Madison Square Garden, 1934-05-17.
This is another quote from Sarah Churchwell's wondrously well-written "Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream". Below, there are some enlightening and refreshing words from Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1935, and later, of how 20,000 nazis filled up Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1934.
I have to say, Thompson's acid tongue in regards to Hitler is fantastic to read:
While America was confronting its spiritual failures in 1933, Europe was confronting the Nazis’ consolidation of power: Roosevelt was sworn in as president almost exactly one month after Hitler became chancellor. Three weeks after that, the Chicago Tribune was reporting that he had ceremoniously opened his first concentration camp, ‘at Dachau, near Munich’, on 22 March 1933.1 Two years earlier, the journalist Dorothy Thompson had interviewed the chancellor, calling him ‘inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.’ In I Saw Hitler, her 1932 book based on the interview, Thompson noted that Mein Kampf was ‘eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction’.
Perhaps the most extraordinary part of Hitler’s rise, she thought, was its very premise: ‘Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.’ She would later be mocked for having ‘dismissed’ Hitler in this first assessment, but although she underestimated dictators, she also overestimated voters.
Perhaps the most extraordinary part of Hitler’s rise, she thought, was its very premise: ‘Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.’ She would later be mocked for having ‘dismissed’ Hitler in this first assessment, but although she underestimated dictators, she also overestimated voters. When Hitler took control, Thompson was aghast at his electorate’s self-deception and self-destruction, writing that Hitler had not been ‘thrust upon’ the German people; instead ‘dictatorship was accomplished by popular will … He recommended himself to them and they bought him.’ More than 50 per cent of German voters ‘deliberately gave [up] all their civil rights, all their chances of popular control, all their opportunities for representation’. In sum, ‘they bought the pig of autocracy in a poke’.
Hitler came to power ‘largely because so-called civilized people did not believe that he could’, Thompson warned. The problem was that they complacently assumed that their idea of civilisation was ‘greatly cherished by all men’, who agreed that their culture, a ‘complex of prejudices, standards and ideas’, had been ‘accumulated at the cost of great sacrifice’ over centuries.
On 17 May 1934, 20,000 members of a group called the ‘Friends of New Germany’ held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Friends of New Germany had been authorised by Rudolph Hess in 1933; officially recognised by Hitler, it was described by American papers as the ‘American subsidiary of the Nazi party’.
Newspapers did not give the American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden that May much space. ‘Hitler Cheered at N.Y. Rally,’ read a small headline on page 4 of the Allentown Morning Call. ‘Chancellor Hitler was cheered and boycotters of German goods were booed tonight as 20,000 Nazi sympathizers packed Madison Square Garden in a rally under the watchful eye of hundreds of metropolitan police.’ There were also ‘eight hundred members of the German “Ordnungs Dienst”’ there to help ‘preserve order’. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle told its readers of clashes among protesters in the streets after the ‘Nazi rally’, putting the story on page 3.45 The Chicago Tribune called it a ‘demonstration’, relegating it to a few lines on page 6. The pictures taken that night in Madison Square Garden, however, suggest that more attention should have been paid; the New York Times reported it on the front page, reprinted a chilling photograph on page 3, mentioned it again the following day, and then never returned to the story again.