This final book in a monumental history of New York City was worth the wait

Wallace writes, “Throughout 1938 polls showed consistently that 71-85 percent of Americans opposed increasing the immigration quotas.” The country was still in the grip of the Great Depression, with nine million unemployed that winter, many Americans didn’t want German Jews coming over here to compete with them for jobs.

It was very obvious Jews remaining in Germany were in mortal peril. Despite that a 1939 poll asked “if they would vote on opening the doors if they were members of Congress, 85 percent of Protestants, 84 percent of Catholics, and an astonishing 25.8 percent of Jews said they’d vote no.”

Things were playing out in Gotham: “Feb. 20, 1939, Madison Square Garden was packed with Nazis ostensibly there to celebrate George Washington’s birthday... there was a towering portrait of Washington flanked by giant black swastikas and U.S. flags.”

Fascists gathering inside were dwarfed by the crowd of protesters outside, one hundred thousand New Yorkers waving signs that read “Drive the Nazis out of New York.” Police restrained them from going after the Nazis.

Meanwhile the Fascist Benito Mussolini was doing bad stuff in Italy. New York City was filled with Italian immigrants and many of them felt great nationalistic pride in the Italian dictator known as ‘Il Duce."

Wallace states “New York’s Italian districts supported Fascism far more enthusiastically than Gotham’s Germans did Nazism.” In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, claiming it as an Italian colony. Aggression, invasion, declarations that other countries belonged to them, the wheel of history can be very repetitious.

Wallace takes us through a fascinating surrogate confrontation between Italy and Africa that took place in New York City. Blacks in Harlem were in an uproar over Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and these tensions were playing out in an unusual venue; Yankee Stadium.

The African American boxer Joe Louis fought the Italian boxer Primo Carnera there that day. Louis demolished Carnera. Wallace sets the scene, “even as a long line of slow moving cars of white patrons was leaving the fight, throngs of Black boys 10 or 12 years of age, raced in and out, shouting ‘let’s get Mussolini next.’”

We are not even up to page 50 yet. What a book-such a timely reminder that Americans will always fight back against fascism.