On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover’s charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a “temporary dictatorship” in order to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States.
In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves as crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, under assault from godless Communism, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. The front’s anti-Semitism was inspired by Sunday sermons and by lay leaders openly espousing fascist and Nazi beliefs.
Gallagher chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the mainstream political and religious leaders who shielded the front’s activities from scrutiny. Nazis of Copley Square is a grim tale of faith perverted to violent ends, and a warning for those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.
Charles R. Gallagher, S.J., is Professor of History at Boston College. In 2017, he was the William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellow on America, the Holocaust, & the Jews, at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Gallagher is interested in religion and right-wing movements, the Holocaust, American Catholicism, Vatican diplomacy, and the intersection of religion and espionage. His current writing is on Joseph E. McWilliams, founder of the Christian Mobilizers, and known during the World War II era as “Joe McNazi.”
Father Gallagher is featured on Episode 2, “The Brooklyn Boys,” on Rachel Maddow’s “Ultra” podcast. Learn more HERE
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This program is supported by The Dreifus Family in Memory of their Aunt Esther Teidor.
