American Antisemitism

In a 1938 public opinion poll, 60 percent of  American respondents held a low opinion of Jews, labeling them “greedy,” “dishonest,” and “pushy.” Right-wing demagogues linked the Great Depression, the New Deal, President Roosevelt and the threat of war in Europe to the machinations of an imagined international Jewish conspiracy that was both communist and capitalist. Prominent anti-semites including Father Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, Gerald L.K. Smith, Fritz Julius Kuhn, William Dudley Pelley, and the Rev. Gerald Winrod.