The Harvard Marching Bund – Antisemitism at Cambridge

This month, we at History, Rinse & Repeat celebrated, with no fanfare, a significant milestone.  It was last October that we posted our first piece, Kowtow vs. Fist Bump: How A Greeting Can Overshadow The Substance Of A Diplomatic Mission, a piece we shamelessly reprise at any opportunity.  We have been publishing at this site for more than a year.  Throughout that year, we have had one cardinal rule -- to meet our deadlines.  Although we have relaxed our schedule over the summer, we have kept to it no matter the circumstances.

Until this week.  We apologize.  Our lapse is, in part, due to our failure to adopt a sitewide maternity policy prior to this summer.  We have been training our newest staff member on the fly, and we, or more particularly, A.H., have discovered that orientation is a far more difficult task than expected.  Our lapse is also due to the gravity of the situation still unfolding in Israel.  To be frank, we are intimidated by the task of writing something that can provide significant insight into a situation so dreadful. 

However, we are up to commenting on news closer to home, and the strange embrace of antisemitism by diverse groups across the country, even if it is only in a short, impromptu post in honor of our anniversary.  Of personal interest to this site have been stories coming out of Harvard, from which both A.H. and I graduated, where the administration has vacillated and temporized in response to events of October 7^th, and where much of the student body has expressed robust support for Hamas and the massacre that it perpetrated. 

Harvard’s latest vacillation was its announcement, last week, that it had created a task force to support students purportedly harassed for their support of Hamas’s actions in Israel.  It would be fitting if Harvard could pay for this task force, which will assist those who condoned or justified the murder, torture, rape, and mutilation of innocents, including children and infants, from the funds it saved when it forced the resignation of Laurence Summers, for the far more heinous crime of suggesting there might be innate differences between the sexes.  However, this is not the only task force that President Gay has created.  Last week, she also announced the creation of another task force to study Harvard’s long and well-known history of antisemitism, perhaps in the hope that the highlighting of historical antisemitism would distract attention from its current incarnation and that the unspoken bias reflected in apparent quotas applied to current Jewish applicants will appear more benign in comparison to the overt bias expressed by President A. Lawrence Lowell almost a century ago, when he openly proposed a formal quota system to effect that same end.  To confuse matters even more, President Gay announced, just today, the creation of yet another body, an advisory committee, to advise her on the issue of antisemitism (If necessary, this site will update this article to provide a table of President Gay’s various task forces and advisory committees, categorized into columns as either antisemitic or anti-antisemitic.)

The controversy that continues at Harvard results from the university’s equivocal response to the horrific carnage that took place on October 7^th.  However, equivocation in the face of antisemitism is nothing new at Harvard.  Lowell’s successor at Harvard, James Bryant Conant, famously refused to take a stand through most of the 1930s against the Nazi regime or the policies directed at Jews that it adopted.  As recounted in  Stephen Norwood’s 2004 article, “Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime, 1933-1937,” cited recently by Ira Stoll in the New York Sun, Harvard famously sent a representative to celebrate the 300^th anniversary of the University of Heidelberg, allowed a Nazi wreath, emblazoned with a Swastika, to be presented in Harvard’s Memorial Chapel to honor German war dead, and remained neutral to the proposed appointment of Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, Class of 1909, as an assistant to the Grand Marshall for the 1934 commencement and reunion.  Hanfstaengl, at the time, was a high ranking Nazi and intimate of Hitler; it was in his house that Hitler hid, awaiting arrest, after the Beer Hall Putsch.  In yet another example of history repeating itself, the administration, just prior to the day of the commencement, authorized the campus police to tear down posters protesting Hanfstaengl’s participation in the day’s ceremonies.

However, if Harvard’s administration was equivocal toward the Nazi regime, the student body was not.  Then, as now, Harvard’s student body was far more up front about its antisemitism.  Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, denounced, in an editorial, a mock trial held in New York’s Madison Square Garden that presented “The Case of Civilization Against Hitlerism.”   The Crimson supported the laying of the Swastika wreath in Harvard’s chapel (the gesture reflected “Harvard’s breadth of mind”), the invitation to Hanfstaengl (a “man of ability and distinction”), supported the police’s brutal suppression (‘skull crunching”) of a demonstration that protested the arrival in Boston of a Nazi warship, and criticized Harvard’s decision to not send a delegate to the bicentennial of the University of Göttingen, a decision which Conant reached only after virtually every other American university had declined to attend. 

It can be argued that Harvard’s record with respect to the Nazi regime simply mirrored that of other universities in the United States, particularly Columbia.  However, in one respect Harvard stands alone.  It boasts among its graduates the first American-born member of the Army ever convicted of treason and sentenced to death, Dale Maple, Class of 1941 and Phi Beta Kappa, a sentence (later commuted) that he received for aiding the attempted escape of Nazi prisoners of war from Colorado to Mexico.  One can only wonder whether a student currently matriculating at Harvard might take the baton from Maple.

It is hardly surprising that, in a period where antisemitism was broadly accepted, that Harvard engaged in practices that mirrored the national zeitgeist.  What is sobering, and particularly relevant to a site premised upon history repeating itself, is how little Harvard has changed.

Events at Harvard are not the only ones personal to this site.  Closer to home, we have been observing the pro-Hamas protests in New York City, where A.H. and I have lived almost all of our lives.  Marches steeped in antisemitism have a long history in New York.  In the 1930s, the American Nazi party, or the Bund, frequently held rallies and marches in New York, primarily along East 86^th Street, the heart of what was then a predominantly German neighborhood located around the old Rupert brewery.  Legend has it that many of these marches and rallies were “disrupted,” at the request of certain Jewish leaders, by associates of the famed gangster Meyer Lansky, including members of Murder, Inc.

Many know of the most famous of these rallies, one organized by the Bund in February 1939 and held at Madison Square Garden, attended by more than 22,000 people.  However, that rally does not provide an example of history repeating itself.  Far fewer people know of a rally held later that year, also in Madison Square Garden, also attended by close to 20,000 people, and also extolling the Nazi regime.  This rally was not organized by the American Nazi Party.  Instead, it was organized by the Communist Party of the United States to express public support for the Non-Aggression treaty signed between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, demonstrating that the Left’s embrace of horrific and brutal regimes is hardly new, and that political idiocy is timeless.