An Expansive look New York in the Era of the Axis

“If I had my way, I would hang all Jews in the country,” roared Ralph Ninfo in a 1938 as pro-Mussolini Italian American fascists and pro-Hitler German American Bund members met at a Bund rally in New York to share their antisemitic beliefs, in a city of two million Jews. (p. 55).

Gotham at War is a detailed accounting of events in New York City between 1933-1945, from the pen of Mike Wallace, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Wallace has written a monumental, and exhaustive, history of the city detailing every significant event, such as the April 21, 1943, shut down of the Savoy Ballroom, “the largest and most popular dance hall” (p. 544) in Harlem on phony vice charges. Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins noted in the African American newspaper, The Amsterdam News, that liberal fusion mayor Fiorello La Guardia and other city authorities objected “to the very thought of Negroes and whites enjoying themselves socially together.” (p. 544). One thing Wallace left out in his brilliant history of the city is the following from lyricist Andry Razaf,

  “Guilty of national unity,

   By allowing the races, openly,

   To dance and mingle in harmony,

   Guilty of its location – by now you can guess the place is.

   Guilty of being in HARLEM,

   And that is where the core of the case is!” *

Apparently, Wallace, in his exhaustive bibliography, did not come across the 2023 work of Emily Brooks which covers the same time period as he does, but focuses on how the police suppressed women, juveniles, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. Brooks focuses on Mayor La Guardia and New York City from an oppression studies perspective, whereas Wallace offers a broader account that includes various ethnic and religious groups and provides a comprehensive overview of the city's diversity. While the State Department initially celebrated Hitler as a bulwark against communism, La Guardia and Al Smith took part in the March 7, 1934 anti-Hitler rally at Madison Suare Garden, called “The Case of Civilization Against Hitler.” As plans were made for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, La Guardia urged the creation of a chamber of horrors, to include an image of Hitler, which led Secretary of State Cordell Hull to apologize to Germany for the mayor’s words. The “Little Flower of New York,” as Wallace documents, emerged as the most consistent anti-Nazi American politician in 1933-45.

For Jews, Wallace covers the efforts of Jewish groups in the city to boycott Germany and the 1936 Olympics. He devotes a chapter to the resettlement of 70,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria in New York, especially in Washington Heights, now heavily Dominican, and on the upper West Side and in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Because of this immigration, Mt. Neboh Temple on West 79 St. had the largest Jewish sisterhood in the country. Mike Tress of Queens College managed to raise enough funds to bring 4,500 Orthodox Jews to Williamsburg in 1939-1940 including Yosef Schneersohn, the sixth Chabd Lubavitch Rabbe who established his headquarters in Crown Heights, still a heavily Hasidic community.

Wallace looks into other ethnic groups. German Americans, who in 1900 were 22% of the city’s population, but dropped to 4% by 1949. The pro-Hitler German American Bund found a receptive audience in the city, as most German New Yorkers identified with his “new” Germany and did not oppose Nazi and Bund antisemitism. Wallace points out that groups of German spies operated in New York and the 1939 movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy was a slightly fictionalized account of how the FBI broke up one of these spy rings. This is the level of detail Wallace offers. Likewise, a majority of the city’s Italians, including Generoso Pope, editor of Il Progresso, identified with fascist Italy. However, the city’s unions with large Italian membership hated fascism. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the city’s African Americans supported Ethiopia while most Italians favored the Italian conquest. This got played out in Yankee Stadium on June 25, 1935, when 60,000 spectators watched the Brown Bomber Joe Louis take on 260-pound Italian favorite Primo Carnera. Harlem went wild when Louis won and young African American boys, ten to twelve, shouted “Let’s get Mussolini next.” (p.49) Later, at PS 178 Italians and African Americans fought their own version of the Ethiopian War with “ice picks, lead pipes, and sawed-off billiard cures.” (p. 51) When Italians in May 1936 celebrated Italian annexation of Ethiopia, African Americans marched down Lenox Avenue attacking Italian owned stores as foreign conflicts got played out on the streets of New York.

According to Wallace, another ethnic group’s power, the Irish, began to wane. From 1850 to 1910 Irish New Yorkers comprised between 20% and 33% of the population. By 1940 they were down to 10% due to decline of immigration, lower birth rates, and movement to the suburbs. While the Irish dominated the Catholic Church, Catholicism in New York, included Irish, Italians, Poles, Puerto Ricans, Germans, and some African Americans. Increasingly, in the 1930s the extremism of the antisemitic Christian Front arose, and by 1939 Irish Christian Front gangs roamed the streets shouting “Heil Hitler!” and slugging and stabbing Jews and attacking synagogues in Washington Heights and Fordham Road in the Bronx. The Archbishop of New York and Bishop of Brooklyn ignored the Christian Front’s antisemitism because members belonged to Catholic parishes. Then, in January 1940, the new Archbishop of New York, Francis Spellman, denounced the Front

While this is a comprehensive look at New York, at times Wallace leaves out information or is superficial. Christin Front members included 5,000 members of the New York City police, which explains why Christian Front thugs could attack Jews in the city as late as 1944, ignoring Spellman’s denunciation. Jews despaired they would get any protection since so many police officers belonged to or sympathized with the Christian Front infiltration. Wallace does not explain why by 1944 “every synagogue in northern Manhattan had been desecrated” (p. 586 ) Judd Teller, editor of the Independent Jewish Press Service, served as an intermediary between Jewish leaders and Murder Incorporated who “marinated” (beat, not murdered) some members of the Bund and Christian Front as a lessons in inter-ethnic tolerance. Wallace also doesn’t look into the possible role of Jewish war veterans in defense of Jewish institutions. It also would have been helpful if he explained the German spy rings he mentioned, but did not detail. Wallace’s treatment of Polish Americans is limited to the 150,000 Poles who marched down Fifth Avenure on October 15, 1939, weeks after the Germans completed the conquest of Poland. His chapter on “Spanish Americans,” covers Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Spanish residents, with a very brief discussion of the Spanish Civil War. How did New Yorkers divide over the war, how many residents joined the Abraham Lincoln or George Washington battalion and fought? Brooks does a better job discussing Puerto Ricans and the problems of women in the city between 1933-45. What is somewhat maddening in this work is the absence of an index in the copy I reviewed.

On the whole, Wallace wrote the most detailed history of New York from 1933-1945 without the ideological biases of the work by Brooks. He covers in a stellar manner the peace movement in the city between 1939-41, the mixed efforts at tolerance and brotherhood from 1941-45, all the major war related problems, and efforts at post-war planning. In the epilogue he points out that the motormen of 3,500 subway cars halted in place to honor the death of President Roosevelt, and the fight to place the United Nations in the city. Ironically, the UN location used to serve as home for stockyards and slaughter houses, a rather appropriate location. Some of the issues Wallace covers for the 1930s may reappear with the election of Mamdani as mayor, who is certainly not another La Guardia.

* Emily Brooks, Gotham’ War Within a War (Chapel Hill: UNC. 2023), p. 161.

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Our Reviewer: Harvey Strum is a professor of history and political science at Russell Sage College and a former Sherman David Spector Faculty Fellow in Humanities. He previously reviewed Contested Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-era South, Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries during the Cold War, From the Battlefield to the Big Screen, and Spain, the Second World War and the Holocaust. .

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Note: Gotham at War is also available in e-editions.

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