The plot against America (24 page)

The very next weekend, the German-American Bund filled Madison Square Garden with a near-capacity crowd, some twenty-five thousand people who had turned out to support President Lindbergh's invitation to the German foreign minister and to denounce the Democrats for their renewed "warmongering." During Roosevelt's second term, the FBI and congressional committees investigating the Bund's activities had immobilized the organization, designating it a Nazi front and bringing criminal charges against leaders in its high command. But under Lindbergh, government efforts at harassing or intimidating Bund members ceased and they were able to regain their strength by identifying themselves not only as American patriots of German extraction opposed to America's intervention in foreign wars but as staunch enemies of the Soviet Union. The deep fascist fellowship uniting the Bund was now masked by vociferous patriotic declamations on the peril of a worldwide Communist revolution.

As an anti-Communist rather than a pro-Nazi organization, the Bund was as anti-Semitic as before, openly equating Bolshevism with Judaism in propaganda handouts and harping on the number of "prowar" Jews—like Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and financier Bernard Baruch, who'd been Roosevelt confidants—and, of course, holding fast to the purposes enunciated in their official declaration on first organizing in 1936: "to combat the Moscow-directed madness of the Red world menace and its Jewish bacillus-carriers" and to promote "a free Gentile-ruled United States." Gone, however, from the 1942 Madison Square Garden rally were the Nazi flags, the swastika armbands, the straight-armed Hitler salute, the storm trooper uniforms, and the giant picture of the Führer that had been on display for the first rally, on February 20, 1939, an event promoted by the Bund as "George Washington Day Birthday Exercises." Gone were the wall banners proclaiming "Wake up America—Smash Jewish Communists!" and the references by speechmakers to Franklin D. Roosevelt as "Franklin D. Rosenfeld" and the big white buttons with the black lettering that had been distributed to Bund members to stick into their lapels, the buttons that read:

KEEP AMERICA OUT OF THE JEWISH WAR

Meanwhile, Walter Winchell continued to refer to the Bundists as "Bundits," and Dorothy Thompson, the prominent journalist and wife of novelist Sinclair Lewis, who'd been expelled from the 1939 Bund rally for exercising what she called her "constitutional right to laugh at ridiculous statements in a public hall," went on denouncing their propaganda in the same spirit she'd demonstrated three years earlier when she'd exited the rally shouting, "Bunk, bunk, bunk!
Mein Kampf,
word for word!" And on his Sunday-night program following the Bund rally, Winchell contended, with his usual cocksureness, that growing hostility to the von Ribbentrop state dinner marked the end of America's honeymoon with Charles A. Lindbergh. "The presidential blunder of the century," Winchell called it, "the blunder of blunders for which the reactionary Republican henchmen of our fascist-loving president will pay with their political lives in the November elections."

The White House, accustomed to nearly universal deification of Lindbergh, seemed stymied by the strong disapproval that the opposition was so rapidly able to muster against him, and though the administration sought to distance itself from the Bund's New York rally, the Democrats—determined to associate Lindbergh with the organization's ignominious reputation—held a Madison Square Garden rally of their own. Speaker after speaker scathingly denounced "the Lindbergh Bundists," until to everyone's astonished delight, FDR himself appeared on the platform. The ten-minute ovation his presence elicited would have gone on even longer had not the former president called out forcefully, above the roar, "My fellow Americans, my fellow Americans—I have a message for both Mr. Lindbergh and Mr. Hitler. The moment compels my stating with a candor they cannot misunderstand that it is we, and not they, who are the masters of America's destiny," words so stirring and dramatic that every human being in that crowd (and in our living room and in the living rooms up and down our street) was swept away by the joyous illusion that the nation's redemption was at hand.

"The only thing we have to fear," FDR told his audience—recalling the opening seven words of a sentence as renowned as any ever spoken at a first inaugural—"is the obsequious yielding to his Nazi friends by Charles A. Lindbergh, the shameless courting by the president of the world's greatest democracy of a despot responsible for innumerable criminal deeds and acts of savagery, a cruel and barbaric tyrant unparalleled in the chronicle of man's misdeeds. But we Americans will not accept a Hitler-dominated America. We Americans will not accept a Hitler-dominated world. Today the entire globe is divided between human slavery and human freedom. We—choose—freedom! We accept only an America consecrated to freedom! If there is a plot being hatched by antidemocratic forces here at home harboring a Quisling blueprint for a fascist America, or by foreign nations greedy for power and supremacy—a plot to suppress the great upsurge of human liberty of which the American Bill of Rights is the fundamental document, a plot to replace American democracy with the absolute authority of a despotic rule such as enslaves the conquered people of Europe—let those who would dare in secret to conspire against our freedom understand that Americans will not, under any threat or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty framed for us by our forefathers in the Constitution of the United States."

Lindbergh's response came a few days afterward—he donned his Lone Eagle flying gear and early one morning took off from Washington in his two-engine Lockheed Interceptor to meet with the American people face to face and reassure them that every decision he made was designed solely to increase their security and guarantee their well-being. That's what he did when the smallest crisis loomed, flew to cities in every region of the country, this time to as many as four and five in a single day owing to the Interceptor's phenomenal speed, and everywhere his plane set down the cluster of radio microphones was waiting for him as were the local bigwigs, the wire-service stringers, the city's reporters, and the thousands of citizens who had gathered to catch sight of their young president in his famous aviator's windbreaker and leather cap. And each time he landed, he made it clear that he was flying the country unescorted, without either Secret Service or Air Corps protection. This was how safe he considered the American skies to be; this was how secure the
country
was now that his administration, in little more than a year, had dispelled all threat of war. He reminded his audiences that the life of not a single American boy had been put at risk since he'd come to office and would not be put at risk so long as he remained in office. Americans had invested their faith in his leadership, and every promise he had made to them he had kept.

That was all he said or had to say. He never mentioned von Ribbentrop's name or FDR's or made reference to the German-American Bund or the Iceland Understanding. He said nothing in support of the Nazis, nothing to reveal an affinity with their leader and his aims, not even to note with approval that the German army had recovered from its winter losses and that all along the Russian front, the Soviet Communists were being pushed farther eastward toward their ultimate defeat. But then everyone in America knew that it was an unshakable conviction of the president's, as it was of his party's dominant right wing, that the best protection against the spread of Communism across Europe, into Asia and the Middle East, and as far as to our own hemisphere was the total destruction of Stalin's Soviet Union by the military might of the Third Reich.

In his low-key, taciturn, winning way, Lindbergh told the airfield crowds and the radio listeners who he was and what he'd done, and by the time he climbed back aboard his plane to take off for his next stop, he could have announced that, following the von Ribbentrop White House dinner, the First Lady would be inviting Adolf Hitler and his girlfriend to spend the Fourth of July weekend as vacation guests in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House and still have been cheered by his countrymen as democracy's savior.

My father's boyhood friend Shepsie Tirschwell had been one of several projectionist-editors at the Newsreel Theater on Broad Street since its opening in 1935 as the city's only all-news movie house. The Newsreel's one-hour show comprised news clips, shorts, and "The March of Time," and it ran daily from early morning until midnight. Every Thursday, out of thousands of feet of news film supplied by companies like Pathe and Paramount, Mr. Tirschwell and the three other editors selected stories and spliced together an up-to-the-minute show so that regular customers like my father—whose office on Clinton Street was only a few blocks away—could keep pace with national news, important happenings worldwide, and exciting moments from championship sports matches that, back in the radio era, could be seen on film nowhere but at a movie theater. My father would try to find an hour each week to catch a complete show, and when he did, he'd recount over dinner what he'd seen and whom. Tojo. Petain. Batista. De Valera. Arias. Quezon. Camacho. Litvinov. Zhukov. Hull. Welles. Harriman. Dies. Heydrich. Blum. Quisling. Gandhi. Rommel. Mountbatten. King George. La Guardia. Franco. Pope Pius. And that was but an abbreviated list of the tremendous cast of newsreel characters prominent in events that my father told us we would one day remember as history worthy of passing on to our own children.

"Because what's history?" he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. "History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that'll be history too someday."

On the weekends when Mr. Tirschwell was working, my father would take Sandy and me to be further educated at the Newsreel Theater. Mr. Tirschwell would leave free passes at the box office for us, and each time my father brought us up to the projection booth after the show would give the same civics lecture. He'd tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen's most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day. We'd gather close to the film projector, each of whose parts he'd name for us, and then we'd look at the framed photographs on the walls that had been taken at the theater's black-tie opening night, when Newark's first and only Jewish mayor, Meyer Ellenstein, had cut the ribbon strung across the lobby and welcomed the famous guests, among whom, as Mr. Tirschwell told us, pointing to their pictures, was the former U.S. ambassador to Spain and the founder of Bamberger's department store.

What I liked best about the Newsreel Theater was that the seats were constructed so that even an adult didn't have to get up to let others by, that the projection booth was said to be soundproof, and that on the carpet in the lobby was a design of motion picture reels that you could step on when you went in and out. Not until I think back to those consecutive Saturdays in 1942, when Sandy was fourteen and I was nine and we were taken by my father specifically to see the Bund rally one week and FDR addressing the anti-Ribbentrop Garden rally the next, am I able to remember anything much other than the narrating voice of Lowell Thomas, who introduced most of the political news, and of Bill Stern, who enthusiastically reported on sports. But the Bund rally I've not forgotten because of the hatred instilled in me by the Bundists up on their feet chanting von Ribbentrop's name as though it were he who was now president of the United States, and FDR's speech I've not forgotten because when he proclaimed to the anti-Ribbentrop rally, "The only thing we have to fear is the obsequious yielding to his Nazi friends by Charles A. Lindbergh," a good half of the movie audience booed and hissed while the rest, including my father, clapped as loudly as they could, and I wondered if a war might not break out right there on Broad Street in the middle of the day and if, when we left the darkened theater, we'd find downtown Newark a rubble heap of smoking ruins and fires burning everywhere.

It wasn't easy for Sandy to sit through those two Saturday-afternoon shows at the Newsreel Theater, and since he'd already understood beforehand that it wasn't going to be, he at first refused my father's invitation and agreed to come along with us only when he was ordered to do so. By the spring of 1942, Sandy was a few months from beginning high school, a lean, tall, good-looking boy whose attire was neat, whose hair was combed, and whose posture, standing or sitting, was as perfect as a West Point cadet's. His experience as a leading young spokesman for Just Folks had endowed him, in addition, with an air of authority seldom seen in one so young. That Sandy should prove himself so adept at influencing adults and that he should have developed a reverential following among the younger neighborhood kids who were eager to emulate him and qualify for the Office of American Absorption's summer farm program had surprised my parents and made their older child more intimidating to have around the house than he was back when everyone thought of him as an affable, fairly ordinary boy with a gift for drawing people's likenesses. To me he'd always been the mighty one because of his seniority; now he seemed mightier than ever and easily aroused my admiration despite my having turned away from him because of what Alvin had described as his opportunism—though even the opportunism (if Alvin was correct and that was the word for it) seemed another remarkable attainment, the emblem of a calm, self-aware maturity knowingly wedded to the ways of the world.

Of course, the concept of opportunism was barely familiar to me at the age of nine, yet its ethical status Alvin communicated clearly enough by the disgust with which he'd pronounced his indictment and what he added by way of amplification. He was still fresh from the hospital then and far too miserable to show much restraint.

"Your brother's nothing," he informed me from his bed one night. "He's less than nothing." And that was when he labeled Sandy opportunistic.