Book Review/Heather Seggel

Flag Overboard

Peter Duffy’s new biography, The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising Against Nazism (Public Affairs), is a largely forgotten story that deserves to be revisited. It’s cinematic in scope and an inspiring reminder that seemingly small actions can yield great results.

The story opens with parallel biographies of man and boat. William Bailey had a hardscrabble youth in tenement housing and routinely stole to survive. A brief stint in jail showed him a world to which he did not want to return, so he lied about his age and talked his way into work aboard ships, which offered a different version of “three hots and a cot.”

In Germany, the slow creep of Nazism was in effect, and one of the nation’s crowning achievements, the SS Bremen, a massive ship that hosted posh midnight sailing parties in New York Harbor, proudly flew a swastika flag for all to see. Bailey and five others, later dubbed the “Bremen Six,” made a plan that was basically the world’s riskiest game of Capture the Flag, and all hell broke loose. Dressed as wealthy partygoers, they created a diversion and, with security distracted, managed to cut down the flag and toss it into the drink.

A riot ensued, and the NYPD were not on the side of the activists, instead jockeying to grab the six at all costs. Shots were fired by police, and a few people were seriously injured. One of the six foolishly carried brass knuckles and was later caught with them, but they were otherwise armed with one razor blade to cut down the flag, which ended up cutting a hole in Bailey’s pants and disappearing down his leg before he could use it (he got a last-second assist from someone in the crowd to finally take it down).

Duffy notes how the NYPD and US government were unwilling to speak to Nazi atrocities or get involved in the war, preferring to remain willfully ignorant even as upstart groups spoke out. The judge who heard the Bremen Six case was an anomaly, calling out the police when they made up details of the brawl that exploded as the flag came down. One officer, who was Jewish, was badly hurt in the melee while fighting to protect German property. A crowd of demonstrators who had come to the dock to decry the flag took to the streets and followed the six activists to night court in first one, then another precinct in support. The six were ultimately acquitted, but the US apologized to Germany for the incident, an embarrassing display.

What’s surprising from this vantage point is that this is the first time many Americans were forced to confront what Adolf Hitler truly intended to do. There was no official German response to our tepid apology, but shortly thereafter Joseph Goebbels gave a ranting speech that began by touching on our lack of civility for so much as touching the flag, then devolved into cries that, “No foreign protest will prevent Germany from annihilating the Jew!” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Had this handful of scrappy activists not tossed the flag overboard, who knows how much longer the two countries might have spent tentatively playing footsie with one another.

Bailey’s story is a joy to take in. His conscience developed early in life when he saw the unequal treatment given to workers and the incarcerated, and he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and World War II before dedicating much of his life to labor activism. He ended his career in San Francisco but never stopped demonstrating and urging young people to take up the fight. Duffy captures it all with vibrant energy. The despicable actions of the Nazis can’t ever be set aside, but the Bremen is nevertheless given its due as a masterpiece of engineering, and excess, in its time; it’s easy to understand why New York’s elite wanted to see and be seen on board.

One hopes that the film rights to this story will be optioned; while the action at its heart is small there’s plenty of story to work with. Bailey deserves the honor, as does Duffy for this fine telling.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2019

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