But it shouldn't be attempted without really contending with how extreme Father Coughlin was.Ĭoughlin wrote fan mail to Benito Mussolini. And there is a way to make that case, sure.
#Mission failed we will get them nextime tv
Maddow: Today, Father Coughlin sometimes gets referenced like there's a direct throughline from him to modern, ultra-conservative radio and TV personalities in the United States.
Powerful elected officials in Washington helping the Hitler government operate inside the United States, targeting the American people with this information, taking money to do it. The Justice Department had a tiger by the tail with that investigation. The Justice Department would soon reveal in court, that the Nazi propaganda scheme the Senator was involved in was the subject of a big, ongoing, indeed widening, federal criminal investigation. Senate.Ī speech written for him by a Nazi agent was found by the FBI along with the senator’s remains in the field where his plane went down outside D.C. In the wake of the crash, there were these explosive reports that the senator had been engaged in a scheme with an agent of the Hitler government to distribute Nazi propaganda in the United States, through congress and the U.S. It was 1940 when Senator Ernest Lundeen died in a mysterious plane crash, with two FBI employees and a Justice Department prosecutor on board that plane with him.
And what was in all those pages, it confirmed Gallagher’s suspicions that those men with guns, they weren't kidding around. That’s as big as the FBI file on the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Maddow: The file was, in fact, just massive. Gallagher: So I called them back and then we had to negotiate three times to get the file released because they told me it was the third-largest case file in their inventory. And it was at this point in Gallagher’s pursuit to pry-loose that file, that he got the call from the FBI. I went back to Washington, went to the National Archives, and they went through their database with that case number and, miraculously, they actually found it. And it, frankly, it looked like what an FBI case number ordinarily would look like. Someone on Reddit had, input a case number from what they said was the case from 1940. Gallagher: So I got on a website called Reddit. He decided to request the FBI file on the case. Maddow: In 2010, Charles Gallagher set out to figure out, once and for all, what those guys with guns on the front pages of the newspaper had been up to, and how big of a threat they really did pose. Against kind of, you know, against a lot of dissuasion, I just kind of kept digging. Gallagher: I always had them in the back of my mind because my big question was what motivates religious people to take up arms. But all that time- through his studies, and his career changes, and his travels, and taking the vows of the priesthood- that photo of those men who plotted to overthrow the government, the guys with the rifles in that photo, it just nagged at him. In his mid-30s, he became a Jesuit priest. These days, Charles Gallagher is a history professor at Boston College.Ĭharles Gallagher also became Father Charles Gallagher. Maddow: Charles Gallagher disagreed with his professor on that. And it was those guns that were what caught Gallagher’s attention in the first place.
government, they were all holding these big rifles in that front page newspaper photo. Those young men in the photo, accused of trying to violently overthrow the U.S. As one journalist, put it a, a playful plot. Just kind of crazies who really didn't have any real intent towards either lethality, or toward any kind of systematic overthrow of the U.S. Particularly magazine journalists, in writing stories about it, seemed to disregard these folks as being, kind of crackpots, was the main term used. Gallagher: And as I kept reading about the case, it seemed that the journalists at the time downplayed it. I mean, it sounded weird, but it seemed like maybe a serious threat to the country. To a young, undergraduate, Charles Gallagher, this sounded serious. Maddow: A group of armed, American men led by a Catholic Priest with a plot to overthrow the government of the United States, forgotten about and filed away in a stack of old newspapers.
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