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

In this well-told history, journalist Duffy (Double Agent) recounts a little-known incident of American protest against the Third Reich. In July 1935, a small group of Communist Party members and fellow travelers, led by a young merchant seaman named Bill Bailey, crashed a huge reception on the German luxury liner SS Bremen, berthed at a New York dock. They tore down its swastika flag and tossed it into New York Harbor to protest the Third Reich’s violence against Jews and dissidents. Duffy profiles Bailey in depth: a “slum kid from a destitute Irish family, a reformed juvenile delinquent with a Hell’s Kitchen twang who developed a political conscience” who went on to be an actor and to defy the House Un-American Activities Committee. Duffy places the event in context (including the summer 1935 Berlin pogrom against Jews known as the Kurfürstandamn riots) and recounts how Bailey and his comrades (the Bremen Six) were acquitted of charges of violence and unlawful assembly thanks to popular support, a skilled defense team headed by the communist congressman Vito Marcantonio, and a sympathetic judge, Louis Brodsky. Duffy also contrasts their action with the diplomatic diffidence of the State Department, which apologized to Berlin three times for the incident. The Bremen protest was a fascinating event, and Duffy’s account of it is pleasaing and brisk. [em](Mar.) [/em]