2-378-252 - Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images

Gerald LK Smith with Dr Francis E Townsend flanking Father Charles Coughlin, 1936. Left to right: Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith (1898-1976); Father Charles Edward Coughlin (1891-1979); Dr Francis Everett Townsend, (1867-1960). Born in Canada, Coughlin was a Catholic priest and a controversial radio personality in 1930s America. He broadcast programmes commenting on political and economic issues that became increasingly anti-semitic and sympathetic to the policies of Hitler and the Nazis towards the Jews and Communists. Smith was a right-wing politian and activist who founded the America First Party in 1943. He was a white supremacist and a member of a pro-Nazi movement known as the Silver Shirts, modelled on the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany. Townsend was a physician and social reformer who proposed an old age pension plan during the Great Depression. The three men formed the short-lived Union Party, a political party opposed to the New Deal policies of Franklin D Roosevelt, for the 1936 US presidential election.