Mr. McNazi

Harry Dalton, 29, is a big, friendly Manhattan building contractor who used to play halfback at West Point. He is also a devout Catholic and vigorous American. Strolling with some friends one evening a few years ago, he paused to listen to a soapbox orator in full cry under a huge cross set up in Manhattan's Columbus Circle. Some of the things the rabble-rouser spouted as "Catholic" doctrine burned Harry up. "I was in Jesuit schools twelve years," he growled, "and I never heard stuff like that." He began to growl louder. The speaker kicked at him. That was a mistake. Two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound Harry Dalton caught the speaker's foot, yanked him from the stand. Then Harry Dalton took his place, delivered a 20-minute opinion on the folly of preaching hate.

The man whom Harry Dalton had pulled off the stand was a Christian Mobilizer, an organization spawned by radiorating Father Coughlin (though Father Coughlin denies any relationship). Harry began to attend Christian Mobilizer meetings as a heckler. At one meeting he heard handsome, Jew-baiting Joseph Ellsberry McWilliams, leader of the Mobilizers, and American Destiny Party candidate for Congress from Yorkville, Manhattan's German settlement. After listening to handsome Joe, who is part Cherokee Indian, with a smattering of formal education (a WPA public-speaking course), Harry decided that heckling was not enough. He hauled McWilliams off the stand. McWilliams' platform might have brought a milder man than Harry to the boiling point :

"Adolf Hitler is the greatest leader in the history of the world.

"Herbert Hoover is mentally deficient and Roosevelt is an amateur Englishman, a Jew, and the leader of the fifth column in this country.

"America suffers from effeminacy; it is time to get strong.

"I intend to get a huge following and run the Government like a factory, appointing all the key men. I may not be President but I will have absolute control.

"The Jews are in control and demand complete intellectual subserviency. To combat this, I would ship all the Jews to some place such as Madagascar.

"As far as violence is concerned in my methods, I will only say that I must have control.

"I look on every newspaperman as a prostitute. I have a blacklist of the worst ones and they will be taken care of. The newspapers and magazines will be run with a firm hand. We'll make a real free press.

"Once in power, I will down all dissident opinion."

Joe McWilliams gave Harry Dalton a new aim in life. Harry's West Pointer father, a former sergeant at arms of the New York State Senate, and as husky as his son, joined him in the cause. For $50 they bought a fruit & vegetable truck, festooned it with flags, mounted a pair of spotlights, christened it Old Ironsides and moved in on McWilliamsland. Said Harry: "I decided to find out if Yorkville was a part of the U. S." If McWilliams held three street-corner meetings a week, the Daltons held five. Harry talked about Americanism, and what it meant: freedom of religion, speech, assembly, press, not the hate-engendering, terrorizing tactics of the Mobilizers. He called his organization the New York Council for American Traditions, Inc. One night a bundle of garbage was dumped on Harry's head; another night, two bags of cement. But that kind of thing didn't faze Harry.

Last week Harry Dalton, doling out patriotic literature from his Yorkville headquarters, found himself leading a full-fledged political movement. At a mass meeting 4,500 patriotic Yorkvillagers rallied round his Congressional candidate, Republican James Elaine Walker Jr., great-nephew of Garfield's and Harrison's Secretary of State James Gillespie Elaine. Out on parole awaiting sentence for disorderly conduct was Joe McWilliams, whom Dalton (and Walter Winchell) had dubbed "McNazi." But not even McWilliams' impending defeat satisfied Harry. He wanted to debate with him from the same platform. Closest he had come to it was a few weeks ago when Mobilizer McWilliams shouted to his audience: "I've never seen the color of a man's eyes that I'm afraid of." "Well," said Dalton, "you're looking into a pair right now." McWilliams looked annoyed, and went on talking.

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