[applause] good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Historical Society. I am the president and ceo. I am thrilled to see so many of you here in our auditorium. Tonights program, a night at the garden, the into nazi rally of part of thert distinguished speakers. I would like to thank him for his generosity which enabled us to bring so many fine speakers to the space. [applause] i would also like to recognize and thank a number of trustees who have joined us this evening. I would like to recognize first about our chair and think pamela for her truly outstanding work on behalf of this institution. [applause] to just impart from our trustees for one second to recognize her husband, and we have three programs this evening and he has been to two of them. I want to congratulate him for his dedication to his wifes favorite organization. I would like to recognize other trustees. Again, slightly departing from our trustees, i want to recognize a great friend of this and he isn, the head known to people as the president of brown, head of the Public Library and all sorts of other things. He is known to us as a great friend. Thank you for joining us. [applause] now then, this Evenings Program last about an hour and will include a screening of the short film a night at the garden, as well as a question and answer session. Are going up and down the aisles with note cards and pencils. The note cards with your questions will be collected later on in the program. We are truly honored to welcome Marshall Curry back to the near Historical Society this evening. Documentary and editor in has been nominated for films. Filmsfter nominated included for tree falls, a story of the liberation front which chronicles the radical environmental group. And also the subject of tonights discussion. His film won top honors at the film festivals and earned two Writers Guild of america nomination. We are also delighted to welcome our moderator this evening, roger cohen, and welcome him back to new york historical. Cohen has worked as a foreign correspondent, editor and now columnist. He previously worked for the wall street journal and reuters. He is the author of numerous ,ooks, including his latest entitled the girl from in a jewish family. He tells us he is working on a novel, so we have something to look forward to soon. To ask that want you please make sure that anything that makes a noise like a cell phone is switched off. Now just before we welcome our speakers to the stage, we will screen the Academy Award nominated documentary short a , night at the garden. The film runs about seven minutes. Thank you. [applause] [video clip] [cheering] undivided allegiance to the flag of the United States of america and the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [cheering] ladies and gentlemen, fellow americans, american patriots, i am sure i do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger. You all have heard of me. Through the press, as a creature of harm, alarm tales. We, with american ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American People who founded it. [cheering] if you ask what we are actively fighting for, first a social just for the United States. Free from labor unions. [applause] [crowd noise] [cheering] [starspangled banner] [cheers and applause] good evening, everybody. Marshall, i remember when i first saw the documentary. And i was in a state of shock. Such a state of shock that i promptly wrote a column about it. You know, this happened in new york city. I had no idea. The material in it, was it hard to unearth . Had it in effect been hidden for seven, eight decades . Or was it just sitting there . So i didnt know about it either. Id never heard of it. In fact, i was at dinner with a friend of mine, who is a screenwriter. And he was he was telling me that he was working on a screen play that takes place in new york in 1939. And that this rally had happened. And i didnt believe him when he told me actually. I thought surely this was something i would have heard about. I went to college. This is america. We should know this sort of thing. So i went home that night and looked it up. Sure enough, he was right. Not only that, there were some historical documentaries that have little fivesecond clips of the rally. I thought, if theres five seconds of this thing, theres got to be a lot more than that. So i called an archivist, who is also a friend, and said, could you dig around and see if you could find where this footage is . Turned out that there was some of it in the National Archive and some of it in uclas archive s and grinburg. Scattered in a bunch of places. The National Archive even had film that had never been scanned highdef before. So we got field of vision, which is a production company, sort of financier, to give us the money. And we got all of the footage. And once i saw the footage, i thought, oh, my gosh, we need to share this with people. And to your question of why this isnt something that Everybody Knows about, its not our proudest time. I mean, its not a story that we should be proud of. You know no. Not americas proudest moment. So i think that it was sort of brushed aside, once world war ii started. And we kind of pretended like these kinds of ideas had never had any purchase in america, which they had. Was it the current drift of political events in the United States that inspired you to make this movie . Did you see parallels . Commercial yes. I saw the footage and i thought this unfortunately seems elements of this feel familiar to me. And, you know, i think that demagoguery is something that were seeing all around the world. I mean, in brazil, in the philippines, in parts of europe, in venezuela. And in the United States. And were seeing people who use a playbook that is that predates this by 2,000 years. And it is to attack independent observers, the press, to scapegoat minority groups and to , wrap your ideology in the symbols of patriotism. Well, the charlottesville, where the crowd in 2017, when part of the crowd was chanting jews will not replace us, the president , as you know, as we all know, responded that there were fine people, fine people on both sides. Right. What do you think about that . I mean, one of the, i mean, one of the things about the drift toward totalitarian rule is that it is a drift and every human being has a limited capacity for outrage. And when outrage fatigue sets in, then the field begins to clear for the demagogue to move forward with his and it is always a man, it seems with his program. Marshall yeah. I mean, i think one of the things that was so shocking to me, when i saw this footage, was not that there were antisemitic leaders. Theres always going to be sort of a fringe element. But to see the crowd. That was what shook me. And to see 20,000 new yorkers who im a new yorker. These are my neighbors. Im sure that they were nice same as in nuremburg. Marshall to see them. They dropped off their kids with the babysitters and they put on suits and hats and they went to a rally and just sort of laughed and cheered as the spectacle unfolded in front of them. And to me, that was the thing that i really felt was so striking about it, is that there are regular people who can be lured into ideas like this. And there are good people who dont speak up when they see it. And so i hoped that by reminding people of what happened in 1939, when these kinds of things happened, that, you know, it would sort of sharpen our sensitivities today. Tell us a little bit about greenebaum, the jew who charges up on stage and says, ok, maybe you guys are all gonna sit here. I am not. I am not going to sit here and listen to this. I am going to try and get the leader of bund off the stage, throw him off the stage. Its an act of conscience. Its a brave act because there were 20,000 people there who were hostile to what he was doing, right . Who was he and what became of him . And why have we not heard more about him . Marshall he was a jewish plumbers assistant from brooklyn who just went that night. Was not planning on trying to disrupt the event. Just wanted to see what was going on. And was so outraged by what he was hearing that he just felt like he had to go out on stage and try to do something. He was arrested that night. And he had to pay a fine the next day. It was a fine for disturbing the peace. Had to pay a 25 fine, which was not inconsequential then. And at his sentencing, the judge said to him, dont you realize that someone could have been hurt from what you did . And he said, dont you realize that someone could be hurt from what was being said up on stage . Whats gonna happen . I think he said some jews in europe could be hurt or elsewhere by that. In fact, it turned out to be six million. Theres something so chilling to me about this event being before most of the killings had begun. And to have a snapshot of what life is like, none of the people probably in that room almost no one in the world could have imagined what was about to unfold. And yet it did unfold. Theres something so emotionally powerful to me about thinking about your life and saying, where are we going . And greenbaum, he ended up joining the military. He was in world war ii. And later he was interviewed by people who said, you know, how did you summon the courage to go out on stage . And he said, gee, what would you have done . But the fact is that most people in such situations will be bystanders. The one who decides that people need to know about this, or when i was in berlin covering germany, a barracks was renamed for sergeant schmidt, who almost alone in lithuania had witnessed the mass killings of jews and had decided to try to help them. And he was promptly executed. But he where to his wife, much like that, that he could not act any differently, that he just physically could not. So there are people whose consciences will not be quieted. Marshall its funny, when the film came out, his grandson got in touch with me. Wed been talking about whether there would be some way of honoring Isadore Greenbaum, a park named after him or Something Like that. And theres nothing. Marshall no. Forgotten to history. But i have a couple of slides. Theres a photo of him from later. Im going to jump through. This is the article from the New York Times of when greenbaum was fined. Stars and stripes, the military magazine, did a profile of him during world war ii and somehow the story became that he had landed a punch on fritz kuhn before being taken out. So here he is rubbing his fists. Such a good story. I mean, the attack in the documentary, i mean, kuhn takes aim, the bund leader, at the jewish controlled press. Right now, its the failing New York Times, its the fake news, New York Times. Its enemies of the people, weve heard from the white house several times, which is a phrase of pure totalitarian pedigree. They were used by mao and stalin. How worrying do you see these attacks on the press . Once you give up the ability to agree on facts, then your ability to negotiate differences of opinion become impossible. So its very frightening, i think. Because there in the movie, you see all these people saluting the image of washington, and then next to it, theres the swastikas. Marshall right. Which those swastikas in that context are a complete negation of everything that we stand for as americans, of freedom, of a free press, checks and balances, independent judiciary. Marshall right. And there you have it, right . Marshall the First Amendment of our constitution is respect for religious minorities, respect for the press, respect for the right to protest. And yet somehow an event that is sold out front as a proamerica rally, could disrespect all three of those institutions so violently. Perhaps you could show some f the New York Times coverage, reporting on the rally. You know, we ill say we. We play it kind of right down the middle. No sense of outrage. There was a rally. This was said. Greenbaum tried to stop it. He went before a magistrate. The magistrate said to him, well, you behaved irresponsibly. People could get hurt. Greenbaum made this comment about, well, a lot more people could get hurt in europe if you allow this kind of thing. There is absolutely nothing in the piece, as i read it, in which you could detect any viewpoint whatsoever of the paper. This, of course, prescients the New York Timess great failings in covering the holocaust. How do you see, you know, that copy . How did it strike you . Marshall i will say, one of the wonderful things about having a New York Times subscription, is that you have Digital Access through their website of every newspaper that theyve ever printed. So now you have no excuse, ok . Marshall and it can be a rabbit hole if you find something that youre interested in, because just to see the juxtapositions of articles and to see, you know, the advertisements next to the article, so this is inside the inside. And theres a little bit more, a little bit more depth here. And in fact, they cover it again the next day a little bit as well. But youre right. They basically report the news. And though they do include points of view, strong points of view, in quotes throughout. And that was also something that i thought was interesting about the debate over this event felt extremely contemporary. I mean, there was a big question. Should this kind of thing be permitted . And one of the leading jewish groups said, these people are antisemites. Theyre antidemocratic. But the difference between the United States and fascist germany is that, in america, even idiots are allowed to say what they think. And mayor laguardia sort of dismissed the whole thing with a sort of humorous sneer where he said that the gathering that night was the largest assembly of international cooties ever under one roof. And he said, in the way that you kill cooties is with sunlight. So were gonna let them say what they think and were gonna counter them with righteousness and truth. And though there were, also to be fair, people who said, ok, in america you can say what you want. But should you be given Madison Square garden as the place to be able to say it . Which i think kind of mirrors a lot of the debates that are happening on College Campuses and places like that, where people say, sure, you can say what you want, but show be shouldnt you be given, you know, school money . Should you be given a School Auditorium to say these things . Just even the subtleties of the debate that were having now, were happening in 1939. Tell us a little bit about what happened to the bund. What happened to this movement . Did it fizzle quickly or not . It you know, it never was a mainstream movement. It was always a little bit fringe. But if you have a rally where 20,000 people show up, you know that there are a lot more people than that who support your ideology and even more who sort of passively accept it. And i think that that is thats the real lesson of this time, was that you had father coughlin, whose comments on the radio in favor of mussolini and hitler were reaching 30 million americans and you had people like henry ford and lindbergh and hurst who were sympathetic to antisemitism and fascism. But they were never probably a majority point of view. But they were accepted. It was part of the discourse of normal people. And i think what happened is when world war ii happened and suddenly, you know, this is 1939, so its still a couple more years later before japan bombs pearl harbor and we get involved in world war ii. But once that happened, and people with swastikas started killing american kids, i think we suddenly decided this was not an acceptable point of view anymore, and it was not and it took that . And it took that to get to that point. So for the bund, they had power. They didnt just have this event. They also this is 86th street on october 30. Big rally on 86th street. They had camps in new jersey and pennsylvania, out to wisconsin. Summer camps for kids to come. And it was frighteningly mainstream but still relatively fringe. I think partly it was fringe because it was german. And so, you know, you can even hear, fritz kuhn has this german accent and there are probably a lot of people who didnt particularly like germans, who werent gonna be lured into joining that. But that also is another thing thats so frightening about this kind of movement today, is that its so american. They know how to navigate the internet. They know how to be sarcastic and funny and mean in these ways that like you said, the movement today, what exactly are you referring to . Marshall i mean, just sympathetic to fascism and all of it, you know, whether its antisemitism or antimuslim or just destructive of americas social fabric, destructive of checks and balances, destructive of the press. I think that they have theres a famous saying from this time period that when fascism comes to america, it wont have a stamp on it that says made in germany. It wont have swastikas. It wont even be called fascism. It will be called americanism. And that is that is where we are. Marshall thats the warning. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, its striking again that fritz kuhn calls for United States to be returned to its essence, which he describes as white, gentile america, against the subversion of the jews. And today we have attacks on brown people. We have attacks on mexicans as rapists. We have attacks on muslims. And in a way, perhaps you can view some of what is happening in our country as a white reaction against the demographics of the 21st century. So, again, do you i dont want to push this too far, but do you see parallels of that kind . Marshall i do. I mean, i dont want to i want people to watch the film. Theres a reason that it doesnt have subtitles, that i dont cut back and forth between modern politics. I want people to look at it openly and say to themselves, is there something in here that feels familiar to me . And if so, is there something that i should be doing about that . What about the counterargument, you know, were up here chatting. Times isork times close still around. We Just Announced record results. Our institutions are intact. Three years into the current presidency. And, you know, to even begin to worry along the lines that were doing right now up here on stage is just farfetched and probably people who take a different view would say fatuous. Marshall i think those were the conversations they were having in 1939. In fact, there were protesters handing out flyers. I wish we had a scan of it. But well put it on our website. The film is online at anightatthegarden. Com. There are additional photos and background information. The pamphlet that people were all handing out said act now, before the camps get out of control or some phrase like that. When i saw it, i thought, i bet people thought these people were crazy, who were handing these out. I bet they were seen as fringey fanatics, to shop outside this event and making a big hoopla about this kooky, tiny group, talking about death camps. Nobody is gonna do death camps. Its not to say that that is our future, but we dont know what our future is. Things could have been different in the United States, if roosevelt wasnt the president , if the japanese were or roosenfelt, as they called him. Marshall exactly. If japanese had not bombed pearl harbor, we could have easily skated through and not gotten involved in world war ii and the world would be very different. You know, theres phillip rothbuck, the plot against america, which has just been made into either a film or a series im not sure on hbo that i saw the trailer for. Somebody a few people have sent me the trailer, because it has a couple of shots in it from the rally. And so and, you know, its counterfactual history. Its what could. But thats what we know of history, is history is made by people who do things or dont do things. And when lots of people do things or dont do things, history goes this way or it goes that way. Its written by us. What sort of reaction did you get did you get a big reaction . I know there was a column in the New York Times. [laughter] other than that. Was there the sort of wonderment, incredulity, and frankly preoccupation that assailed me when i watched it. Did you feel that this was a widespread that people were somehow aghast on a significant scale . Marshall i think they were. We put it up our goal initially was just get this into the world. We want people to see this story. Thats one of the reasons we made it short. We wanted people to be able to watch it on the internet and send it to somebody and say, you gotta spend seven minutes and watch this thing. And we encouraged people to pirate it. We put it on youtube and facebook and anywhere that wanted it. We were happy for them to get it out. Its my goal that this footage would be like the footage of, you know, activists being hosed in the south. Something that is everybody has seen in america thats a part of every High School History class in america. And is not a condemnation is it shown in any high schools . Marshall i think it is, yes. Yes, ive heard from schools that are showing it. And it isnt a condemnation of things that weve done in the past as much as it is a warning for the future. And i would love for it to continue to find more and more audiences. Weve spoken a couple times about checks and balances. This week, the president was acquitted. The Supreme Court is what it is today. Do you feel that these checks and balances are still firmly intact . Shall i i hear mumblings of no. Marshall yeah. It feels like we are letting the sand run through our hands. And not taking seriously the threats that are facing our institutions. I remember that you asked what happened to fritz kuhn in the end. And he eventually, once world war ii started, he was arrested for having embezzled money from the bund. [laughter] surprise, yeah. We dont want to overdue the parallel. [laughter] marshall but he and eventually the bund was shut down. He was actually stripped of his citizenship and deported to germany after world war ii, where he died ultimately in obscurity there. One other interesting thing about the bund was that hitler actually did not want the bund to be too active in the United States. And fritz kuhn billed himself as the american fuhrer. But hitler understood that it was to his advantage to be able to build power in europe without awakening america to the threat. And he knew that if fritz kuhn was having events like this, and the New York Times was writing articles about it and people were showing up to protest it, that it made it more likely that america would stand up to him. So i thought that was interesting. I think were going to take i think were going to take some questions here. From 1945 on, the United States rebuilt the world, rebuilt the architecture of the world and has been, for all our failings, and god knows we have a lot of failings, but the United States has been a kind of moral arbiter. It has been a counterweight to those who wanted to move in a dictatorial direction, those who were grossly abusiving human rights, those who didnt care about a free press, those who didnt believe in what we believe in and what is enshrined in the constitution. Right now the United States, in that role, at least in my view, has gone awol. It just isnt there. We dont really mind what muhammad bin salman does or whats going on in moscow or just about anywhere. How serious is that . I find it serious. And upsetting. I mean, im not a im a documentary filmmaker. [laughter] thats no excuse. But, yes, i am very concerned about the direction of the country. And i hope to shine light on places where people arent paying attention. Great. Now ive been handed a few questions. And the first one i have in front of me is, how do you think the people who attended the rally reacted when the United States declared war on germany . An interesting question. I mean, i could only guess as much as anybody in this room could guess. I do think that when the United States did declare war, and there were a lot of people who probably hid their pamphlet of their the thing that they got at the rally that night, the program from the rally. Suddenly they thought, oh, this is not ok anymore. But, of course, ideas dont disappear so quickly. You know, you can say these are socially unacceptable and people will stop talking about them. And sometimes i think thats an important step. But i think it would be foolish to think that, you know, as soon as world war ii began, suddenly american sympathy for these kinds of ideas just somehow vanished. It couldnt be. Do you know if there were any prominent government attendees at this rally . Were there any prominent nongovernment attendees . I dont know the answer to that. I dont know whether there were i feel like if there were prominent attendees, the New York Times would have written about it. [laughter] but there were yeah. Im not sure. Ok. Were german americans put in internment camps like japanese americans . You know, one of the interesting things about the fritz kuhn story that he had a citizenship stripped from him and was sent back, is that i found myself, as a liberal, feeling a little bit mixed about that. On one hand, i thought, good, that he should have been sent away. And on the other hand, i thought, hmm. A system where somebody from another country, who is an american citizen, who says an unpopular idea can have his citizenship stripped, not a great system. So i dont know. I felt that strange feeling of mixed appreciation and fear when i heard that. And do you know the specific answer to the question . Of the internment camp . I dont know about internment camps. Im not sure either. Sounds like somebody does. Maybe somebody does. How did the government how did the u. S. Government react to american sympathy for naziism . Something like this rally . I mean roosevelt spoke out aggressively against it and was targeted by them as well. Pretty aggressively. So, you know, he was a very outspoken leader on that topic. I think that there were other people, and mayor laguardia as well. I think that there were leaders who stood up and said, this is not american values. These are not our american values. But i think that there were lots of other folks who were more tried to thread the needle a little bit. Even people who may not have agreed with all of the ideas, didnt want to upset potential voters and, you know, wanted to keep people in their camp. Do you think people at the rally were specifically drawn toward german naziism or more generally to White Supremacy . I think it was largely german. So the group was the germanamerican bund, and there was a lot of it was about germany. But i dont think it ended with that. It was a wider thing. You know, one of the things, when i was making the film, that i was trying to do when i first had the idea to make a film, i thought i would have historians explain the background. And instead, just kind of one evening i decided, let me just see what this would be like if i cut it like i cut a if i edit it like i edit a documentary where youre just dropped into a world and you have no explanation for what it is and youre just trying to figure out what is going on. So i tried to build it with a series of to prompt a series of questions from the audience that then are undercut. So, you know, it begins with this strange crowd gathered. The billing outside says its a proamerica rally. You get inside and you think, oh, i see american flags. This must be some sort of patriotic event. But wait. Are those swastikas i see there . Then you think, oh, wait, its 1939, so maybe the swastika didnt have the same significance that it does now. And the leader gets up on stage and begins saying the things that he said. And you think, oh, no, that crowd is reacting positively to those things. But maybe thats just, you know, spectacle. If there were theres a big difference between an idea and seeing actual violence. Im sure these people, if actual violence was laid out in front of them, would recoil. And then a protester runs out on stage and is savagely beaten. And the pan across the crowd of people laughing and cheering reminds you i found when i was watching this footage that i kept wanting to make excuses for the audience. And i tried to edit it in a way that sort of systematically undercut those excuses until you realize, we are creatures that can be swayed. And we can have dark passions whipped up in if us. Theres a shot that i noticed in the background of one of the shots, of one of the frames, of a little boy who is watching Isadore Greenbaum getting beaten up and he rubs his hands together and does this sort of jig. It says so much about the frailty of human beings, the thrill of being in a mob and having this kind of thing, you know, stirred up in us. So that shot, i actually zoomed in and reframed that shot to try to highlight him in there. That look of complete terror and anguish and stup efaction on greenbaums face. It reminded me of the famous photo of the jewish boy, just that dismay, terror. That was a pretty radical artistic decision to cut everything but the footage. Would you edit my next book . [laughter] when i did it, i was also a little bit worried that people that, you know, the sort of alt right would use this as a propaganda tool to say, look at this glorious time when america knew our values and did these great events. Was there any of that . There was a little bit. But, you know, one of the as a filmmaker, you have tools in your tool belt. So, you know, the sound design and the music that i used was very intentional to even though theres no academic who is expressing a point of view, the film has a point of view. And so the original music, when theyre marching in, is this boom boom, marshal, upbeat, jaunty music. I had this drone. You yeah. I was. I thought of it for sure. I thought of it. But i just thought there was a power in dropping an audience into this event with no explanation and just saying, hey, what do you notice . Well, its its extremely powerful, i think. Because you are a bit lost at the beginning. Its a miniature voyage of discovery and very powerful for that. I have a question here which i dont know what the reference is. Could you comment on camps, long island . I cant. Is that a bund yeah. So i think that there were a number of bund camps, sort of like the ones here. And, yeah, they were in wisconsin, new jersey, pennsylvania. And all the way out to california, there were places where they had similar gatherings. And this gets back to the point you were making about the expulsion of fritz kuhn after the war. A similar point about the essence of liberalism and free speech. Somebody asks, although i condemn that this happened, does the free speech and assembly allow such rallies . I think that was the debate they were having. My debate is, yes, people should be allowed to say things like this. I think theres questions about how what sorts of institutions should give people platforms to say things like this. And i think that was a lot of what was being debated at the time. I think maybe theres a New York Times oh. Actually, it is on the 80th anniversary of the rally, february 29 of last year, we did a projection on the outside of Madison Square garden, on a loop of the film. It was pretty extraordinary to see people walk by and look up and, of course, Madison Square garden now is in a different place than it was in 1939. It was a different location. But the sort of iconography of the most famous arena in the world being used for this. It was a powerful event of new yorkers just walking by and looking up and saying, what is that . What happened . People were given out leaflets to explain the history of what happened. There was this sort of eerie sense of ghosts coming from 1939, out of the walls to warn us. Marshall, how outraged should we be when president ial candidates call working class people deplorables, and when president s talk disparagingly about people with their bibles and guns . Ah. I mean, we could get into a we could spend the night discussing that. To be one thing, in terms of sort of correcting historical records, the deplorables line, if anybody reads the deplorables line, the point that Hillary Clinton was making was not that everybody who supports donald trump is a deplorable. In fact, she was making exactly the opposite point. She said that many of the people, most of the people are good, hardworking, decent people, who are being, you know, who are being who are attracted to what hes saying. There is a group that she called the basket of deplorables, but she was very clear to differentiate between a group of people who i think everybody would agree, there are people who support all these candidates who are deplorable. I mean, the people in charlottesville are deplorable. Thats not controversial. So just i think its important for us, you know, particularly as lovers of history, to make sure that statements that are taken out of context dont become accepted as a mainstream understanding of politics. I think the deeper, perhaps lying deeper in that question is the question, do we liberals in new york just fail to get the rest of the country and whats going on in it . And why, you know, half the country more or less seems so close to, you know, 40 to 50 , see whats going on in a radically different way . I mean, i live in new york. But i used to live in north carolina. My parents are from south carolina. I have many friends who are trump supporters, who i disagree with, but i make documentaries. Im curious about why people do what they do and think what they think. Im genuinely curious about that. I think thats important to understand for sure. So i its enough to sit around a dinner table in new york and sneer at people, for sure. But, yeah, i think its incredibly important to understand why americans think what they think and believe what they believe. I dont think that that should be the end of the conversation either, though. No. Do you know who shot the footage . Do you see images reminiscent and this gets back to what i said do you see images reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl . Yes. Well, i think Leni Riefenstahl is the famous filmmaker who shot nuremburg and so many nazi propaganda films. As far as i understand, the footage of the protests outside were shot by newsreels. But the footage inside was shot by the bund themselves. Who was planning, i assume, you know, there are many different camera angles where they were shooting expensive film. It was not just a trivial matter to film this much footage from this many perspectives. I assume they were planning to make a Leni Riefenstahl type triumph of will movie about how exciting the bund was. Somebody has quoted sinclair lewis, saying, quote, when fascism comes to the United States, it will come with the cross, wrapped in the flag. Is this dire warning as true now as it was then . I mean, like i said, the thing that struck me so much about this footage was the use of patriotic symbolism, iconography of flags and the pledge of allegiance, which incidentally, a lot of people have noted that under god was not part of the pledge of allegiance. That wasnt added until the 1950s. That was not part of the original pledge of allegiance. It wasnt just because the bund left it out. It was actually an addition that came later. So, yes, i mean, that was one of the things that really struck me, was george washington, the pledge of allegiance, starspangled banner, all of these things can be used to sell ideologies that are against our constitution and most peoples american values. One more. Who owned Madison Square garden in 1939 and gave permission for the rally . [laughter] that is a question i should have off the tip of my tongue and i dont. Yeah. And one thing i have thought a lot about over the last few years is the whole question of truth. And, you know, obviously in the movie you see wild propaganda, this takeover. And truth has been a casualty of the sheer torrent of either outright lies or misrepresentations coming out of the white house and this administration. But its also true that, you know, a lot of the country thinks that right now, this is the most honest president that the United States has ever had. Why . Because he tells it like it is. And he does exactly what he said he would do, whether its iran, or moving the embassy to jerusalem. So you have half the country that thinks its absolutely obvious that this is the most dishonest president ever, and a big chunk of the country that thinks hes the most honest. And the whole question of truth and what is true, theres a kind of unbearable lightness, to quote, about life these days and nothing seems so much gravity by the end of january, the fact that we almost went to war with iran, has been more or less completely forgotten. Three weeks have elapsed and its gone. So how did we last question. How did we reach this point, this dangerous point in my view, where the distinction between truth and falsehood is in danger of disappearing . I think like all these things, its a slow erosion. Its tiny chips. Each one of them doesnt seem significant on its own. Suddenly you wake up and youre in a different place. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, marshall. [applause] good good evening, everyone. Im dale gregory. We want to thank you, Marshall Curry, roger cohen, this evening for the work that you both do. There wont be a book signing tonight but we want to invite everyone back to more programs. We love having our auditorium filled. And well try as we always do to give everyone something to think about. So thank you so much. Lets give them another big hand. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] a state dinner at the white house. The Vice President and mrs. Lyndon johnson are among those who attended. Americaneekend, on history tv, the 1962 film, firm withs alliance, president john kennedy and first Lady Jacqueline kennedy. I speak of behalf of all of my fellow americans in welcoming you to the United States. The interests of both of us is the same, to maintain our , and to provide a better life for our people. On American History tv on cspan3. Our cspan cities tour takes American History tv on the road to take a history of cities across america. Here is a recent program. Established in 1926, route 66 was one of the original highways in the u. S. Highway system, carrying motorists over 2400 miles from chicago, illinois to