American Experience: "Nazi Town, U.S.A." (WGBH, PBS, aired January 23, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 23) my husband Charles and I watched two documentaries (three if you count the two halves of the Frontline program, “Israel’s Second Front” and “Failure at the Fence,” separately), one of which I was particularly interested in and I was glad that Charles could see, too, since he’d taken the day off work. That was an American Experience episode called “Nazi Town, U.S.A.,” dealing mostly with the German American Bund. (The German word “Bund” officially means “federation” but it’s also translated as “organization.”) This was a front group originally started by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi German government as soon as it took over in January 1933 to build support for the Nazi regime among Americans in general and Americans of German origin in particular. It was originally called “Bund of Friends of the New Germany” and it staged mass parades and rallies carrying swastika flags. As word of the brutality of the Nazi regime started to filter into the U.S. – though until the U.S. actually entered World War II in December 1941 surprisingly little news about the horrors of Nazi Germany appeared in the U.S. media – the Bund’s open identification with the Nazi regime started to be a political liability. In 1935 the Nazi government decided to close it down, but Fritz Kuhn, the German-born naturalized U.S. citizen who had been picked to head the Bund, kept it going anyway, rebranding it the “German American Bund” and trying to pass it off as the fulfillment of America’s own Revolutionary ideals. Bund rallies and events featured life-sized paintings or statues of George Washington onstage, and much of the rhetoric of the Bundists is strikingly similar to the way the American Right talks today. Like the U.S.’s modern-day Right-wing revolutionaries (usually misbranded “conservatives” even though they are anything but true conservatives), the Bundists spoke of creating a “Christian nationalist” government with ultimate power in the hands of a single individual and Jews, Blacks and others deemed “racially inferior” relegated to second-class status.

The documentary’s title, “Nazi Town, U.S.A.,” relates to the real-life Nazi town the Bund and its allies tried to create in 1937 in Yaphank, Long Island, New York (ironically also the location of the military base where Russian-born Jewish-American songwriter Irving Berlin had created his World War I musical Yip Yip Yaphank). Working off their success in creating a German-American district of New York City in Yorkville, Manhattan, the Bund and its supporters set up a township called “German Gardens” in Yaphank and named its streets after prominent Nazi leaders like Adolf Hitler and his second-in-command, Herrmann Göring. The German American Bund also set up summer camps for children, mostly young boys, with the promise to parents that they could protect their kids from having to mix with “racial undesirables” over the summer. The most successful of these was “Camp Siegfried” in Yaphank which, as historian William Hitchcock explains in the show, “was a destination for lots of people from the New York area, not just during summer camp, but for rallies and picnics and gatherings throughout the year.” Among their tactics for making sure Jews and other “undesirables” couldn’t buy homes in German Gardens were racially restrictive covenants in the title deeds saying that owners couldn’t sell their homes to anyone from a racial, ethnic or religious group the Nazis didn’t approve of. Racial covenants were actually a quite common thing in American real estate until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them in 1948 – they didn’t outright declare them unconstitutional, but they said the courts could no longer enforce them – and they were used against many different groups, though mostly against Jews and Blacks. (There’s a marvelous line in the play Auntie Mame in which the villain, Babcock, tries to assure Auntie Mame Dennis that a certain neighborhood is “exclusive and restricted.” Mame snaps back, “Exclusively what, and restricted to whom?” She’s referring to racial covenants designed to keep out Blacks and Jews, especially Jews, and later in the story she announces that she’s bought a home in that neighborhood and intends to convert it into a school for Jewish musicians whose teachers are refugees from Nazism.)

During the 1920’s and 1930’s there was an immense amount of racism in America, and it was freely, openly and proudly expressed. D. W. Griffith’s racist movie masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915) had sparked a revival of the Ku Klux Klan that was larger and more powerful than the original – and reached as far north as Indiana, where it briefly controlled the state’s politics. In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed an openly racist new immigration law that set up quotas – limits on how many people from each country could enter the U.S. – and the quotas were written to make sure most immigrants would come from the northern European countries the racists of that era considered most “white.” (This system remained in force until 1965, and many people in the Trump administration, including anti-immigrant hard-liner Stephen Miller, regarded it as a model for how they wanted to rewrite U.S. immigration laws.) Then in 1929 the U.S. stock market crashed, and racists throughout America seized on it as a justification for even more hard-line policies against immigrants. It also kicked off the Great Depression, which led a lot of Americans to believe that capitalist democracy had reached its limit and the future lay with authoritarian rule, either on the Left with Communism or on the Right with fascism. Before Hitler, fascism had meant Benito Mussolini’s regime in Italy, which had taken power in 1922 and which had generally got quite good press in the U.S. American newspapers regularly published fawning profiles on Mussolini, heralding not only his success at getting Italian trains to run on time but eliminating the Mafia in its country of origin – which looked good to Americans who saw U.S. gangsters running roughshod over law-abiding Americans and staging drive-by shootings that claimed the lives of innocent victims. (Ironically, the U.S. and its World War II allies would bring the Mafia back to Italy by organizing it as a resistance movement against fascism, the way the Mafia had been set up in the first place as a resistance against Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the early 19th century; the name “Mafia” is actually an acronym for the Italian for “Anti-French Society.”)

Mussolini had not only invented the ideology of fascism but had coined the name, taking it from the fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of authority consisting of a bundle of twigs with axes bound in. So there was already fertile soil for an American Right in the early 1930’s that openly disdained democracy and hailed fascism as the wave of the future, and when Hitler and the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 they seized on that as a way of fighting back against perceived enemies like Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had organized a boycott of all goods imported from Germany that significantly impacted the German economy. In 1936 the subversive activities of the German American Bund were so blatant and open that President Franklin Roosevelt asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate it. The FBI agents in charge of the investigation produced a 1,000-page report – which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover suppressed because he regarded the major threat to U.S. security as the American Left in general and the Communist Party, U.S.A. in particular, not the American Right. In 1937 the state legislature of New Jersey passed a so-called “race libel law” which banned speech attacking other people for their race, color or religion. The first prosecution under this law took place over Camp Nordland, a Bund-run summer camp in New Jersey, but the convictions were later reversed on appeal after the American Civil Liberties Union intervened on the Bund’s side and got the law thrown out as a violation of the First Amendment. (The ACLU got into trouble for a similar case 45 years later when they intervened on the side of neo-Nazis who wanted to stage a march through Skokie, Illinois in a neighborhood with many Holocaust survivors. Staging parades through largely Jewish neighborhoods had been a regular tactic of the original Bund, too.) In 1939 the Bund rented Madison Square Garden for a major rally at which Fritz Kuhn was the featured speaker – and when he began his speech he was heckled by a Jewish man who had crashed the event. Members of the crowd beat him within an inch of his life, and only the police, who’d been sent by then-Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to keep order and prevent a fight between Bundists and anti-Bund counter-protesters, rescued him.

The stage at Madison Square Garden featured Bund members dressed as the original Minutemen from the American Revolution, as well as at least one man in full Native American drag, though it wasn’t clear whether that was a real Native person or a Bund member dressed as one. (Charles mentioned that there was at least one Native activist who was also a Bund supporter, Elwood Towner a.k.a. Chief Red Cloud of Portland, Oregon, who was attracted by Silver Shirts founder William Dudley Pelley’s proposal to empty the reservations of Native Americans and force American Jews to live there instead.) One upshot of the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden was that Mayor La Guardia called in New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey and asked if there was anything they could do to stop Fritz Kuhn. There was; it turned out Kuhn had been regularly embezzling from the German American Bund to fund his various mistresses across the country, and he was prosecuted for that. By the time he was released from prison on that charge, the U.S. had entered World War II and he was re-arrested for failing to register as an agent of the German government (a charge the U.S. used against quite a number of home-grown fascists). Meanwhile, the ever-resourceful American Nazis had gone on from the discrediting of the Bund to form the America First Committee, an umbrella organization that attracted a wide range of members including ideological pacifists like Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, and Communist Party members who opposed U.S. entry into World War II as long as Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were allies but quickly changed their tune as soon as Hitler broke the alliance and invaded Soviet Russia in June 1941. But the main impetus behind the America First Committee was from the old Bund leaders and their pro-Nazi brethren, and they recruited a major celebrity to be the public face of their movement. He was Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 had become world-famous for becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris.

In 1938 Lindbergh had been personally invited to visit Nazi Germany by Herrmann Göring himself, who in addition to his other titles was head of Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe (literally “air weapon”). Lindbergh was persuaded by Göring that the German air force was far too powerful for the U.S. to resist, and this set him on a career of making isolationist speeches and using his still-great fame to keep the U.S. out of World War II. He was such an asset to the movement that the American Right started talking him up as a Presidential candidate and a replacement for the discredited Fritz Kuhn as America’s would-be Führer. What’s most striking about “Nazi Town, U.S.A.” is how it shows that the modern American Right has adopted not only the goals of the 1930’s fascist movement but a lot of its tactics as well, including the invocation of both God and America’s patriotic past and the claim that their goal is to “Make America Great Again.” (This desire to return to an idealized mythical past is one of the usual hallmarks of fascism: the name came from Mussolini’s appropriation of a symbol of ancient Rome, and Hitler invoked Siegfried and other fabled characters of Norse mythology.) One of the most powerful comments on the program came from anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler in 1931 (two years before he seized power in Germany), had been personally ejected from Germany on Hitler’s orders in 1934, and who in 1938 said, “The classical end of all pure democracy is the popular tyrant. And incidentally, all successful tyrants throughout history have been popular idols. The tyrant, said Machiavelli, must pose as the friend of the people, as their champion against the rich and aristocratic, as the incorporation of the people's will. They must be made to feel that through him, in his person, they are actually ruling. This was the formula of Caesar, and it's the formula of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.” She could have been talking about Donald Trump!