On the night of February 20, 1939 20,000 members of the Amerikadeutscher Bund (German American Bund) gathered at Madison Square Garden in New York City, ostensibly to honor George Washington on his birthday. Actually, the rally was an opportunity to display Nazi regalia and deliver a harangue on the "Jewish Conspiracy" to take over the United States. The wild evening was captured in the brilliant Oscar-nominated short documentary film A Night at the Garden.
While outside the Garden the New York Police struggled to contain groups of angry protesters, at least two brave souls made it inside the event. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen paid tribute to one these - Isidore Greenbaum, a young Jew from Brooklyn - in his recent column:
His name is Isadore Greenbaum. He’s a Jew, a plumber’s helper from Brooklyn. He rushes onto the stage, beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. He tries to accost the Nazi who is denouncing the “Jewish-controlled press” and calling for a “white gentile-ruled” United States. Uniformed storm troopers beat him. Police officers drag him from the stage, pants ripped, arms raised in desperate entreaty. The mob howls in delight.
It’s Feb. 20, 1939. More than 20,000 Nazi sympathizers are packed into Madison Square Garden as Greenbaum attempts to silence Fritz Kuhn, Bundesführer (so-called) of the German American Bund. Greenbaum has been enraged by Kuhn’s demand that the country be delivered from Jewish clutches and “returned to the American people who founded it.”
But there was another, much more prominent, protestor who made her way to a seat in the Garden whom Roger Cohen failed to mention. Dorothy Thompson was a well-known conservative commentator in newspapers and on the radio. She spent years as a correspondent in Germany, and was the only American reporter granted an interview with Der Führer. She was not impressed. She published her impressions - and warning to the United States - in her 1932 book I Saw Hitler:
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. … His movements are awkward. There is in his face no trace of any inner conflict or self-discipline.
For her blasphemy Goebbels had Dorothy Thompson expelled from the Vaterland. Inside the Garden on the night of 1939, Thompson found the whole Nazi pageantry ridiculous, and as she listened to the speech of Bund-Leader Fritz Kuhn she burst into hysterical laughter. Kuhn had his Nazi goons remove her from the event. Fortunately, Thompson wasn't roughed up like Isaodore Greenbaum:
Thompson was married to the writer Sinclair Lewis, whose 1935 satirical novel It Can't Happen Here warned of a fascist takeover of the United States. Dorothy Thompson herself issued this warning which is just a applicable to today in the age of Donald Trump:
No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument — the Incorporated National Will. … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!"
See also my posts:
Dorothy Thompson: Fearless Friend of Free Germany
Two Americans Who Rescued German Literature
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