All of Donald Trump’s major rallies incorporate certain common elements: attacks on the press, the ritualistic demonization of immigrants and other minorities, exhortation of “real Americans” to “take back their country,” and overt, exclusionary appeals to patriotism (along with a gaudy emphasis on patriotic symbols and imagery). At several of his rallies, there has been a palpable undercurrent of incipient violence, as dissenters or protesters were subjected to assaults and physical and verbal threats by Trump supporters, with Trump himself nodding approval or encouragement.
Before Trump came along, most of us, thankfully, had never witnessed anything remotely like these spectacles in our lifetimes. Historical examples, such as the inflammatory political rallies of segregationist Governor George Wallace in the 1960s, were generally presented to us in textbooks as aberrations to be universally reviled as they faded into the dustbins of our history; We recognized that there was something deeply unsettling and anti-American about them.
Some events were revolting and embarrassing enough to be simply erased from the public memory, never to appear in anyone’s textbooks. One of those was the so-called “pro-American” rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, in February of 1939, attended by 22,000 pro-Nazi Americans.
Marshall Curry’s 2017 film, A Night at the Garden, assembled rare archival footage of this rally, and in 2018 it earned an Academy Award nomination in the category of Best Documentary, Short Subject. It was produced by Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook, with Field of Vision.
Approximately six minutes in length, the complete film can be viewed below.
The rally was hosted by the German-American Federation or ”Bund,” which explains the heavy German accent of the speaker featured in the film, Bund president Fritz Kuhn. Again, most Americans have, quite understandably, never heard of the rally, which took place only seven months before Germany invaded Poland, an event which made such views unfashionable to say the least. At the time, the dues-paying membership of the Bund probably did not exceed 25,000, but as pointed out by Jon Schwarz in his 2017 article about the film for The Intercept, the Bund was allied with the “Christian Front,” an American organization associated with the anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin’s radio audience numbered in the millions, and, according to Schwarz, the Christian Front would have helped to turn out the crowd at this rally. The fact that it was held in supposedly “liberal” and cosmopolitan New York City also suggests that passive support for the Bund, and its views, was substantial among the American public.
The film shows that the tactics employed by demagogues, fascist or otherwise, have not appreciably changed over time. Every one of the characteristics of Donald Trump’s rallies is present in the film above: the same vicious denunciation of the press, the same appeals to patriotism and white nationalism, the same urging that the audience, the only “true” Americans, need to “take their country back” from a despised minority (just substitute “Illegals” or “liberals” for “Jewish” here).
And, most tellingly, the reaction of the crowd is the same. The film is relatively quiet up to a certain point, when a Jewish protestor (26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum of Brooklyn) rushes the stage. He is then roughed up, to the delight and cheers of the crowd, while Bund president Kuhn smirks. One of the participants, a young boy standing behind the podium, actually dances a victory jig. Schwarz describes the boy’s reveling in this violence.
Perhaps the central moment of “A Night at the Garden” is a shot of a young uniformed boy on stage. He is maybe 8 years old, and part of the Bund youth; he appears smaller and slighter than the others. As the crowd humiliates Greenbaum and drags him away, the boy looks around for affirmation that he is not alone. Then he does a joyful jig, rubs his hands together, and performs his dance again.
This is a ferocious, simian exhilaration that can only be felt by someone who is emotionally a child. But there are always many chronological adults waiting for someone to give them permission to lay down the burden of an individual adult’s consciousness. To tell them: We’ve located the culprits causing all your frustration and pain. They look like us, like humans, but they’re not. They’re wearing a disguise. Dissolve with us into this howling mass of protoplasm, and you will be responsible for nothing.
Director Marshall Curry, when interviewed by Field of Vision, describes what initially struck him as he worked to assemble the fragments of the rally’s meager existing footage, which had been dispersed around the country.
It really illustrated that the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the true Americans (or Germans or Spartans or ...). And they encourage their followers to “take their country back” from whatever minority group has ruined it.
Curry was also asked what he would like audiences to take away from the film.
To me, the most striking and upsetting part of the film is not the anti-Semitism of the main speaker or even the violence of his storm-troopers. What bothers me more is the reaction of the crowd. Twenty-thousand New Yorkers who loved their kids and were probably nice to their neighbors, came home from work that day, dressed up in suits and skirts, and went out to cheer and laugh and sing as a speaker dehumanized people who would be murdered by the millions in the next few years.
This point is less an indictment of bad things that Americans have done in the past, than it is a cautionary tale about the bad things that we might do in the future. [...]
We’d like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people. But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is naïve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness.
For anyone who still harbors the illusion that “it can’t happen here,” Curry’s film is essential, if disturbing, viewing. For those of us who no longer harbor that illusion, it simply serves as confirmation of our worst fears.