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Author : Coughlin Charles Edward
Title : I take My Stand
Year : 1940

Link download : Coughlin_Charles_Edward_-_I_take_My_Stand.zip

All week long the daily papers and news reels-particularly those in the East-have been headlining and screening a fantastic story of an alleged seditious plot to overthrow the Government of the United States. In all, 18 young men were taken prisoners by the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and one was released. Although Mr. J. Edgar Hoover and his colleagues were careful to describe them as members of two distinct rifle clubs, nevertheless, the press of the nation saw fit to identify all of them with the Christian Front, thereby placing that organization and those who sponsored and encouraged it on trial before the bar of public opinion. Definitely, they were not all members of the Christian Front. Mayor LaGuardia of New York properly ridiculed the entire affair as ludicrous. Some public officials intimated that the Government was playing politics with the Department of Justice. "The Detroit Free Press" humorously remarked that "If they (the G-men) had only added a couple of those Daisy air rifles (to their seizure), they (the prisoners) might have captured Canada, too," and then added in a more serious vein : " ... the great plot to seize America will go down in the funny books of history to be written about the New Deal long after the headaches of it are over -to keep company with Mr. Roosevelt's daily reports last summer of finding fleets of U-boats off our coast every time he looked out of his window." Be this as it may, I do not regard this episode so lightly; for the implications which attend it impel me to take a more serious view in so far as my name has been linked adroitly to this "plot" to overthrow the Government. Thus, I appear before you today to record the fact that while I do not belong to any unit of the Christian Front, nevertheless, I do not disassociate myself from that movement. Therefore, I reaffirm every word which I have said in advocating its formation; I re-encourage the Christians of America to carry on in this crisis for the preservation of Christianity and Americanism more vigorously than ever, despite this thinly veiled campaign launched by certain publicists and their controllers to vilify both the name and the principles of this pro-American, pro-Christian, anti-Communist and anti-Nazi group. ...