Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally Mirrors Shameful 1939 NYC Nazi Gathering

We take a close look at Donald Trump’s campaign and racist rally at Madison Square Garden with filmmaker Marshall Curry, who attended the rally and also directed the short film A Night at the Garden, about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and notes, “The demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today.”

TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this discussion Marshall Curry. Marshall Curry went to the Madison Square Garden event, but he also did an Oscar-nominated film. That film was called A Night at the Garden, about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. This is a clip.

FRITZ KUHN: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans, American patriots, I am sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger. You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof and a long tail. We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.

If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social, just, white, gentile-ruled United States. Second, gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish, Moscow-directed domination.

AMY GOODMAN: A Night at the Garden. That was an excerpt not of Nazi Germany, but of a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, from the Academy Award-nominated short film directed by Marshall Curry. That voice, explain what we just saw and listened to, and the person, the protester, who came up and was beaten up.

MARSHALL CURRY: Sure. So, in 1939, there was a rally in Madison Square Garden where 20,000 New Yorkers gathered to celebrate the rise of Nazism. And when I first saw that footage, I was completely shocked to see the American flag and George Washington and, you know, hear people singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then offering a stiff-armed salute and cheering white supremacy.

So, the man who was speaking was named Fritz Kuhn. He was the head of the German American Bund, which had camps all around the country, had quite a big following and some significant power. The protester who runs out on stage and is beaten up was a man named Isadore Greenbaum, who was a Jewish plumber’s assistant who just went to the rally that night to find out what was going on, and was shocked and appalled by what he saw.

AMY GOODMAN: And you went to Madison Square Garden Sunday?

MARSHALL CURRY: I did. So, I made this film seven years ago out of archival material that we sort of found in the National Archive and UCLA’s archive and Grinberg Archive. And that was, you know, seven years ago, at the beginning of Trump’s administration. I saw some similarities between some of the demagoguery that was happening on stage in 1939 and what Trump was doing at his rallies. And so — but I had never actually seen a Trump rally personally. And so, when I heard that he was going to be at Madison Square Garden, I thought I needed to go and see it for myself.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Marshall Curry, as you mentioned your surprise, many Americans are not aware of how extensive the fascist and Nazi movement was in the U.S. back in those days. Could you talk about that?

MARSHALL CURRY: Sure. I mean, when I grew up, I always learned in school that America took on the fascists and we fought the Nazis and defeated them. And we did, and that’s a great, you know, point of pride for our country. But we were not entirely united. As today, there were people in our midst who were antisemites, who were anti-immigrant.

And I think the thing that struck me the most about seeing that footage was the way that the demagogues in 1939 used the same tactics that we see today. You know, they use this kind of dark humor. They wrap their ideology in the symbols of patriotism, and they go after immigrants and the press and minority religions. And they do it to distract people from the fact that they really want to cut taxes for rich people and take away healthcare and do policies that people wouldn’t support.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, this Madison Square rally has happened numerous times in U.S. history. People forget that in 1968, when George Wallace, the white supremacist governor, was running for president, he held a rally at Madison Square Garden in October of 1968. And it was filled, as well, with segregationists from right here in New York City. And in fact, the police were picking up people in the streets, anyone who was trying to protest the Wallace rally. I know because I was a young college student at the time trying to get down to Madison Square Garden, was picked up by the police blocks away from Madison Square Garden, and we were held in vans until after the rally was over, hundreds of people. The reality is that filling Madison Square Garden is really not that hard for a political movement. You’re talking about less than — in a metropolitan area of 20 million people, being able to get 20,000 zealots in an arena is basically two-tenths of 1% of the population.

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yes. And the other thing is that this rally, all the different strains of it, playing “Dixie,” this Trump rally, you know, Trump has always provided a big tent, from the very beginning, 2015, ’16, for every possible kind of racist and extremist in America. He addressed himself to Southern racists, people who — he addressed himself to Proud Boys, to neo-Nazis, famously, at the Charlottesville rally — every type of person with a grievance, and then enlarged that with espousing great replacement theory, and, of course, in partnership with Fox, with the GOP elite, etc.

And so, all of this was represented at this rally, together with people from the fields of business, like the businessman Grant Cardone, who said, “We have to slaughter these people,” referring to people who aren’t supporting Trump. And you had people from the world of entertainment and from sports. And so, Madison Square Garden, you know, a seat of spectacles and sports spectacles, entertainment spectacles, political spectacles, was the perfect place, actually, for MAGA to show how many people are fitting into its big tent of racism and extremism.

AMY GOODMAN: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, we want to thank you for being with us, expert on fascism and authoritarianism, wrote the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Her newsletter is called Lucid, on threats to democracy. And we want to thank Marshall Curry, director of the Oscar-nominated short film A Night at the Garden about the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

When we come back, as billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defends his decision to block the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris, we’ll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Post reporter David Hoffman, who’s resigned from the Post editorial board in protest, and with Los Angeles Times editorials editor Mariel Garza. She resigned after the L.A. Times billionaire owner also blocked the board’s endorsement of Harris. Back in 20 seconds.