Racism and hate have troubling roots in New Jersey

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New Jersey has recently become a shocking case study for hate crimes.

But long before groups like the Proud Boys appeared, historians say 60,000 Jerseyans joined the Ku Klux Klan between World War I and World War II, with local groups in places like Scotch Plains, Mountainside, New Brunswick, Plainfield and the Amboys. They were led by a former vaudevillian named Arthur Bell, who lived in Wall Township and assembled a real estate empire in Monmouth County by collecting membership dues and selling official Klan hoods and apparel. Bell was a showman who essentially ran a pyramid scheme, historian Joseph Bilby, author of The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, told the New Jersey Monthly.

The Klan’s fortunes here declined after a mob of irate immigrants stormed a Klan meeting in August 1923 in Perth Amboy. Five hundred panicked Klansmen who had gathered in an Odd Fellows Hall ripped off their hoods and rushed out of town. The mob overturned a police van full of cowering Klansmen. A New York Times front-page article said an unfortunate Klansman was nearly rammed into a manhole. The title: Perth Amboy Mob in Anti-Klan Riot; The scores are beaten. Crowd of 6,000 Hall Drive Ku-Kluxers, beating and stoning them; police tear gas is useless.

Bilby said Jersey Klan leaders eventually began fighting with each other and with national Klan leaders over their real estate holdings and profits from the pyramid scheme. Bell found himself broke, jobless and living in a garage in Belmar.

By the mid-1930s, members of the German-American Federation of the Bund were writing a new chapter of Jersey-style white supremacy. More than 112,000 people of German descent lived in New Jersey during the Depression era. Historians say about a third of them sympathized with Adolf Hitler’s racist view.

To lead the American Bund, Hitler chose Fritz Kuhn, a Munich-born World War I veteran known as the American Fhrer. Under Kuhn, Bund chapters opened in New Jersey. There were also rural and woodland retreats for Bundists in Bloomingdale’s, Griggstown and Andover, home to the infamous Camp Nordland, which drew 10,000 people on opening day alone.

Bund members enjoyed all the benefits of a close-knit social club—singing, dancing, drinking beer.

Hitler Youth at the German-American Bund Camp Nordland in 1939, having a meal together. Photo courtesy of weirdnj.com

But the main activity was the celebration of the homeland, the Aryan culture and the emerging Nazi ideology. Photos from the heyday of Camp Nordlands record one-armed salutes and parades of Hitler Youth in uniform.

As the reality of Nazi evil began to sink in, the American Bund increasingly attracted the attention of lawmakers and law enforcement suspects, from local sheriffs to the FBI. Bund leaders at Camp Nordland were investigated for a series of serious crimes ranging from child abuse to embezzlement.

Kuhn was convicted of stealing $14,000 from Bund funds and ended up in Sing Sing prison.

At the start of World War II, the Jersey Bund was anemic and officially disbanded after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Jeff Pillets is an award-winning investigative journalist.

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