University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Supervised Undergraduate Student Research Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects and Creative Work Spring 5-2008 Mediating Civil Liberties: Liberal and Civil Libertarian Reactions to Father Coughlin Margaret E. Crilly University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj Recommended Citation Crilly, Margaret E., "Mediating Civil Liberties: Liberal and Civil Libertarian Reactions to Father Coughlin" (2008). Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1166 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Margaret Crilly Mediating Civil Liberties: Liberal and Civil Libertarian Reactions to Father Coughlin Marta Crilly By August 15, 1939, Magistrate Michael A. Ford had had it. Sitting at his bench in the Tombs Court of New York City, faced with a sobbing peddler of Social Justice magazine, he dressed her down with scathing language before revealing her sentence. "I think you are one of the most contemptible individuals ever brought into my court," he stated. "There is no place in this free country for any person who entertains the narrow, bigoted, intolerant ideas you have in your head. You remind me of a witch burner. You belong to the Middle Ages. You don't belong to this modem civilized day of ours ..