New York at War (37 page)

Anticipating such a collision, officials called for both preparedness and the avoidance of panic. “New York City is the logical and most attractive and tempting target for a foreign enemy,” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared in June 1941. He was echoed by New York State’s lieutenant governor, Charles Poletti: “Who can say that 3,000 miles of ocean are sufficient insulation against attack by those who, we know, hate America?” Despite the distance, New York’s leaders warned, the attack—however minimal the possibility—might come. As early as the previous summer, after France fell to the Germans, La Guardia had revamped the city’s Disaster Control Board, turning it into a preliminary coordinating group for defense planning. In March 1941, President Roosevelt appointed him director of a new nationwide Office of Civilian Defense. Corralling city councilmen; the police, fire, and health commissioners; and representatives of the utility companies and mass transit lines, La Guardia sought to make New York a national showcase for effective civil defense.
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In June 1941, the mayor announced the formation of the city’s Air Raid Warden Service, a voluntary organization for men and women exempt from the draft. With bases of operation in each of the city’s eighty-two police precinct houses, the service would carve up the city into districts staffed by volunteers who would enforce blackouts, direct civilians to safe shelter during raids, report all bombings and fires, administer first aid, and help people trapped in damaged buildings. By September 1941, one hundred thousand New Yorkers had voluntarily joined the Air Raid Protection Services in one capacity or another.
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La Guardia urged calm, repeatedly asserting that there was only a 3 to 5 percent chance of an aerial attack on his city. (The mayor neglected to explain how he had arrived at this very precise-sounding percentage.) But throughout 1941, an array of institutions reinforced the mayor’s broader message. New York firemen just back from a fact-finding tour of London publicly demonstrated the proper technique for rescuing residents from burning tenements during an incendiary attack. As the city’s public schools began conducting air raid drills, the Upper East Side’s elite, private Dalton School “evacuated” one hundred students and fifteen teachers to Connecticut to “test the possibilities of carrying on school work in the suburbs while New York City is theoretically the target of bombers.”
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Much of New York’s preparation was playacting, to be sure. But such double vision—a sense of the city as probably safe but possibly at risk—had been the response of countless New Yorkers during earlier wars. As in those bygone conflicts, some—probably a minority—worried about an attack, others dismissed such fears as groundless, and still others leaned one way or the other as global and personal circumstances moved them. Over the next five years, this dual awareness of safety and risk would shape the way New Yorkers experienced a new world war. As their city became the outlet for Franklin Roosevelt’s “great arsenal of democracy,” as it became a port of embarkation for three million Americans bound for the battlefields of North Africa and Europe, New York’s people measured in their mind’s eyes the vast stretches of ocean and sky—vast
enough
, they hoped—separating them from Hitler’s fleets and planes.
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As New Yorkers looked eastward across the ocean, the rise of dictators and new wars in Europe and Asia generated tense undercurrents that divided city dwellers from each other. In the years before the United States entered World War II, ethnic loyalties and new ideologies—sharpened by harsh economic times—brought the city’s people into collision, once more raising the prospect that New Yorkers themselves were importing distant conflicts. Though the National Origins Act of 1924 had drastically reduced immigration into the country, in 1940 some 2 million New Yorkers had been born abroad; another 2.7 million claimed at least one foreign-born parent. This also meant that millions of New Yorkers had living relatives in Europe. By the mid and late 1930s, well before Hitler’s troops marched into Poland, the tensions dividing Europe had reached New York’s street corners. The rallying chants of clashing allegiances resounded down the avenues and through the parks.

Mayor La Guardia (left) watches as city air raid wardens demonstrate the removal of casualties from a mock bomb site, c. 1941. PHOTO BY FOX PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES.

The most provocative of the militant groups in Depressionera New York was the German American Bund, the American version of the Nazi Party. In marches through Yorkville on the Upper East Side, at banquets in Ebling’s Casino in the Bronx, and during rallies in their compounds at Camp Nordland in New Jersey and Camp Siegfried on Long Island, Bundists unfurled the swastika next to the stars and stripes. New York’s first Nazis had organized in the Bronx in 1922, only three years after German extremists formed the party in Munich. By 1936, various splinter groups had consolidated under the leadership of Fritz Kuhn, an immigrant chemist who ran his nationwide Bund from offices on East Eighty-Fifth Street in Yorkville. Estimates of Bund national membership ranged from 8,500 to 25,000. The one indisputable fact was that more Bundists lived in the New York metropolitan area than anywhere else.
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Parroting his German role model, the führer of East Eighty-Fifth Street urged “Aryan (White Gentile) Americans to stamp out Jewish-Atheistic Communistic International Outlawry!” New York Nazis also warned of the “Black Danger”—the masses of “subhuman” African Americans who did the Jews’ dirty work. In his speeches and in the pages of the bilingual Bund newspaper, the
Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter
, Kuhn demanded that the United States remain neutral while Hitler extended the boundaries of “the New Germany.”
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For many German New Yorkers, the Bund was an uncomfortable presence. The German Workers Club openly denounced the American Nazis, warning that “democracy . . . will be destroyed in Yorkville, if the people of Yorkville are not vigilant.” Others maintained a careful public silence. Whatever they might have thought of Nazi racism and the rise of the one-party state, it was hard for many German Americans not to feel pride in the resurgence of their homeland. Above all, however, they feared a return of the anti-“Hun” fervor of 1917–1918, and consequently most avoided any overt identification with Kuhn’s and Hitler’s New Germany. The majority of Kuhn’s recruits remained recent émigrés, young down-and-out Germans who had taken advantage of the relatively generous quota accorded them under the National Origins Act to flee financial turmoil in Weimar Germany. Frustrated by New York’s Depression economy, they felt no stigma in looking homeward for political inspiration.
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In their jackboots and armbands, the Bundists were out to get attention—and they certainly succeeded with the city’s Jewish population. Many of New York’s two million Jews had expressed their out-rage from the very beginning of Hitler’s accession to power. On May 10, 1933, for example, one hundred thousand people marched from Madison Square to the German consulate at the Battery to protest the new Nazi government’s forced retirement of Jewish civil servants, its establishment of restrictive quotas on Jewish enrollment in German high schools and universities, and its call for all Aryans to boycott Jewish businesses. Mayor John O’Brien reviewed the march from the steps of City Hall, and numerous Christian politicians and clergymen took part. But most marchers were members of Jewish organizations and Zionist clubs; the Jewish Undertakers’ Union brandished a banner reading “We Want Hitler.”
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Stars, stripes, and swastikas. German American Bund marchers on East Eighty-Sixth Street, October 30, 1939. NEW YORK WORLD-TELEGRAM & SUN NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Already underway was a boycott against businesses selling imported German goods. Various Jewish community and veterans’ groups had called for the boycott in March; soon it was endorsed by Rabbi Stephen Wise’s American Jewish Congress, and volunteer activists confronted shoppers with leaflets and picket lines outside offending stores. But the boycott actually divided New York’s Jews. Many among the city’s German-Jewish businessmen and civic leaders feared the protest would further inflame the Nazi regime and consequently refused to endorse it. As if to confirm their fears, Bundists—aided, this time, by the German consulate in New York—eventually launched a counter-boycott. On Yorkville street corners, they handed out fliers urging consumers to “Patronize Gentile Stores Only!”
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After January 1, 1934, anti-Nazis could rely on the city’s leading public official for wholehearted aid. Fiorello La Guardia had earned a reputation as one of the nation’s most liberal congressmen. Now, as mayor, La Guardia recognized that his political future depended on the support of progressive Jews as well as proud Italian Americans. To ensure the allegiance of the former, anti-Nazism was good politics. But the mayor’s heart was also in it. When he had joined the National Conference Against Racial Persecution in 1933, he publicly labeled Hitler “a perverted maniac.” Two years before the opening of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the mayor told a Jewish women’s group that the fair ought to include a “Chamber of Horrors” with a wax figure of “that brown shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world.” Speaking in Yiddish, La Guardia shared his opinion of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin with a Jewish audience in 1937: “
Ich ken die drei menschen, die schlag zoll zei trefen
” (“I know these three men; the Devil take them”).
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La Guardia delighted in making such statements, which invariably elicited press coverage. Just as delightful was the fact that his statements got under the skin of the Reich leadership in Berlin. After it became public knowledge in 1937 that La Guardia’s Italian-born mother was Jewish, Josef Goebbels’s propaganda ministry derided him as “a dirty Talmud Jew,” and the Nazi press ran a photograph allegedly showing the “pimp” La Guardia pinching the backsides of scantily clad young women (in fact, the picture showed the New York nightclub owner Billy Rose surrounded by showgirls). With ominous specificity, Hermann Goering suggested that his Luftwaffe might bomb Manhattan from Governors Island to Rockefeller Center—the heart of the downtown and midtown business districts, and of the city’s internationally renowned skyline—to “stop somewhat the mouths of the arrogant people over there.”
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La Guardia’s sparring with the Nazis clearly gratified the man in the White House, who could not publicly indulge his own anti-Nazi sentiments so bluntly. When the German government protested La Guardia’s “Chamber of Horrors” remarks to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Roosevelt told Hull, “We will chastise him like
that
,” lightly tapping his own wrist with two fingers. The next time the mayor was a guest in the Oval Office, Roosevelt greeted him with the Hitler salute. “Heil Fiorello,” he said, grinning. “Heil Franklin,” the mayor responded with the same salute.
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Holding that the Bill of Rights must be maintained in New York, La Guardia permitted the Bund to hold a mass rally in Madison Square Garden on Washington’s birthday, 1939. Addressing an audience of twenty-two thousand, which included reporters and hecklers as well as Bundists, Fritz Kuhn lambasted Roosevelt and his Jewish Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, for turning America into a “Bolshevik paradise.” Dwarfed by a thirty-foot-high portrait of George Washington and banners reading “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America,” Kuhn warned that only Nazism could rescue “Americanism.” “The time will come,” he insisted, “when no one will stand in our way.”
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