Rosh Hashanah 2024

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By Lew Finfer 

In reading Boston Boy, the autobiography of nationally prominent political journalist, jazz historian, civil libertarian, and contrarian Nat Hentoff who died in 2017, I discovered the story of the crusading Boston journalist Frances Sweeney.

When Hentoff was a student at Boston Latin, Sweeney gave him a job on the paper she edited, the Boston City Reporter, which was published during the 1930s and into the 1940s. It started out focused on political corruption and then worked at exposing antisemitism that was connected to pro-fascist activities.

This daughter of a saloon keeper campaigned vigorously against Fr. Charles Coughlin, the radio priest whose weekly radio broadcasts drew tens of millions of followers in the 1930s and whose newspaper “Social Justice” was sold after Mass outside of many Catholic churches in Boston.

From 1932 to 1934, Coughlin was an ardent supporter of President Roosevelt and would say that “the New Deal is Christ’s Deal.” But by 1936, he had turned against Roosevelt completely and went on the attack against communists while asserting that Jewish bankers were running the world.

Coughlin reprinted the infamous and false Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a made-up text about a meeting of Jews conspiring to take over the world that played prominently in Nazi propaganda. Coughlin favored backing the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini as the best way to fight communism. And for many years, leaders in the Irish-Catholic establishment in Boston backed him. Boston Mayor James Michael Curley at one point even claimed that Boston was the most pro-Coughlin city in America.

Coughlin’s writings and an organization he backed, the Catholic Front, were part of a movement that led to physical attacks on Jews in Boston. Gangs of Catholic teens would enter Jewish neighborhoods with blackjacks and brass knuckles, beat up the residents, and vandalize stores.

This wasn’t just a turf issue; these gangs went on rampages through Jewish sections of Dorchester and Roxbury. Contemptuously, they called Blue Hill Avenue, which ran through the Jewish parts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, “Jew Hill Avenue.”

Frances Sweeney took on the Catholic Church, in particular, Cardinal William O’Connell, and politicians for not condemning these attacks. She was angry that Catholics, who had been discriminated against only decades earlier by the Yankees with their “No Irish Need Apply” signs, turned around and discriminated against the Jews, who had arrived in the next wave of immigrants following the Irish.

It was O’Connell’s silence that Sweeney took great issue with. The Cardinal was an immensely powerful figure in this era when Catholics controlled local government, when 95 percent of them attended Mass every week, and when the Church ran parochial schools in every parish, sponsored youth activities, and owned hospitals.

Irritated by her criticism, O’Connell demanded she come to meet with him and threatened to excommunicate her if she continued her writings. That was an incredible threat to make against any Catholic. She did not back down in the meeting. Hentoff wrote that she told the Cardinal that “the facts are the facts.” She continued her campaign and he ultimately did not move to excommunicate her.

She also took on antisemitism within the Boston Police Department, which contributed to the firing of the Boston Police Commissioner in 1943.

Sweeney also focused on alerting the public and the government about profascist activities of the Christian Front, which distributed Nazi propaganda before World War II and tried to continue that work after we went to war with Germany. She also got the Boston Herald to run a “Rumor Clinic” column that exposed negative false rumors that could undermine morale during World War II.

In 1944, Sweeney died of rheumatic heart failure at just age 36.

The famed muckraking journalist of the second half of the 20th century I.F. Stone said of her: “Fran Sweeney could not be discouraged, could not be beaten down, could not be frightened, could not be put in her place. She was a one-man crusade. She burned with some of the hottest and most inextinguishable passion for social justice that I have ever seen.” In his turn, Nat Hentoff fittingly dedicated his book Boston Boy to her. What a heroine she was.

Lewis Finfer is a community organizer and lives in Dorchester. He can be reached at LewFinfer@gmail.com.