Hitler in New York

...If hysteria won it will prove to be only a temporary defeat if we can be prodded to realize once more the full and at times frightening implications of what democracy means, to remember that the truism is still true: the problems of democracy can be solved only by more democracy, not less...

...But we flatter ourselves that we are different and somehow better...

...and many protest that "free speech wasn't meant to include psy-chotics," or "anyone who says Jews ought to be killed should be jailed," or "freedom of speech should be only for those who believe in it for others...

...At this point, however, one of his handful of supporters bought him a house in Arlington (which serves as his base of operations) and Rockwell embarked on a new program: he started conducting open-air meetings in Washington, where, guarded by a handful of uniformed "storm troopers," he attacked Jews and Negroes with such vigor that he began to make the local papers...

...Perhaps most disturbing of all is that those who faced this crucial test of freedom and failed it have no sense of failure, but rather they seem to find pride in their liberal bigotry...

...There is no evidence that Rockwell gathered any significant following during these hops from one organization to another—six groups in four years—and the American Jewish Committee recently estimated he has only twenty-five to fifty hard-core supporters...

...When we speak of protecting democracy by outlawing this or that extreme little group we would do well to remember that the loyalty oaths, subversive lists, and political arrests which President Harry Truman directed against the Communists did not lead us to greater freedom, but delivered us into the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who expanded political terror until it embraced virtually everyone, including the United States Army and the Protestant churches...

...If it falls back upon the coercive power of the state to check subversion then we have lost the fight before it has even begun, not only because we have already been forced to adopt the methods of our opposition but, equally important, because we have confessed to ourselves that our own ideology is too weak to survive in a free contest...

...Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy made it clear he felt the police could remain in full control of the situation...

...It is further clear that New York City is controlled by Jewish Communists because when the Jews and the Communists demanded the Rockwell rally be banned Mayor Wagner responded by banning it...

...It is a necessary part of a healthy society and must be fully extended to all men and to all views...

...Let us suppose they had said that, bitterly as they opposed Rockwell, they would not let him provoke the citizens of New York into destroying civil liberty...

...Let us begin by understanding that Rockwell never intended to speak in Union Square, never wanted to speak in Union Square, and never expected to be allowed to speak in Union Square...

...The social problems which gave rise to Hitler do not presently exist in this country, and the cultural patterns of the two countries are vastly different...

...Democracy is not a slogan...

...Under a headline Free Speech In New York Only For Communists, they comment on the Rockwell case: ". . . it cannot be denied his experience in New York City demonstrates clearly what would happen to free speech in our country once the so-called 'Jews' secured the same control of the U.S...

...That response indicated how shallow is our faith in civil liberties and the process of debate...

...Such a creative action would have gone a long way to returning Rockwell to the shadowy underworld from which he came...

...Five months later the charges were dismissed but by then Rockwell had been evicted from his headquarters-home—swastika, Hitler, special lighting effects and all—and early 1960 found him unable to do anything more dramatic than hand out "hate" literature in the downtown area of Washington, D.C...

...It is fashionable for liberals to believe in civil liberties...

...He was indicted for maintaining a public nuisance and for disorderly conduct...

...So it was that on May 2, 1960, he wrote the New York Police Commissioner saying he wanted a permit to hold a "Nazi Rally" in Union Square on the Fourth of July...

...that they had insisted the permit be issued...

...4) leading Jewish organizations demanded the Mayor ban Rockwell's Nazi Rally...

...It is for this reason that I do not feel more secure because Rockwell was banned from Union Square to save us from the Nazis a little while longer...

...it involves a complex relationship between majority and minority, and an effort to weigh intensity of feeling, and an understanding that "majority—minority" are not fixed but shift and change with time...

...One cannot limit freedom and still retain it...

...Let's add up the facts: (1) Communists are free to speak in Union Square (though they almost never exercise this right, having long ago wisely written off the Square as a gathering place for crackpots...

...Born in Bloomington, Illinois, he traveled with his parents, attended various schools, enlisted in the Navy during World War II, served again in the Korean War, and emerged as a full commander...

...Hitler in New York by DAVID McREYNOLDS George Lincoln Rockwell, forty-two year old estranged son of "Old Doc Rockwell," the vaudeville comedian, was a man living in the seamy shadows of America's conservative underworld until May 2, 1960, when he suddenly became front page news as the self-proclaimed leader of the "American Nazi Party...

...They also serve as a safety valve for releasing social pressure—in some ways nothing is as therapeutic as talk and I would far rather have Rockwell spewing forth his hatred in Union Square than have him assembling bombs in some cellar...

...For while it is tragic to find any mind so sick and perverted that it preaches hate and violence, we all know such people exist...

...If hysteria won in New York it is still true that both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee stood their ground, despite great pressure even from some of their own members...

...Outraged Jewish, Negro, and liberal organizations demanded, successfully, that Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., ban the meeting...

...And the real issue under McCarthy was not whether liberals would be free but whether Communists would be free...

...Rockwell was not arrested until after he had ordered his storm troopers to "silence" hecklers at an open air meeting, making him clearly guilty for the brawl which resulted...

...But on August 30 this request was turned down by Judge Henry Epstein of the New York Supreme Court...

...He was interested in being banned from Union Square...

...It is true also that the stand of the ACLU was supported by the New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Journal-American...

...However, even if this suggestion is Utopian (and one cannot demand, but only -hope, that people who have suffered greatly should respond in a creative way), there was never any clear and present danger of law and order crumbling before Rockwell and his storm troopers...

...Instead of dealing with that, far too many liberals swallowed Sidney Hook's line, "heresy yes, conspiracy no," which had about it an Orwel-lian simplicity...

...I am being unfair to the liberal viewpoint, overstating my case, to drive home my feeling that it has become the fashion to modify and soften our commitment to the Bill of Rights, to insist that those who want to dissent must first give us guarantees they are reasonable men (like ourselves) before we hand out speaking permits...

...Democracy cannot be defined with precision, because it is a way of life, a state of mind, an attitude toward other people, not simply a political system...

...Does this sound fantastic...

...Navy relieved Commander George Lincoln Rockwell of his reserve commission because of what they gently termed his "civilian activities...

...To put it another way, if a man stands up in a crowded theater and screams "Fire," that will have one kind of effect, but if you take the same man and set him down in the middle of New York's Union Square he can yell "Fire" all day long and achieve little more than frightening the pigeons...

...and an unsuccessful effort to become a publisher (among material he published was John Rasper's booklet "Segregation or Death...

...DAVID McREYNOLDS, associate editor of Liberation, is field secretary of the War Resisters League and a member of the national committee of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation...

...The question is what kind of defense we shall mount against ideologies we consider unpleasant, heretical, or dangerous...

...When extremists are curbed then the whole range of debate is drastically narrowed...

...and finally, as proof that they felt the strongest defense against fascist ideology was democratic action, they would form a human ring around Union Square to insure that no one would be able to attack Rockwell without first attacking a Jew, a Negro, or some member of the liberal community...

...But any system of parties and parliaments will fail unless we can sense that beneath that system and underlying our bitterest debates is a striving toward a sense of comradeship and community...

...a brief stint with The American Mercury...

...Rockwell's career as a professional anti-Semite started fairly late in his life...

...It is a commitment, a way of life, and it often proves to be unpleasant, tedious, foolish, dangerous, or vulgar...

...5) the Mayor banned the rally...

...By early 1959 his fortunes were at such a low ebb he was reduced to passing out leaflets to high school and college students in the Arlington, Virginia, area, inviting them to his home for lectures on Nazism—his home having been rigged out as a "Nazi Headquarters," complete with swastika, photograph of Hitler, and special colored lighting effects...

...But there are aspects of the Rockwell saga that are not so dark...

...In February, 1960, the U.S...

...The police in Arlington stepped in then, and, armed with a warrant, raided his home, seizing literature and weapons...

...We must realize that freedom for extremists is the price we have to pay for our own freedom...

...A society is not unlike an individual...

...Reaction in New York was swift...

...3) the Communist Party demanded that Mayor Wagner ban Rockwell's Nazi Rally...

...On June 22 when he appeared for a court hearing in New York he was mobbed and had to be rescued by the police...

...Democracy is not fifty per cent plus one...

...The roots of American democracy run deeper than we sometimes realize...

...On May 18 he filed his formal application with the New York City Department of Parks...

...During his earlier period of street speaking in Washington, D.C, Rockwell and seven of his storm troopers were arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, found guilty, and fined...

...And this is unfortunate, because civil liberty is not a luxury to be granted only to those close to the middle of the political road...

...Now tie these five facts together and we have the following "thesis," which is incorrect, but at every point related to the facts: the Jews in New York never protest Communist meetings but gave almost identical reasons as the Communist Party gave in urging that the Rockwell rally be banned...

...He was interested in only one thing— which he got on a silver platter dripping with front page headlines...

...it may often happen that the group finds itself of one mind...

...However, when Rockwell was harassed by students who heckled instead of listened to the lectures, he publicly threatened to kill any hostile youngsters coming to his "Nazi Headquarters...

...Such a demonstration would have been front page news—and the emphasis would have been on the drama of those who supported free speech, not on what Rockwell was saying...

...Mayor Wagner, surely one of the dullest men ever to warm a mayor's chair, and undistinguished for his courage, gave in to the mob and to general community pressure...

...As liberals and radicals we must certainly be deeply concerned with solving this problem...

...Of course, but let me quote a story from the July issue of Common Sense, an extreme anti-Semitic tabloid issued in New Jersey...

...They want to destroy democracy while we seek only to extend it...

...Hitler did not rise to power because of what he said, but because of the social environment within which he was saying it...

...Rather, it is a failure of American liberalism as such, highlighting the long erosion that has gone on in the liberal mind, showing up the vacuity of liberal thinking on the question of civil liberties...

...Thus Milton Himmelfarb, a contributing editor to Commentary, a liberal intellectual monthly published by the American Jewish Committee, asks scornfully "what professional obligation led Jewish lawyers to volunteer" to defend Rockwell (emphasis his)—as if it were the lawyers, and not Himmelfarb himself, who had broken faith...

...2) Jewish organizations have not protested Communists speakers or urged the Mayor to ban Communist meetings in New York...

...And flowing from this is the proposition that at any given moment the "front line" in the fight for freedom is that minority under the heaviest attack for its ideas...

...Yet many of them feel Mayor Wagner was correct...

...Kill him...

...Nor is the failure to extend civil liberties to Rockwell simply a failure of the New York Jewish, Negro, and liberal community...

...And yet free speech means that totalitarian psychotics have the right to hold public meetings denouncing the Jews...

...In small groups discussion may be possible to such ah extent that it is not even necessary to vote...

...And that confession of weakness only terrifies us more and speeds the process of decline...

...Civil liberties are functional...

...Still, it is a great temptation when faced by a philosophy we do not like to feel democracy has a right to defend itself...

...Any student of propaganda knows the most effective propaganda is that based on actual facts, however it may distort them...

...He announced on June 22, after the riot in the courtroom, that Rockwell was a "half-penny Hitler" who "will not speak here on the Fourth of July, or any other time . . ." Still supported by the AGLU, Rockwell turned to the courts again, to force the city to grant a permit for his Nazi rally...

...Thus it is clear the Jews are Communists...

...One reason Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany was because Germany, unlike England or the United States, had never developed a tradition of respect for dissenting views and minority rights...

...To ban Rockwell, or to mob him, only confirms the anti-Semite in his paranoidal prejudice...

...It is my hope that when Hitler returns to New York he will be able to speak his piece in Union Square like any other crackpot...

...Rockwell wanted the publicity of being banned...

...I do not believe the liberals in New York or in the nation as a whole are really prepared to let one political crank like Rockwell topple a way of life for which so many have sacrificed so much for so many generations...

...It is all too easy to turn to the state, to fall back on loyalty oaths, security checks, political arrests, and a secret police—always in the name of freedom...

...That is democracy...

...But democracy has only one valid weapon: more democracy...

...In the larger framework of society such extensive discussion is impossible as a prelude to action, so we develop devices such as political parties and elections...

...What really disturbed me about the Rockwell case disturbed me also during the McCarthy period: the liberals backed away from the real issue...

...They want murder while we seek brotherhood...

...America in 1960 is not Germany in the early Thirties...

...The sense of human comradeship and human community that often emerges out of heated debate, and as a result of that vigorous exchange of views, is not at all the same thing as the present "aura of good fellowship" which we are substituting for politics in this country...

...the Rockwell case is not simply a battle over abstract and possibly outdated principles, but over practical matters...

...New York City is not a place where an anti-Semite can make headway...

...if Christians want free speech, they are fascists...

...if there are severe emotional conflicts in a person it is best if they are brought to the surface so they can be dealt with, rather than repressed...

...Rockwell turned to the American Civil Liberties Union for help and fought back through the courts to get his permit...

...Having touched on the immediate problems involved in the Rockwell case I want to return to my point concerning the "erosion of commitment" to civil liberties on the part of liberals...

...The ACLU is now preparing to appeal the case...

...He has been married twice...

...But in the Washington case there was no civil liberties question involved...

...But let us suppose for a moment that the Jewish, Negro, and liberal groups in New York had taken an entirely different approach to Rockwell...

...And the answer is, clearly, no, it will not...

...How, then, do we deal with Rockwell...

...If anti-Semitism is a kind of mental illness projected to a social level then we ought to use some insight in dealing with it...

...We discover to our dismay that people who all their lives have talked of the sacredness of the Bill of Rights are suddenly talking about the "limits of freedom...

...Never have we heard of Communists being denied the privilege of speaking there, but Rockwell, who applied for a permit, was not only denied, but . . . when Rockwell, appeared at the court-room in an effort to secure a permit, 200 Khazars yelling 'Kill him' knocked down several police trying to get to him . . . These so-called 'Jews' believe in free speech for themselves...

...If extreme views are given a full hearing they serve as a barometer of the political climate, giving wise men warning long before the storm...

...However, even though this is not Germany in the early Thirties, it re^ mains true that anti-Semitism is an unhappy factor in American life, warping the lives both of those who are hated and those who do the hating...

...The Republic will survive —and be the stronger for the experience...

...that they enjoy in New York City...

...The Jewish, Negro, and liberal organizations of New York gave Rockwell and his followers a truly devastating arsenal of "facts" which he can now use in his work in the South and the Midwest, where anti-Semitism does have a following...

...But always democracy comes back to the effort to establish a sense of community through the fullest discussion possible...

...His name was briefly in the news in connection with the Atlanta synagogue bombing in October, 1958, but he was never indicted...

...After all, he could hardly expect to build a following in New York City, in which so much of the population is either Jewish, Negro, Puerto Rican, or Catholic...

...And then one morning we wake up to read in the newspaper that our liberal friends have mobbed a man in the courts of New York, screaming "Kill him...

...Leaving aside all the "idealistic and absolutist" arguments that might well be used to support civil liberties, and, instead, looking at the Rockwell case in a realistic and pragmatic way, the question is: Would free speech for Rockwell lead to gas chambers for the Jews...

...But if democracy does not guarantee the right to express extreme viewpoints then there is no democracy, and we are all living in a fool's paradise papered with old liberal cliches...

...It was this "aura of good fellowship" which Rockwell shattered when he asked for a permit to speak in Union Square, and if Rockwell himself has sick views it is equally true that the response of the citizens of New York to Rockwell was sick...

...The words may be the same, but their impact will differ with the circumstances under which they are spoken...

...Deciding the time had come to move into the big time, he chose New York City as his next target...

...And of course a democracy does have the right and the obligation to defend itself...

...What is disturbing about the Rockwell case in New York is not Rockwell at all—or Rockwell least of all...

...Thus those who seek to ban Rockwell's meetings in order to prevent a Hitlerian regime are unwittingly laying the cultural groundwork for precisely the kind of system they oppose...

...These "civilian activities" seem to have begun in 1956 and consisted of membership or active participation in half a dozen or more extreme rightist groups...