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by Terry Golway
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As hard as it is to imagine, there was a time in the late 1930s when the United States saw fit to apologize to angry Nazi officials in Berlin because of the intemperate language of an American politician. And yet, it happened.

The politician in question was Fiorello La Guardia, the Republican mayor of New York City and one of the most recognizable political figures of Depression-era America.
La Guardia had been using his very public presence in American life to assail Adolf Hitler and his government since 1933, when he called the new German chancellor a “threat to world peace” at a meeting of the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights.
In his capacity as the head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, he ordered his members to boycott a meeting of global municipal leaders in Berlin in 1936. As long as Germans supported Hitler and the Nazis, La Guardia said, “they cannot expect our friendship or our sympathy.” The United States, he said, should stop all imports from Germany as long as Hitler remained in power.
The Nazis ignored La Guardia’s criticisms at first, but that changed in March 1937, when the mayor used a routine announcement about the coming World’s Fair in New York to launch another personal attack on Hitler. La Guardia said he would support the creation of a pavilion at the Fair dedicated to the cause of religious freedom. And if such a pavilion were built, he said, he would make sure that it included a “chamber of horrors” featuring “a figure of that brown-shirted fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world.”
Hitler—obviously the man in the brown shirt in La Guardia’s reference—and his government were furious. The Nazi press unleashed a vicious, anti-Semitic attack on New York’s mayor, whose mother was Jewish though he himself was raised Episcopalian. One paper called him a “Jewish ruffian.” Another described him as a “dirty Talmud Jew.”
The Nazis then filed a formal protest with the Roosevelt administration Secretary of State Cordell Hull promptly issued a statement loaded with throat-clearing diplomatic mumbo-jumbo, saying he regretted that things had gotten so nasty between the Nazis and the mayor.
The Germans made it clear they wanted more than Hull’s vacuous statement of regret. He then dispatched an aide to the German embassy to deliver a verbal apology to the Nazi government. Hull said the U.S. government “earnestly deprecated” the words La Guardia lobbed at Hitler and noted that they did not “represent the attitude of this government towards the German government.”
Newspaper headlines the following day cut through the diplomatic phrasing. As the New York Times put it in a front-page headline: “Hull Gives Reich Official ‘Apology.’”
If either Berlin or Washington were foolish enough to believe that they had silenced the mayor of New York, they were greatly mistaken.
La Guardia continued to speak out against Hitler and his government’s murderous anti-Semitism, leading to another round of complaints from Berlin and speculation that the U.S. would again apologize. Instead, Hull and President Franklin Roosevelt issued a statement regretting the “bitter and vituperative utterances” on both sides of the Atlantic, implicitly taking note of the attacks on La Guardia in Germany.
Roosevelt would later tell Hull they ought to have summoned La Guardia to the White House and given him a medal.
There would be no more apologies to Berlin from Washington. La Guardia continued to warn his fellow Americans of the menace in Berlin and taunt the “brown-shirted fanatic” until Germany was in ruins and Hitler was dead by his own hand.
Reflecting on La Guardia’s call to arms about the Nazis in the 1930s, Rabbi Stephen Wise said of the mayor: “There was one great American who lifted his voice and spoke the truth. His name was Fiorello H. La Guardia.”
Those were words nobody was sorry to hear.
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Terry Golway was a senior editor at POLITICO and the author of several works of history, including Frank and Al and Machine Made. He has been a columnist and city editor at the New York Observer, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, and a columnist for the Irish Echo. He holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Rutgers University and has taught at the New School, New York University, and the College of Staten Island.
The post The Mayor and the Nazis appeared first on The History Reader.
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