The controversy over the city’s efforts to maintain public order during the upcoming convention recalls Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s successful 1960 efforts to prevent George Lincoln Rockwell, self-proclaimed American Fuhrer, from holding a Fourth of July Nazi rally in Union Square.

Born into a vaudeville family in 1918, Rockwell had studied commercial art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute after his World War II naval service. While recalled to active duty as a training officer during the Korean conflict, he spent his off-duty hours at the San Diego Public Library. His reading included such bigots’ treasures as the Overman Report to President Wilson on the Russian Revolution, an official State Department document whose tone is summed up in its description of the Bolsheviks as “atheistic Jews of the shabbiest and most dangerous kind,” anti-Semitic rags such as Conde McGinley’s notorious “Common Sense,” and even “Mein Kampf.” This material convinced him that society was endangered by a Jewish-communist conspiracy.

After returning to civilian life in 1954, he briefly lived in New York, where he worked as assistant publisher of the “American Mercury,” founded by H. L. Mencken and long since controlled by racists. Harold Arrowsmith Jr., a wealthy anti-Semitic pamphleteer, then hired Rockwell to run the National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination, which would publish Arrowsmith’s “exposes” of the conspiracy. Instead, as Rockwell later wrote, he began “agitation of such a blatant and revolutionary sort that the mass media could not ignore it.”

On July 29, 1958, he picketed the White House against President Eisenhower’s intervention in Lebanon with a sign reading “SAVE IKE FROM THE KIKES.” The ensuing media attention horrified Arrowsmith, who withdrew his money, and Rockwell’s wife, who divorced him. Nonetheless, now convinced his destiny was to lead Nazism “to world-wide victory,” Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party, thus taking up his father’s business: vaudeville. By conventional standards, the ANP was a failure. Rockwell never had more than a few dozen members (largely kids, ex-convicts, and government agents).

When Rockwell proposed his Union Square rally, Mayor Wagner denied his permit to speak. On June 22, 1960, Rockwell personally argued in State Supreme Court for an order compelling the city to issue the permit. He then held a press conference in the courthouse rotunda in which he called for gassing the Jews. This was quite enough and the crowd assaulted him live before the television cameras. Police officers waded into the mob and arrested Rockwell for incitement to riot. The arrest warrants from this episode remained outstanding for years: thus, a substitute had to deliver his 1962 speech at Hunter College and four years later, he was held at the Tombs during an attempt to speak at Columbia University.

Rockwell was a striking performer, but his talent was for offensive stunts. The doormat at party headquarters was a Jewish altar cloth on which Rockwell’s dog Wolf had been trained to urinate. When the Freedom Riders went south, Rockwell followed on a “Hate Bus.” He issued 45-rpm “hatenanny” records, featuring “the musical prejudices of Odis Cochran and the Three Bigots,” and blood-red stickers bearing black swastikas and the words, “We are back.” Parenthetically, he later became America’s first Holocaust denier.

Rockwell’s 1965 Virginia gubernatorial campaign, complete with television commercials, yielded only 1.2% of the vote – last in a field of four, amidst wide publicity over a former follower’s suicide. Dan Burros, despite an IQ of 154, had often been in trouble with the police because he loved to paint swastikas on buildings. Though blonde and blue-eyed, Burros was sallow and squat, with thick-lensed glasses and an uncontrollable giggle. A printer by trade, Burros lived in Queens, where he published such magazines as “The Free American,” dated YF 76 (meaning Year of the Fuhrer, counting from Hitler’s birth) and “Kill.” But he had a secret: he was a Jew, bar-mitzvahed at 13, and a former star pupil at Hebrew school. “Times” reporter McCandlish Phillips reported this as front page news on October 31, 1965. Later that day, Burros shot himself.

“Playboy” then assigned Alex Haley to interview Rockwell. Haley, not yet famous for “Roots,” assured Rockwell that he wasn’t Jewish during their telephone conversations. He neglected to mention that he was black. When both men finally sat down, Rockwell drew a loaded pistol, placed it within reach, and said, “I’m ready when you are.” The interview, published in 1966, made Rockwell a sought-after speaker on the college circuit, where his showmanship and willingness to offend drew sellout crowds. By mid-1967, he was making up to $2,000 a week.

On August 25, 1967, as Rockwell was leaving an Arlington launderette, a disaffected party member fired from a nearby roof. Rockwell collapsed on the pavement. The 1967 Associated Press yearbook claimed his last words were “I forgot the bleach.”