Rallied

Today's counter-programming the present: "Anti-Fascist Protest Tomorrow Night! Workers! Jam Madison Sq. Garden Against the Nazi Brown Plague!"

A sentiment and tone not at all outside any number of stock Daily Worker headlines! (If you wanted to check, there's so, so many issues archived online—that will get you started.) And a sentiment to fall back on today, as a rally still going on right now at MSG has correctly stirred up comparisons to 1939's Nazi rally at MSG.

I'd rather dwell a minute on this one. Even The New York Times was there. The headline? “15,000 Reds Cheer Attacks on Hitler”:

This is just the first part of the story, as it ran on page ten on April 6, 1933. Its placement on the page (via the Times Machine) is also significant:

("How much brim"!)

The story:

More than 15,000 Communists and sympathizers assembled at Madison Square Garden last night at a meeting organized by the Communist party with the support of some liberals to protest against the regime of Adolf Hitler.

The vibe—"with the support of some liberals"—was still very much in the neighborhood of the Popular Front.

Notable attendees perhaps bear this out:

Roger Baldwin, secretary of the America Civil Liberties Union, ridiculed the value of political democracy, which he pronounced moribund, and called for a united front of Communists and liberals to fight Fascism. ...

Malcolm Cowley, an editor of The New Republic, reviewed the suppression by the Hitler government of all the opponent elements and assailed the terrorism of the Nazis as 'a picture of the best capitalism has to offer in the present stage of the crisis.'

Let's see how the Daily Worker covered it, also on April 6:

Madison Square Garden, 22,000 capacity, was jammed full last night with New York workers pouring in from all parts of the city to join in mass protest against German fascism. At 6:30 p. m. a line four deep extended from the the 49th St. entrance to Eighth Ave. ...

"Three hundred seaman"! "Two hundred Italian workers paraded in, singing 'The International'"! The Worker is never not prone to exaggeration, as nearly five years spent consulting its archives has demonstrated to me, but the spectacle not being rendered in the Times doesn't mean it didn't happen, only that it was not deemed newsworthy to its audience (who desperately needed to know what intra-left drama was unfolding, particularly amongst the editors of little magazines).

The Worker did mention some who were conspicuously not noted by the Times, such as William Kelley, editor of The Amsterdam News, a major Black newspaper.

This all ran on page 1, most of which was devoted to news out of Decatur, Alabama concerning the Scottsboro trial.

Writing again today on lynching for Against.