Above, two-time Academy Award nominee Marshall Curry presents A Night at The Garden, a film that revisits a night in February 1939 when “20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an event largely forgotten from U.S. history.” As we described it back in 2017, the film documents the following scene:
What you’re looking at is the 1939 “Pro-American Rally” (aka Pro-Nazi Rally) sponsored by the German American Bund at Madison Square Garden on George Washington’s 207th Birthday. Banners emblazoned with such slogans as “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans,” “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism,” and “1,000,000 Bund Members by 1940” decorated the great hall.
New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—an Episcopalian with a Jewish mother—considered canceling the event, but ultimately he, along with the American Jewish Committee and the American Civil Liberties Committee decreed that the Bund was exercising its right to free speech and free assembly.
A crowd of 20,000 filled the famous sports venue in mid-town Manhattan to capacity. 1,500 police officers were present to render the Garden “a fortress impregnable to anti-Nazis.” An estimated 100,000 counter-demonstrators were gathering outside.…
The most disturbing moment in the short film comes at the 3:50 mark, when another security force—the Bund’s Ordnungsdienst or “Order Service” pile on Isidore Greenbaum, a 26-year-old Jewish worker who rushed the podium where bundesführer Fritz Julius Kuhn was fanning the flames of hatred. Valentine’s men eventually pulled them off, just barely managing to save the “anti-Nazi” from the vicious beating he was undergoing.
Made entirely from archival footage filmed that night, A Night at The Garden “transports audiences to this chilling gathering and shines a light on the power of demagoguery and anti-Semitism in the United States.” You can learn more about the film and the 1939 rally at Marshall Curry’s web site.
Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or other xenophobic rallies being held this weekend in Madison Square Garden is purely coincidental, of course.
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