The impression left on New York by the spectacle of 20,000 persons gathered Monday night in the Madison Square Garden to listen to German-American Bund leaders denounce the Government and the Jews, while a record detail of more than 1,700 police kept some 10,000 anti-Nazis at bay, continued to evidence itself today in comment of press and public.
Predominant opinion appeared to be that while such a rally was deserving of condemnation, the democratic principle of free speech left city officials no alternative but to permit the meeting and protect it from disturbance. There were some, however, who took the opposing view, that the Bund rally was a threat to democracy and that permitting it was a sign of weakness.
The New York Times expressed the majority press opinion when it said editorially that while the Bund was an enemy of democracy, “its members are entitled to free speech and to the protection of the other constitutional guarantees so long as they keep within the laws which bind all of us….If any groups attempt to overpass these limits, ample and legal force exists to put them down — and let them have no doubt of the outcome: they will be put down.”
The Herald Tribune said that the Bund presented a “grave problem” that required action by legislators and prosecutors, without “hasty conclusions or wholesale condemnations,” and added that “it is along these lines of clear legal right that the nation must protect itself, and not by establishing unsound restraints upon the right of free speech which might well destroy that right altogether.”
The World-Telegram asserted that “democracy worked last night with health and self-respect, to the refutation of the Bund and the contradiction of short-sighted Americans who felt that the demonstration should be prevented.” The World-Telegram also featured an editorial cartoon, captioned “Incitement to Nausea,” which depicted “New York Nazism” as a storm trooper with a swastika flag shouting Nazi and anti-Jewish phrases and receiving the “heils” of the audience. The Post, pointing out that such movements had come and gone in America before, said that “the Bund isn’t big enough for us to make a dent in our own Constitution to fight it.”
DOROTHY THOMPSON SEES COUGHLIN-KUHN ALLIANCE
Dissenting opinions were voiced by two commentators who attended the meeting. Dorothy Thompson, who created a sensation at the rally by laughing loudly at a Nazi speaker’s reference to the “Golden Rule” and other remarks as her form of protest against it, said in her Herald-Tribune column today that an alliance had been formed between the followers of Father Coughlin and Fritz Kuhn “to abolish the American democracy as we have known it since the days Lincoln.” In a statement in the Herald Tribune yesterday explaining her demonstration at the Garden, she warned that “between Mr. (Wilhelm) Kunze’s speech and a wholesale pogrom is but a short step.” She asserted: “If this democracy allows a movement, the whole organization and pattern of which is made by a government openly hostile to the American democracy, to organize, set up a private army and propagandize on this soil, we are plain saps….The immediate object of the Bund is to deprive all non-Aryans (according to their own interpretation) of their Constitutional rights. This conspiracy — an open conspiracy — is protected, heaven help us, by the American Civil Liberties Union.”
Heywood Broun, who had assisted Miss Thompson’s demonstration at the Garden by giving her his seat at the press table and later insisting that she be permitted to return after police had removed her from the ball, said in his World-Telegram column: “I do not think our frontier is the Rhine. But let us defend the Hudson and the Harlem and keep our river rim safe from these drums of devilment….Once again our leader Washington must cross the Delaware.”
In contrast with the English-language press, the dominant note in Yiddish press comment was that the rally should have been prohibited. The Jewish Morning Journal declared that such meetings “must not be tolerated in New York” on the ground that to permit the preaching of anti-Semitism in the center of New York is “to open the way for the undermining of American freedom.” The Jewish Daily Forward asserted that “the first duty of a democracy is to protect itself against internal and external enemies” and the permitting of racial incitement “no longer means democratic freedom but rather permitting anarchy.” The Day, on the other hand, viewed the meeting as “a plague which perhaps must be tolerated.”
The New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung, principal German-language daily, confined itself to praising the work of the police in handling the rally, without taking a stand on the question of whether such rallies should be allowed.
In the aftermath of the Nazi rally, several anti-Nazi organizations took action. Col. Lewis Landes, chairman of Serve America, Inc., and commander of an American Legion post, wrote to United States Attorney Gregory F. Noonan requesting a Federal Grand Jury investigation of the Bund members’ conduct as a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of America citizens, particularly Negroes and Jews. The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League filed a complaint with Attorney General John J. Bennett Jr. charging the Bund with fraudulent advertising in connection with sale of tickets and collection of funds for the meeting. The Socialist Workers’ Party, Trotskyist organization which had sought to organize picketing of the Garden but was prevented by police, charged police brutality in the fighting that occurred in the streets around the hall. Similar charges were made by the American Fund for Political Prisoners and Refugees. However, Mayor LaGuardia expressed satisfaction with the police handling of the meeting, asserting that “it was a contrast between the way we do things here and the way they do things there.”
While some 10,000 anti-Nazis were packed in all side streets within a block’s radius of the Garden, prevented by police cordons from coming closer and dispersed in many attempts to break through police lines, there was only one anti-Nazi demonstration in the Garden, in addition to Miss Thompson’s laughter. While Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Bund, was attacking the Jews in the final address of the evening, a young man who had been standing near the platform leaped upon it and tried to reach Kuhn. He was pounced on immediately by about a dozen uniformed Nazis and beaten before police could climb the high platform and rescue him. He was dragged down by police, the while shouting, “Down with Nazism! Down with Communism!” and placed under arrest. The man, Isidore Greenbaum, 26-year-old ship’s waiter, was fined $25 for disorderly conduct.
During the meeting the crowd cheered speeches demanding the freeing of America from “Jewish domination” and various other attacks on Jews, the present administration and the C.I.O. One noteworthy fact was that the loudest and most sustained applause of the evening was not for Hitler or Mussolini, but for Father Charles E. Coughlin. James Wheeler-Hill, executive secretary of the Bund, in an announcement which closed the meeting, urged all present to join in the picketing of Station YMCA, which has barred Father Coughlin from the air.
While the extraordinary police precautions averted any serious incident, the rally and the presence of large numbers of anti-Nazis in the area caused considerable tension. A Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter who toured the area after the meeting was over found numerous altercations and some fist fights occurring even many blocks away from the Garden as late as one a.m. One fight was seen to start because an anti-Nazi thought he heard a man mutter, “Dirty Jew!” The police made only 13 arrests, limiting their activity largely to halting fights and dispersing crowds.
During the rally, the Madison Square Garden office made public a letter received from the American Jewish Committee opposing “any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views.” The committee, together with the Zionist Organization, B’nai B’rith, the Alliance Israelite and the Jewish Colonization Society, were attacked by Kuhn in his address as “outposts of the Jewish government.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
