Today in Labor History February 16, 1934: Thousands of Socialists battled Communists at a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden. 20 were injured in the melee. The rally was organized to protest the massacre of 1,000 Austrian socialists by the fascist regime of Engelbert Dollfuss. 5,000 members of the Communist Party violently disrupted the meeting to prevent Matthew Woll, of the AFL, and New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, from speaking. Woll was a collaborationist who believed that the most effective strategy for workers was a partnership with the bosses. He was also a staunch anti-communist and worked with the CIA to disrupt leftwing labor organizing in Europe. Some American Communists at that time considered that anyone who wasn’t communist was fascist, including non-communist socialists. On the morning of the rally, the Daily Worker denounced Woll and La Guardia as “open fascist[s]” and urged their Socialist brothers not to let them speak. During the rally, Communists jeered and booed the Socialists, calling them fascists, leading up to the violence.
The next month, five days after the opening of the Dachau concentration camp, the American Jewish Congress held another anti-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. 20,000 attended, plus another 40,000 rallied outside. One of their demands was that President Roosevelt immediately amend the immigration laws to allow German Jews entry into the U.S.
A few years later, 2/20/1939, Nazis held a large rally at Madison Square Garden. Advertised as a “Pro-American Rally,” 20,000 attendees, in Nazi armbands, were greeted with a 30-foot-tall banner of George Washington, flanked by large swastikas. Storm troopers in Nazi uniforms guarded the aisles. Their rhetoric was very similar to that of the participants at Trump’s rally there in 2024. Attendees had picket signs that read “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America.” There were speeches about stopping the Jews from taking American jobs. One of the speakers, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, pointed out that American history has always been white supremacist, from the founding of the country by white men, to slavery, the Chinese exclusion act, anti-miscegenation laws, and Jim Crow. They referred to Washington as America’s first fascist. Thousand of anti-fascists demonstrated outside. Both Mayor LaGuardia, and the American Jewish Committee supported the Nazis’ right to hold the rally. LaGuardia said, "If we are for free speech, we have to be for free speech for everybody, and that includes Nazis."
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