Arlene Stein asks: Why did we forget?
In 1930s America, a notorious far-right group openly supported Adolf Hitler, spread racist and antisemitic propaganda, and drew 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden.
The German American Bund was outlawed in the early 1940s after the U.S. entered World War II and the group faded into history.
Sociologist Arlene Stein is interested in how collective memories are constructed. But in a recent article for the journal Memory Studies, the Rutgers sociologist Arlene Stein questions why the Bund—which had a significant presence in New Jersey, including a 200-acre summer camp—so easily slipped from public memory, along with other fascist groups from that time.
The failure to remember, Stein says, is a collective, societal decision. And it’s also a dangerous one, especially at a time when white supremacist groups and ideas are increasingly visible and ascendant.
“This forgetting, I argue, has contributed to making the contemporary influence of authoritarian ideas and movements more difficult for Americans to grasp,” Stein, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology, wrote in the article, which is titled We Have Never Been Nazis: Forgetting the Far Right in Interwar America.
In the interview below she discusses her research.
Can you briefly explain what the Bund was?
The German American Bund was founded in 1936 and led by Fritz Kuhn, a 40-year-old German immigrant, who called himself the America fuehrer. The Bund tried to instill in German-Americans a strong identification with the fatherland, and the belief that the U.S. should be a white, Christian, male-dominant country.
Camp Siegfried was a summer camp on Long Island that taught Nazi ideology and was owned by the German American Bund.Was it overtly racist and antisemitic?
Absolutely. Jews and leftists were the main targets. But the Bund also held rallies with the Ku Klux Klan.
How did you first become aware of the Bund and what made you decide to pursue it as a research topic?
When I was living in South Orange, New Jersey, a neighbor mentioned that there was once a Bund meeting house on our street. That was quite shocking to me. I’m Jewish and my father was a Holocaust survivor. Growing up, I was taught that fascism was anathema to Americans, and that the system inoculates us against extremism.
And yet here, in this suburban community, and in other nearby towns too, a far-right organization operated out in the open. This was not a secret society. They marched in public, had summer camps in which people undertook and participated in what were basically Hitler youth rallies.
How do you approach the topic as a sociologist?
Sociologists are interested in how collective memories are constructed and consolidated. My book, Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, explored the ways in which the Holocaust had become memorialized and understood in the U.S. Most people think of collective memory as something that simply “is.” Of course, Americans were going to try to make sense of this event and teach their children about it.
But what I found was that it was not at all inevitable. There was actually quite a bit of resistance to memorializing the Holocaust, even at times from within the Jewish community. But people mobilized to make it happen—survivors, allies, liberal Christians. It takes groups and institutions to remember, to keep these memories circulating within the larger culture. These institutions include school districts, religious organizations, civic organizations, local government or the federal government.
The German American Bund drew 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden.For your article, you reviewed the personal narratives of Jewish and German Americans who witnessed the Bund, and who were interviewed many years later by the Rutgers Oral History Archive. You note that many of the respondents downplayed the Bund. Why do you think they reacted this way?
This is a difficult history, especially in light of what we now know about World War II and the Holocaust. I think people avoid difficult emotional subjects. In the interviews with German Americans, many mocked Bundists and saw them as buffoons and stupid people. They didn’t take them seriously. By ridiculing them, they may have been protecting themselves.
The Jewish respondents were similar and different. Some of them witnessed violence in their own communities by the Bund. But they reassured themselves these movements were an aberration and didn’t pose an ongoing threat to them.
Do you think these responses, though certainly sincere, reflect a larger culture of denial about fascist movements in America?
Absolutely. I think Americans have a blind spot when it comes to understanding far-right movements. Americans are more vigilant about seeing the far left as a threat in part because of the legacy of the Cold War. Anti-communism penetrated people’s lives in many ways and made certain things difficult to say in public.
Someone might ask: Well, why does that still hold when we’re no longer in the Cold War? In some ways, it still lingers from that period. It’s also a product of the pervasive belief that the United States is fundamentally a liberal democracy—though that may be changing, now. We don’t learn about fascism in school, and if we do, it’s something that happened in Europe, not here.
And the media reinforce this. Take for example the response to Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America,” a fictionalized account of the Bund and other far-right groups. When critics discussed the TV miniseries, following the 2016 election, they called it ‘brilliant speculative fiction’ that was “eerily prescient.” They had no idea Roth had based many of the scenes in the book on things he witnessed firsthand as a child growing up in New Jersey.
What do you think could have been done to remember the Bund as a cautionary tale and teachable moment?
This history should be part of the high school curriculum throughout New Jersey, but I would be very surprised if the Bund or other similar groups were mentioned at all. Sussex County owns the site of the former Nordland Camp and yet there is barely a whisper of this history. And where are the statues and plaques that commemorate those who refused to allow the Bund into their communities? Only one community has done this. A small town in Connecticut erected a plaque proudly declaring that it prevented the Bund from mobilizing there.
How do you think such educational efforts would help the public understand and navigate the current moment?
What begins as denial ends with ignorance. There are fundamental beliefs common to far-right movements: Seeing immigrants as the problem, and longing for a time when the country was largely white and Christian. Many people find the fact that Donald Trump was elected twice shocking; that the candidate was willing to say certain things and people still voted for him. But right-wing populism has a long history in this country.
If we understood this better, we would have seen the far right as an ever-present threat, one that we need to be vigilant against—to preserve and strengthen the inclusive democracy most Americans believe in.