Thursday, February 21, 2019

When the Nazis rallied in New York

NPR has an article up about the 1939 Madison Square Garden "Pro America Rally" which was really just a Nazi rally.  While having heard of it before, I'm not sure I had seen photos of what it looked like:


and this:


The speeches were quite something:
At Madison Square Garden, the rally opened with the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. The mood was jubilant. Attendees wore Nazi armbands, waved American flags and held aloft posters with slogans like "Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America." There were storm troopers in the aisles, their uniforms almost identical to those of Nazi Germany. "It looked like any political rally — only with a Nazi twist," said Arnie Bernstein, author of Swastika Nation.

The speeches were explicitly anti-Semitic, and tirades against "job-taking Jewish refugees" were met with thunderous applause. "They demanded a white gentile America. They denounced Roosevelt as 'Rosenfeld,' to say that Roosevelt was in the pocket of rich Jews," said Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America. In equal measure to the xenophobia, the speeches were loaded with American boosterism.
 There's a short doco in the article too which I haven't watched yet.  Seems like a bit of pretty forgotten history to me.

Update:  here's the 7 min video about it, well worth watching:

Field of Vision - A Night at the Garden from Field of Vision on Vimeo.

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