by James Mauro
After a prolonged ovation, La Guardia rose to speak. The afternoon was stiflingly hot and humid; all morning, a storm hovered over the horizon but held its rain in exchange for sopping humidity, and the mayor mopped his brow, wishing he could shed his formal coat. But he had been waiting for this moment. This pavilion was literally sticking it to the Nazis, and he was loving every minute of it.
“I have no apologies3 to make to anyone,” he began, and the crowd renewed its applause and added whistles and hoots of laughter. As early as March 1937, La Guardia had used the World’s Fair as an excuse to heckle Hitler. When a building dedicated to religious freedom was proposed, La Guardia stated that it should include a “chamber of horrors4 [containing] a figure of that brown-shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world.”
In response, the German press called him a “dirty Talmud Jew” and a “Jewish ruffian.” Eventually, Secretary of State Cordell Hull formally apologized, and La Guardia took the opportunity to make a joke out of it. “Secretary Hull and I5 have an agreement,” he said later. “He attends to foreign affairs and I attend to cleaning the streets of New York. And when it concerns the relations with a certain gentleman in Europe, we’re both dealing with the same commodity.”
Punctuating his words in his peculiar nasal speech with fist pounding and head bobbing, La Guardia ended with the carefully chosen sentence “We are dedicating this temple to the cause of liberty and to the cause of a people who will not and who refuse to surrender their liberty.”
President Roosevelt’s invitation to participate in the World’s Fair had been extended to every foreign nation, including Germany. Not surprisingly, this did not go over well with a great many New Yorkers. There were even some who talked of supporting La Guardia’s reelection in 1937 if only because, with him as mayor, Hitler would never allow a German pavilion to be built. In an editorial titled “No Swastikas at the World’s Fair!” The Nation issued a direct warning to Grover Whalen regarding his own political ambitions should he allow the Nazis to participate.6
Summing up the tenor of the city’s Führer furor, writer Oswald Villard asked, “Will any Jew set foot7 in the German exhibit? Certainly no self-respecting Jew. Will any Jews be permitted in the German exhibit? That may be for Hitler to decide.”
Despite misgivings about a potential backlash against any sort of Nazi representation in Flushing Meadows, on December 30, 1937, Whalen had convinced Consul General Johannes Borchers to sign a contract for a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot pavilion,8 envisioned as one of the “major exhibits” at the Fair.
Almost immediately, there were doubts that the Germans intended to live up to their agreement. In February, Edward Roosevelt reported in a memo, “The Germans are not at all satisfied9 with their location.” There had also been rumors that Hitler was still angry over La Guardia’s “brown-shirted fanatic” comment and the fact that the Department of the Interior had recently refused the export of helium to Germany for use in its dirigibles.
Finally, on April 26, 1938, when with only a year to go before opening they would either have to begin construction or cut bait, Borchers sent a letter to Whalen formally declining participation. “The German government sincerely desired to accept your kind invitation and to participate in the World’s Fair,” he wrote. “As you know, several obstacles originally stood in the way…. However, the most important one remained, namely, the foreign exchange problem…. Because of this situation my government very much regrets its inability to actively participate as originally planned.”
It was a pretty flimsy excuse; neither Italy nor the USSR was all that concerned with getting their money’s worth, and Germany’s investment was originally estimated to be about half their costs. Privately, bankers like Gibson and McAneny believed that Germany could come up with the money if they wanted to, but that the country was secretly building up a war chest against the day when cash would be needed for military supplies.
But even though Germany was out, there were some who believed that the country should be represented anyway. With some sixty-odd nations represented, the absence of Germany, even under current circumstances, would constitute a glaring omission in the World of Tomorrow. Every important power was represented; and after all, the country had existed long before the Nazis and God willing would continue on when Hitler’s regime was long gone.
With that thought in mind, a small but distinguished group of New York’s elite—including ex-governor Alfred E. Smith and his ex-protégé Robert Moses, Marshall Field, and, amazingly, even La Guardia—came up with a plan to erect what it called the Freedom Pavilion, with the subtitle “Germany Yesterday—Germany Tomorrow.” (Like current movie heroine Scarlett O’Hara, this committee obviously preferred not to think about today.) Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Herbert Bayard Swope got behind it. Even the State Department thought it was a good idea.
A letter to Secretary Hull spelled out its purpose: “We believe that as Germany10 will not be represented at the Fair, an exhibition comprising the creative efforts of many of Germany’s most gifted artists and scientists … would be welcomed by the public.” It was, among other things, to be a tribute to the culture that had netted America Einstein.
Hull’s reply approved the idea (or, more specifically, didn’t disapprove of it), and in the fall of 1938, McAneny assigned the project his blessing and Lot N-14, a thirty-thousand-square-foot space in the Government Zone. On January 13, 1939, the proposal made headlines, and all hell broke loose. The Nazi press called it a “Pavilion of Jewish Jetsam.”
“Four days later,”11 wrote Laura Z. Hobson in The Nation, “the whole project was dead.” Hobson, who would go on to write the bestselling novel Gentlemen’s Agreement, about anti-Semitism in America, stated, “Whalen won’t let us do it. They’ve been getting to him. He won’t let us have the site.”
The truth was a bit more complicated and somewhat indicative of the split emotions regarding Germany, first as a nation of the world and then as a potential world dominator. At a luncheon at the River Club to raise money for the pavilion, a soft-spoken, eighty-two-year-old priest, Monsignor Michael Lavelle, voiced his opinion that the plan might be “loaded with dynamite….
“We don’t want to do anything12 that is going to provoke a conflict,” he added. “That’s what I’m afraid of in anything of this kind. The smoldering end of a cigarette has often burned down many a towering building.”
In contrast, the relatively youthful (at age sixty-five) Al Smith elucidated what was on everyone’s mind at the time: “I have never believed13 and I never will believe that the present government of Germany is in keeping with the heart of the German people. Anything we can do to exalt Germany in the past, in the situation she now finds herself in, is a favor to the rank and file of the German people [who] someday are going to throw Hitler out the window.”
Swope, who had been one of the project’s earliest proponents, now stood and voiced his opinion against it. “This enterprise would be14 completely empty if it were even remotely to inflame a warlike spirit,” he said. The next day, he gave the ad hoc committee the bad news. “I’ve been in constant touch with Al Smith and Grover Whalen. They think this will make trouble. Bobby [Governor] Lehman’s against it. The Fifth Avenue store crowd is against it…. The World’s Fair is supposed to be a pleasure place—controversial stuff’s bad.”
But while the Freedom Pavilion was never built, curiously the pavilions of Italy and Japan thrived during both seasons. The Italian Pavilion,15 a three-story palazzo offering an ingenious, if puzzling, synthesis of the architecture of classical Rome and modern Italy, was capped by a statue of the goddess Roma atop a two-hundred-foot tower. From her perch, and reflecting an Italian sense of both defiance and bravado, a waterfall cascaded down a long flight of steps and foamed into a pool featuring a monument to Guglielmo Marconi, the radio pioneer and noted Fascist. In the Salon d’Onore (Room of Honor), a statue of Il Duce stood defiantly facing the Court of Peace.
By co
ntrast, Japan’s pavilion was modeled after an ancient Shinto shrine, surrounded by gardens and pools and planted with Japanese trees and shrubs. Still, this was a world exposition, and understatements simply would not cut it. In what may have been the most outrageously ironic display at the Fair, the pavilion featured “the Million-Dollar Liberty Bell”—a replica of America’s symbol of freedom re-created in a silver shell adorned with more than eleven thousand cultured pearls and four hundred diamonds.
The irony didn’t end there. June 2 was officially declared “Japan Day” at the Fair, an event that “stressed the cordial relations existing between the United States and Japan.” In a ceremony similar to Palestine’s lighting of the eternal flame, a pretty girl named Akiko Taukimoto (for the purposes of the day, she was dubbed “Miss Japan”) presented a “flame of friendship” to Grover Whalen. This particular flame had also traveled quite some distance to Queens, having been lit a month earlier at the eternal fire of Izuno, Japan’s oldest shrine.
Japanese ambassador Kensuke Horinouchi solemnly declared that by sending the flame, “the Japanese people16 symbolize their ardent hope that the glorious tradition of peace and amity between America and Japan will remain as bright and eternal as the temple fire at Izumo.”
To Whalen’s utter delight, a member of the Japanese commission told him that the Fair was so well advertised in his country that the Trylon and Perisphere were seen everywhere, and that schoolchildren were especially obsessed with the symbols. Japan, he reassured everyone, was creating “a new civilization17 based on the harmonizing of the East and the West. That is the shape of things to come in the world of tomorrow as the Japanese conceive it.”
Even in 1939, the Nazis were causing trouble in New York. Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha got in the middle of it in February when the German American Bund decided to hold a meeting in Madison Square Garden. Forty thousand of them were expected to show up, give their speeches, and raise all kinds of anti-American hell. Worse, they had chosen as their motto for the evening “True Americanism and George Washington Birthday Exercises.”
The Washington connection could not have been lost on Whalen.
Lynch and Socha were drawn into the fray when La Guardia’s office received an anonymous letter threatening that three time bombs would blow up the Garden if the meeting was allowed to take place. Chief Inspector Louis Costuma called Lieutenant Pyke, and two days before the event, the men of the Bomb and Forgery Squad spent hours combing through its seats and corridors and alleyways and finding, as usual, no trace of any such device.
But Pyke wasn’t satisfied. If there was any occasion for a bomb to go off, this was certainly one of them. At first, to ease public tension, he reassured the press that the tip, like so many others his office was receiving these days, was almost certainly a prank. But then La Guardia couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it. In Memphis for a conference, he had left New York City Council president Newbold Morris in charge as acting mayor, but Morris was a blue-blooded Yalie who was about as far removed from the dirty dealings of the city as La Guardia would have been from the privileged society Morris had grown up in.*
La Guardia, conscious of the turmoil that a Bund meeting would create, had nevertheless signed off on it, providing “it were orderly and no violence were advocated.” On the day of the rally, he stunned New Yorkers in general and incensed Pyke personally by responding publicly to the threat and stating matter-of-factly, “If they bomb it,18 we’ll catch the bombers.” No one on the squad could believe he was being so cavalier about the idea.
Lynch, Socha, and the rest of Pyke’s men were sent out repeatedly to make sure it was a hoax. If they allowed a bomb to go undetected and the damn thing went off and killed God knew how many—even if they were Nazis—the entire department would come under fire. Given the circumstances, the event was shaping up to be a black eye for the city and the police any way you looked at it.
Police Commissioner Valentine wasn’t taking any chances, either. In addition to the bomb threat, anti-Nazi groups of all kinds were organizing various protests; the Socialist Workers Party began holding rallies the night before, a Friday, and was prepared to go right on demonstrating before amassing a group of thousands of Trotskyites at six o’clock the following evening, two hours before the event kicked off.
Valentine worried that it would spill over onto Eighth Avenue, that Bund members entering and leaving Madison Square Garden would cause trouble and endanger the usual hordes of people out for a nice evening at the theater. He had originally ordered almost a thousand police officers to be on duty; then on Friday he upped it to thirteen hundred. Pyke’s men were part of a twenty-four-hour guard inside the building. Like it or not, Lynch and Socha were going to get a firsthand view of the Nazis strutting their stuff.
The Bund meeting sharply divided New York City along political and emotional lines. The American Civil Liberties Union and the National League for American Citizenship argued that the meeting should be allowed, if only to uphold the principles of American democracy. La Guardia again surprised everyone by supporting it: “If we are to have free speech, we have to have free speech for everybody,” he said. “And that includes the Nazis.”
On the other side, the New York contingent of the National Lawyers Guild stated, “We are outraged19 at the association of the Bund and the swastika with Americanism and the birthday of George Washington.” The Bund was considered by many to be the local voice of the Nazi Party, determined to overthrow the government and install a Fascist dictatorship. It didn’t help that some three thousand Bund members, dressed as storm troopers, would be acting as ushers at the evening’s entertainment.
Newbold Morris himself got into the fray. “Why is it necessary20 for them to disport the storm trooper uniform, the symbol of a doctrine which stirs bitter resentment in the hearts of free people throughout the world?” he asked.
Worse, the uniforms themselves looked … well, actually, with their Sam Browne belts and snappy blouses, they looked amazingly similar to the uniforms Grover Whalen had designed for his police force way back when, leading Colonel Lewis Landes of the American Legion to worry that it would “mislead the people in the belief that these German-American Bund officials are wearing a part of the United States uniform.”
The night of the rally started off orderly enough. Valentine, feeling the tension of the entire city coiled into an angry knot of resentment and barely repressed fury, was certain it would turn into a riot. Once more he upped the police detail to more than seventeen hundred, creating an almost impregnable fortress around Madison Square Garden. It may have been a wise decision, but the sight of so many civil servants called to duty in order to protect a gathering of Nazis only fueled the public’s anger. For two blocks in every direction, the area around Fiftieth Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway was cordoned off to pedestrians.
That was too much. Now the average New Yorker couldn’t even walk on his own streets because the Nazis had commandeered a square mile of ground. “We have enough police here21 to stop a revolution,” Valentine joked as the meeting kicked off at precisely eight p.m. The Socialists, needless to say, were not amused.
Inside the Garden, the meeting went pretty much as expected. Banners were waved exhorting members to “Smash Jewish Communism” and “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” A particularly tense moment occurred when, during a speech by Fritz Kuhn, national führer of the Bund movement, a young man in a blue suit (later identified as Isadore Greenbaum of Brooklyn) tried to rush the stage single-handedly. He was tackled by several burly cops but kept on pushing, somehow losing his pants in the effort.
Outside, however, there was chaos. Lynch and Socha had once again combed the Garden for any signs of a bomb in the hours before the meeting, and now Lieutenant Pyke called out his men for a different disturbance. Out of a second-floor apartment on Forty-ninth and Eighth, a loudspeaker could be heard blaring the message “Be American, stay at home!” and denouncing the Nazis. Pyke’s contingent
rushed into the building and kicked in the door. The sight of an alarm clock froze them, its ticking like the countdown of a bomb explosion they had all been dreading.
Frantically, they inspected the clock and found it had been set for seven fifty-five, about fifteen minutes earlier, yet no explosion had occurred. Pyke studied the setup and determined it had been wired to set off a record player, the source of the protest speech. They gathered the evidence and headed back out to the street, where spectators were already beginning to break through police lines. Fights broke out throughout the evening and escalated when the meeting concluded a few hours later.
It began as an ugly demonstration against the Nazis but somehow ended in a sorrowful protest against the police themselves. “You ought to be proud22 of yourself,” said nineteen-year-old George Mason as he scuffled with a mounted patrolman. Charges of police brutality followed the next day. Isadore Greenbaum even became something of a heroic martyr when he showed up in court to defend himself against a charge of disorderly conduct.
“I went down to the Garden23 without any intention of interrupting,” he explained. “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.”
“Don’t you realize that innocent people might have been killed?” Magistrate Andrews asked him.
“Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?” he answered, exasperated that the police had arrested him while the Nazis, who had thrown him to the floor and beaten him, were allowed to continue their meeting.
For days the papers talked of nothing else, especially the local tabloids in outlying boroughs with a mostly Jewish readership. On top of everything else Pyke’s men were facing, now they were being placed in cahoots with the Nazis. The bad reputation Joe Lynch Sr. and Jr. had been experiencing throughout their careers had shown no signs of letting up; the public took every opportunity to berate its police force in the 1930s.