1933: Communist Party packs Madison Square Garden for anti-fascist rally

'United Front Against Fascism' - The mass anti-fascist rally in New York's Madison Square Garden organized by the Communist Party USA on April 5, 1933, just weeks after Hitler came to power in Germany. | People's World Archives

This article is part of the People’s World 100th Anniversary Series.

With Donald Trump’s hate-filled Madison Square Garden rally drawing comparisons to the Nazi rally hosted at the same venue in 1939, People’s World looked through our archives and found this story about a very different kind of political event staged at the Garden in that period.

On April 6, 1933 – just weeks after Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took power in Germany – the Communist Party USA organized a mass anti-fascist demonstration in New York to show solidarity with the besieged Jews and workers of Germany and also to sound the urgent call to form a “United Front Against Fascism” in the U.S.

The CPUSA regularly filled Madison Square Garden from the 1920s through the early 1950s with all manner of meetings and demonstrations – Lenin Memorials, election rallies, national conventions, protests against war and McCarthyism, International Women’s Day celebrations, and a long list of other causes. The April 1933 meeting stands out, however, as it signaled the start of a nationwide campaign to build a broad anti-fascist alliance of labor and democratic forces.

Taking up the invitation, a number of unions, Jewish groups, progressive political organizations, representatives of several influential publications, and spokespeople for resistance groups inside Nazi Germany attended the CPUSA’s MSG rally: the Longshoremen’s Union, Needle Trades International Union, the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, the Trade Union Unity League, International Labor Defense, the ACLU, The Freiheit, The New Republic, The Amsterdam News, and more.

In the two excerpted articles below, Daily Worker reporter Robert Hamilton reports direct from Madison Square Garden about the formation of the united front against fascism.

Selections from two articles published in the Daily Worker on April 6 and 7, 1933:
– “22,000 workers in Madison Square Garden forge united front against fascism”
– “German workers fight for lives against terror; U.S. workers build united front against Nazis”

By Robert Hamilton

NEW YORK—Madison Square Garden, capacity 22,000, was jammed full last night with New York workers pouring in from all parts of the city to join in mass protest against German fascism. At 6:30 p.m., a line four deep extended from the 49th St. entrance to Eighth Ave.

Delegations from workers’ organizations marched in ranks into the hall, shouting, “Down with Hitler!” Three hundred seamen from the waterfront were greeted with thunderous applause as they streamed in. Two hundred Italian workers paraded in, singing “The Internationale,” and the whole crowd joined in the chorus.

After that, organizations arrived thick and fast. Fifty mounted police sat on their horses near the entrance and glowered, and 200 more police were around the arena.

Many of the workers had been mobilized by a huge head in an effigy of Hitler with his mouth open, carried through working-class sections of the city. On the truck with the head were a Negro and white worker, shouting alternately, “Down with Hitler!”

Inside the hall was a sea of color, with tossing banners of the unions and placards denouncing the atrocities of fascism. Banners hung from the balconies and were massed on the stage.

The Workers International Relief Brass Band played revolutionary songs, and the whole audience joined in the singing….

[The opening statement from the New York District of the CP] declared: “This is not a meeting to end the struggle against German fascism, but to further it until Hitler and fascist rule shall be overthrown and the working class come into power.”

It was then announced that the Conference for Progressive Labor Action had accepted the invitation of the Communist Party for joint action against fascism.

—

The meeting was the expression of the growing will for the unity of the entire working class on the platform of unrelenting struggle against fascism wherever it raises its head, in America as well as in Germany.

Communists and Socialists, workers and intellectuals, Negroes and whites, joined in proclaiming their steely determination to forge a powerful united front in the unyielding struggle against fascism.

…

[The opening speech] outlined the readiness of the Communist Party to cooperate with all workers’ organizations, of every shade of opinion, in building a united front to battle fascism in the United States.

…

Erna Stams, chairman of the German Committee for Action Against Fascism and leader of the Ruhr workers in Germany, spoke in German on behalf of the revolutionary German proletariat. She pointed out that though workers’ blood has reddened the streets of German cities, the Communist Party’s illegal apparatus is already functioning efficiently, reaching into every factory, spreading the illegal party press throughout the nation. Stams appealed to the workers of America to redouble their protest action of international solidarity, emphasizing that the workers of Germany would respond with tenfold activity, heartened by the aid of the American working class.

Robert Minor, speaking for the Central Committee of the Communist Party, urged the workers who are members of any organization that calls itself a working-class group to see to it that their leaders do not evade or reject the offer of the Communist Party for an extensive united front, based upon the determined will to struggle against the capitalist dictatorship in America, against anti-Semitism and anti-Negro terror, against wage cuts, and for the 17,000,000 unemployed in America.

…

Roy Hudson, speaking for the Marine Workers International Union, pointed out that: “Fascism means war – war upon the workers, war between imperialist powers, war against the Soviet Union. And in these war plans, the bosses need the seamen and longshoremen to load and transport the war materials and munitions necessary to carry on a war….

J.B. Matthews, Socialist and secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, made a trenchant attack upon the illusions of bourgeois democracy prevalent among the intelligentsia. “Fascism is not a rejuvenated nationalism, rising from the ashes of military defeat. Essentially, fascism is capitalism turned nudist. Bourgeois democracy is a fig leaf to hide the naked realities of the capitalist system. But just as soon as revolutionary action is threatened from the working class, the fig leaf is thrown aside….”

Joseph Freeman, editor of the New Masses, and Malcolm Cowley, of the editorial board of The New Republic, described the fascist attack upon culture in Germany, the hounding and arrest of Germany’s greatest writers, artists, and scientists for their radical views. Freeman brought tidings of the rising heroic and successful struggle of the Communist Party of Germany against the Nazi terror….

Peretz Hirschbein, famous Jewish dramatist, speaking in Yiddish in a voice charged with pent-up emotion, pictured the iron boot trampling out the best in German culture, the best blood of the German working class…

Richard B. Moore, speaking for the Negro Department of the International Labor Defense, pointed out that the fight against fascism necessarily involves the unrelenting struggle for the release of the Scottsboro Nine, that fascism is like the Negro oppression in the South under Ku Klux Klanism….

Other speakers included Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union; M.J. Olgin, editor of The Freiheit; and Edward Dahlberg, an American writer recently attacked and beaten by Nazi thugs in the streets of Berlin.

The mass meeting adopted a resolution pledging to stand united in the fight for support of the heroic German people against the bloody fascist dictatorship…. The proposal called upon all workers…to join the united front struggle against fascism.

Another resolution, introduced by Alfred Wagenknecht of the Workers International Relief, supported calls for the organization of united relief committees for the relief of the victims of German fascist terror. The audience contributed the imposing sum of $1,304.21 in response to the stirring appeal.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Special to People’s World

People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements to our readers across the country and around the world. People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper, founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists in Chicago in 1924.