Who Persecutes Boston?

by WALLACE STEGNER

1

TO MANY Americans outside of New England, Boston remains what the school history books left it — the home of the bean and the cod, of Cabots and Lowells and the Bluestocking tradition, Back Bay and the water side of Beacon Street and the nostalgic impotencies of H. M. Pulham. It is still partly that, fusty and archaic and tartly charming. But it is also probably the most class-bound of American cities, and the difficulties arising from its divergent racial groups are as much a part of modern Boston as the cowpath streets and the pigeons on the Common.

Boston has had race troubles for more than a hundred years. The street violence which broke into the headlines last autumn — and has broken into them periodically since then — was variously labeled “race riot,” “wartime hoodlumism,” or “kid stuff ” according to the interests of the commentator. A recent incident on May 12, in which twenty hoodlums beat up three Jewish boys in a subway train near Shawmut station, was called a riot by most of the Boston papers, though previously they had been unwilling to admit that there was anything approaching riot conditions. But such outbreaks are neither new nor unusual. They are only one phase of the religious and racial animosity that has been smoldering in the Hub since the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Probably it is not proper to call any of the troubles, even the subway fight, a riot. But it is proper to point out that cemetery desecrations, insults, beatings, property damage, and public demonstrations have occurred over a long period. The American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Irish Defense Association have been collecting affidavits on such incidents for at least five years. The Dorchester Record, a little weekly published in the most troubled district, headlined them for years without being able to get support from any metropolitan paper. I have talked with Jewish boys from that section who were shouldered off the sidewalk, surrounded, and beaten bloody as early as 1939.

What Boston had, and still has, is a social situation of lower voltage than a riot, but with dangerous implications. It has in addition, even with most of the activities of native fascist groups checked by the FBI, an inherited persecution complex that can be worked upon subtly by Nazi and pro-Nazi forces.

It is that social situation, rather than the bloodand-stitches details of the recent beatings, that should be Boston’s chief concern.

But let us look at these latest symptoms before working backward to the earliest ones. Who got hurt? The Jews got hurt, particularly the Jews of Ward 14, Dorchester, a section running along spinal Blue Hill Avenue in the southeastern part of the city. There was violence in other wards, but Ward 14 suffered worst because it is perhaps the most solidly Jewish neighborhood in the United States, with only 2 per cent of Gentiles in its population. Studies of similar outbreaks in other cities indicate that they occur in direct proportion to the concentration of Jews. In New York, for example, trouble was most frequent in the Bronx, the most heavily Jewish part of the city, and next most frequent in Brooklyn.

Sometimes, fairly clearly, the violence was the “kid stuff” that the Boston mayor and the police commissioner called it, and sometimes it was semiorganized warfare between neighborhood gangs. But very often it was a planned assault, preceded by the question, “Are you a Jew?” Gangs laid for Jewish boys coming out of Hecht Neighborhood House, roamed Franklin Field and Franklin Park in search of cross-lot walkers. Sometimes they appeared in cars, which pulled up beside Jewish youths to disgorge half a dozen attackers.

Occasionally the residents of Dorchester had revenge, as when a Jewish amateur boxer, set upon by three toughs, wiped the sidewalk with the three of them. But generally the victims were boys from twelve to sixteen, and generally the odds were at least three to one, with the attackers both bigger and older. After Pearl Harbor, when the dimout made street prowling safer, the number of reported incidents increased. A careful scrutiny of the affidavits collected by various organizations shows that, from an average of two or three a month prior to the summer of 1943, they jumped in July of that year to eight, and in September to eleven. By October the residents of Ward 14 were living in a perpetual state of alarm. A good many incidents undoubtedly were not reported, because some Jews were afraid that airing the trouble would only make it worse.

The question, “Who did it?” is more difficult. The few arrests which were made invariably involved minors, and it is not customary in Massachusetts to make public either names or evidence in a juvenile court trial. Perhaps for that reason, the report which Public Safety Commissioner Stokes prepared for Governor Saltonstall had no findings on the identity of the gangs.

Still, there is some evidence. The identity of individual assailants is known to Dorchester Jews who were attacked. It is known that they came from outside Ward 14, since that ward is almost solidly Jewish. It is known also, from the implication of certain Roxbury and South Boston street gangs, about what sections the attackers come from. The Jewish section itself, a sociological island of approximately sixty thousand, is surrounded by suburbs largely Irish-American in population. The logical inference is that the gangs who raided Blue Hill Avenue (Jew Hill Avenue to them) were composed mainly of young Irish-Americans, and that inference is strongly supported by the fact that most of the boys identified in connection with the late subway beating bore Irish names.

These boys were minors, but what they were doing could not be dismissed as “kid stuff” or even as juvenile delinquency, though it was clearly both. When the victims are always Jews, we are dealing with a special kind of delinquency. And when, according to all the available evidence, according to the testimony of those who have been attacked, and according to geographical probabilities, the assailants are generally of Irish extraction, we are dealing with an even more special kind. Every ethnic and religious division of Boston’s polyglot population breeds its share of bad boys. Why is it that so many Irish bad boys turn upon the Jew?

The answer is that Dorchester’s anti-Semitic violence is not really a Jewish problem at all, but is part and parcel of the Irish problem winch has been with Boston all through its recent history. To understand why Jewish boys (and sometimes grown men) get their noses broken and their teeth knocked out in 1944, we must go back at least a hundred years. The present situation cannot be understood without some understanding of the history of the Irish in Boston.

2

PROBABLY no other large group of immigrants ever came to America with so little of the world’s goods as the Irish. They came literally to escape starvation, and after 1844 they came in streams. For twenty years the flood continued; and by the time it had begun to dwindle, the city, which had reached its natural limit of growth in the eighteen-twenties, had thousands of new residents.

Unkempt, untrained, ignorant, and poor after the ageless British oppression, they took whatever work they could find, at whatever wages they could get. Employers exploited the unexpected cheap labor pool mercilessly; the mere fact of that pool changed Boston from a mercantile to an industrial city, and much of Boston’s wealth was built with it. Yankee workmen whose jobs the Irish threatened disliked them heartily almost on sight.

Penniless, without friends except those as poor as themselves, they squatted along the docks near the places where they worked. They had come to Boston because that was where the immigrant boats landed; they stayed because they didn’t even have carfare to the country. Between 1820 and 1860 more than 166,000 landed from Ireland; uncounted thousands more came indirectly by way of England and Canada. Most of them stayed in the Greater Boston area, whose population, though shrinking in terms of the Yankee native-born, jumped from 64,000 to 288,000 in those forty years.

There was little housing for them except ratinfested tenements and cellars. Because they were kindhearted people, they took in friends and relatives newly arrived, and overcrowded their unsanitary warrens even more. Quite naturally the results of their poverty followed them. They brought typhus and cholera to a city previously healthy; they created abysmal slums in a city noted for its civic pride. Among the Yankees they acquired the obnoxious tag of “shanty Irish,” and a reputation for lying, cheating, brawling, and drunkenness. Within a few years of the first mass landings, the sedate port of Boston found itself with totally unprecedented problems of open-sewer slums, epidemics, drunkenness, prostitution, and crime. The misfortunes of the Irish were widely construed as their vices.

It is little wonder that the Yankees disliked and feared the immigrants even while they exploited them. The miserable and driven Irish found reason to hate Bostonians almost as much as they hated the British. Boston found Irishmen useful as laborers, their wives and daughters handy as domestic servants. Otherwise they were snubbed, bought and sold in the labor market, segregated, and disliked.

To see how unhappy was the early history of the Irish in Boston one has only to follow the cool survey by Oscar Handlin in Boston’s Immigrants, 17901865, a book which ought to be required reading for every Bostonian. But there was another side, as Mr. Handlin points out, to the difficulties they encountered: other immigrant groups readily adopted the institutions and habits of America; the Irish, with a suspicion of Protestants that went back to Cromwell, chose to segregate themselves and to build their own world within the American society which they found hostile and foreign.

They avoided Protestant asylums and almshouses and hospitals and the Protestant public schools. When the compulsory education law forced them to send their children to school, they painfully created their own system. So strong was the Irish solidarity that they would not even use for long the French and German Catholic churches then existing. Of all the immigrant groups, the Irish were the only people to insist on a separate and exclusive institutional life. In very definite ways, they chose to remain unassimilable. The result was to exacerbate the initial discrimination until antagonism became persecution and persecution became violence.

It was their Catholicism that set them apart, and it was as Catholics that they suffered. They were the target of rumors and libels and whispering campaigns. The stories of dark rituals and abominations that had been spread about the Masons in the 1790’s and would soon be spread about the Mormons were whispered about the orders of the Catholic Church. As early as 1834 a mob of Yankee truckers burned down the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown while the firemen stood by and played their hoses on the houses next door. The poison pen did its worst in such sensational “exposés” as Six Months in a Convent (1835) and The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836).

Other attacks, such as those contained in Samuel F. B. Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, published in 1835, formulated the vague Protestant fears of Jesuit conspiracy and Catholic domination which ninety years later were still strong enough to swell the Ku Klux Klan to enormous membership and to injure the Presidential chances of Al Smith. Morse may have had some justification for believing that the Church was ambitious to grow in the United States, but the effect of his writings was incendiary. Bolstering the prejudice of men who were already fretted by Irish competition, it gave impetus to the rise of Nativism and eventually Know-Nothingism, and contributed to the bloody riots of the fifties.

Boston imbibed freely from that stream of antiCatholic propaganda. The riots which disgraced Philadelphia, New York, and St. Louis had their counterpart in Massachusetts. In 1854, the same year as the street war in Philadelphia, John S. Orr led a mob which tore down a cross from a Catholic church in Chelsea, and a few months later a church in Dorchester was dynamited. Every Irish parade was an invitation to a brawl.

Only one result was conclusive: the Boston Irish, attacked on every side, developed a group consciousness hardly matched by any other group in the history of America. They had already had it when they came from persecuted and plundered Ireland, and their experience in America, far from leveling the old hatreds, built new ones on top of the old. From that time to the present, two cultures, with different premises and different traditions, have lived uneasily side by side in Boston.

3

BUT they have not remained in the same relative position. As early as the fifties it was clear that the mere numbers of the Irish constituted a serious threat to the status quo. One set of figures tells the story: from 1850 to 1855 the number of naturalized voters in Boston increased almost 300 per cent, while the number of native voters was increasing 14 per cent.

By the outbreak of the Civil War the Irish began to feel their political strength. By the seventies they had representatives in the legislature, in state and city posts, in Congress. By 1885 Hugh O’Brien was beginning the first of his four consecutive terms as mayor of Boston, and Thomas Talbot, a Republican but Irish on both sides, had served two terms as governor. And the Commonwealth census figures for the same year showed that children of Irish parentage in the city outnumbered the children of Massachusetts parentage by almost ninety thousand. The persecuted minority had become a majority.

But it was, and has to some extent remained, a majority without a majority’s privileges. Outmanned in the fight to control the city, the Yankees fell back, moved out of one district after another as the Irish moved in. They retreated, but they did not give up their conviction of difference and irreconcilability; if they could not defeat the Irish at the polls, they could buy them or snub them. They have been buying them and snubbing them to this day.

Both Henry Adams, in the Education, and Henry Cabot Lodge, in Early Memories, testify to that gradual alteration of the old Boston and to the halfburied viciousness of the feelings it created. The Common, Adams recalls, was the scene of snowball fights between North-Enders and South-Enders — fights which were sometimes disguised gang wars, with stones concealed in snowballs and with sticks and slingshots operated from dark alleys. “Bully Hig” Higginson, the leader of the North-Enders, is a symbolic figure as he is led bleeding back to the Beacon Hill stronghold after being hit over the eye by a rock. The symbolism is underlined by Senator Lodge’s rueful memory of how the tide of battle always turned against the Latin School boys toward the end. “What was more serious,” he writes, “the ever-increasing numbers of our opponents gradually by sheer weight pushed us, and still more our successors, from the Common hills and the Frog Pond to seek coasting and skating in the country.”

That sentence is the epitaph of an era.

As a majority, the Irish have done what one would expect of any group which suddenly found itself with power over its enemies. The principal virtue of many an Irish politician is that he defends and protects the interests of his race and religion. The Irish control the public schools they once despised, and the Yankees complain that the public schools are no longer fit for their children. The Irish run the Police Department and the city government. The birth-control legislation for which Protestant Massachusetts has been agitating for years has been repeatedly defeated by Irish-Catholic solidarity. They join forces with the reactionary Watch and Ward Society against the liberals of city and state, so that anything of which the Church disapproves is likely to be censored along with what the old guard thinks obscene. The hand of the alliance is felt by novelists (Lillian Smith is the latest), and by dramatists (Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude was forbidden production in Boston). The Old Howard and burlesque remain largely untouched.

It would be false to say that Boston in 1944 is an armed camp with the two forces glowering at each other across the Common. Many of the Irish have risen to positions of public esteem as well as power. There are plenty of firm friendships between Catholic and Protestant, and feelings of mutual trust are not unusual. Given another generation, without external irritation and with a political cleanup of the city machine, Boston might achieve something like internal peace. But the almost inflexible social barriers set up by the Brahmins and the persistent conflict of interest and belief between Catholics and Protestants have kept alive the Irish sense of persecution and the Yankees’ defensive contempt.

At the bottom, among the frustrated and the embittered, these feelings find their most direct expression; there the age-old desire for a scapegoat breaks out with a vengeance. The entrenched Yankees are invulnerable. But the Jew is relatively impotent and defenseless. It is with the least privileged group of Irishmen, and a few Individual demagogues, that any study of anti-Semitism in Boston must be concerned.

4

LACKING an adequate and complete official report on the Dorchester incidents, one may be excused for turning, in search of light, to the very able report of Investigation Commissioner William B. Herlands of New York on the similar outbreaks in the Bronx. In that district the Christian Front and the Christian Mobilizers held frequent meetings. Coincident with and following upon those meetings, bands of juvenile thugs began to go “Jew-hunting.” Because New York’s officials and police were not quite so ready to dismiss the incidents as “kid stuff,” there were more arrests in New York than in Boston, and one can gain a clearer picture of the people responsible for the violence.

Of the vandals examined by Herlands, many were from Christian Front or Christian Mobilizer homes, or had friends who were. Almost without exception they were underprivileged children; all but one were stupid in school; many had records of juvenile crime and sex aberration; often their parents were chronic “reliefers”; common-law marriages were frequent among the parents, and a low scale of intelligence, social responsibility, and economic wellbeing was characteristic.

In other words, all the sociological causes of juvenile delinquency were present in the Bronx. The only thing new about the trouble was that the delinquency was concentrated against Jews. That was the prime work of the street-corner fascists who worked the district over until they had its unstable elements aroused.

With some local differences, the same thing happened in Boston, and with even greater success for the agitators because of the strained racial situation. The meeting place of Boston’s Christian Front, until it was closed by the police, was Hibernian Hall, in Roxbury, not very far from the Jewish district where the trouble was centered. At those meetings, attended usually by capacity crowds, anti-Semitic speeches and anti-Semitic literature (much of it stemming from that Flanders Hall Publishing House which was the organ of George Sylvester Viereck, Nazi agent) worked upon an audience already receptive to race poison and the scapegoat urge.

Though it is impossible to get accurate figures, three observers close to the Boston Christian Front have estimated the local circulation of Social Justice, before it was barred from the mails two years ago, at twelve thousand. Perhaps three or four times that many people read it. When the post office banned it from the mails the local Front tried defiantly to distribute the latest issue by truck. A Boston Traveler photographer, trying to nail this picture, reported that he had his camera smashed by the truck driver, while a helpful policeman pinioned the photographer’s arms.

According to the Boston Observer, Father Coughlin himself testified in 1936 before a group of Internal Revenue agents interested in his income tax that he drew most of his funds from Boston supporters. And when he ran a Presidential team in the 1936 elections, his choice as a running mate for Lemke was Thomas C. O’Brien, a Boston lawyer.

Christian Frontism was powerful enough among Boston Americans to import Father Edward Lodge Curran, Father Coughlin’s Eastern apologist, to address the annual South Boston Evacuation Day exercises on St. Patrick’s Day, 1941. The next year it was still potent enough to ask Father Curran back, despite vigorous protests, and with him Hamilton Fish. Both of those celebrations were paid for by the city of Boston; at both the inherited Anglophobia of the local Irish was enthusiastically vocal.

The atmosphere of these tax-supported occasions in South Boston and something of the personalities concerned are to be found in routine press reports. The Boston Post, for example, quoted Father Curran as saying at the 1942 Evacuation Eve banquet that those who opposed him were “bigots ... I don’t care whether they are common bigots or Episcopal bigots. . . . I don’t care whether anyone else likes me here in Boston. You do and I’ll come back any time you want me to.”

Father Coughlin’s deception of his ecclesiastical superior in regard to the proprietorship of Social Justice, and his failure to enter a defense at the Washington hearing on the publication, have not dimmed his local prestige. Speaking in George Brown Hall of the New England Conservatory of Music on March 11, 1944, Father Curran is reported by the Boston Globe to have opened his remarks by “bringing greetings from the greatest American priest and the greatest priest in America, Father Coughlin.” There were no advance press notices of that dinner; yet seven hundred people attended and hundreds more were turned away.

Less than a week later, during the Evacuation Day parade in South Boston, violence broke out again. As the episode was reported by the Boston Traveler on March 17 and by the Boston Globe the next day, the junior band of the Malden Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was followed all along the line of march by a growing gang led by a red-haired youth. When the band members were boarding their special streetcar at Broadway and B Streets, they were attacked, several of them hurt, and a number of instruments smashed. Both Arthur Crosby, the director, and Jeremiah Lucey, one of the band committee of the Malden Post, were quoted to the effect that there were numerous anti-Semitic remarks before the gang attacked, and that individual band members, including a Jewish bandsman in the uniform of the United States Coast Guard, were jostled and heckled.

Both Father Coughlin and Father Curran have insisted publicly that they are not anti-Semitic. So has Francis P. Moran, former local leader of the Christian Front, with whom Father Curran has several times shared public platforms. Yet Moran, according to the Providence Journal of November 10, 1939, charged President Roosevelt with “treason,” called him a Jew, pronounced his name “Rosenfelt,” and railed against the Communist-riddled government of the United States. On June 10, 1941, according to the Boston Globe, he issued a pamphlet calling the war “just a racket for the Roosevelt-Rothschild-Lehman families and their associates.” Twice he showed in Boston the German propaganda film, Victory in the West, and harangued his audiences on German invincibility. As for Father Coughlin, his tirades against the “international Jewish bankers,” the communistic Jews, and the British are too well known to call for explicit quotation. It is notable that Theodore Maynard’s Story of American Catholicism, a highly respected work of Catholic scholarship with the imprimatur of Archbishop Spellman of New York, cross-indexes Father Curran and Father Coughlin with anti-Semitism. Nihil obstat. On page 596, speaking of Father Coughlin, Maynard says, “He might have done . . . valuable service, had he not, like Father Edward Lodge Curran of Brooklyn, virtually identified social justice with Jew-baiting (under the guise of attacking both Communism and the banking system) and with a form of fascism.”

Father Curran’s confessed admiration for Father Coughlin, and his close relationship with Christian Fronters like Moran, can leave little doubt of his attitudes and his influence. That influence is especially great in Boston, which has been and still is a pesthole of Christian Frontism. There seems no reason to doubt that the focusing of juvenile delinquents upon Jewish victims was part of the Front’s work, and that the principal support of the Front in Boston has come from Irish-Americans.

For the past two years vicious propaganda, much of it couched in the vein of raw humor, has been circulated through war plants, navy yards, barrooms, beauty parlors, and subway stations. Much of it is calculated to give the impression that all the heroes of this war are Irishmen, all the chiselers Jews. Consider the snide little libel, circulated in various printedand mimeographed forms, called “The First American":—

First American killed in Pearl Harbor — John J. Hennessy
First American to sink a Jap ship — Colin P. Kelly
First American to sink a Jap ship with torpedo — John P. Buckley
Greatest American air hero — “Butch” O’Hare
First American killed at Guadalcanal — John J. O’Brien
First American to get four new tires — Abraham Lipshitz

The large body of the Christian Front is made up of the dregs of the Irish community. Its leaders are politically ambitious demagogues; but the long history of isolation and discrimination in Boston has built into the Irish-American mind such a sensitiveness to criticism, and so automatic an impulse to defend anything Irish and anything Catholic, that the vast majority of respectable Irish-American citizens find themselves used as a shield by the breeders of hate and disunity, their inherited persecution complex deftly manipulated by people whose whole purpose is to set American against American, race against race, religion against religion. Suspicion breeds counter-suspicion, charge breeds counter-charge. Father Curran, charged with antiSemitism, charges his accusers with anti-Catholicism. A clever propagandist can manipulate those two antagonistic elements like the two glasses used in mixing a Bromo-Seltzer, and get with each manipulation a greater effervescence of hate—which is precisely what Hitler and Goebbels, and their American admirers, want.

5

I HAVE found no evidence whatever that the Catholic Church had anything to do with the Dorchester trouble. If any blame attaches to the Church in Boston it would be for a lack of coöperation with other churches and other men of good will.

Protestant clergymen who, after the revelation of the beatings last fall, organized an inter-faith committee in the Dorchester-Roxbury-Mattapan district for the purpose of furthering good will among all racial and religious groups found some Catholic laymen willing to coöperate but most of the clergy inert and even aloof. While Protestant groups were clamoring that the racial issue be cleared up and that equal police protection be afforded all races and creeds, only two or three of the Catholic clergy raised their voices.

This lack of coöperation may have a number of explanations. The Catholic clergy may be honestly convinced, as they told the Mattapan committee, that there is no real problem. Some churchmen may mistrust their Protestant and Jewish neighbors, and feel that Catholics are under unwarranted attack for the outbreaks. Yet because of this aloofness there have been people who jumped to the conclusion that because the Boston Roman Catholics are not active in suppressing anti-Semitism, they must therefore condone it.

It is true that Father Curran, an influential priest and President of the International Catholic Truth Society, has never, at least as far as the public has been informed, been chided for his activities among the Christian Fronters of Boston and Brooklyn. The contention of apologists for Father Coughlin that his speeches did not involve questions of “faith and morals,” and so were outside the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical authorities, is probably employed in behalf of Father Curran as well. Yet in September, 1939, Pope Pius XI told his audience: —

“Abraham is called our Patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is not compatible with the reality of this text. It is a movement in which we Catholics cannot share. It is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism. We are Semites spiritually.”

That is a completely unambiguous pronouncement from the ultimate spiritual father of all Catholics. It should make clear that any Irish youth from South Boston or Codman Square who joins in a beating of a Jew is as bad a church member as he is a citizen. One is forced to the conclusion that if the hierarchy of the local Church were not almost solidly Irish, and were not affected by the history of discrimination and suspicion against Irishmen and Catholics, it might have made that point much plainer than it yet has, and might certainly have been more critical.

The tendency to react violently to criticism, even when criticism touches the Church or the Irish only by implication, was dramatically evident in an address by the Right Reverend Monsignor Lawrence W. Bracken before the Holy Name Society of the Brooklyn and Queens police on April 16, 1944. “Ten years ago,” the Brooklyn Tablet reports him as saying, “if you failed to apprehend a desperate gunman or solve a complex crime you, as an individual, might be criticized unfavorably but that would be all. Today, however, if a child hits another child with a dead cat, at once some racial issue emerges and if you do not capture the offending child and find out what part of Ireland the dead cat came from, and if his old man was on Hitler’s payroll, not only you but the whole force are apt to be denounced as anti-this or anti-that, or perhaps you will be accused of belonging to a subversive organization.”

Here was a priest speaking before three thousand policemen, and openly belittling the racial beatings and the organized gang warfare against the Jews. It is impossible on any grounds to reconcile Monsignor Bracken’s words with those of Pope Pius XI.

6

ONE highly important difference should be noted between the anti-Catholic riots of the nineteenth century and the anti-Semitic violence of 1943-1944. Where the advent of the Civil War effectually put the prejudiced parties out of business for a time, the present war has aggravated every group antagonism in America. The reason for that difference lies not in any psychological or sociological difference between anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice. The reason is simply that the Confederacy had no Goebbels. In the German propaganda machine lies the reason why the beating of one Jewish boy, the distribution of one anti-Semitic broadside, must be viewed, especially in Boston, with very great concern.

The bill of particulars filed by Attorney General Biddle against the thirty people now standing trial for sedition indicates how close a link there is between race hatred in America and the Goebbels office. As that bill of particulars is reported in the New York Post, “German agents . . . were ordered to do nothing but ferret out what the Nazis called ‘Kernels of Disturbance’ in the U. S. They sent back reports on differences of opinion which were splitting political parties and minority groups, detailed memos on the frustrated ambitions of politicians, racial controversies, economic inequalities, and on petty jealousies in public life.” Boston, with its closely knit racial groups and its history of religious antagonism, is such a “kernel of disturbance.” That kernel was carefully nurtured by the Christian Front and its backers.

An interesting development, still unsolved as this is written, is the distribution during Holy Week and at odd times since of two scurrilous pamphlets dealing with the ways in which the Jews have “ruined” the areas of Chelsea, Roxbury, and Dorchester. The slogan, “Be American, Buy American,” on each pamphlet, is signed with the initials “C.F.” Those initials should stand for “Christian Front,” and possibly do.

Whether they were put on the pamphlets as a blind or whether they are an arrogant challenge is a detective problem, not a sociological one. But it is clear, from the quality of the printing and the care with which cheap, unidentifiable lots of paper were selected, that this was a shrewd job and a job with money behind it. One remembers that Attorney General Biddle has characterized the Nazi propaganda machine in this country as a twenty-million-dollar industry.

Because it is a multi-million-dollar industry, and because racial strife has increased rather than decreased during the war, it is imperative that we cast about for some way of combating and ameliorating a situation which shows signs of growing extremely ugly. As a matter of fact, two or three promising ways have already been found. The Springfield Plans, the Good Neighbor Associations, are at the very least expressions of a will to tolerance among the large masses of Americans.

Yet in those movements the Catholic Church in Boston has not come strongly forward. With all its enormous prestige and power, it has chosen to speak little and late. Among Catholics there is a widespread feeling that if the Church fights anti-Semitism it lays itself open to the charge of having fostered it before. The uneasy relations between the Irish Catholics and other elements in Boston seem to lead the Church and its people to interpret any criticism of bad government as a criticism of the Irish, any criticism of religious intolerance as a criticism of the Church.

Though one can understand why that attitude persists, one cannot agree with any part of it. No Protestant minister who throws himself into the fight against bigotry and violence is accused of covering up a guilty conscience. Even if a member of his congregation has been involved in Jew-baiting, there is no stigma which attaches to the pastor. The only stigma is the stigma of refusing to do something about a situation when conscience and good citizenship demand action. In Boston the Church is in a position of tremendous power, and the withholding of that power can only have the effect of encouraging such Catholics as are involved in anti-Semitism, while at the same time convincing people unfriendly to the Catholic Church that the Church for some reason finds its Father Coughlins and its Father Currans useful.

For the sake of religious peace in the city of Boston, for the sake of the American creed of diversity without disunity, it is high time Catholicism in Boston made very clear that it is not in sympathy with the prophets of dissension. There is no doubt in the world that the prestige of the Catholic hierarchy is greater than any personal prestige of Father Coughlin, Father Curran, or any of the Christian Front demagogues. But that prestige can never be effectively employed until the local Church sees fit to assert, and forcibly, its distaste for the aberrations of some of its members.

The Roman Catholic Church is not in the least responsible for the anti-Semitic outbreaks in Boston. But it could do more than any other single agency or institution to stop them, if it would.