When Nazis Filled Madison Square Garden (1939)

[steve2470]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/23/nazi-german-american-bund-rally-madison-square-garden-215522




Anxious to find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of the German-American Bund rally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis.

That rally, the largest such conclave in U.S. history, shocked Americans at the time. They had seen the press accounts and newsreel footage of the Nazis’ massive Nuremburg rallies; they had read about Kristallnacht, the murderous, two-day anti-Semitic pogrom of November 1938, which the Bund—the fast-growing, American version of the German Nazi party, which trumpeted the Nazi philosophy, but with a stars-and-stripes twist—had unabashedly endorsed.

But that was in Europe. This was America. New York City. For Americans wondering whether it could happen here, the Bund rally provided the awful answer.

“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally In Garden,” blared a front-page headline in the New York Times. Inside, photos captured the restless throng of counterprotesters outside the arena and the Bund’s smiling uniformed leaders. “We need be in no doubt as to what the Bund would do to and in this country if it had the opportunity,” the Times opined in an editorial later that week. “It would set up an American Hitler.”

[kimbutgar]

1. I have a book that has a picture of a Nazi rally in San Francisco in 1935

It was at the San Francisco City Hall. I brought the book at a flea market for that picture.

The book is the Restless decade about the 1930's.

[underpants]

2. I had no idea

[Behind the Aegis]

3. Many people do not know this part of our history.

Too many are unaware of the rank anti-Semitism which has been steeped into the American psyche. Heroes like Lindbergh; a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. Great managerial/innovative minds, like Ford, an anti-Semite. Ulysses Grant, Union General and President, an anti-Semite. There are various kinds of supremacies and bigotries, and anti-Semitism is often overlooked despite being on the receiving end of white supremacy and bigotry.

[steve2470]

4. very true! I wasn't aware of Grant, thanks! nt

[Behind the Aegis]

5. A bit of history...

and a bit of...well, I'll let you read it for yourself...

Today in history: Grant expels all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, & Mississippi

[BigmanPigman]

6. According to an old Seinfeld episode they were also there in the 90's

or at least it was white supremacists and they thought George was their leader.

[Solly Mack]

7. Yep

K&R