We've posted whatever we could find of the German-American Bund's Madison Square Garden rally more than once; now someone has scoured the nation for all the footage of the event.From The Intercept_.
Finally, the Times notes, the journalist Dorothy Thompson was present, and at one point was temporarily evicted for laughing. Years before, Thompson had been the Berlin bureau chief for the New York Post, and covered the rise of fascism before she was expelled from Germany in 1934. At the time of the Bund rally, she was married to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote It Can’t Happen Here.
Several years after the events of “A Night at the Garden,” Thompson contributed a famed article to Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” In it she describes a “macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.”
“Nazism,” Thompson said, “has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. … The frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi.”
In other words, every last one of you All-American shitheels.
The Bund – meaning “federation” – never metastasized to any appreciable size. Estimates vary, but its dues-paying membership did not top 25,000. However, it was allied with the Christian Front, an organization inspired by the notorious anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Tens of millions of Americans tuned into Coughlin’s weekly radio show; one of his slogans was “Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.”
In what can only be cosmic synchronicity, I spotted this Father Coughlin episode of American Experience a couple of wks. ago & was planning to share it; now, added context in which to present it:Tip o' the Bouffant chapeau to digby at Hullabaloo, who titled her item "It can happen here" which (esp. w/ the quotes above from Mrs. Sinclair Lewis) obligates us to embed this perennial.
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