[On September
20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under
Operation Paperclip arrived at a
landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on
that fraught anniversary.]
On three telling
sides to a February
1939 Nazi rally in New York City.
1)
Organizers: Thanks to prominent individual figures
like the three on whom I’ll focus tomorrow (Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and
Father Coughlin), I think Americans have a general sense that there was support for Nazis
in 1930s America. But that support was also organized, and one of the chief
such national organizations, the German
American Bund, was the force behind the Madison Square Garden rally. While
the Bund was paralleled by other pro-Hitler organizations in the period like
the Free
Society of Teutonia and the Friends
of the New Germany, it seems to me that the Bund were also singular in
their desire to wed these pro-Nazi Germany sentiments with direct appeals to
mythic images of American identity and patriotism (on which more in item 2). And
the rally’s two keynote speakers reflect the Bund’s own multi-national,
immigrant origins (not unlike America’s, if far more fully European): Bund
leader Fritz Julius Kuhn
was a German immigrant who had become a naturalized American citizen in 1934;
while Bund secretary and Kuhn’s right-hand man James
Wheeler-Hill was a Russian (Latvian) national and recent immigrant known as
“the boy orator of the Bund.”
2)
George Washington: The rally’s February 20th
date was chosen very specifically—it was George Washington’s birthday, and the stage
featured a portrait of Washington flanked by both American flags and Nazi
flags/swastikas. After the rally opened with a performance of “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” Wheeler-Hill’s introductory
speech proclaimed that “If George Washington were alive today, he would be
friends with Adolf Hitler.” In my forthcoming book Of
Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, I argue that
celebratory patriotism (like the communal ritual of standing for and singing the
anthem) has throughout American history too often turned into mythic
patriotism, the creation of myths about our history and identity that are generally
used to exclude particular groups from the America being embraced (and to
define those groups as un- and even anti-American). So it’s no coincidence that
in Kuhn’s concluding speech, he argued that “The Bund is open to you, provided
you are sincere, of good character, of white gentile stock, and an American citizen
imbued with patriotic zeal.”
3)
Protesters: That speech of Kuhn’s did not go off
smoothly, however—it was interrupted when Isadore
Greenbaum, a 26-year-old Jewish American from Brooklyn (and future World War II naval sailor),
charged the stage; Greenbaum was attacked by Nazi guards, pulled away by
police, and charged with disorderly conduct (for which he paid a $25 fine to
avoid a 10-day jail sentence). He wasn’t the least bit apologetic, later stating, “Gee, what would you
have done if you were in my place listening to that s.o.b. hollering against
the government and publicly kissing Hitler's behind while thousands cheered?
Well, I did it.” Nor was he alone, as an estimated 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters
gathered
outside the Garden, dwarfing the 20,000 or so Nazi sympathizers inside. The
protesters featured World War I veterans, members of the Socialist Workers
Party, and countless other organizations and communities. This inspiring group
in no way mitigates the troubling realities of the rally and its reflection of widespread
American support for Hitler and the Nazis; but it does remind us that 1930s American
patriotism, like every other element of our society and history, was deeply
contested.
Next
NaziStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
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