The story of Coughlin, the demagogic radio priest who dominated American airwaves during the Great Depression, offers an intriguing analog-age precedent to the digital-age debates over the limits of free expression ... It was the forward march of Nazism overseas that would eventually transform the priest into a pariah. The tipping-point year—for both Coughlin and Europe—was 1938. Appropriately, the sound of the Nazi goosesteps came directly into American homes over shortwave radio, live, from Vienna and Berlin: the annexation of Austria in March, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in October, and (though the sounds of the rampage were not broadcast live) the anti-Semitic pogrom now known as Kristallnacht, unleashed on the night of Nov. 9–10.

Though the domestic zeitgeist had become firmly anti-Nazi, Coughlin continued to use his radio platform to slander Jews. It was just 10 days after Kristallnacht that WMCA in New York felt compelled to call out Coughlin’s many “many misstatements of fact.”