A Night at the Garden

Q:�How did you discover this event?
A: A friend of mine told me about it last year, and I couldnt believe that Id never heard of it. When I found out it had been filmed, I asked an archival researcher, Rich Remsberg, to see what he could find. It turned out that short clips had been used in history documentaries before, but no one seemed to have collected together all of the scraps of footage there was some at the National Archives, some at UCLAs archive, some at other places. So he gathered it, and I edited it together into a short narrative. When Charlottesville happened, it began to feel urgent. So I sent it over to Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook at Field of Vision and said, Have you ever heard of this event? Would you be interested in supporting the film? And they jumped on board.

New York Times, Feb. 21, 1939.
Click for article.

Q:�What struck you about the footage?
A: The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City, a city that was diverse, modern, and progressive even in 1939. The second thing that struck me was the way these American Nazis used the symbols of America to sell an ideology that a few years later hundreds of thousands of Americans would die fighting against.

It really illustrated that the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the�true�Americans (or Germans or Spartans or&). And they encourage their followers to take their country back from whatever minority group has ruined it.

Q:�Why do you think that most Americans have never heard of this group or this event?
A: The footage is so powerful, it seems amazing that it isnt a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because its scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that wed prefer to forget. Wed like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times more were passively supportive.

*March down East 86th Street, October 30, 1939.*

In a part of Fritz Kuhns speech that isnt in the film, he applauds Father Coughlin, whose radio shows praising Hitler and Mussolini reached audiences of 30 million Americans. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh expressed anti-Semitic beliefs. And press magnate William Randolph Hearst declared, Whenever you hear a prominent American called a fascist, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen who stands for Americanism. (In a small ironic twist, we licensed some of the Bund footage from the Hearst collection at UCLA.)

These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. But two years after this rally, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. And at that point this sort of philosophy became unacceptable. When the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever shared their philosophy.

In the end, America pulled away from the cliff, but this rally is a reminder that things didnt have to work out that way. If Roosevelt werent President, if Japan hadnt attacked, is it possible we would have skated through without joining the war? And if Nazis hadnt killed American soldiers, is it possible that their philosophy wouldnt have become so taboo here?

denounce_bund-e1518119083149 — New York Times, March 4, 1939.
Click for article.

Q:�Who was the guy who ran out on stage during the rally?
A: He was a 26-year-old plumbers helper from Brooklyn named Isadore Greenbaum. When he ran on stage to protest, he was beaten up and had his pants ripped off as he was thrown from the stage. He was also arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25.

There was a debate at the time over whether the Bund should be allowed to have a rally, which like so many things about the event seems eerily contemporary. Greenbaum explained to the judge the day after the rally, I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution I lost my head, and I felt it was my duty to talk. The Magistrate asked him, Dont you realize that innocent people might have been killed? And Greenbaum replied, Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there? (New York Times, 2/22/39).

bund-foes-protest — New York Times, Feb. 22, 1939.
Click for article.

But in�The�New York Times, the American Jewish Committee argued that although the Bund was completely anti-American and anti-Democratic& because we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views. Mayor LaGuardia, for his part, ridiculed the event as an exhibition of international cooties, and said he believed in exposing cooties to the sunlight. Here is a�terrific article�on Greenbaum from the Washington Post.

Years later when Greenbaum was asked why he did what he did, in spite of the risk, he simply said, Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place&? I think that’s a question for all of us who are witnessing similar demagoguery today.

Q:�What happened to this group after this rally?
A: The German American Bund, who held the rally, had a significant presence in the 1930s, with�youth camps and training camps�in New Jersey, upstate New York, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and a huge march down East 86^th�Street in Manhattan. But their mainstream appeal was reduced by their leaders German accents and culture.

As Halford E. Luccock famously said, When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled made in Germany; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, Americanism. The groups leader Fritz Kuhn was eventually arrested for embezzling Bund funds and�sent to prison and stripped of his citizenship. After the war, he was deported to West Germany where he died a few years later. The Bund disbanded soon after the start of World War II, but the people who had supported it remained.

Q:�How did you decide on the editing approach?
A: At first I thought Id make a traditional documentary with an historian explaining the background of the group. But when I started cutting the footage together, I realized there was real power in just watching it unfold, without explanation. When most people watch it, at first they are puzzled: What�is�this? They see George Washington and American flags and hear the Pledge of Allegiance (notably, before the phrase Under God was added in 1954), but then they see swastikas and people giving the Nazi salute, and its really unsettling. So I decided to keep it pure and cinematic and unmediated as if you are there, watching, and wrestling with what you are seeing. I wanted it to be more provocative than didactic an icy splash of history tossed into the discussion we are having about white supremacy right now.

Q:�What do you want the audience to take away from the film?
A: The film doesnt have narration or interviews to clearly underline the takeaways, but I think most audiences will find lots to chew on. To me, the most striking and upsetting part of the film is not the anti-Semitism of the main speaker or even the violence of his storm-troopers. What bothers me more is the reaction of the crowd. Twenty-thousand New Yorkers who loved their kids and were probably nice to their neighbors, came home from work that day, dressed up in suits and skirts, and went out to cheer and laugh and sing as a speaker dehumanized people who would be murdered by the millions in the next few years.

This point is less an indictment of bad things that Americans have done in the past than it is a cautionary tale about the bad things that we might do in the future. When the protester is being beaten up theres a little boy in the crowd who I zoomed on in the edit. You can see him rub his hands together, doing an excited little dance, unable to contain the giddy excitement that comes from being part of a mob. And when the protester is finally thrown off stage, theres a long slow pan across the crowd that is laughing, clapping, cheering, like theyre at a World Wrestling Federation match.

Wed like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people. But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is na�ve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness. Events like this should remind us not to be complacent that the things we care about have to be nurtured and defended regularly� because even seemingly good people have the potential to do hideous things.

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Updates About Updates

I love reading posts in which people talk about recent updates to their personal sites. It does three things:

It shows the person reading your post that you care about this little corner of the Web and that it is worth doing so.
It (most often) demonstrates why you picked a certain solution and how you implemented it. Maybe it even introduces your readers to a new idea they haven’t thought about yet. Most definitely, they will learn something new.
It acts as motivation for people to work on their sites, as well. And it also shows that you, too, might have experienced a few roadblocks and had to make decisions with an unclear outcome – regardless of how experienced you are or how many followers you have. The medium is the message.

Just recently, Hidde wrote an in-depth post outlining his approach to adding a dark mode toggle to his site. This made Kilian link to a post in which he explains his approach of adding a third option for the default system setting. And now, Ethan has written about his recent updates to his site, including, you already guessed it, his new theme switcher.

Last week, I released a little starter kit for Eleventy Plus Vite that already respects the user’s system settings for a light or dark mode via the prefers-color-scheme media query. The next thing on my list is to add a theme switcher. I’ll read all posts I can find, including Hidde’s, Kilian’s, and Ethan’s, with much interest and will then publish an update about this update here.

Why don’t you do the same with something you are working on?

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Declarative design systems

When I wrote about the idea of declarative design it really resonated with a lot of people.

I think that there’s a general feeling of frustration with the imperative approach to designing and developing—attempting to specify everything exactly up front. It just doesn’t scale. As Jason put it, the traditional web design process is fundamentally broken:

This is the worst of all worlds—a waterfall process creating dozens of artifacts, none of which accurately capture how the design will look and behave in the browser.

In theory, design systems could help overcome this problem; spend a lot of time up front getting a component to be correct and then it can be deployed quickly in all sorts of situations. But the word “correct” is doing a lot of work there.

If you’re approaching a design system with an imperative mindset then “correct” means “exact.” With this approach, precision is seen as valuable: precise spacing, precise numbers, precise pixels.

But if you’re approaching a design system with a declarative mindset, then “correct” means “resilient.” With this approach, flexibility is seen as valuable: flexible spacing, flexible ranges, flexible outputs.

These are two fundamentally different design approaches and yet the results of both would be described as a design system. The term “design system” is tricky enough to define as it is. This is one more layer of potential misunderstanding: one person says “design system” and means a collection of very precise, controlled, and exact components; another person says “design system” and means a predefined set of boundary conditions that can be used to generate components.

Personally, I think the word “system” is the important part of a design system. But all too often design systems are really collections rather than systems: a collection of pre-generated components rather than a system for generating components.

The systematic approach is at the heart of declarative design; setting up the rules and ratios in advance but leaving the detail of the final implementation to the browser at runtime.

Let me give an example of what I think is a declarative approach to a component. I’ll use the “hello world” of design system components—the humble button.

Two years ago I wrote about programming CSS to perform Sass colour functions. I described how CSS features like custom properties and calc() can be used to recreate mixins like darken() and lighten().

I showed some CSS for declaring the different colour elements of a button using hue, saturation and lightness encoded as custom properties. Here’s a CodePen with some examples of different buttons.

See the Pen Button colours by Jeremy Keith (@adactio) on CodePen.

If these buttons were in an imperative design system, then the output would be the important part. The design system would supply the code needed to make those buttons exactly. If you need a different button, it would have to be added to the design system as a variation.

But in a declarative design system, the output isn’t as important as the underlying ruleset. In this case, there are rules like:

For the hover state of a button, the lightness of its background colour should dip by 5%.

That ends up encoded in CSS like this:

button:hover {
    background-color: hsl(
        var(--button-colour-hue),
        var(--button-colour-saturation),
        calc(var(--button-colour-lightness) - 5%)
    );
}

In this kind of design system you can look at some examples to see the results of this rule in action. But those outputs are illustrative. They’re not the final word. If you don’t see the exact button you want, that’s okay; you’ve got the information you need to generate what you need and still stay within the pre-defined rules about, say, the hover state of buttons.

This seems like a more scalable approach to me. It also seems more empowering.

One of the hardest parts of embedding a design system within an organisation is getting people to adopt it. In my experience, nobody likes adopting something that’s being delivered from on-high as a pre-made sets of components. It’s meant to be helpful: “here, use this pre-made components to save time not reinventing the wheel”, but it can come across as overly controlling: “we don’t trust you to exercise good judgement so stick to these pre-made components.”

The declarative approach is less controlling: “here are pre-defined rules and guidelines to help you make components.” But this lack of precision comes at a cost. The people using the design system need to have the mindset—and the ability—to create the components they need from the systematic rules they’ve been provided.

My gut feeling is that the imperative mindset is a good match for most of today’s graphic design tools like Figma or Sketch. Those tools deal with precise numbers rather than ranges and rules.

The declarative mindset, on the other hand, increasingly feels like a good match for CSS. The language has evolved to allow rules to be set up through custom properties, calc(), clamp(), minmax(), and so on.

So, as always, there isn’t a right or wrong approach here. It all comes down to what’s most suitable for your organisation.

If your designers and developers have an imperative mindset and Figma files are considered the source of truth, than they would be better served by an imperative design system.

But if you’re lucky enough to have a team of design engineers that think in terms of HTML and CSS, then a declarative design system will be a force multiplier. A bicycle for the design engineering mind.

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