On Oct. 9, 2024, Donald Trump announced that he had added a rally to his campaign schedule for Oct. 27. “We just rented Madison Square Garden,” Trump told the crowd at campaign rally stop in Scranton, Penn. “We’re gonna make a play for New York, it hasn’t been done in a long time. It hasn’t been done in many decades.”
It has been eight and a half decades in fact. From NPR:
On the evening of Feb. 20, 1939, the marquee of New York’s Madison Square Garden was lit up with the evening’s main event: a “Pro American Rally.” The organizers had chosen the date in celebration of George Washington’s birthday and had procured a 30-foot-tall banner of America’s first president for the stage. More than 20,000 men and women streamed inside and took their seats. The view they had was stunning: Washington was hung between American flags — and swastikas.
The rally was sponsored by the German American Bund, an organization with headquarters in Manhattan and thousands of members across the United States. In the 1930s, the Bund was one of several organizations in the United States that were openly supportive of Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism in Europe. They had parades, bookstores and summer camps for youth. Their vision for America was a cocktail of white supremacy, fascist ideology and American patriotism.
While there were 20,000 fascists in the Garden, the streets outside the arena wwere crowded with thousands more protesters. Packing the Midtown streets were diverse groups of housewives, military veterans, socialists and people of many relgious faiths, including, of course, Jews. One of them, Isadore Greenbaum, 26, managed to breach the guantlet of New York police officers guarding the arena. After listening to speeches about the evils of Judaism and Jewish control of the press and banking and the rest for three hours, Greenbaum leapt onto the stage, grabbed the mic and shouted, “Down with Hitler.” He survived being kicked, beaten and even depantsed by Brown Shirts before the NYPD rescued him. Greenbaum suffered a black eye and a broken nose, and then said he’d gladly do it again.
