Winner of a Catholic Media Association Book Award “A great, but deeply unsettling, revelation…This book is more than an account of Boston in wartime. It is a warning.”― Boston Globe “The rare book by a scholar that is such a page-turner it is hard to put down…A potent brew of spy story, detective story, and frank, fearless account of how a significant wing of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States spawned a movement aimed at defending Hitler and sabotaging America’s war effort.”―David I. Kertzer, author of The Pope and Mussolini “[A] well told, expertly researched, and much-needed history of the Christian Front, an organization that presages today’s far-right activity…Riveting.”― Commonweal On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes 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” to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. Interviewed in his jail cell, the front’s ringleader was unbowed: “All I can say is―long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!” In this brilliant work of historical reconstruction, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right. The men of the Christian Front imagined themselves to be crusaders fighting for the spiritual purification of the nation, and they were hardly alone in their beliefs. Nazis of Copley Square chronicles the evolution of the front, the transatlantic cloak-and-dagger intelligence operations that subverted it, and the political and religious leaders who shielded it from scrutiny. A riveting tale of faith perverted to violent ends, it offers a potent warning to those who hope to curb the spread of far-right ideologies today.

Recommended on 1 episode:

What Rachel Maddow Has Been Thinking About Offscreen

“The Rachel Maddow Show” debuted in the interregnum between political eras. Before it lay the 9/11 era and the George W. Bush presidency. Days after the show launched in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and a few weeks later Barack Obama was elected president. And then history just kept speeding up. The Tea Party. The debt ceiling debacles. Donald Trump. The coronavirus pandemic. January 6th. The big lie. Maddow covered and tried to make sense of it all. Now, after 14 years, she has taken her show down to one episode a week and is beginning other projects — like “Ultra,” the history podcast we discuss in this episode. But I wanted to talk to Maddow about how American politics and media has changed over the course of her show. We discuss the legacies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cycle of economic crises we appear to keep having, Maddow’s relationships with Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson, where the current G.O.P.’s anti-democracy efforts really started, how Obama’s presidency changed politics, how Maddow finds and chooses her stories, the statehouse Republicans who tilled the soil for Trump’s big lie and more.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Hitler in Los Angeles by Steven J Ross
• 📘  Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front by Charles Gallagher
• 📗  Hitler's American Friends by Bradley W Hart
• 📙  The Oppermanns: A Novel by Lion Feuchtwanger
• 📕  1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler the Election amid the Storm by Ms. Susan Dunn
• 📘  Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City by Billy Sothern, Nikki Page

Rachel Maddow Oct. 14, 2022 6 books recommended

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