The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising against Nazism

252 Pages·2019·2.78 MB·English

by  Peter Duffy

Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Peter Duffy
Jacket design by Pete Garceau
Jacket photographs: Swastika flag aboard the SS Bremen: Jimmy Condon/NY
Daily News Archive via Getty Images; identification of William Bailey courtesy
of the author
Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: March 2019
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018052360
ISBNs: 978-1-5417-6231-2 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-6232-9 (ebook)
E3-20190130-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Index
To El
PROLOGUE
“A
ND THEN,” AS Virgil wrote, “were portents given of earth and ocean.”
New York City had been suffering for three weeks under the worst heat wave
in thirty-four years. Hundreds of thousands were flocking each day to the
beaches at Coney Island and the Rockaways in search of a little relief. The
newspapers printed lists of those who died from the heat, drowned attempting to
escape it, or were so overcome they had to be revived. At least one suicide was
recorded. A Riverside Drive physician, “his nerves worn ragged by his inability
to get cool,” leaped to his death from a fifth-floor apartment.
But the weather had broken. A series of rain showers swept through the city
followed by a blast of cool wind from the north. By nightfall on Friday, July 26,
1935, the temperature hovered around 70 degrees. There was a slight breeze in
the air.
Bill Bailey, dressed uncharacteristically in a dark suit, striped tie, and Panama
hat, was ready for his mission.
Bailey was a young merchant seaman with the grittiest of proletarian
occupations, working with the “black gang” in the belly of a ship, “eating,
drinking, and breathing in the smoke and gas of the engine room,” as he later
wrote. In this primordial epoch before his nose turned bulbous and his face
craggy, “Big Bill” was towering and handsome, if salty of demeanor and tattered
of clothing. His accent identified him as a New York Irishman of shanty lineage.
He would orate from his soapbox about wealthy capitalists enjoying filet mignon
while “we’re down here eating boint liva.” This, in his heavy Jimmy Cagney
brogue, was how you pronounced “burnt liver.”
Just twenty, Bailey had been a shoeless newsboy, grammar school dropout,
juvenile delinquent, panhandler, turnstile jumper, insubordinate dockworker,
stowaway, hobo, vagrant, thief, reformatory inmate, drunk, “lyin’ son of a bitch,”
apprentice sailor, and connoisseur of the pleasures of the harbor. His life was
transformed when he was working as a fireman (operating the oil burners to
generate steam to power the ship) on a freighter traveling between New York
and London. He was so outraged over the mistreatment of a stowaway of color,
“so naïve, so trusting, so beautiful at heart,” that he joined the Communist-led
Marine Workers Industrial Union and, shortly thereafter, the Communist Party
itself.
During the torrid days of July 1935, Bailey was mired “on the beach” without
a ship. Broke and homeless, he was sleeping on the benches of the old
International Workers Order hall on Union Square.
He had plenty of time to huddle with fellow unemployed seamen of leftist
bent and discuss the civilizational assault that Adolf Hitler was conducting
before the eyes of newspaper and radio correspondents who were relaying the
news to the world. Over the previous few months, the Nazi state had launched its
second major anti-Jewish onslaught since Hitler was elevated to power two and a
half years earlier, proof that the initial-stage actions against Jews in March 1933
were just the beginning of the promised eradication of an existential foe. The
Hitler government was also attracting international attention with strictures
against the last vestiges of antiregime sentiment, targeting groups as varied as
far-right paramilitaries of non-Nazi allegiance and professional comedians who
lacked proper deference for regime leaders. The front pages blared the news
about a months-long drive against the Catholic Church. Of particular note to the
radicals on the waterfront, the Nazi government seized an American sailor from
a US-flagged liner in Hamburg and threw him in a concentration camp for
plotting to circulate antiregime printed materials.
“Something had to be done,” Bailey said.
The SS Bremen was the flagship of Hitler’s commercial armada, a technical and
aesthetic marvel regarded by the world as the waterborne embodiment of
German nationhood. It was the most popular of the European passenger liners,
the “floating palaces” that traveled between Europe and the United States in the
first half of the 1930s, boasting the highest percentage of berths filled of any
competitor on the Atlantic run. The ship was a “vast seagoing cathedral of steel,”
in the conception of its builders. “The Great Pyramid of Gizeh out for a stroll,”
declared the New Yorker.
The Bremen steamed twice a month into New York Harbor, easing with slow-
moving grandeur into the Hudson River slip reserved for the Fatherland’s
premier vessel along what was known as “luxury liner row.” The area around
Pier 86, which extended a thousand feet into the river from the foot of West
Forty-Sixth Street, was a tiny province of the Third Reich with bars, restaurants,
shops, and newsstands catering to a German-speaking clientele. Here, on the
western edge of Manhattan Island, European civilization touched American soil
(or cracked cobblestone) in the era before the standardization of air travel, before
the transatlantic jets at LaGuardia and Kennedy.
On the night in question, at the height of the Great Depression and more than
four years before the start of World War II, the Bremen was hosting a “midnight
sailing,” a cherished tradition of the European superliners during interwar New
York. A few thousand guests paid a nominal fee to come aboard and imbibe with
departing passengers like it was New Year’s Eve. The bon voyage party lasted
until the last woozy guests were shoved ashore and the ship backed into the river
at the celebratory height of the gaiety at midnight. Anyone properly attired could
join the bash whether they had an acquaintance on board or not. The topside
areas with views of the shimmering cityscape resembled a packed subway train
at rush hour.
It would later be estimated that 4,800 nonpassengers had boarded the ship for
the affair. With the addition of 1,300 passengers and a thousand German crew
members, the population on the Bremen hovered around 7,000. The revelers
included a Hollywood movie star, a delegation of Protestant clergymen, a
Rockefeller heiress, the new US ambassador to Norway, a future secretary of the
navy, a collection of wealthy financiers, the governor of Pennsylvania, a
Honduran nobleman, a Chicago meatpacking mogul, and the two-year-old
grandson of the president of the United States.
On the stretch of shoreline under the looming bow of the forward-facing ship,
a few thousand anti-Nazi activists gathered to protest the mounting crisis in the
Third Reich, chanting slogans, holding signs, and delivering speeches. “Arise ye
prisoners of starvation!” they sang, using that era’s translation of “The
Internationale.” “Arise ye wretched of the earth!” The ranks included
communists and socialists, anarchists and social democrats, high school students
and old-timers, concerned citizens and cranks, gentiles and Jews, and, a rarity in
those days of bedrock racism, blacks standing alongside whites.