All students and scholars of New York City will remain indebted to Mike Wallace for generations to come. Oxford University Press recently released the third—and alas, final—installment of Wallace’s magisterial Gotham series.
Starting with Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham (1998), Wallace and the late Edwin Burrows traced the region’s history from Lenape terrain through the creation of modern New York City. In 2017, Wallace followed up with Greater Gotham, a deep dive into the tumultuous first two decades of the new five-borough metropolis. Wallace’s new Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933-1945 completes the trilogy.
Born soon after the U.S. entered World War II, the Queens native did his graduate work at Columbia University, where he was mentored by Richard Hofstadter, the legendary American political historian. Wallace then became a leading practitioner of social history. Unlike Robert Caro’s classic work The Power Broker (1975), Wallace’s Gotham series views the city from the bottom-up, centering the lives of everyday New Yorkers and frequently spotlighting radical activism.
At an October 8 discussion of the final installment at CUNY’s Gotham Center (which Wallace created in 2001), leftist New York City historian Kim Phillips-Fein called Gotham at War “a testament to the collective power of the city—not only its scholars but all of its people.”
Here is an excerpt of the book.
—Theodore Hamm
On the summer evening of August 21, 1936, just over a month after civil war had erupted in Spain, the Hapag Lloyd liner Bremen had been preparing to depart from Hudson River Pier 86, at the foot of West 46th Street. Unbeknownst to the 3,000 visitors on hand to see off the 800 passengers, among their number were 150 men and women who had sauntered up the gangplank, dressed in evening clothes, but who were not bent on partying.
Around 11:00 p.m., occupants of a car driving slowly past the pier on the West Side Elevated Highway tossed some firecrackers to the street below, a signal for the “visitors” to whip off their outer wraps, revealing white cotton sweaters emblazoned (in red paint) with “Hands off Spain.” They proceeded to march through the ship, passing out handbills, yelling “Hitler must be kept out of Spain.”
Crew members and pier police leapt to the attack, touching off a wild confrontation, with deck chairs swinging and spectators shrieking “Communists!”—correctly, as it turned out. Several of the CP women produced chains and padlocks and affixed themselves to the railing of the first-class decks, and crew members began chopping the chains with axes.
Finally, a large contingent of New York policemen showed up, restored order, and arrested twelve protesters (eight women and four men, including two stenographers, two housewives, two office workers, two unemployed, and a pianist, teacher, pharmacist, and writer).
In the coming months, New York Communists kept ratcheting up the noise level—two days after Thanksgiving, 15,000 paraded from Union Square to the German Consulate at 17 Battery Place, singing the Internationale and carrying banners like “Make Madrid the Tomb of Fascism.” November had brought a still sharper escalation, when, pursuant to a Comintern communiqué newly arrived from Moscow, the Party began seeking volunteers to fight Franco on the battlefields of Spain.
Word was passed along the waterfront and to furrier shops, union halls, ethnic associations, and unemployed organizations, and by early 1937 nearly 1,000 men (of an eventual 2,800) had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Officially it was the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, part of the Fifteenth International Brigade, but “Brigade” was the name that stuck.
Most volunteers were in their twenties. About one in four were from Gotham. The great bulk of the Brigade—over 70 percent—were committed Communists. Over a third were Jews. The brigade included over eighty African Americans, making it the first racially integrated military unit in US history.
Students were the biggest white-collar contingent—eighty-eight members of the American Student Union served—second in numbers only to volunteers from the maritime trades, with their long tradition of radicalism. Sailor Bill Bailey had taken part in an earlier CP protest on the Bremen (in July 1935), during which he had slashed down its black swastika flag; now Bailey signed up for service in a machine gun company.
Lincoln Brigade recruits convened several nights a week at hired halls like the Manhattan Lyceum (68 East 4th Street) and the Spartacus Club (269 West 25th Street), where they drilled with broomstick-rifles. The first group sailed the day after Christmas 1936 on the Normandie, traveling as “tourists,” their real mission forbidden by US law.
By February 1937 the first 450 had been hurried into the Battle of Jarama, where they helped win Madrid’s defenders a temporary respite at a cost of 120 dead and 175 wounded. By late November Franco’s advance had been stymied. Both sides settled in for a long and ferocious war.
From the war’s opening days in 1936, Catholic clerics and publications in New York, already hyper-sensitized by events in Mexico, responded to the violent anticlericalism, and growing Soviet involvement, by unequivocally supporting the Nationalist insurrection.
Local Jesuits were quickest off the mark. Francis X. Talbot, editor of the Jesuit magazine America, was a man of monarchical inclinations with close connections to the Spanish Right. He declared that Franco was not a fascist; that he sought only to bring a Catholic order to power in Spain; and that those who criticized him were simply “lovers of communism and Sovietism.”
Equally adamant in defense of the Nationalists was Patrick Scanlan, managing editor since 1917 of The Brooklyn Tablet (as The Tablet was called between 1931 and 1939), the official weekly voice of the Brooklyn Diocese. In the 1920s, Scanlan—when not inveighing against the evils of jazz, immodest dress, and contraception—had battled the Ku Klux Klan in the US.
In the 1930s, from his paper’s perch in the Williamsburg Savings Bank skyscraper, Scanlan told his 50,000 readers—overwhelmingly working-class, Irish Catholic Brooklynites—that not only was the Spanish conflict an Armageddon between atheistic communism and Christian civilization, but that the Nationalists were liberal democrats—the equivalents of “our Patriots of 1776”—and that Franco was the George Washington of Spain.
Another Brooklynite, the Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, pastor of St. Stephen’s Church (on Summit and Hicks in Red Hook), was even more proactive. Curran, who held a PhD from Fordham and a law degree from St. Lawrence, was Dean of Brooklyn’s Cathedral College until he left in 1932 to head the International Catholic Truth Society. Headquartered at 407 Bergen Street in Brooklyn since its founding in 1899, the ICTS had labored to refute calumnies against the Catholic faith.
In 1936, the Society established an American Committee against Communism (ACC), also directed by Curran, which dispatched hundreds of Catholic girls across the city to collect funds for medical supplies to send to Franco’s forces. In May 1937 the ACC cosponsored a mass rally at Madison Square Garden (approved by Cardinal Hayes and Bishop Molloy), at which speakers glorified the insurgents and minimized the butchery at Guernica and a choir sang a processional hymn, composed for the occasion, which asserted: “Now again over Spain, Hangs the Hammer of Hell, And the Sickle of the Bolshevik, And the Anarch’s evil spell.”
There were dissenters from this orthodoxy in New York, and Dorothy Day was among the first. As early as September 1936, Day argued in the Catholic Worker that the Spanish situation was nowhere as clear cut as Talbot, Scanlan, and Curran were arguing. The Worker reprinted assessments from knowledgeable European sources—notably the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain—that disputed those coming from the Spanish clergy.
Day also argued that the defenders of the Nationalist–Nazi alliance should look closely at Hitler’s persecution of German Catholics. Nor should New York Catholics uncritically back the Nationalists, Day counseled, as they, too, were committing horrendous crimes.
While many New York [Catholic leaders] hailed the victory over communism in Spain, many feared it was on the rise in Gotham. In a troubling number of local contests—over labor unions, civil service jobs, birth control, and public education—things were not going their way.
Gotham at War A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945 is available now from Oxford University Press!
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