New York at War (38 page)

Outside, however, thousands were ready to stand in the Bundists’ way. While 1,700 policemen ringed the building, ten thousand Jewish veterans, American Legionnaires, African American protesters, and members of the Socialist Workers Party chanted, “Keep the Nazis Out of New York.” Inside, fistfights broke out throughout the hall as a young Jew, Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage. Bundists threw him to the floor. By evening’s end, police had arrested Greenbaum and twelve other demonstrators for disorderly conduct. German propaganda sheets soon reviled “the Jew Greenbaum,” confirming that Nazi hatred of Jews was now a transatlantic affair, bridging the ocean between Berlin and New York.
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Bundists were not the only group denouncing a “Jewish conspiracy” in Depression New York. In Irish neighborhoods, an aspiring middle class of teachers, lawyers, and civil servants saw Jews as rivals for a dwindling supply of Depression-era jobs. Accustomed to controlling Tammany Hall, Manhattan’s Democratic Party machine, many Irish New Yorkers resented La Guardia’s successful “Fusion” movement of liberal Republicans and anti-Tammany Democrats, which appeared to be putting Jews, Italians, and Protestants into traditionally “Irish” civil service posts. Additionally, the Irish-dominated Catholic Church in New York, deeply conservative in its leadership and official teachings, warned parishioners that the True Faith was under siege from the forces of modernity, liberalism, leftism, and atheism—in Soviet Russia, in anticlerical Mexico, in the godless Spanish Republic, and in New York City. Jews appeared to be in the vanguard of these ideological threats. (In truth, while the vast majority of New York’s Jews were not Communists, the city’s Communist Party, claiming over thirty thousand members, was heavily Jewish). Underpinning these various resentments and fears was a vernacular folk Catholicism, brought from Europe by generations of immigrants (and sustained by some priests and nuns), which nurtured the image of the Jew as “Christ-killer.”
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In combination, these volatile elements predisposed thousands of the city’s Catholics, particularly Irish Americans, to the nationwide messages broadcast in the late 1930s by Michigan’s “Radio Priest,” Father Charles Coughlin. Increasingly, Coughlin joined an unabashed anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism to his populist economic message. Coughlin defended Berlin after the Crystal Night pogroms and repeatedly denounced Jews and Communists as if the two were synonymous. Rather than disavow Coughlin, the
Brooklyn Tablet
, official paper of that borough’s diocese, argued that the charge of anti-Semitism was “nothing more than a ‘Red’ herring used by Communists and their ‘liberal’ dupes and stooges to spread strife, discord and confusion.” To be sure, numerous Catholics attacked Coughlin, and Professor Emmanuel Chapman of Fordham University founded the Committee of Catholics to Fight Anti-Semitism. But while some official church periodicals offered condemnations of anti-Jewish bigotry, the church hierarchy proved reluctant to chastise the popular Coughlin.
²¹

Among those stirred by Coughlin were young working-class and lower-middle-class men for whom passive radio listening was not enough. By 1938, orators were mounting soapboxes in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle and Washington Heights, Brooklyn’s Flatbush, and the South Bronx, hectoring passersby to join the Christian Front, a Coughlin-inspired movement pledging “to defend Christian civilization.” Recruiting primarily in mixed Irish-Jewish neighborhoods or at the borders between Irish and Jewish blocks, Fronters declared that “the Jews have all the good jobs” and that Franklin Roosevelt was at the helm of a plot to hand over the nation to Jewish Communists. Boycotting Jewish businesses and keeping America out of a war for England and Jewry were imperative. Even more militant were the Christian Mobilizers, a splinter group led by a Protestant named Joe McWilliams (“Joe McNazi” to his foes), who judged Hitler to be “the greatest leader in the history of the world” and who cultivated ties with Kuhn’s Bundists. By decade’s end, fistfights between Irish and Jewish New Yorkers were a common occurrence in the streets and in front of the offices of WMCA, the local radio station that broadcast Coughlin’s tirades.
²²

In early 1940, the FBI broke up an outlandish plot by eighteen New Yorkers—including eleven Irish Americans and five Germans, one of them a Bundist—to foment a “Christian uprising” by blowing up Jewish businesses and the offices of the Communist
Daily Worker
and assassinating prominent Jews. The conspiracy may have been more fantasy than reality; the trial resulted in acquittals, dismissals for lack of evidence, and a mistrial for three of the defendants. But the hatred underlying such dreams of destruction was very real. “New York is a veritable powder keg,” William J. Goodwin, a prominent Coughlinite and isolationist, warned in February 1941. “Our entry into the war might touch it off.”
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For another of the city’s largest ethnic groups, responses to international events took on the character of an internal civil war. After his rise to power in 1922, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime elicited widespread enthusiasm among the one million denizens of “the biggest Italian city in the world.” Indeed, Italians were not Mussolini’s only New York fans: numerous Anglo businessmen and pundits lauded Fascism as a pragmatic solution to Italy’s problems, and Thomas Lamont, partner at J. P. Morgan, enthusiastically arranged a $100 million loan to Italy in 1926. But Il Duce’s ambition to revive ancient Rome’s glories resonated most fully in the tenements and social clubs of Mulberry Street, East 116th Street, and Arthur Avenue. Blackshirts strutted through Italian East Harlem, practicing the Fascist salute. Mussolini sparked community pride and patriotism in people who had long endured the epithets “wop” and “dago.” As one anti-Fascist woman admitted, the dictator “enabled four million Italians in America to hold up their heads, and that is something.”
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Faith in a homeland seemingly reborn under Fascism united many Italian New Yorkers. The community’s
prominenti
—its leading businessmen and spokesmen—included many who cultivated intimate ties with Fascist Rome, none more powerful than the publisher and Democratic politician Generoso Pope, whose daily
Il Progresso Italo-Americano
covertly received direct cables from the Italian foreign ministry until 1940. Rich and poor rallied together when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. To help pay for the invasion, Italian American women sent their gold wedding bands to Rome by the thousands (in return they received steel rings blessed by a parish priest). Fiorello La Guardia considered Mussolini “a barbershop bully,” but he watched his step and his words when it came to developments in the mother country. The mayor never publicly blasted Fascism the way he lambasted Nazism. To do so would be to risk his electoral base among New York’s Italians.
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A vocal and vigorous minority of anti-Fascists, however, also inhabited the Italian community. Their most colorful figure was the anarchist Carlo Tresca. A man of great charm and gusto, Tresca was equally at home conversing with his friend the philosopher John Dewey, blasting Mussolini in his weekly
Il Martello
(the Hammer), and leading fellow Italian leftists armed with daggers and baseball bats into battle against Fascists in the streets of New York. Pro-and anti-Fascists clashed repeatedly, leaving a trail of bloodied heads, and sometimes corpses, behind them. On the Fourth of July, 1932, hundreds battled at the Garibaldi “shrine” at Rosebank on Staten Island, where the great nineteenth-century Italian liberator had once lived in exile. Although outnumbered, Tresca’s men claimed victory over their enemies. Salvatore Arena, a Brooklyn member of the Duce Fascist Alliance, was shot and killed; his murderer was never caught.
²⁶

In 1935, another population confronted and challenged the city’s Fascists, adding racial tensions to political ones. The Christian kingdom of Ethiopia had long been a focal point of pride for New York’s black nationalists. When the Italian army invaded Ethiopia that year, the specter of arrogant Europeans slaughtering poorly armed Africans sparked a groundswell of indignation throughout Harlem. Thousands—conservative churchmen, Communists, followers of Marcus Garvey—crowded into the Abyssinian Baptist Church for meetings of the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia. Some began training as a “Black Legion” with the aim of reaching Africa to fight Mussolini’s troops. Aviator Herbert Julian, Harlem’s “Black Eagle,” trained for battle at Roosevelt Field on Long Island. When he reached Ethiopia, that nation’s leaders consigned him to the task of training ill-equipped ground troops.
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Back in New York, the proximity of Italian East Harlem and black Harlem generated friction. When Ethiopia fell in May 1936, jubilant parades filled the streets of Italian neighborhoods. A few days later, Rome announced a policy of strict racial segregation in its new colony, and news arrived of Italian massacres of Ethiopian prisoners. Four hundred black demonstrators marched on Lenox Avenue, broke the windows of two Italian American groceries, and fought with policemen, one of whom shot and wounded an African American. Bitter feelings continued after the war ended. “No black man could, in good conscience, go into most Italian bars in Harlem,” black nationalist James R. Lawson recalled later. “Mussolini’s picture hung over almost every Italian cash register up there.”
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With Ethiopia under Fascist control, African Americans resorted to the symbolic satisfaction of sports. They exulted in June 1935 when the “brown bomber,” Joe Louis, knocked out Italy’s heavyweight champion, Primo Carnera, before an interracial audience of sixty thousand in Yankee Stadium. Aware of Nazi Germany’s racism, they were mortified less than a year later, when Louis fell to the punches of the German heavyweight Max Schmeling in the very same ring. Walking on Seventh Avenue in Harlem, the poet Langston Hughes saw “grown men weeping like children, and women sitting on the curbs with their heads in their hands.” Two years later, sweet redemption: in a rematch, again in Yankee Stadium, Louis sent Schmeling to the canvas in the first round. The German champion didn’t regain his feet. Blacks, Jews, and other anti-Nazis celebrated throughout the city. As the news came over the radio in Harlem, tens of thousands poured into the streets. “With their faces to the night sky,” reported the novelist Richard Wright, “they filled their lungs with air and let out a scream of joy that it seemed would never end, and a scream that seemed to come from untold reserves of strength.”
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Uptown, Africa’s war aroused black Harlem; downtown, Asia’s war stirred the people of Chinatown. Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 had led to a brutal, protracted conflict in China, pitting Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists against the Japanese—and often against each other. These conflicts echoed on Mott, Bayard, and Pell Streets, where perhaps ten thousand immigrants, mostly men, filled tenements that had first become a recognizable Chinese district in the late nineteenth century. Elite businessmen allied with Chiang’s Nationalist Party dominated Chinatown’s affairs, but many residents were restaurant and laundry workers who sympathized with Mao’s movement. Chiang’s attacks on the Communists and his failure to back up his own generals against the Japanese kept political tensions high in Chinatown throughout the 1930s.

Opposing factions sponsored their own newspapers, clubs, and rallies; threats, name-calling, and occasional bloodshed ensued. But at times the opponents managed to submerge their differences long enough to cooperate for the greater good of the homeland. The Chinese Women’s Patriotic Association held fund-raising auctions and charity balls. Residents feted the war hero General Tsai Ting-Kai on his New York visit in 1934, and they cabled money and encouraging messages to Shanghai and other strongholds of anti-Japanese resistance. In November 1937, two thousand Chinese New Yorkers paraded through lower Manhattan with a dragon float and a banner reading, “Fight Against Japan to the Very Bitter End to Save China.” But this sentiment found no outlet in local violence. Only a few thousand Japanese businessmen, consular agents, and domestics lived in New York, and they were scattered. Chinatown residents had no Little Japan against which to vent their outrage.
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Long ignored by the city’s politicians and civic leaders, caricatured by journalists and entertainers, the Chinese broke out of their ghetto to command white attention during the Sino-Japanese conflict that preceded—and ultimately bled into—the global war. They did so on their own terms and for the first time in the community’s history. By 1938 a widespread boycott of Japanese silk was underway in New York, and politically enlightened women traded their silk stockings for lisle cotton ones. Merchant seamen picketed ships carrying scrap iron to Japan. A war seven thousand miles away had arrived on the city’s streets and piers, much as events in Germany, Italy, and Ethiopia pitted New Yorkers against each other in a seemingly endless round of marches, speeches, boycotts, and brawls.
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In the years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, international politics made strange bedfellows in New York. Movements like the America First Committee, opposed to any American entanglement in foreign wars, included liberals, pacifists, and pro-Nazi allies of Father Coughlin. Support for Roosevelt’s efforts to aid an embattled England came from Democratic internationalists, but also from the Republican businessmen of the Fight for Freedom Committee, who called for an American declaration of war on Germany.