Copyright Copyright © 2019 by Peter Duffy Jacket design by Pete Garceau Jacket photographs: Swastika flag aboard the SS Bremen: Jimmy Condon/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images; identification of William Bailey courtesy of the author Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc. PublicAffairs Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10104 www.publicaffairsbooks.com @Public_Affairs “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” by Irving Berlin © 1935 by the Irving Berlin Music Co, Administered by Williamson Music Co. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. 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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018052360 ISBNs: 978-1-5417-6231-2 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-6232-9 (ebook) E3-20190130-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Acknowledgments About the Author Notes Index To El PROLOGUE “A ND THEN,” AS Virgil wrote, “were portents given of earth and ocean.” New York City had been suffering for three weeks under the worst heat wave in thirty-four years. Hundreds of thousands were flocking each day to the beaches at Coney Island and the Rockaways in search of a little relief. The newspapers printed lists of those who died from the heat, drowned attempting to escape it, or were so overcome they had to be revived. At least one suicide was recorded. A Riverside Drive physician, “his nerves worn ragged by his inability to get cool,” leaped to his death from a fifth-floor apartment. But the weather had broken. A series of rain showers swept through the city followed by a blast of cool wind from the north. By nightfall on Friday, July 26, 1935, the temperature hovered around 70 degrees. There was a slight breeze in the air. Bill Bailey, dressed uncharacteristically in a dark suit, striped tie, and Panama hat, was ready for his mission. Bailey was a young merchant seaman with the grittiest of proletarian occupations, working with the “black gang” in the belly of a ship, “eating, drinking, and breathing in the smoke and gas of the engine room,” as he later wrote. In this primordial epoch before his nose turned bulbous and his face craggy, “Big Bill” was towering and handsome, if salty of demeanor and tattered of clothing. His accent identified him as a New York Irishman of shanty lineage. He would orate from his soapbox about wealthy capitalists enjoying filet mignon while “we’re down here eating boint liva.” This, in his heavy Jimmy Cagney brogue, was how you pronounced “burnt liver.” Just twenty, Bailey had been a shoeless newsboy, grammar school dropout, juvenile delinquent, panhandler, turnstile jumper, insubordinate dockworker, stowaway, hobo, vagrant, thief, reformatory inmate, drunk, “lyin’ son of a bitch,” apprentice sailor, and connoisseur of the pleasures of the harbor. His life was transformed when he was working as a fireman (operating the oil burners to generate steam to power the ship) on a freighter traveling between New York and London. He was so outraged over the mistreatment of a stowaway of color, “so naïve, so trusting, so beautiful at heart,” that he joined the Communist-led Marine Workers Industrial Union and, shortly thereafter, the Communist Party itself. During the torrid days of July 1935, Bailey was mired “on the beach” without a ship. Broke and homeless, he was sleeping on the benches of the old International Workers Order hall on Union Square. He had plenty of time to huddle with fellow unemployed seamen of leftist bent and discuss the civilizational assault that Adolf Hitler was conducting before the eyes of newspaper and radio correspondents who were relaying the news to the world. Over the previous few months, the Nazi state had launched its second major anti-Jewish onslaught since Hitler was elevated to power two and a half years earlier, proof that the initial-stage actions against Jews in March 1933 were just the beginning of the promised eradication of an existential foe. The Hitler government was also attracting international attention with strictures against the last vestiges of antiregime sentiment, targeting groups as varied as far-right paramilitaries of non-Nazi allegiance and professional comedians who lacked proper deference for regime leaders. The front pages blared the news about a months-long drive against the Catholic Church. Of particular note to the radicals on the waterfront, the Nazi government seized an American sailor from a US-flagged liner in Hamburg and threw him in a concentration camp for plotting to circulate antiregime printed materials. “Something had to be done,” Bailey said. The SS Bremen was the flagship of Hitler’s commercial armada, a technical and aesthetic marvel regarded by the world as the waterborne embodiment of German nationhood. It was the most popular of the European passenger liners, the “floating palaces” that traveled between Europe and the United States in the first half of the 1930s, boasting the highest percentage of berths filled of any competitor on the Atlantic run. The ship was a “vast seagoing cathedral of steel,” in the conception of its builders. “The Great Pyramid of Gizeh out for a stroll,” declared the New Yorker. The Bremen steamed twice a month into New York Harbor, easing with slow- moving grandeur into the Hudson River slip reserved for the Fatherland’s premier vessel along what was known as “luxury liner row.” The area around Pier 86, which extended a thousand feet into the river from the foot of West Forty-Sixth Street, was a tiny province of the Third Reich with bars, restaurants, shops, and newsstands catering to a German-speaking clientele. Here, on the western edge of Manhattan Island, European civilization touched American soil (or cracked cobblestone) in the era before the standardization of air travel, before the transatlantic jets at LaGuardia and Kennedy. On the night in question, at the height of the Great Depression and more than four years before the start of World War II, the Bremen was hosting a “midnight sailing,” a cherished tradition of the European superliners during interwar New York. A few thousand guests paid a nominal fee to come aboard and imbibe with departing passengers like it was New Year’s Eve. The bon voyage party lasted until the last woozy guests were shoved ashore and the ship backed into the river at the celebratory height of the gaiety at midnight. Anyone properly attired could join the bash whether they had an acquaintance on board or not. The topside areas with views of the shimmering cityscape resembled a packed subway train at rush hour. It would later be estimated that 4,800 nonpassengers had boarded the ship for the affair. With the addition of 1,300 passengers and a thousand German crew members, the population on the Bremen hovered around 7,000. The revelers included a Hollywood movie star, a delegation of Protestant clergymen, a Rockefeller heiress, the new US ambassador to Norway, a future secretary of the navy, a collection of wealthy financiers, the governor of Pennsylvania, a Honduran nobleman, a Chicago meatpacking mogul, and the two-year-old grandson of the president of the United States. On the stretch of shoreline under the looming bow of the forward-facing ship, a few thousand anti-Nazi activists gathered to protest the mounting crisis in the Third Reich, chanting slogans, holding signs, and delivering speeches. “Arise ye prisoners of starvation!” they sang, using that era’s translation of “The Internationale.” “Arise ye wretched of the earth!” The ranks included communists and socialists, anarchists and social democrats, high school students and old-timers, concerned citizens and cranks, gentiles and Jews, and, a rarity in those days of bedrock racism, blacks standing alongside whites.