Charles Coughlin
Father Charles Edward Coughlin (1891-1979), the 'Radio Priest', was a Canadian Roman Catholic priest who became notorious for the anti-semitic radio broadcasts he made during the 1930s and 40s.
Coughlin was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and was ordained in 1916. In 1923 he moved to Detroit and from 1926 began broadcasting weekly radio sermons. In the early 1930s he enthusiastically endorsed President Roosevelt and the New Deal, but the tenor of his talks, as the sermons had become, changed to attacks on Wall Street, international finance, and the New Deal itself. As Coughlin was attracting audiences in the tens of millions, Roosevelt sent intermediaries including Joseph P. Kennedy Snr to try and quieten the priest, to no avail.
From 1936 Coughlin began to express admiration for Hitler and Mussolini and to attack Jews; he founded a publication 'Social Justice' which published extracts from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He also gave his support to the Christian Front, an organisation suppressed by the FBI in 1940 for planning Nazi terroristic attacks. In 1938, following Kristellnacht in Germany, he blamed the Jewish victims for the assaults they had suffered. By the laet thirties, pressure was growing from both inside and outside the church to stop Coughlin's broadcasts. Several major networks refused to carry his talks, or inssisted on pre-approval of his scripts; but he only ceased broadcasting upon receipt of a direct order from the Bishop of Detroit in 1942.