I’ve posted this before but since Trump will be holding another “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night, I thought you might want to see this again. It is chilling:
An interview with the filmmaker:
Q: How did you discover this event? A: A friend of mine who was writing a screenplay about New York in the 1930s told me about it, and I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of it. When I found out it had been filmed, I asked an archival researcher, Rich Remsberg, to see what he could find. It turned out that short clips had been used in history documentaries before, but no one seemed to have collected together all of the scraps of footage – there was some at the National Archives, some at UCLA’s archive, some at other archives. So he gathered it, and I edited it together into a short narrative. When Charlottesville happened, it began to feel urgent. So I sent it over to Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook at Field of Vision and said, “Have you ever heard of this event? Would you be interested in supporting the film?” And they jumped on board.
Q: What struck you about the footage? A: The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City, a city that was diverse, modern, and progressive even in 1939. The second thing that struck me was the way these American Nazis used the symbols of America to sell an ideology that a few years later hundreds of thousands of Americans would die fighting against.
It really made clear how the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the true Americans (or Germans or Spartans or…). And they encourage their followers to “take their country back” from whatever minority group is ruining it.
Q: Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event? A: The footage is so powerful, it’s amazing that it isn’t part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.
We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while that might be true for many Americans, there was a significant group who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, antisemitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive.
These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. In a part of Fritz Kuhn’s speech that isn’t in the film, he applauds Father Coughlin, whose radio shows praising Hitler and Mussolini reached audiences of 30 million Americans. Henry Ford published excerpts from the antisemitic and fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
National hero Charles Lindbergh wrote in Reader’s Digest, “Our civilization depends on a Western wall of race and arms which can hold back… the infiltration of inferior blood.” In a speech for his America First Committee (which had 850,000 members) Lindbergh argued that “Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
Press magnate William Randolph Hearst defended the creeping fascist movement, saying, “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a fascist, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen who stands for Americanism.”
But two years after this rally in Madison Square Garden, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. At that point this philosophy became socially unacceptable. And when the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever supported it.
In the end, America pulled away from the cliff, but this rally is a reminder that things didn’t have to work out that way. If Roosevelt weren’t President, if Japan hadn’t attacked, is it possible we would have skated through without joining the war? And if Nazis hadn’t killed American soldiers, is it possible that their philosophy wouldn’t have become so taboo here?
Q: Who was the guy who ran out on stage during the rally? A: He was a 26-year-old plumber’s helper from Brooklyn named Isadore Greenbaum. When he ran on stage to protest, he was beaten up and had his pants ripped off as he was thrown from the stage. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25.
Greenbaum explained to the judge the day after the rally, “I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution I lost my head, and I felt it was my duty to talk.” The Magistrate asked him, “Don’t you realize that innocent people might have been killed?” And Greenbaum replied, “Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?” (New York Times, 2/22/39).
He went on to serve in the military during WW2 and was featured in Stars and Stripes magazine. (The Washington Post did a terrific article on Greenbaum after the film came out.)
Years later when Greenbaum was asked why he did what he did, in spite of the risk, he simply said, “Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place…?” I think that’s a question for all of us who are witnessing similar demagoguery today.
Q: What was the public response to the rally? A: There was a debate at the time over whether the Bund should be allowed to have a rally, and that debate – like so many things about the event – seems eerily contemporary.
In TheNew York Times, the American Jewish Committee argued that although the Bund was “completely anti-American and anti-democratic…because we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views.” Mayor LaGuardia, for his part, ridiculed the event as an “exhibition of international cooties,” and said he believed in exposing cooties to the sunlight.
Q: What happened to this group after the rally? A: The German American Bund, who held the rally, had a significant presence in the 1930s. They had youth camps and training camps in New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and held a huge march down East 86th Street in Manhattan. But their mainstream appeal was reduced by their leaders’ German accents and culture.
As Halford E. Luccock famously said, “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’”
The group’s leader Fritz Kuhn was eventually arrested for embezzling Bund funds, sent to prison, and stripped of his citizenship. After the war, he was deported to West Germany where he died a few years later. The Bund disbanded soon after the start of World War II, but the people who had supported it remained.
