[4] After making attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program Golden Hour to broadcast antisemitic commentary.

[citation needed] Unwilling to accept the monastic life, Coughlin applied for incardination, or transfer, out of the Basilians to the Archdiocese of Detroit.

He later said that he started his radio show in response to the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross at the shrine and wanted to provide support to local Catholics.

[16] When the Goodwill Stations radio network acquired WJR in 1929, owner George A. Richards recognized Coughlin's talent as a broadcaster.

[17][20] With Coughlin paying for the airtime on a contractual basis, the number of affiliates carrying Golden Hour increased to 25  stations by August 1932.

[24] With the United States suffering through the Great Depression, Coughlin strongly endorsed New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in the 1932 Presidential election.

Historian Alan Brinkley wrote that "by 1934, he [Coughlin] was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day" and that "his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.

Author Sheldon Marcus said that the size of Coughlin's radio audience "is impossible to determine, but estimates range up to 30 million each week".

FCC Chairman Frank R. McNinch warned that it would not allow broadcasters to use their networks or stations as “...an instrument of racial or religious persecution.”[35] Coughlin's attacks on Roosevelt continued to increase.

[38] After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, Coughlin accused Roosevelt of "leaning toward international socialism" by his failure to support the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco.

[42] According to a 2021 study in the American Economic Review, Coughlin's criticisms did reduce Roosevelt's share of votes versus the 1932 election.

When the owner of WMCA in New York, Donald Flamm, saw the preliminary script for the November 20 broadcast of Golden Hour, he immediately demanded that Coughin change inflammatory references to Jews.

[42][50][b][49] In the December 5th issue of Social Justice, Coughlin wrote a column that plagiarized portions of a 1935 speech by the German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a rabid antisemite.

The administration decided that, although the First Amendment protected free speech, it did not necessarily apply to broadcasting because the radio spectrum was a "limited national resource" and as a result was regulated as a publicly owned commons.

[citation needed] The authorities imposed new regulations and restrictions on radio stations for the specific purpose of forcing Coughlin off the air.

[53] After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939, Coughlin appealed to Golden Hour listeners to travel to Washington D.C. as "an army of peace".

[46] Coughlin's call for a march on Washington finally motivated the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) to take action against the Golden Hour.

[54] Fearing FCC intervention, NAB formed a self-regulating Code Committee that limited the sale of air time to controversial individuals.

[46] WJR, WGAR and the Yankee Network, all of which carried Golden Hour, threatened to quit the NAB over the new code, but eventually adopted it.

[d][58] [59] In January 1940, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided the Brooklyn headquarters for the Christian Front, arresting 17 men on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government.

In the September 23, 1940, issue of Social Justice, Coughlin announced that he was cancelling Golden Hour, forced "...by those who control circumstances beyond my reach".

[64][65][33] After the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war against the Axis Powers, anti-interventionist movements rapidly lost public support.

[70] Unable to mail Social Justice to its subscribers, Coughlin was confined to distributing it by private delivery trucks only in the Boston area.

[74] Richards died following a long legal fight to keep his broadcast licenses amid accusations of antisemitism and of using the stations to further his political interests.

[81][82][83] During the last half of 1938, Social Justice printed weekly installments from the 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent antisemitic text.

They believed that they were defending those people who were joined more by piety, economic frustration, and a common dread of powerful, modernizing enemies than through any class identity.

"[90]The NUSJ's articles of faith included work and income guarantees, the nationalization of key industries, wealth redistribution through increased taxation of the wealthy, federal protection of labor unions, and limiting property rights in favor of government control of the country's assets for public good.

Therefore, it is the business of government not only to legislate for a minimum annual wage and maximum working schedule to be observed by industry, but also so to curtail individualism that, if necessary, factories shall be licensed and their output shall be limited.

[17] In 1936, Coughlin expressed sympathy for the fascist governments of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy, terming them as an antidote to Communism.

[100] A New York Times report from Berlin in 1938 identified Coughlin as "the German hero in America for the moment" with his sympathetic statements towards Nazism as "a defensive front against Bolshevism".