In time for Halloween, the ghosts of the Goebbels’ goblins that once rallied in Madison Square Garden will be resurrected again.
Madison Square Garden will once again be host to a Hitler-admiring fascist when Donald Trump brings his vitriol and hatred to the N.Y.C. sports arena on Sunday. It is an ugly echo back to another rally 85 years ago when the German American Bund filled the arena with Nazi symbolism at its much-advertised “Americanism” rally, a vile night of white nationalism and anti semitism filled the arena in what would become the biggest Nazi rally in American history.
It enraged the Jewish community who refused to be silent.
Concerned Jews like my mother’s father Arthur Joseph who was among the thousands who gathered outside the Garden to protest the rally.
It was a cautionary and frightening story told to me as a child by my mother that was indelibly imprinted in my mind. This double ghost of American Nazism and antisemitism that has haunted me for years has now resurfaced.
1939 Pro-American Rally
(L) My grandfather Arthur Joseph, active in Jewish Community attended the protest for the German American Bund Rally at Madison Square Garden Feb. 1939
On an unusually balmy Monday night in February 1939, as my grandfather Arthur exited the crowded subway at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, he looked up at the brightly lit marquee of Madison Square Garden and got chills. It announced the evening’s main event- a “Pro American Rally.” With a sickening feeling, he knew as did the other thousands who stood outside the sports arena to protest the event being held inside, that it was anything but pro-America.
It was an evening organized by the Pro Hitler -German American Bund that was filled with hate.
Directed at those like him.
The large portrait of George Washington that hung along swastika banners and American flags at Madison Square Garden during German American Bund’s Pro American Rally 1939
The organizers had deliberately chosen the date of February 20th in celebration of George Washington’s birthday and displayed a 30-foot-tall banner of America’s first president on the stage.
More than 20,000 men and women streamed inside and took their seats in the large arena. The mood was jubilant. The view they had was stunning: Washington was flanked by red, white, and blue bunting — and swastikas. That giant portrait of George Washington was no coincidence. Indeed, the pro-Nazi group referred to Washington as “America’s first fascist.” One speaker even argued that if Washington was alive today he would be a staunch friend of Adolph Hitler.
The event was highly choreographed in the fascist style, with uniformed Bund members carrying American and Nazi flags, the display of the Nazi salute, and the playing of martial music and German folk songs.
Under the guise of patriotism, the assembly began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as attendees improbably wore Nazi armbands, waved American flags, and held aloft posters with slogans like “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” There were stormtroopers in the aisles, their uniforms almost identical to those of Nazi Germany.
White Nationalism As American As Apple Pie
German American Bund Poster. “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism” 1939
One of the main speakers, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the national public relations director of the Bund, who fancied himself an American Joseph Goebbels, pointed to the white supremacy at America’s founding as a nation. “The spirit which opened the West and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man,” he preached.
White Nationalism was apparently as American as apple pie as Kunze rattled off the threads of racism that ran through American history to bolster his vision for a whites-only America. He cited anti-miscegenation laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow policies and immigration quotas. “It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation,” Kunze told the rapt audience.
The crowd responds with a Hitler salute as uniformed members of a German-American Bund color guard march at a gathering in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Feb. 20, 1939. (AP Photo)
Calling upon his fellow Americans, he challenged Bund members to restore America to the “True Americans.”
“We, the German-American Bund, organized as American citizens with American ideals and determined to protect ourselves, our homes, our wives and children against the slimy conspirators who would change this glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik paradise”
This elicited great cheers.
The Jewish Problem
Anti Jewish German Poster
The speeches were explicitly anti-Semitic, filled with time-worn tropes, stereotypes, and falsehoods about Jews creating degenerate art and music, Jewish teachers corrupting Aryan children, denouncing the Jewish control of Hollywood and news industries, and the themes of “Jewish world domination” blaming the “oriental cunning of the Jew Karl Marx.”
Angry tirades against “job-taking Jewish refugees” were met with thunderous applause.
In this cartoon, the claim is that FDR is under the control of the Communists and Jews.
They demanded a white gentile America. They denounced President Roosevelt as ‘Rosenfeld,’ claiming Roosevelt was in the pocket of rich Jews. Kunze said the Aryan race follows the Golden Rule while Jews only follow the ‘rule of gold’
Echoing the white Christian nationalism of today the Bund continued to emphasize America as a Christian nation with Christian values. The notoriously anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin, the outspoken radio evangelist, was held high as a martyr and victim of the ‘Jewish-controlled’ media.
Kunze, went on about the Jewish domination of American culture and called for news and culture without “a Jewish accent.” He complained there is “no free speech for white men” in the United States and condemned ‘parasites’ like Walter Winchell, George Burns, and Eddie Cantor, for polluting the airwaves and taking the rightful places of Aryan Americans.. He called for the ethnic cleansing of the airwaves.
It’s not too much of a stretch to go from the Christian Nationalist rhetoric of 85 years ago to current allusions to Jewish control of Hollywood studios and other media outlets.
As Kunze exited the stage, 20 thousand Bund members chanted “Free America! Free America! Free America!” as riled-up attendees waved American flags and performed the Nazi Salute, in the biggest Nazi rally in United States history.
Protestors
Protestors outside Madison Sq. Garden N.Y. Mounted police form a solid line outside Madison Sq. Garden on Feb. 20, 1939, to hold in a crowd that packed the streets around the venue where fascist American Bund was holding a rally. Photo Murray Becker /AP
While there were 20,000 enthusiastic American Nazis inside the Garden listening as Kunze raged against “Jewish domination” and calls for “a socially-just, white, Gentile-ruled United States,” there were also thousands of protesters outside standing shoulder to shoulder including my grandfather who came with other members of his synagogue The Brooklyn Jewish Center on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.
Poster Issued by Socialist Workers Party to Picket Madison Square Garden Monday Feb. 20, 1939 “Wrapping themselves in the cloak of patriotism and ‘Americanism’ the fascists prepare to spew their anti labor and anti-Jewish poison throughout NYC.
This anti-Nazi contingent included everyone from veterans to housewives to members of the Socialist Workers Party all united in one cause.
Arthur would recall there was an eerie quality to being in this place with this crowd.
March 1933 Madison Sq Garden hosts a large rally to boycott Nazi Germany
Only 6 years early many of these same people had gathered together in the same spot when a mass protest rally was held at Madison Square Garden this time to protest Hitler and antisemitism.
Organized by the American Jewish Congress a crowd of 55,000 overflowed the Garden and into the streets to protest the deteriorating circumstances of Jews in Nazi Germany after Hitler’s rise to power The protest was held on March 27, 1933, five days after the opening of the first Nazi concentration camp in Dachau.
Adolph Hitler
After Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany in early 1933, civic leaders with the American Jewish Congress began to coordinate a response. Led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, the Congress organized a boycott of German-made goods beginning in March 1933.
The Congress also spearheaded a National Day of Protest on March 27.
After a day of fasting and prayer, thousands flooded Madison Square Garden and the streets surrounding it for the largest rally. The mass protest rally at Madison Square Garden was broadcast worldwide and Jewish leaders, union presidents, politicians, and Christian clergy addressed the crowd calling for immediate cessation of the brutal treatment being inflicted on German Jews.
1939
And yet just a few years later the streets of midtown Manhattan were packed again with Jews, with more than 100,00 protesters who were protesting the same hate in their own country, denouncing the American Nazi rally as traitorous.
At one point during that February evening, my grandfather recalled the orchestra from a Broadway musical near Madison Square Garden performed a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the protesters.
A mysterious crusader even set up a loudspeaker in a rooming house near the scene and blasted a denunciation of the Nazis out the window: “Be American, Stay at Home.”
The New York Police Department had deployed a record number of 1,700 officers around Madison Square Garden, enough “to stop a revolution,” the police commissioner said. New York City’s mounted police formed a line outside Madison Square Garden to hold in check a crowd that packed the streets.
By 11:oo p.m., the rally was over and Arthur watched as members of the Bund buttoned up their overcoats, conveniently hiding their uniforms, and were escorted through police lines along Fifty-Second Street amid the crowds of protesters waiting outside. Rally participants were greeted with a roar of catcalls, jeers, and even a few punches, but by midnight, all was quiet.
For now.
Postscript
My father (R) Marvin Edelstein, a freshman at University of Virginia 1939 in Charlottesville, Va
The following day in bucolic Charlottesville, Virginia my 18-year-old future father Marvin a transplanted New Yorker who was a freshman at the University of Virginia sat in the Shannon library and read with great distress the report in the New York Times about the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. The event had received broad national coverage.
The fact that the event filled with Nazi sympathizers had been sold out did not surprise him necessarily. He had witnessed more than a few pro-German neighbors in his neighborhood in Astoria Queens. But the magnitude of this event in the heart of the city was alarming.
It was hard to imagine.
Charlottesville and Nazis
How I now wonder, would my father ever have imagined that one day his beloved town of Charlottesville itself would be associated with Nazi sympathizers and hate-filled, torch-carrying rally?
Or that the political party he worked for and believed in for so many decades, that Grand Old Party would have as their standard bearer, their nominees for president, speak so admiringly about Adolph Hitler.
Sargent Marvin Edelstein WWII
My father like others of the greatest generation had fought in WWII to eliminate fascism.
With the end of the war it seemed we had banished Hiter to the ash pile of history, only now to be resurrected again.
By a former American president no less.
The war was fought, and soldiers died so that hate and antisemitism would be eradicated as swiftly as they would eradicate polio.
But it lay dormant.
The German American Bund faded away, but the white supremacist ideology they championed remained. Today when a former president and current Republican nominee for the highest office an admitted Hitler admirer will fill that arena again, I am glad my grandfather and father are not here to see it, I will be haunted for the both of them.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.