"Hypnotized Men"

Last week the Christian Front was again to the fore. G-Man John Edgar Hoover put the Front in the headlines last fortnight by seizing 17 obscure members in New York City, announcing that they had plotted to overrun the East, bomb Reds, exterminate Jews, set up a dictatorship (TIME, Jan. 22). Detroit's radiorating Father Charles E. Coughlin loudly and specifically disavowed the Christian Front to which the captives belonged. The press dug up additional detail, indicating that the captive Christian Fronters were "awful" shots and mere blustering braggarts. Michigan's squat, swart Congressman Frank Hook tried to hook Red-daubing Martin Dies to people who were friendly to the Front, failed to excite a Congress in mourning for veteran Senator Borah (see above).

At week's end many a citizen was ready to shrug off the whole business. Then slippery Father Coughlin popped up again in the Christian Front news, blandly disavowed his earlier disavowal. Said he (in a Sunday sermon) : "While I do not belong to any unit of the Christian Front, nevertheless, I do not disassociate myself from that movement. I reaffirm every word which I have said in advocating its formation; I reencourage the Christians of America to carry on in this crisis for the preservation of Christianity and Americanism. . . . We will visit these prisoners with our prayers. ... If they are guilty let them be punished; if innocent, God speed their freedom."

Meantime The Commonweal, a Manhattan weekly edited by and for liberal Catholics, had searched the backgrounds of the arrested 17 and found Charles Coughlin very much there. Said The Commonweal: "The alarming thing is that for their [the prisoners'] state of mind, Catholics are largely responsible, and we shall continue to be responsible for the creation of other groups of hypnotized men . . . until we all recognize and nullify the powerful propaganda which directly creates them."

Also peering into Christian Front backgrounds and propaganda was the new Attorney General of the U. S., Robert Houghwout Jackson (see p. 17). To an investigation of the Christian Front he detailed Assistant Attorney General Oetje John Rogge. John Rogge's instructions: to examine "the activities of any individual or group, wherever located, who may have aided, abetted, directed, financed or incited these particular defendants or any other subversive group working for similar unlawful ends."

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