Nazis at Madison Square, 20 February 1939
—Chrissie
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In the years before World War II, anti-Nazi and anti-fascist sentiment was not universal in the United States. Bigotry in many forms has been part of American society from its beginnings. Anti-Semitism in particular saw an increase during the years of the Great Depression, due to the very old stereotype of Jews running bank and having control over the financial system. Similar beliefs, and a much longer history of such ideas, led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany during the interwar period.
While anti-Semitism has always existed in the US, it has never been the most prominent form of bigotry, overshadowed as it was by the racism that was required to maintain the slave system and the subsequent systemic racism. The blame for the Depression was also applied differently in the US than in Germany; Americans have a tendency to blame the President for things that go bad and credit them for things that go well. While Germany blamed the Jews (amongst others), Americans blamed President Herbert Hoover and his administration.
Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, enacted his New Deal programs beginning in 1933. They involved heavy government support for the unemployed, protections for workers, and many public works projects. His policies were called socialist and communist by conservatives in the United States, which created a connection between the ideas they opposed and the ones opposed by right-wing governments in Europe, including the Nazis. They found it easy to draw lines between FDR and the collapsed Weimar government of Germany and the Soviet Union.
The American Nazi party (officially the German American Bund) was created in 1933, originally under the name Friends of New Germany, by Heinz Spanknöbel under the instruction of Rudolf Hess. They presented themselves as patriots and connected Nazi ideologies with what were deemed traditional American values. In keeping with those, did not hide their white supremacist agenda. Spanknöbel did not lead the party for very long, as he was deported in October of that same year for being an unregistered foreign agent. The organization remained small for the next few years and was reorganized as the German American Bund in 1936 in order to seem less foreign.
By 1938, the rebranded Bund had become a political force. Its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was one of the most prominent right-wing voices in the US, often called the American Hitler. On 20 February 1939, Kuhn took the stage at Madison Square Garden to address a crowd of 22,000 people. He was flanked by banners with American flags and swastikas and ones that said things like “Smash Jewish Communism,” and behind him an immense portrait of George Washington, whom Kuhn called “The First Fascist.”
The rally was immediately met with opposition and called for it to be stopped and the Bund’s activities banned. However, it was allowed to happen under the auspices of the First Amendment. As New York mayor Fiorella LaGuardia said, to allow it was “a contrast between the way we do things here and the way they do things there.” And so, as the American Nazis made their way to Madison Square that evening, they were protected from protesters by police. And there were tens of thousands of protestors. A group of Jewish veterans of World War I marched on the street carrying American flags, the orchestra from a nearby theater brought out their instruments to play the “Star-Spangled Banner,” for the crowd, and members of local socialist and communist groups chanted anti-fascist slogans. Only one protestor made himself known inside, Isadore Greenbaum, when he ran onto the stage shouting “Down with Hitler!” He was attacked by people on stage and was taken out by police. Greenbaum later explained that he had gone to the rally to see how bad the message was, and was overcome as “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.” He was fined $25 for disturbing the peace. Greenbaum was able to act on his words by serving in the Navy after the US entered the War.
The rally itself was carefully choreographed and contained all of the elements one would expect: blaming Jewish cabals for the world’s problems, condemnation of FDR and his New Deal programs, and calls for a United States run by whites. Whatever the Bund had hoped for the rally to achieve, it didn’t. This was the last major event conducted by the group. At the time, they were already being investigated for financial fraud, a crime which sent Kuhn to prison in December 1939. By that time, though, the Bund had already been losing members since the German invasion of Poland which began World War II. Kuhn’s successor as party leader, Gerhard Kunze, was convicted of espionage and jailed in November 1941. The few people who were still members in December 1941 quickly found it hard to justify their association with an organization that supported a regime against whom the US had just declared war. The last leader of the Bund, George Froboese, committed suicide in 1942, after being subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury because he had encouraged members of the Bund to evade the draft.
Looking back at the Second World War, it is easy to think of Americans as always having been on the correct side, but the reality is not so clear cut: racism and antisemitism have been part of American society from the beginning. These have been (and are being) used by demagogues to mask their own desire for power behind supposed populism, the only way to assure that racism and antisemitism are not also present for the end of American society is to remain vigilant in keeping such people away from power.