Overview
In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin became one of the most influential radio voices in the United States. As his rhetoric radicalized, he increasingly framed world affairs through conspiratorial and antisemitic narratives. One of the most persistent was the claim that international finance and Bolshevism were secretly linked rather than opposed.
In this framework, Wall Street and Moscow were described as two heads of a single monster. The allegation drew on older myths about Jewish banking power, revolutionary subversion, and hidden coordination across ideological enemies.
Historical Background
The theory developed in a period of intense social strain: the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and communism in Europe, anti-New Deal agitation, and public distrust of banks. Coughlin’s newspaper Social Justice and his broadcasts gave these fears a national platform. He increasingly fused anti-communism with attacks on “international bankers,” and those attacks frequently crossed into direct antisemitic accusation.
This was not an isolated invention. It echoed earlier propaganda traditions, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the broader “Jewish-Bolshevik” myth that portrayed revolution, finance, and media as parts of one Jewish conspiracy.
Central Claim
The theory asserted that high finance and revolutionary communism were coordinated rather than genuinely hostile. In practice, this allowed propagandists to explain almost any crisis—bank collapse, labor unrest, diplomatic upheaval, or anti-capitalist revolution—as evidence of one hidden directing hand.
For Coughlin’s audience, the power of the claim lay in its flexibility. It turned apparent contradictions into proof: if bankers and Bolsheviks looked opposed, that opposition was said to be theatrical. If economic hardship worsened, the crisis itself was evidence of design.
Vehicles of Circulation
The allegation spread through radio sermons, pamphlets, newspaper columns, reprinted speeches, and sympathetic political networks. Coughlin’s reach was extraordinary. At his height he spoke to millions. As his messaging sharpened, the Jewish-Bolshevik-banking claim became part of a larger worldview that connected antisemitism, anti-communism, populism, and anti-Roosevelt politics.
By the late 1930s, critics increasingly identified his program as part of a broader extremist turn in American mass media.
Legacy
The theory did not remain confined to Coughlin’s original audience. Its structure survived in later movements that claimed capitalism and communism were only apparent opposites directed by the same covert elite. Its historical importance lies in how openly it combined antisemitic mythology, monetary fear, and mass broadcasting.