On a bitterly cold February night in 1939, as Adolf Hitler prepared to launch the Second World War in September of that year, an estimated 20,000 Americans filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden for a rally organized by the pro-Hitler German American Bund.
Since 1922, when Italy became the world’s first fascist-run nation, fascism has had appeal in some quarters. A decade later, fascism replaced democracies in Germany, Japan and Spain while fascist organizations emerged in other European and Asian nations.
In the Great Depression era, with tens of millions of Americans struggling to find work and feed their families, many feared fascism would eventually grip the United States. Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel, “It Could Happen Here,” was about a U.S. dictator’s rise to power in much the same way Hitler rose to power in once democratic Germany.
Indeed, many wealthy Republicans suspected the president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, of being a wannabe dictator because his New Deal policies that he designed to help lift the nation out of its economic depression included increasing their taxes.
Despite American fears of fascism, which competed for their fears of communism, the Madison Square Garden rally, billed as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” did not lead to a massive turnout of fascist supporters ready to storm the nation’s capital.
Nonetheless, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a short, fireplug of a man known as “The Little Flower,” dispatched a law-enforcement army to ensure order: 1,700 uniformed police patrolled outside the Garden with 35 firefighters, armed with high-powered hoses; 600 undercover detectives and non-uniformed officers circulated inside.
La Guardia, an unorthodox Republican whose mother was Jewish, was an early, outspoken critic of Hitler. However, after a threat to blow up the rally, bomb squads were dispatched beforehand to check for explosives. The Little Flower was as much concerned with those attending the rally as those opposing it.
An estimated 100,000 anti-Nazi protestors gathered outside the Garden as the Bund took to a stage with American flags and a giant image of George Washington as a backdrop. None of the Bund speakers called for the overthrow, violent or otherwise, of the U.S. government.
Instead, led by their German-born now naturalized U.S. citizen, Bundersfuhrer Fritz Julius Kuhn, they espoused their ideological, anti-Semitic views including suggesting that George Washington, if he were alive, would be pals with Hitler.
“My fellow Christian Americans! It is my privilege to welcome you to this impressive mass demonstration sponsored by the German American Bund,” the Bund’s national secretary, J. Wheeler-Hill said, opening the event.
Wheeler-Hill went on and said, “George Washington, whose birthday we are celebrating today, when bidding farewell to the people, said: “Be united! Be Americans! … I must confess that we are utterly and completely disregarding the admonitions of George Washington today.”
One Bund speaker after another extolled the virtues of Nazism in everyday life and finally Kuhn stood to give the keynote address, proclaiming, “We with American ideals demand that our government should be returned to the American people who founded it!”
Kuhn said, “If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States.”
The dramatic moment of the night was when a 26-year-old Jewish man, Isadore Greenbaum, tired of the white supremacist pablum, rushed the stage. He was stopped by Bund members, to a relieved Kuhn, and dragged off by police, somehow losing his pants during the commotion.
The violence that did occur, occurred outside the rally between mostly protestors, police and some of the Bund members who were exiting the Garden. About a dozen people were arrested, Greenbaum among them, charged with disorderly conduct.
Concern that “It Could Happen Here” dissipated. Within less than two years, the United States would be at war with the world’s fascists powers.
Fascism today remains an attractive ideology to some people around the globe. The New York rally in 1939 was neither a social nor historic anomaly for the United States. Kuhn’s idea that America is, and should remain, a white, Christian nation is one that at least half the voters apparently believed then, and apparently believes today.
The violent insurrection in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 was orchestrated by an outgoing U.S. president who throughout his four-year-term demonstrated time and again that he valued authoritarian rule over democratic governance.
Like social media algorithms, Donald Trump appealed to the mobs’ fears and values: the other, whiteness, Christianity—all hard-wired. They already possessed the kindling of fascist tendencies as they stormed the Capitol with their Jesus Saves!, Trump 2020 and American flags.
Trump just put a match to it.
It finally happened here.
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