Marauding youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic violence in Boston and New York during World War II

American Jewish History

Volumn 91, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 233-267

  Norwood, Stephen H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949929052     PISSN: 01640178     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ajh.2004.0055     Document Type: Review

References (139)

1. PM, October 18 and 20, 1943;
2. New York Post, October 20 and 22, 1943;
3. The Day, October 22, 1943. The prominent writer Wallace Stegner in 1944 noted that the "Jewish section" of Boston-that is, Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury-was surrounded by neighborhoods "largely Irish-American in population." The "gangs" that launched raids to beat up Jews "were composed mainly of young Irish-Americans."
4. Stegner, "Who Persecutes Boston?" Atlantic Monthly, July 1944, 46.
5. J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground (New York, 1985), 378.
6. Memo to Governor Saltonstall from WAM [sic], October 19, 1943, carton 9, Leverett Saltonstall Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter, MHS). Frances Sweeney provided valuable assistance to the Jewish organizations assembling information on the antisemitic outbreaks. She edited a newsletter, the Boston City Reporter, dedicated to exposing antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in Boston. Sweeney employed about a dozen volunteer researchers, including Nat Hentoff, then a Northeastern University student. Hentoff recalled that Sweeney had emphasized to her researchers that she only wanted facts from them, which she defined as "something that can be proved." She required them to present "the proof with each fact" they brought her. Hentoff, Boston Boy (Boston, 1986), 69.
7. Dr. Margoshes stated that he had examined fifty affidavits apparently supplied by the AJ Congress, but the total number collected is unclear. An aide to Saltonstall told the governor that Otis Hood, state chairman of the Communist Party, had met with him and stated he could bring in "over 100 affidavits, " and that the Dorchester Record, a Jewish neighborhood newspaper, "had a number of affidavits." Wallace Stegner stated in 1944 that "[t]he American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and the American Irish Defense Association [led by Frances Sweeney] have been collecting affidavits on [antisemitic] incidents [in Boston] for at least five years." Stegner interviewed Dorchester Jews who had been "surrounded and beaten bloody as early as 1939." Memo from WAM, Saltonstall Papers, MHS; Stegner, "Who Persecutes Boston?" 45.
8. Dorchester Beacon, October 22, 1943;
9. Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 1943.
10. Robert T. Bushneil, Attorney-General, to Governor Saltonstall, November 23, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS.
11. Boston Post, March 20, 1943.
12. PM, May 15, 1944;
13. Alson J. Smith, "The 'Christian' Terror, " The Christian Century, August 23, 1939, 1017-18;
14. "Christian Action, " Time, January 10, 1944, 76, 78;
15. Ronald H. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941 (Baltimore, 1978), 159, 161-62.
16. Steven M. Lowenstein, in his study of Washington Heights, observed that, although there was much hostility among ethnic groups in New York during the 1930s and early 1940s, "the greatest conflict . . . seems to have been between Jews and Irish." He notes that "anti-Semitic incidents were frequent" in Washington Heights. Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit, 1989), 222. Two youth gangs identified as Irish American-the Shamrocks and the Amsterdams-were largely responsible for the antisemitic assaults and vandalism in Washington Heights.
17. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 156, 216.
18. Jewish Advocate, November 25, 1943.
19. Arnold Forster, Square One (New York, 1988), 100-1. Forster identified those assaulting Jews and vandalizing synagogues as "Catholic youth . . . [from] parochial schools."
20. Forster, Square One, 101. Forster was present at a Washington Heights Hebrew school assembly when the principal asked the one-hundred-sixty students if any of them had been "molested" by antisémites during the previous eight weeks. He reported that over fifty raised their hands. The ADL took statements from many of them.
21. New York Times, December 30, 1943.
22. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage, 1992), 454;
23. Isabel Currier, "Nine-Year Old Reporter: Helped to Change Boston for the Better, " Boston City Reporter, November 1951, Francis X. Moloney Collection, Manuscript Division, Boston Public Library (hereafter BPL), Boston;
24. Charles H. Trout, Boston: The Great Depression and the New Deal (New York, 1977), 289;
25. Boston Herald, August 19, 1944;
26. Stegner, "Who Persecutes Boston?" 49. In 1940, Mussolini's ambassador to the United States prepared a report on American antisemitism, in which he identified Coughlin as the nation's most prominent antisemite. He stated that "the impact of Father Coughlin's words is mainly among the Irish masses."
27. Philip V. Cannistraro and Theodore P. Kovaleff, "Father Coughlin and Mussolini: Impossible Allies, " Journal of Church and State 13 (Autumn 1971): 437-38.
28. Journalists at the time frequently commented on the Catholic Church's unwillingness to condemn the Christian Front. Theodore Irwin, for example, stated: "Of greatest aid to the Front is the absence of a disapproving word from official, authoritative spokesmen of the Catholic Church." Alson J. Smith declared: "No authoritative Catholic voice" had been "raised in opposition" to the Front. Theodore Irwin, "Inside the 'Christian Front', " Forum, March 1940, 108;
29. Alson J. Smith, "Father Coughlin's Platoons, " New Republic, August 30, 1939, 97.
30. Henry Hoke, Black Mail (New York, 1944), 92;
31. Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 1942. Archbishop Mooney's silencing of Coughlin was the result of U.S. Department of Justice pressure. The Christian Front continued operations "under the cover of newly formed groups, " like the Friends of Father Coughlin.
32. Sachar, History of the Jews, 522;
33. The German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization based in the Yorkville section of Manhattan's Upper East Side, declined precipitously after U.S. entry into World War II. By contrast, New York's "overwhelmingly Irish" Christian Front, less directly associated with America's wartime enemy, Germany, continued to thrive. Even in largely German-American Yorkville, Coughlin's supporters were primarily Irish Americans, who comprised most of the Christian Front chapter there. Irwin, "Inside the 'Christian Front', " 107;
34. Chris McNickle, "When New York Was Irish, and After, " in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 354;
35. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 163. In Boston, the Bund itself was largely Irish. As Frances Sweeney commented to Professor Gordon Allport, "Around here [Boston], there were more Irish than Germans who attended those Bund meetings." Frances Sweeney to Gordon Allport, May 7, 1943, box 10, Gordon Allport Papers, Harvard University Archives (hereafter HUA), Pusey Library, Harvard University, Cambridge.
36. Donald Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio (New York, 1996), 280. The term "blood sucker" evoked the medieval blood libel accusation, that Jews kidnaped and murdered Christian children, extracting blood from their bodies to mix with matzoh at Passover. The image of the Jew sucking the blood of Christians was advanced by official Catholic Church publications, as well as by the Nazis in Germany. For example, in 1893 Father Rondina declared in the Jesuit biweekly Civilta cattolica that "we have known from centuries-long experience that the Jew[s] sucked Christian blood ... in obedience to their law." David I. Kertzer notes that, "In the Catholic world, Civiltà cattolica came to be regarded as the unofficial voice of the Pope himself."
37. David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York, 2001), 135, 160.
38. In 1934, the German Nazi organ Der Stürmer published a special "ritual murder" issue with an illustration "showing four rabbis sucking the blood of a Christian child through straws." Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York, 1985), 43.
39. Stegner, "Who Persecutes Boston?" 49.
40. John Roy Carlson, Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America (New York, 1943), 451;
41. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear (New York, 1995 [1988]), 269. Bennett labels the sermon "defeatist."
42. Northeastern News, October 27, 1943, Archives and Special Collections Department, Northeastern University Library, Boston; ADL Daily Newspaper Report, November 11, 1943, reel 2773, ADL Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati (hereafter AJA);
43. Carlson, Under Cover, 60;
44. Irwin, "Inside the 'Christian Front', " 108.
45. Isabel Currier, "Frances Sweeney, " The Commonweal, August 18, 1944, 428;
46. "March 17 - A Day of Sedition?" Boston City Reporter, March 1943;
47. John Roy Carlson, "Hate-Mongers Among the Clergy, " American Mercury, March 1946, 282;
48. New York Post, March 28, 1944;
49. "Father Edward Lodge Curran, " Boston City Reporter, April 1944, Moloney Collection, BPL;
50. Boston Herald, March 16, 1942.
51. ADL Daily Newspaper Report, March 22, 1944, reel 2773, ADL Papers, AJA. The Boston Herald noted that the South Boston police station did not record the beatings of the Jews at the parade on its blotter.
52. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 101, 198 n.59;
53. Smith, "Father Coughlin's Platoons, " 97;
54. Warren, Radio Priest, 141.
55. Smith, The 'Christian' Terror, " 1018.
56. and James Wechsler, "The Coughlin Terror, " The Nation, July 22, 1939, 95.
57. Bayor, Neighbors, 102, 155;
58. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York, 1948), 210-15.
59. Jonathan Daniels, White House Witness, 1942-1945 (Garden City, N.Y., 1975), 62.
60. Carlson, "Hate-Mongers, " 281-82;
61. Hoke, Black Mail, 91;
62. "Gaelic American Endorses Lodge as Post-War Isolationist, " Boston City Reporter, November 2, 1942, Moloney Collection, BPL.
63. John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York, 1975), 181, 185, 188, 193.
64. Stephen Whitfield, "The Presence of the Past: Recent Trends in American Jewish History, " American Jewish History 70 (December 1980): 151, 160.
65. Scholars of American Jewish history have largely ignored the violent antisemitic outbreaks during World War II. The major overviews of American antisemitism and of American Jewish history by Leonard Dinnerstein and Howard Sachar, respectively, do give them brief attention. Dinnerstein cites PM's report, and states that a resulting investigation initiated by Massachusetts Governor Saltonstall, who had previously ignored the outbreaks, "confirmed the accusations . . . that Jewish youths had been regularly assaulted for . . . years while police officers either abetted the attacking hoodlums or ignored them." Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York, 1994), 133. Dinnerstein entitled his chapter on World War II, "Anti-Semitism at High Tide." Sachar notes that in World War II "in Boston's Jewish neighborhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury, assaults on Jewish children became almost daily occurrences." The governor's investigation "revealed police negligence approaching collaboration."
66. Sachar, History of Jews in America, 523. Similarly, David S. Wyman indicates the severity of the wartime antisemitic violence in Boston and New York in his critical analysis of the United States government's policy toward the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.
67. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York, 1984), 10-11.
68. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 8, 14, 17-18;
69. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1998), 26. Ann Douglas also advances the "whiteness" argument, that even "the poorest, least successful European immigrant" enjoyed a sense of racial superiority, because s/he was defined as white. She allows that "such benefits . . . didn't arrive for Jews until the World War II era." Yet it was precisely during this era that antisemitic violence in major American cities was most intense and widespread.
70. Ann Douglas, "Introduction" to James T. Farrell, Studs Lonigan (New York, 2001), xv.
71. New York Amsterdam News, November 13, 1943.
72. Julian D. Steele to Governor Leverett Saltonstall, November 2, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS.
73. ADL Daily Newspaper Report, December 20, 1943, reel 2773, ADL Papers, AJA.
74. Dinah Braun to Jewish Labor Commission [sic], August 10, 1937, and I. Minkoff to Dinah Braun, August 20, 1937, reel 33, Records of the Jewish Labor Committee, Robert F. Wagner Archives, Tamiment Institute Library, New York University, New York.
75. Christian Science Monitor, April 10 and 11, 1944.
76. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 81, 112.
77. Rose Finkelstein Norwood, president of the Boston Women's Trade Union League from 1941 to 1950, and a member of the executive committee of the Massachusetts Citizens Committee for Racial Unity, established in 1943 to combat the antisemitic attacks in Boston, recalled that Irish American youths frequently threw bricks at her and shrieked "Christ Killer" when she walked to school as a child in East Cambridge, adjacent to Boston, around the turn of the century. She suffered a very serious head injury when struck with a brick in one of these attacks. Stephen H. Norwood, "Rose Finkelstein Norwood" in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, vol. 16 (New York, 1999), 533. The Irish American novelist James T. Farrell, in his Studs Lonigan trilogy, included a scene of a band of Irish American youths invading a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago and dragging two Jewish boys into an alley to administer a beating. As he strikes one of the Jews, an Irish American shouts, "Take that for killin' Christ." The Irish American gang also roams about a park with a pepper cellar, hoping to find Jews and throw pepper in their eyes. They do not treat members of other European immigrant groups in this manner. Besides Jews, the Irish American youths instigate violence only against "shines" - their term for African Americans.
78. Farrell, Studs Lonigan, 120, 134-36.
79. Harold J. Abramson, Ethnic Diversity in Catholic America (New York, 1973), 90-91, 108-9, 159;
80. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 231;
81. Hasia R. Diner, Erin's Daughters in America (Baltimore, 1983), 45-46, 55, 59-62, 70-105;
82. Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia, 2002), 81-82. Virulently antisemitic folk beliefs casting the Jews as responsible for Jesus's crucifixion had deep roots among the Irish, and had helped spark anti-Jewish riots and economic boycotts in Ireland during the late nineteenth century.
83. Rudolf Glanz, Jew and Irish: Historic Group Relations and Immigration (New York, 1966), 12, 22-23.
84. Albert Prago, "Jews in the International Brigades in Spain, " a Jewish Currents Reprint, 1979, 4;
85. Donald F. Crosby, "Boston's Catholics and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, " New England Quarterly 44 (March 1971): 82-83, 85-90, 93-95.
86. Carlson, "Hate-Mongers, " 282.
87. Boston Globe, May 4, 1938.
88. Egal Feldman, Catholics and Jews in Twentieth-Century America (Urbana, 2001), 63;
89. Allen Grover to Deputies and Messrs. Lewis, Bell, Pringle, and Kane, February 23, 1942, Office of Facts and Figures (hereafter OFF), 1941-1942, entry 7, box 7, Office of War Information (hereafter OWI) Papers, Record Group (hereafter RG) 208, National Archives (hereafter NA), College Park, Md.;
90. Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (Reading, Mass., 1992), 451;
91. Boston Herald, March 4, 1941.
92. Rossa F. Downing to editor, Washington Post, November 13, 1941, OFF, 1941-1942; entry 7, box 1, OWI Papers, RG 208, NA.
93. Selden Menefee, Assignment: U.S.A. (New York, 1943), 11;
94. Daniels, White House Witness, 105-6.
95. Currier, "Nine-Year Old Reporter, " Boston City Reporter, November 1951;
96. Boston Herald, November 24, 1943;
97. Hentoff, Boston Boy, 98.
98. Currier, "Nine-Year Old Reporter, " Boston City Reporter, November 1951, Moloney Collection, BPL;
99. "Re: National Roll Call" [1941], clipping from Washington Daily News, October 31, 1941,
100. and pamphlet "No Blarney From Hitler!" OFF, 1941-1942, entry 7, box 1, OWI Papers, RG 208, NA;
101. Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York, 1989), 295, 683.
102. Currier, "Frances Sweeney, " 428;
103. Currier, "Nine-Year Old Reporter, " Boston City Reporter, Moloney Collection, BPL.
104. "In Boston, " Time, November 1, 1943, 42;
105. John P. Lewis to Governor Saltonstall, October 18, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS.
106. See Northeastern News, September 1 and 16, 1943;
107. "In Boston, " Time, November i, 1943, 42;
108. Robert Bushneil to Governor Leverett Saltonstall, November 23, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS. Nat Hentoff describes an incident in 1938 at Grove Hall in Roxbury, in which eight youths in their late teens and early twenties, explicitly identified as "Irishers, " one evening came "careening out of a side street." One "snatched a yeshiva boy's glasses from his face and spun them into the street; as another dumped the [Jewish] newsboy's first batch of Daily Records into the gutter; as yet another . . . yanked, as he had seen in the newsreels, an old, spidery Jew by his beard." Hentoff, Boston Boy, 29.
109. Jewish Advocate, May 6, 1938.
110. Sweeney to Robert Littell, February 20, 1943, box 6, Allport Papers, HUA.
111. Governor Saltonstall to Hon. Joseph F. Timilty, October 18, 1943, and Timilty to Saltonstall, October 18, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS.
112. Boston Globe, October 23, 1943;
113. Stokes to Governor Saltonstall, November 5, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS.
114. Robert Bushnell to Governor Leverett Saltonstall, November 23, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS; Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 1943;
115. Lawrence R. Klein to Governor Leverett Saltonstall, December 1, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS; PM, November 12 and 30, 1943.
116. "Trouble in Cambridge, " Time, June 12, 1944, 81-82, clipping in Headquarters Records, Division of Review and Analysis, Tension File, entry 37, box 448, Fair Employment Practices Commission Records, RG 228, NA;
117. Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore, 1992), 39-40, 143-45;
118. Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 150-51;
119. Sachar, History of the Jews in America, 664-66;
120. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, The Death of an American Jewish Community (New York, 1992), 38;
121. Memorandum from Frances Sweeney Committee to Professor Gordon W. Allport, April 17, 1951, box 10, Allport Papers, HUA, PL, HU.
122. Gordon Allport to Clement A. Norton, April 29, 1944, box 8, and Draft of Gordon Allport statement to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman, n.d., box 16, Allport Papers, HUA, PL, HU; Christian Science Monitor, December 13, 1944.
123. "Public Meeting for Racial and Religious Understanding-Sunday, November 28, 1943, " and Dana McLean Greeley to Governor Saltonstall, August 31, 1943, carton 9, Saltonstall Papers, MHS; Rabbi Korff to Allport, March 23, 1944, box 6, Allport Papers, HUA, PL, HU.
124. Jewish Advocate, April 2, 1944;
125. Kenneth Leslie, "'Seeds of Hate': Textbook Commission to Eliminate Anti-Semitic Statements in American Textbooks, " carton 10, Saltonstall Papers, MHS.
126. "Report: Interview with Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan, by Gordon Hall, " April 7, 1950, box 15, Allport Papers, HUA, PL, HU. Hall also reported that Sullivan referred to an African American police officer as a "big boogie, " and mimicked him by pacing the floor as though he had enormous feet.
127. ADL Daily Newspaper Report, September 10, 1945, reel 2773, ADL Papers, AJA. Gerald Gamm notes that "the anti-Semitic violence of Catholic gangs remained a major concern of Jews throughout Dorchester and Roxbury in the early 1950s." Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 227.
128. "Annual Report of the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'rith, 1945, " and ADL Daily Newspaper Report, March 28, 1946, reel 2773, ADL Papers, AJA;
129. John Roy Carlson, The Plotters (New York, 1946), 82;
130. New York Times, March 29, 1948.
131. "'Accentuate the Positive' About Hecht House, " Boston City Reporter, April 1951,
132. "Father Feeney's Excommunication, " Life, March 2, 1953, 85;
133. Obituary, Boston Globe, January 31, 1978;
134. "Here's Leonard Feeney, Boston's Hate Merchant, " The Compass, January 27, 1952, box 1, series 3, RG 3, E.11.01, ABA.
135. "Who Shall be Saved?" Newsweek, April 25, 1949;
136. "Here's Leonard Feeney, " box 1, ABA; The Compass; "Examiner, " July 20, 1951, box 1, ABA.
137. "All Roads Lead to Rome, " n.d., box 1, series 3, RG 3, E.11.01, ABA.
138. "Examiner, " July 20, 1951, box 1, ABA; "Common Talk, " draft for Boston City Reporter, June-July 1952, box 3, series 3, RG 3, E.11.01, ABA; "Examiner, " July 20, 1951, box 1, ABA.
139. "Examiner, " July 20, 1951, box 1, ABA.