tyrannical government which the US government allows him to put on the draft card because they don’t know what it means.
But he delays and he delays until late December of 1943.

[1:26:22] So he’s in boston when the anti Semitic gang violence breaks out in the summer of 1943 and to the fall of into the fall of 1943.
And for your listeners, this is this is a massive uptick in rioting of irish Catholics anti sema ties irish Catholics as I call them on jewish youth.
And the the usual way that it started was that gangs of irish Catholics would confront,
young jews walking in their neighborhoods, asked them what they thought of Hitler or told them that if they didn’t say that Hitler was a good guy, they would they would be beaten up. And that’s what that’s what happened.
So that’s that’s a huge problem and it’s it’s kind of roiling boston at the time.
It’s kept out of the newspaper headlines because many members of the jewish community did not want to have,
their fellow americans view them as problematic frankly,
but they weren’t the problem, they were victims in in all this and the boston police which had been infiltrated by the christian front and Moran was also very instrumental in this.

[1:27:43] At the same time when Moran was detained in the first week of January 1942, he gave a statement to the police commissioner,
and it was a 13 page statement and the commissioner asked him a question about whether he had a shortwave radio in his home or not.
And Moran answered yes, he said yes, I have a shortwave radio in my home, but it’s only a receiver, it’s not a transmitter.
And the police commissioner let that go. Like there was no follow up.
So Moran is on site in boston. He’s been drafted into the army. He’s kind of trying to figure out how to delay the army and he’s got a short wave at least receiver in his home.
But he’s worked for shoals for over two years now.
And Shoals is a master of spies, Moran and Charles had a meeting the night before.
Souls had to leave the United States and they were able to shake the FBI surveillance of Shoals.

[1:28:50] Moran is a complete amateur keep in mind they were able to shake that surveillance and have their meeting and I actually was able to get some verbatim about what they talked about.
So it’s and and and and and Moran kind of at that last meeting kind of offers his allegiance to shoals and Schultz tells him he says, stay in place, you stay here and we’ll kind of be in touch.
So I don’t have the documentary proof,
To connect shoals as orchestrating from Europe, where he goes on to,
to be the aid to Karl Wolf, who’s the highest ranking SS general over in Italy.
I have no idea if he’s still orchestrating shoals at this time by the fall of 1943, but the contours fit.

Jake:
[1:29:48] After his Army service begins, does the level of street violence change in boston? Does is there a drop off? Is there an uptick or does it just stay level at that?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:29:56] Yeah, so Francis Sweeney gets involved and Francis Sweeney actually pushes a new york,
magazine to finally put the catholic on jewish violence on the front pages and once, once that happens the mayor of boston gets involved.
Governor Saltonstall gets involved, it becomes coast to coast news and the local and the police commissioner, the mayor and the governor all get involved and um eventually the,
the situation is, is rectified.

Jake:
[1:30:36] As we sort of come to a hopefully a natural closing, I realize I’ve kept you here a long time.
I’m just curious where everybody lands after the war. So where what happens to Schultz? What happens to Moran and what happens to the christian front? Cause it didn’t completely evaporate with the ending of the war? So what happens after peace?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:30:57] So America wants to kind of quickly forget about the war and get back to things to try to become normal again.

[1:31:07] Scholes was able to head to Buenos Aires,
where he stayed for about six months through the letter of recommendation from Cardinal Fossati of Turin who was in and around there in Italy where where Souls,
Souls and Wolf were during the war.
He ends up having a brief affair with the first wife of.

[1:31:35] A guy who became a fashion designer that your listeners may know Count Oleg cassini, He was the fashion designer to Jackie Onassis. Right?
So he designed all of Jackie’s hats.
His first wife was a Nazi sympathizer. She ended up with Souls in Buenos Aires for about for a fling basically they had been having an on and off thing all through the war.
Then he leaves Buenos Aires and leaves her actually she left him because she was, he apparently was,
indicating that he felt that Nazism would rise again and that he needed to be in place for the new rise of Nazism,
his consort was not of the same view and she just left him and then he went to uh he went to have a meeting with the Krupp family,
of Krupp Ironworks and then moved to Bolivia,
and opened a copper mine.
He bought a copper mine in Bolivia.

[1:32:37] Then in 1958, when uh,
a more communist style government came in in Bolivia, he left and went back to Germany.
In the meantime he had married a yugoslavian countess,
and he petitioned the new german Democratic Republic for a pension because in his view, he was nothing but a diplomat.
And in fact one of the only things that had survived the war was were the diplomatic lists.
So his diplomatic cover allowed him to claim a pension,
in the new government and they gave it to him and he bought a villa with his countess on the shores of Lake Sternberg, outside of a beautiful beautiful lake outside of outside of Munich.
And lived there until his death in 1985.

Jake:
[1:33:38] That’s not the justice you hope for. For somebody that high up in the Nazi organization. You mentioned that after his enlistment was up, that Moran returned to boston or the boston area. How did he live out His life after the war was over?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:33:51] Between between 1945 and 1947. He complains bitterly in the press that the communists are keeping him out of getting a job.

[1:34:02] He takes a job as a taxi driver In the late 1940s.
The last we hear of him publicly is that he’s a victim of a taxicab robbery. Kind of like a stickup.
He picked up two brothers in, in Roxbury and uh, and his cab was was held up at knifepoint.
It’s unclear who those brothers were. So then he um, he falls off the radar for a long time and then he gets a job,
working for the boston public library for a couple of years as a clerk in in one way or another.
It’s it’s hard to tell whether he was the reference desk or circulation desk.
It’s unclear, but it makes sense. He he was always a bookish individual.
He was a man of ideas and intellectual again like a working but a working class intellectual, not, not the sort of intellectual that that would be recognized in Harvard Square of course.
And so uh, So he lives out his days peacefully.
I I think, you know, his his case file for the FBI closes in 1949 and then they’re done with him.
And I think his silence until the grave is a part of his astute nature.

[1:35:26] Because if the FBI really started digging, he could have gone to jail.
He should have gone to jail for a long, long time.
He was breaking the foreign agents registration act. He was breaking the espionage act.
He was breaking the morale clause of the espionage act as well as the espionage clauses.
And he, he could have gone to jail for a long, long time. And so my view is that he remained out of the limelight.
He lived a quiet life because he knew very well,
that he could get be convicted for espionage if anyone ever found out he was working with souls and he almost got caught, he almost got caught around 1949 1950.
When a doj lawyer interviewed shoals in Germany and shoals spilled the beans to this D.
O. J. Lawyer. Oh john row G and that that lawyer sat on it,
Joel’s kind of explained to the guy that he was breaking the espionage act with Moran,
and that doj lawyer went back to the United States after he wasn’t, he interrogated shoals in Germany,
went back to the United States and sat on that and socials got off scot free and Moran got off and.

Jake:
[1:36:48] A piece of paper and a file in a drawer somewhere that nobody ever saw again.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:36:51] Yeah, I’m not sure you’re supposed to do that as a lawyer. When someone explains that there actually committing crimes especially work for the D. O. J.

Jake:
[1:36:59] Espionage. A big crime. Right.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:37:02] You’re supposed to shove that under the rug.

Jake:
[1:37:06] Well, I’ve gotta tell you I could sit here and talk about this book all night.
I think looking through my notes, I’ve probably asked about a third of the questions that I wrote down, but I’ve kept you here way longer than I said I would, and I appreciate that. So before I let you go, is there anything that you wish I had asked you about tonight that I didn’t.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:37:24] Just to kind of a teaser Russian spies show up just because you know, Russian meddling is in the news these days,
They’re there and they show up in in Roxbury, they show up at the neighborhood level and it’s it’s not your usual Russian spy, it’s actually soviet.
Military intelligence is kind of on the ground in in Roxbury.
Kind of trying to push push a certain narrative. So that’s a really interesting piece that is,
the other the other expository components are so kind of blockbuster in a lot of ways that that Russian piece I think gets lost. But I think it’s really, really interesting.

Jake:
[1:38:07] So readers will have to pick up a copy. Our listeners will have to pick up a copy,
of nazis of Copley Square, the forgotten story of the christian front by professor Charles r Gallagher, Professor Gallagher, if people want to follow up, you follow your work online, where should they look for that?

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:38:24] Well first I would go to the publisher website which is Harvard University Press.
They have multiple links for more information. Uh and then also the book is available on amazon dot com.

Jake:
[1:38:36] Alright, we’ll make sure to link to both of those from the show notes today.
I just want to say one more time. Thank you very much for joining me today and for being so generous with your time. Like I said, I could go on and on, I will stop now and let you go, but I really appreciate how generous you’ve been with your time today.

Charles R Gallagher:
[1:38:52] Jake. This has been great. I’m very fortunate to um be able to speak with your listeners. Thank you so much.

Jake:
[1:39:00] Well, that’s about all for this week. To learn more about the Nazis of Copley square.
Check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 258.
I’ll include a link to purchase the book, as well as a link to Professor Gallagher’s page on the Harvard University press site, which has links to tons of sources and press coverage about the book,
Plus for anyone who’s listening from Minnesota will link to information about a book talk that he’s giving on November three at the University of ST Thomas, which is in ST. Paul.
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Music

Jake:
[1:40:05] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.