What would American fascism look like? A 1939 New York rally offered more than a hint

Vox Populi: On 20 February 1939, roughly six months before Germany invaded Poland, Madison Square Garden in New York City hosted an event held by the German American Federation, a Nazi-supporting group led by the German-born US citizen Fritz Julius Kuhn. The event was attended by a crowd of roughly 20,000 people, nearly all of them Americans sympathetic to Kuhn’s cause. With its swastikas and unapologetically racist rhetoric, cheering crowds and barefaced appeals to US patriotism – including a massive portrait of George Washington – the footage from the event is jarring and surreal to watch today. Eerily prefiguring fictional alternative histories where Nazism came to be embraced in the US, including Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), this little-known piece of US history hints at what American fascism might have looked like on a not-unimaginable alternative timeline.

Director: Marshall Curry

Website: Field of Vision

Text: Aeon