For all we can tell from the photo above, the massive crowd was attending a huge patriotic rally at the old Madison Square Garden in New York City.
The figure in the center is a great American, George Washington, and the banners mention “FREE AMERICANS” and “CHRISTIAN AMERICA.”
The second one starts to give away the real subject of the rally. which took place on February 20, 1939. About 20,000 Americans of German descent, an organization known as the German American Bund, met to celebrate the rising success of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in taking over Europe.
It was still more than six months until Hitler would invade Poland and start World War II and nearly three years till America would go to war with Germany. In fact, the only reason we went to war with Hitler after Pearl Harbor was that he declared war on us.
It was probably his second-biggest blunder, right behind attacking Russia.
The anti-Semitism at Bund rallies was appalling. Bund leader Fritz Kuhn called President Roosevelt “Rosenfeld,” alluding to a ridiculous story that FDR was actually of Jewish descent, and even sillier, he called Thomas Dewey “Jewey.”
America in the late 1930s was a very different place than it is now. Far more racist toward African-Americans and far more open anti-Jewish sentiment. Many European Jews died because America would not increase its immigration quotas and allow more of them into the country.
Why mention this more than 80 years later?
Because prejudice never really goes away. Too many people whose lives basically reflect their own failures love to blame someone else, and while it was truly wonderful that we became the first Democracy to elect a leader from a minority of less than 15 percent of the population, Barack Obama’s election resulted in much more open racism.
When I was a kid in the 1950s, lots of people believed that by now we would have gotten past racism, religious prejudice and ultra-nationalism.
Boy, were we wrong.