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The 1930s American Nazi Movement in New York
Pondering how certain individuals may have reacted to it
I recently came across some photos of the American Nazi movement in New York in the 1930s, published by The Atlantic several years ago. Seeing those photos makes me rethink the scant information I have about the last several years of Ned Cumming’s life in the late part of that decade. Ned, as far as I know, wanted nothing to do with Nazism, but neither did he actively fight it. I’ve wondered if the political climate was stressful to him, and if that stress contributed to his death. He died 40 years before I was born. I wrote a biography of him, Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.
The Fight in Scarsdale
In the 1930s, the late lawyer George M. Cumming’s widow, Lucy, and her two adult children, Emily and Ned, were paying $60 a month to stay in the suburb of Scarsdale, New York. Lots of people were downsizing in the Depression. The Cummings were people who had money, or at least thought they did, until they suddenly didn’t.
Their landlords in Scarsdale, the Johnsons, were newlywed Swedish immigrants. The man was the same as age as Ned (about 30 in 1930), and his wife was 15 years older. It was a three-bedroom house: “Probably the Johnsons slept in one room, Ned’s mother and sister in…
