A Night at the Garden

“As chilling and disorienting to watch as the most inventive full-length horror movie.” –The New Yorker

“In a scant six minutes of archival footage, director Marshall Curry delivers an emotional wallop.” –NPR

“In the current climate of intolerance, this footage is especially chilling.”
–The New York Times

“A taut, dramatic seven-minute film.” –The Washington Post

“Eerily relevant.” –Rolling Stone

“Remarkable!” –Los Angeles Times

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In 1939, 20,000 Americans held a pro-Nazi rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden — an event largely forgotten from American history.

A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN, made entirely from archival fragments filmed that night, transports audiences into this disturbing gathering and shines a light on the enduring power of demagoguery and antisemitism.

Directed and edited by Marshall Curry and produced by Field of Vision, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and was released theatrically around the country.

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Q: How did you discover this event?
A: A friend of mine who was writing a screenplay about New York in the 1930s told me about it, and I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of it. When I found out it had been filmed, I asked an archival researcher, Rich Remsberg, to see what he could find. 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 archives. So he gathered it, and I edited it together into a short narrative. When Charlottesville happened, it began to feel urgent. 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.

Q: What struck you about the footage?
A: 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. 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.

It really made clear how the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the true Americans (or Germans or Spartans or…). And they encourage their followers to “take their country back” from whatever minority group is ruining it.

Q: Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event?
A: The footage is so powerful, it’s amazing that it isn’t part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.

We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while that might be true for many Americans, there was a significant group who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, antisemitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive.

These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. In a part of Fritz Kuhn’s speech that isn’t in the film, he applauds Father Coughlin, whose radio shows praising Hitler and Mussolini reached audiences of 30 million Americans. Henry Ford published excerpts from the antisemitic and fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

National hero Charles Lindbergh wrote in Reader’s Digest, “Our civilization depends on a Western wall of race and arms which can hold back… the infiltration of inferior blood.” In a speech for his America First Committee (which had 850,000 members) Lindbergh argued that “Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Press magnate William Randolph Hearst defended the creeping fascist movement, saying, “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a fascist, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen who stands for Americanism.”

But two years after this rally in Madison Square Garden, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the U.S. At that point this philosophy became socially unacceptable. And when the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever supported it.

In the end, America pulled away from the cliff, but this rally is a reminder that things didn’t have to work out that way. If Roosevelt weren’t President, if Japan hadn’t attacked, is it possible we would have skated through without joining the war? And if Nazis hadn’t killed American soldiers, is it possible that their philosophy wouldn’t have become so taboo here?

Q: Who was the guy who ran out on stage during the rally?
A: He was a 26-year-old plumber’s helper from Brooklyn named Isadore Greenbaum. When he ran on stage to protest, he was beaten up and had his pants ripped off as he was thrown from the stage. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25.

Greenbaum explained to the judge the day after the rally, “I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution I lost my head, and I felt it was my duty to talk.” The Magistrate asked him, “Don’t you realize that innocent people might have been killed?” And Greenbaum replied, “Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?” (New York Times, 2/22/39).

He went on to serve in the military during WW2 and was featured in Stars and Stripes magazine. (The Washington Post did a terrific article on Greenbaum after the film came out.)

Years later when Greenbaum was asked why he did what he did, in spite of the risk, he simply said, “Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place…?” I think that’s a question for all of us who are witnessing similar demagoguery today.

Q: What was the public response to the rally?
A: There was a debate at the time over whether the Bund should be allowed to have a rally, and that debate – like so many things about the event – seems eerily contemporary. 

In The New York Times, the American Jewish Committee argued that although the Bund was “completely anti-American and anti-democratic…because we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views.” Mayor LaGuardia, for his part, ridiculed the event as an “exhibition of international cooties,” and said he believed in exposing cooties to the sunlight.

Q: What happened to this group after the rally?
A: The German American Bund, who held the rally, had a significant presence in the 1930s. They had youth camps and training camps in New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and held a huge march down East 86^th Street in Manhattan. But their mainstream appeal was reduced by their leaders’ German accents and culture.

As Halford E. Luccock famously said, “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’”

The group’s leader Fritz Kuhn was eventually arrested for embezzling Bund funds, sent to prison, and stripped of his citizenship. After the war, he was deported to West Germany where he died a few years later. The Bund disbanded soon after the start of World War II, but the people who had supported it remained.

Q: How did you decide on the editing approach?
A: At first I thought I’d make a traditional documentary – with an historian explaining the background of the group. But when I started cutting the footage together, I realized there was real power in just watching it unfold, without explanation. When most people watch it, at first they are puzzled: “What is this?” They see George Washington and American flags and hear the Pledge of Allegiance (notably, before the phrase “Under God” was added in 1954), but then they see swastikas and people giving the Nazi salute, and it’s really unsettling. So I decided to keep it pure and cinematic and unmediated – as if you are there, watching, and wrestling with what you are seeing. I wanted it to be more provocative than didactic – an icy splash of history tossed into the discussion we are having about white supremacy and antisemitism right now.

Q: What do you want the audience to take away from the film?
A: The film doesn’t have narration or interviews to clearly underline the takeaways, but I think most audiences will find lots to chew on. To me, the most striking and upsetting part of the film is not the antisemitism of the main speaker or even the violence of his storm-troopers. What bothers me more is the reaction of the crowd. Twenty-thousand New Yorkers who loved their kids and were probably nice to their neighbors, came home from work that day, dressed up in suits and skirts, and went out to cheer and laugh and sing as a speaker dehumanized people who would be murdered by the millions in the next few years.

This point is less an indictment of bad things that Americans have done in the past than it is a cautionary tale about the bad things that we might do in the future. When the protester is being beaten up there’s a little boy in the crowd who I zoomed on in the edit. You can see him rub his hands together, doing an excited little dance, unable to contain the giddy excitement that comes from being part of a mob. And when the protester is finally thrown off stage, there’s a long slow pan across the crowd that is laughing, clapping, cheering, like they’re at a World Wrestling Federation match.

We’d like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people. But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is naïve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness. Events like this should remind us not to be complacent – that the things we care about have to be nurtured and defended regularly – because even seemingly good people have the potential to do hideous things.

• WNYC ARCHIVES: Full unedited audio and photos from the rally, along with historical background.
• THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: A look at the history of fascism in America.
• THE SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE: Article exploring the historical background behind the film.
• THE WASHINGTON POST: Reporter Philip Blum digs into the story of Isadore Greenbaum, the Jewish protester who ran out on stage the night of the rally.
• ROLLING STONE: On the 80th anniversary of the 1939 rally, filmmakers projected footage from A Night at The Garden onto Madison Square Garden. Director Marshall Curry explained, “We wanted the projection to feel like ghosts were coming back to remind Americans not to be complacent.”

• THE GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND: Transcripts of Nazi Speeches from 1939.
• THE GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND CHARTS: A series of charts created by the German-American Bund as propaganda and archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
• “IT CAN HAPPEN HERE” TV SPOT: 30-second ad for A Night at The Garden, which was rejected by FOX News for being “unsuitable for air.” Read more about the controversy.
• THE MEMORY PALACE: “The Year Hank Greenberg Hit 58 Home Runs.” Gripping podcast about a brawl outside of The Garden that night.
• RADIO DIARIES: “When Nazis Took Manhattan.” Terrific NPR podcast about the rally.
• RETROPOD: Podcast story from The Washington Post about Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Nazi group called the German-American Bund.
• PROTEST FLYER: Thousands of protestors gathered outside the rally, some of whom handed out this flyer. Note the final chilling statement: “Don’t wait for the concentration camps — Act now!”

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MARSHALL CURRY is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker who directs both documentary and fiction films. He won the Oscar for writing and directing The Neighbors’ Window, a short narrative film, and he was previously nominated three times for Academy Awards in the documentary categories. His films include Street Fight, which chronicled Cory Booker’s first run for mayor of Newark, NJ.; Racing Dreams, about two boys and a girl who live in rural America and dream of one day racing in NASCAR; If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, which peels back the layers of a radical environmental group; and Point and Shoot, about a Baltimore native who sets off for Libya to join the rebels fighting Gaddafi. Marshall was also Executive Producer and an additional editor of Mistaken For Strangers, a comedy rock-doc about indie band The National.

FIELD OF VISION is a filmmaker-driven documentary unit that commissions and creates original short-form nonfiction films about developing and ongoing stories around the globe. They produce cinematic work that tells the stories of our world from new perspectives. Inspired by past projects such as World in Action and Life Magazine, their work includes individual short and feature-length films, episodic series, and thematic approaches to a single topic by multiple filmmakers, deep-dive investigations pairing filmmakers with journalists, and rapid-response assignments and collaborations with artists across mediums. They are committed to short-form because it allows filmmakers to respond quickly, take creative risks, reach wide audiences, explore new ways of storytelling and make films with a faster production cycle. They are committed to making cinematic work that tells the stories of our world from different perspectives. Their films are distributed through a variety of partners including news organizations, film festivals, online platforms, broadcast, streaming and cable. Field of Vision provides filmmakers the necessary support and resources to create their films.

FIRST LOOK MEDIA launched in 2013 and is a multi-platform media company devoted to supporting independent voices. Field of Vision is a project of First Look Media. First Look Media produces and distributes content in a wide range of forms including feature films, short-form video, podcasts, interactive media and long-form journalism.

Directed, produced and edited by Marshall Curry
Archival Research: Rich Remsberg
Executive Producers: Laura Poitras, Charlotte Cook
Music: James Baxter
Re-Recording Mixer: Paul Hsu Mixed at C5, inc, New York
Colorist: Sandy Patch
Post Production Services: Final Frame
Post Production Assistant: Ian Kelly
Thank you:
Elizabeth Martin
Jane and Rivers Curry
Guido Jimenez-Cruz
Peter Yost
Michael Hearst
Matthew Hamachek
Joe Harris
Archival Footage:
National Archives and Records Administration
UCLA Film & Television Archive
Grinberg Film Library
Streamline Films
For Field of Vision:
Supervising Producer: Anne Neczypor
Managing Editor: Bryce Renninger
Production Manager: Farihah Zaman
Data Manager: Mark Lukenbill
Editorial Coordinator: June Jennings

© 2017 Marshall Curry Productions, LLC

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