Charges that “radio priest” Charles E. Coughlin used funds collected for the defunct League of the Little Flower, a charity organization, to speculate in the stock market, were made today by John L. Spivak in another of a series on Coughlin in the current issue of the periodical New Masses.
The magazine published photostatic reproductions of brokerage accounts in Coughlin’s name which showed purchases of stock in 1929, at a time when in his radio broadcasts “he called stock market gambling ‘shooting craps with other people’s money.'”
The reporter intimated that Coughlin used money collected for the League, which had been formed for the ostensible purpose of building a new church and which had almost $31,000 in its bank account at the time it was dissolved and replaced by the Radio League for the Little Flower, to pay for the stock transactions. The stock purchase, 500 shares of Kelsey Hayes Wheel, totalled $30,000. Spivak said his efforts to interview Coughlin on that and other questions were unsuccessful.
Spivak disclosed, also, that there is no such person as Ben Marcin, featured anti-Semitic writer in Social Justice, who has been represented to be a Jew. According to an affidavit by a former employe of a Detroit firm that prepared art work for Social Justice, Marcin is a combination pseudonym representing E. Perrin Schwartz, editor of the magazine, and Joseph Patrick Wright, who prepare all articles bearing the Marcin by-line.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
