When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.
But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. Q: Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event?Ī: The footage is so powerful, it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. And they encourage their followers to “take their country back” from whatever minority group has ruined it. They tell their followers that they are the true Americans (or Germans or Spartans or…).
They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. It really illustrated that the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. The second thing that struck me was the way these American Nazis used the symbols of America to sell an ideology that a few years later hundreds of thousands of Americans would die fighting against. So I sent it over to Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook at Field of Vision and said, “Have you ever heard of this event? Would you be interested in supporting the film?” And they jumped on board.Ī: The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City, a city that was diverse, modern, and progressive even in 1939. When Charlottesville happened, it began to feel urgent. So he gathered it, and I edited it together into a short narrative. It turned out that short clips had been used in history documentaries before, but no one seemed to have collected together all of the scraps of footage – there was some at the National Archives, some at UCLA’s archive, some at other places. When I found out it had been filmed, I asked an archival researcher, Rich Remsberg, to see what he could find. A: A friend of mine told me about it last year, and I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of it.
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