The rally, planned for George Washington’s birthday, began with the pledge of allegiance. After a while, speaker after speaker brought the picture into focus. They all claimed, unrelated to history, that what they wanted was a country ruled by the white Christians who founded it. They didn’t try to hide the basics of their ideology; white supremacy and fascism wrapped in the American flag. They’d had enough, they said, of job-taking Jewish refugees, of “fake news” where journalists were untrustworthy and the whole newspaper business was controlled by Jews. They also gave the Jewish people credit for communism and domination of every American institution.
The year was 1939, and that rally, organized by the German-American Bund, the America First Committee and the Christian Front, showed the sincerity of thousands of Americans who actually came to the rally to support Adolf Hitler and of the thousands more around the country, including Charles Lindbergh, a real American hero, the guy everyone loved for “The Spirit of St. Louis”. The Madison Square Garden rally was planned and organized at Bund headquarters in New York City six months after Hitler had ordered the building of the first six concentration camps.
Father Coughlin, the inspiration for the Christian Front, was a right wing radio host at the time, whose program was listened to by millions of Americans. His anti-Semitic “talks” and his clear belief in some rationalized hateful form of Christianity, eventually riled up hundreds of thousands of Americans to support the Nazi cause. Capitalizing on Coughlin’s success, the rally that the three groups advertised and put together, successfully brought 20,000 people inside to listen. It also brought about 100,000 people outside to protest.
Expecting trouble, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia asked the police commissioner to have a large police presence. And so he did, assigning 1,700 patrolmen from every borough, 600 undercover detectives and an unknown number of non-uniformed police officers. Outside, the police locked arms to try to keep the protesters out. They were jolted by the loud, screaming protesters directing their anger at the Nazis inside, who were making speech after speech about the evil, power-hungry Jews, many of whom unabashedly took part in the protests.
The poster for the event advertised it as the Pro America Rally. It didn’t look much like New York or America inside – white people with swastikas on their sleeves as they raised the Nazi salute, brownshirts holding American flags onstage, with a giant picture of George Washington as the backdrop. Men dressed all in black, looking a lot like the SS, walked up and down the isles sometimes checking for tickets, as the few NYC policemen inside tried to be unnoticeable.
The last and main speaker of the night was Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Bund. He had become a U.S. citizen in 1934 and had worked as a chemist at the Ford Motor Co. He was fired for stirring people up with his constant political rants filled with anti-Semitism, despite the fact that Henry Ford himself was an anti-Semite.
Kuhn stirred up the crowd at the Garden with his railing against Jews. He referred to President Roosevelt as Rosenfield and began his speech by saying “You have all heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press.” Just as Kuhn’s crowd reached a fever pitch, a man from the audience charged the stage, knocked over Kuhn’s microphone, and yelled “Down with Hitler!” He was tackled by the Bund’s SS, who beat the man, ripping off his pants. As the crowd cheered the work of the storm troopers, the NYPD moved in and pulled the man, later identified as Isadore Greenbaum, to safety. Greenbaum, a Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, later said that although he did sneak into the Garden, he had no intention of doing what he ended up doing. Later that night he was charged with disturbing the peace.
Kuhn continued with his speech, wrapping it up around 11pm. He knew exactly what he was doing. The applause and salutes all fed into his desire to be the American Hitler. When the Bund later came under investigation, it was discovered through financial records that $14,000 (about $250,000 in 2018 dollars) was unaccounted for. Apparently, Fritz Kuhn had spent a lot of Bund money on himself, his mistress and other personal gratifications.
As time went on, the Bund, the America First Committee, and Father Coughlin all faded into history. American Nazi summer camps for families and children like Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, NY, closed. Father Coughlin was eventually pulled from the airwaves by WMCA for speaking “purposeful untruths”. But believers in Nazi ideology did not disappear. The white supremacist and Nazi movement in the United States has not simply faded away into history.
So what did those true believers really want? What would the future look like? Aside from the generalities of a white Christian nation, a land without Jews, what kind of government would actually take the place of the American republic? They thought they wanted a leader just like Hitler, a leader who would have simple answers and who would make them feel safe.
But rallies are not the place for thought, no place for serious evaluation of what actually goes on in an authoritarian state. There was no talk of the reality of Hitler’s totalitarian government where the military swore an allegiance to Hitler not to Germany, where opposition was eliminated and democracy dismantled. Rallies are useful for poking at emotions that will stir people to act on those emotions alone, without thought. Hating difference was the pillar for those who called for a white Christian America, a nation free from anybody who might disagree.
