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

“Strictly remarkable.” –Los Angeles Times

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In 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism – an event largely forgotten from American history. A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN, made entirely from archival footage filmed that night, transports audiences to this chilling gathering and shines a light on the power of demagoguery and anti-Semitism in the United States.

A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN was directed and edited by Marshall Curry and was supported and released by Field of Vision. The film was nominated for a 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short; it was also an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival and was part of a special screening and panel discussion at the New York Film Festival. It was released on 22 Alamo Theater screens across the country and at The IFC Center in NYC.

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Q: How did you discover this event?
A: A friend of mine told me about it last year, 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 places. 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 illustrated that 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 has ruined 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 seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part 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 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. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive.

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 and Charles Lindbergh expressed anti-Semitic beliefs. And press magnate William Randolph Hearst declared, “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.” (In a small ironic twist, we licensed some of the Bund footage from the Hearst collection at UCLA.)

These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. But two years after this rally, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. And at that point this sort of philosophy became unacceptable. When the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever shared their philosophy.

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.

There was a debate at the time over whether the Bund should be allowed to have a rally, which – like so many things about the event – seems eerily contemporary. 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).

But 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. Here is a terrific article on Greenbaum from the Washington Post.

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 happened to this group after this rally?
A: The German American Bund, who held the rally, had a significant presence in the 1930s, with youth camps and training camps in New Jersey, upstate New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and 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 and 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 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 anti-Semitism 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.

• “IT CAN HAPPEN HERE” TV SPOT: 30-second TV trailer for A Night at The Garden, which aired nationally on MSNBC and CNN but was rejected by FOX for being “unsuitable for air.“
• WNYC ARCHIVES: Full audio and photos from the rally, along with historical background from the WNYC archives.
• 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 said, “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. If you compare Kuhn’s speech with the audio file above, you’ll notice that there were edits made by the Bund to the transcript.
• 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.
• THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The New York Review of Books looks at the history of fascism in America.
• THE SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE: “Footage Recalls the Night Madison Square Garden Filled With Nazis” by Jason Daley. An article detailing the historical background behind the events of the film.
• THE WASHINGTON POST: “When Nazis Rallied In Manhattan, One Working-Class Jewish Man From Brooklyn Took Them On.” Reporter Philip Blum tells the story of Isadore Greenbaum, the Jewish protester who ran out on stage the night of the rally.
• THE MEMORY PALACE: “The Year Hank Greenberg Hit 58 Home Runs.” A podcast story about a brawl outside of the Garden that night.
• RADIO DIARIES: “When Nazis Took Manhattan.” Terrific NPR podcast about the rally.
• RETROPOD: “In 1939, the ‘American Hitler’ Took the Stage at Madison Square Garden.” A podcast story from The Washington Post about Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Nazi group called the German-American Bund.
• PROTEST FLYER: There were thousand of protestors outside, some of whom handed out this flyer which ends with the chilling statement: “Don’t wait for the concentration camps — Act now!”

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MARSHALL CURRY is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker who has directed both documentary and fiction films. Most recently, Curry won the Oscar for The Neighbors’ Window, a short narrative film that he wrote and directed. He was previously nominated for an Oscar and an Emmy for his documentary Street Fight, which follows Cory Booker’s first run for mayor of Newark, NJ. His follow-up documentary, Racing Dreams, tells the story of two boys and a girl who live in rural America and dream of one day racing in NASCAR. It won numerous awards, including Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, and aired on PBS and the BBC. His third film, If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, peels back the layers of a radical environmental group that the FBI called the number one domestic terrorist group in the United States. That film won the award for Best Documentary Editing at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Marshall was Executive Producer and an additional editor of Mistaken For Strangers, a comedy rock-doc about indie band The National. In 2014, Curry directed and edited Point and Shoot, a documentary about a young Baltimore native who set out on a 30,000-mile motorcycle trip through Northern Africa and the Middle East and wound up joining the rebels in Libya fighting Gaddafi. It won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released in theaters and aired on PBS and the BBC. Curry is a graduate of Swarthmore College where he studied Comparative Religion and has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, Duke, Columbia, NYU, and other colleges.

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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