SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: New Focus On Nazi Center In Suffolk County

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

With the opening of a play off-Broadway in Manhattan titled “Camp Siegfried,” what was a major Nazi center for Nazis in the New York area in years before World War II — Camp Siegfried, in the middle of Suffolk County—is receiving renewed attention.

It’s a fitting subject considering the role of Nazi sympathizers in the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the rise of fascist movements in places around the world and also despotic government leaders—from Hungary to Nicaragua and, particularly, Putin in Russia. And there is also the sharp increase of antisemitic talk and incidents. 

Camp Siegfried consisted of a parade ground to which thousands of Nazis came by train and car to march in Nazi uniforms at rallies and listen to hate-filled speeches. It was surrounded by a housing settlement with roads such as Adolph Hitler Street.

The review of the play “Camp Siegfried” by Jesse Green in The New York Times noted how the play “deals with homegrown American Nazism as inculcated at a camp run by the German American Bund in Yaphank, N.Y., from 1936 to 1941. There, in [playright Bess] Wohl’s fact-based fiction, young Aryans are taught Master Race ideology….That there really was a Hitler Street in Yaphank, and roads named for Rommel and Goebells as well, gives ‘Camp Siegfried’ its big clonk of icky relevance….But Wohl…wants to do more than invoke the dread of the evil among us. She wants to expose the emotional roots of fascism that a typically political or social framing…underplays. In this case, that means looking at how right-wing radicalism can be fueled by, and feed into, hysteria…”

A Newsday piece by Verne Gay, headed “When Nazis came to Yaphank: ‘Camp Siegfried’ play explores dark chapter in LI history,” has a subhead, “How Easily Darkness Can Sneak Up On Us.” It cites “the authoritative history of Camp Siegfried by Marvin D. Miller. Miller was a longtime history teacher in Commack. He passed away in 2020. The book is, indeed, the “authoritative history” of the Nazi center and “dark chapter” in Long Island history.

I interviewed Miller after the book was published in 1983. 

Its title is “Wunderlich’s Salute” because that salute was a pivotal event in the saga of Camp Siegfried. It was 1938 and Suffolk County brought charges against six Nazi Bund leaders involved with Camp Siegfried accusing them of violating the New York State Civil Rights Law of 1923 requiring that “oath-bound” organizations file member lists with the state secretary of state. The prosecutor was Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Lindsay Henry.

Martin Wunderlich, a Bundist, was on the stand in Riverhead in a courtroom in which Judge L. Barron Hill of Southold presided.

From the exchange:

Judge Hill: “Stand up and show us how you salute the flag at Camp Siegfried.”

Wunderlich: “I salute the American flag as a member and proud member of the white race.” He then flung up his right arm in the Nazi salute.

Henry: “That is the American salute?”

Wunderlich: “It will be.”

Henry: “It will be? That is what you want to put over the United States, you and your crowd, make us salute that way. That is enough from you.”

After Wunderlich’s Nazi salute, Suffolk County won the case. Camp Siegfried was shut down in 1945. 

Hill and Henry were American patriots.

Hill was a pilot in World War I and Suffolk district attorney from 1932 to 1937 when he became a County Court judge. During World War II he organized the Suffolk County Defense Council which arranged for volunteers to be air-raid spotters and otherwise engage in civil defense. He died in 1985. 

Henry, raised in Babylon, rejoined the U.S. Navy in World War II (he had served in the Navy in World War I) and held the rank of captain. He commanded a landing craft flotilla that hit the shore on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. His actions that day caused President Harry Truman to award him the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He was elected Suffolk DA in 1947 and served until 1953. He died in 1959.

His son, named Patrick Henry, was Suffolk DA from 1978 to 1990. And he was a former Navy officer, too. He died in 2018. Lindsay Henry’s grandson, also named Lindsay Henry, is an attorney in Babylon and previously a member of the Babylon Town Board.

In 2016, the Suffolk County Community College-based Center for Social Justice and Human Understanding: Featuring the Holocaust Collection (I am its vice chairperson) held an exhibit titled: “Goose Stepping on Long Island: Camp Siegfried.” Professor Steven Klipstein, who for decades has taught Holocaust Studies at the college and is the center’s Holocaust scholar, opened the exhibit by declaring: “They chose Long Island because they thought it would be sympathetic to their ideas….I shake my head with incredulity about these people being so close” in proximity. “

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Steven Englebright's Loss Is A Loss For The Environment

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A big change resulting from the 2022 election in Suffolk County was the narrow defeat of 30-year (!) New York State Assemblyman Steven Englebright—a surprise upset. 

Steve for decades has been a giant in environmental affairs in Suffolk and the state. He was elected to the Suffolk Legislature in 1983 and in 1992 initially elected to the State Assembly. He has been the leading environmental figure in the New York State Legislature. He’s chair of the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee. He’s been prime sponsor of hundreds of successful measures on the county and state levels on the environment.

“Nobody has made a bigger contribution to the environment,” commented Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. last week. “Steve has been at the forefront of all the major environmental measures. He has made such a big difference,” said Thiele, of Sag Harbor, who has served with Englebright in the county and state legislatures.

Englebright, of Setauket, is especially proud that he helped “shape” the New York State Clean Air, Clean Water, and Green Jobs Bond Act approved overwhelmingly statewide in a referendum this past Election Day. He is equally proud of his labor last year on a “prelude to it,” a “Green Amendment” added to the state constitution. It, too, was approved overwhelmingly in a statewide referendum on Election Day 2021. 

Of the $4.2 billion bond act, he said: “We are an island, after all, and we need to challenge the overheating of the earth’s atmosphere and earth’s oceans. Long Island is at the frontline. It is important to do what we can to set an example to sister states and other nations in the fight against climate change.” The Green Amendment now enshrined into New York law declares that every person has “the right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

A Democrat, he attributes his reported 23,707 to 22,734 loss to Republican lawyer Edward Flood to a spillover in Brookhaven Town of votes for town favorite son Lee Zeldin for governor, and “at the end of the campaign, dark money mailings full of misinformation and accusations over the bail issue.”

Steve’s love for the environment started early. He grew up in Bayside, Queens and “I saw the last farms in Bayside developed,” he was recalling last week. He spent time in “Bayside Woods—all gone now, built on. All the open space has been lost.” What happened to his boyhood home “left an indelible imprint.” He spent summers at the vegetable farm of his grandparents in Indiana. “I always walked in their shadow.” He spoke of his grandfather “leading me out into the field and showing me how to plant,” working in “my grandma’s garden” and exploring the “stream that ran along the farm. It was a very impactful part of my early life.” 

He went to the University of Tennessee for its “great geology program” and received a Bachelor’s Degree and later a Master’s in paleontology/sedimentology from Stony Brook University. Stony Brook hired him to “curate its geological collection.” Because of his background in museums—including as a junior curator at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and volunteer in the vertebrae and paleontology collection at the American Museum of Natural History—he was asked to launch a museum. He founded the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at the university.

The first exhibit concerned the Long Island Pine Barrens. Steve understood the extraordinary purity of the water beneath the Pine Barrens, how their sandy porous soil allows rainwater to migrate cleanly to the aquifers below on which Long Islanders depend for all their potable water. Underneath the Pine Barrens, Englebright knew, was the finest of our water supply. And, he comprehended the ecological import of Pine Barrens habitat which includes many rare plants, birds and animals. 

In the 1970s and early 80s, hardly anyone else on Long Island understood any of this. The Pine Barrens were considered “scrub,” “wasteland”—not important like the land along the shoreline or farmland—and were designated in government development plans for industrial use.

The first exhibit focused on the Pine Barrens where the Hauppauge Industrial Park had gone—on top of Pine Barrens. “I had watched it, basically a complete ecosystem, wiped away and transformed into buildings and parking lots,” Steve recounted. He decided it “was basically unethical to simply document the passing of the ecosystem.” So, he decided to get into politics—running for the Suffolk Legislature—and through government get environmental action. 

Steve taught me and many others about the huge significance of the Pine Barrens. He would take people, one at a time, up Danger Hill in Manorville. From the top of it, one could see the Long Island Sound to the north, bays and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to the west and east great stretches of green Pine Barrens. We were looking, said Steve, at “Long Island’s reservoir.” He was critical to the passage of the Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act of 1993 which has saved more than 100,000 acres of Pine Barrens. 

“I think I have the strongest environmental record in the history of the state legislature,” Steve said last week. What a loss his election defeat is to the state and this county!

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Traffic

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Most of us have gotten adjusted, are used to, the way traffic moves on Long Island and the rest of the New York Metropolitan Area. But once I had an experience which clearly exposed how frenzied, how often danger-filled, it can be. We had stayed too long on a vacation and it was Saturday in New Mexico and we all had to return Monday. So, the plan was to drive through the day and then night to get back. 

I couldn’t do it now, but a younger me had the energy to drive through New Mexico, into Texas, across Oklahoma, up to Arkansas and as the sun set and darkness came, into the Midwest, finally crossing into New Jersey, the New York City skyline appearing as sunrise arrived, and then on to Long Island.

With the traffic flow in the west still fresh in my mind, crossing the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and encountering New York and then Nassau and Suffolk County traffic, it was so apparent how many a driver in this part of the United States can be highly aggressive.

I was thinking about this experience recently reading an article in Newsday about fatal auto accidents on Long Island. Its headline: “Deadliest roads on Long Island: Route 25 and 27 had most crash fatalities over five-year span, analysis finds.” The article said “a Newsday analysis of federal data…identified the five deadliest thoroughfares” on Long Island between 2016 and 2020. State Routes 25, also “known as Jericho Turnpike and Middle Country Road, had 62 deaths, trailed closely behind by Route 27, also called Sunrise and Montauk highways, with 61 traffic facilities, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data.” Those roads were followed by State Route 25A, Suffolk County Route 80 and State Route 24.

And the analysis didn’t consider the Long Island Expressway—a kind of Main Street for Long Island—which for more than four decades I’ve driven on several times a week from our home in Noyac after receiving a position as a journalism professor at SUNY Old Westbury. 

That LIE drive is among some drivers with the mistaken idea that the LIE is the Indianapolis Speedway.

I am routinely passed (and I’m not a pokey driver) by cars wildly weaving through lanes of traffic at high speed. There are police cars along the LIE and they stop some of the speed-racer weavers. But there are still many left driving recklessly, dangerously. And then there are the tailgaters. 

Most LIE drivers motor sensibly and courteously, but far from all. When I get near SUNY Old Westbury and need to move right to get off at the Route 106/107 exit, most drivers are considerate and let me change into the lane they’re in, but not all. 

As to traffic deaths, I inputted these words last week into Google: “Fatal Auto Accidents Long Island Expressway.” Displayed were a cavalcade of items with headings starting: “Long Island Expressway Deadly Crash—NBC New York;” “Update: Woman Seriously Injured in LIE Crash in Yaphank;” “89-year-old driver killed in fiery crash on Long Island” (in Melville), “Long Island Expressway crash leaves man, 39, dead—PIX 11,” and so on. 

Regarding Route 27, when it gets out to around Westhampton and the East End, some drivers hit the gas and take off, like in airplanes. Then, Route 27 at Shinnecock Hills also becomes County Road 39. Years ago, when Suffolk County government officials figured a way to expand that often traffic-clogged road to four relatively narrow lanes, they set the speed limit at 35 miles per hour. This is posted on signs all along County Road 39, and painted on the highway itself, and is completely ignored. Accidents on County Road 39 are common. 

The Newsday piece on Long Island traffic fatalities has a subhead: “Experts blame speed.” Under it was the explanation: “Perilous conditions can occur when the thoroughfares cut through shopping areas and intersections where cyclists, pedestrians and cars converge.” 

Indeed, we live on Noyac Road in Noyac. When we first moved to Noyac nearly 50 years ago, we figured it would be a wonderful road for bicycling. However, for long stretches, the shoulders of Noyac Road on which cycling might be done are but a few inches in width. It can be cycling suicide. So, we forgot about using our bicycles on Noyac Road, now busier than ever with cars and trucks, many moving at high speed. 

On Long Island, beyond the behavior of a lot of drivers, there is the additional complication of how it is car-dependent, thanks largely to public works czar and roadbuilder (including the LIE) Robert Moses who never drove a car but worshipped the auto. Thus, transportation forms are very limited. European countries such as Holland have a wide array of transit options—trams, safe bicycle routes, trolleys, a profusion of local and long-distance trains, a wide variety of bus routes and even, yes, set-aside walking paths. That’s all so needed here.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : "A Celebration Of Trees"

 SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s enchanting and important: “A Celebration of Trees,” an exhibit at the Southampton Arts Center.

The inspiration for it came from the experience of artist Laurie Dolphin at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic at her home, amid trees, off Fresh Pond on Shelter Island. “During COVID I was on Shelter Island surrounded by trees and I was isolated,” she relates. The “trees were talking to me. I would feel their interconnectivity.”

She had a “dream” of organizing an exhibit honoring and recognizing the significance of trees. 

Knowing “I cannot do this alone,” she enlisted Daniela Kronemeyer and Coco Myers to work with her in being co-curators of a possible exhibit.

It is outstanding—and includes the work of 77 artists from 20 countries. 

Dolphin explains that the aim was not only to present the “diversity” of trees from around the world but also to do it with a diversity of art: paintings, photography, sculpture, film, etchings and poetry. 

Upon entering the exhibit, one encounters a narrative on a wall declaring: “A Celebration of Trees is an ecological multi-media exhibition created to expand thought and consciousness about the world’s vast network of trees, a critical resource to humanity’s survival…. This exhibit showcases the beauty and mystery of trees while inspiring viewers to thoughtfully contemplate how to protect them.”

The eloquent narratives on the walls of the many rooms that the exhibit encompasses are the words of poets Megan and Scott Chaskey of Sag Harbor. Scott is also the author of books, a farmer and pioneer of the community farming movement. At the entrance, too, is a striking sculpture, in wood, done by Megan’s father, the late Bill King.

“Trees have been called the most successful form of life within the great wheel of nature,” says one of the narratives.

The exhibit includes photos by famed Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado of trees and Indigenous people in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest—which is under extreme threat.

There are photos by Beth Moon who has traveled the world photographing trees notably the Baobab tree in Africa which can live for more than 2,000 years.

Information and art relating to the redwoods of California which “can live as long as 3,000 years” it is noted, are featured.

Focusing on Long Island, there are presentations involving Indigenous people here and trees—notably the white pine with its medicinal values for them.

There is a series of nine etchings by master printmaker Dan Welden, who came from Babylon to Sag Harbor, of evergreen trees, their limbs bedecked by snow.

Photos of palm trees taken by artist Andy Warhol, long a resident of Montauk, are presented. It is explained: “Little known and rarely exhibited are Andy Warhol’s black and white silver gelatin photographs” and how Warhol “viewed trees and the natural landscape with just as much importance as the celebrity-filled arts and culture scenes for which he is most famous.”

There are “60,000 species of trees,” the exhibit points out. 

“For over 300 million years, trees have helped stabilize and improve environmental conditions for life on our planet,” it is noted. 

A partner, too, in the exhibit is the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive. As a flier available at the exhibit says about this Michigan-based organization, its “mission is to propagate the world’s most important old growth trees before they are gone… and reforest the Earth with the offspring of these trees to provide the myriad of beneficial ecosystem services essential for all life forms to thrive.” There is a warning: “Even though the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has made great strides, there is still much work to do. With over eight thousand tree species on the endangered species list and our world in ecological peril, AATA needs your help in attaining their goal.”

There is also a series of events—including workshops—connected to the exhibit. 

Two weeks ago, my wife and I went to Vermont to witness the glorious burst of color of trees in Vermont starting in early October. Now, in late October, trees on Long Island are also abounding in color—just one of the gifts they provide.

“A Celebration of Trees” will be running Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through December 18. The Southampton Art Museum is at 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton. Admission is free. What you will get out of it is enormous.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Elections, Political Advertising And Likability

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

As the 2022 election season comes to a close, highways in Suffolk County are full of political campaign signs making those sequential Burma-Shave signs of decades ago look minimal. For those who were not around when those placards bedecked the landscape, one of their sequences ran: “Within this vale/of toil/and sin/your head grows bald/but not your chin/use Burma-Shave.”

Put up until the 1960s, what became 7,000 signs are credited with leading Burma-Shave to becoming the second best-selling shaving cream in the U.S. I’d say there are well more than 7,000 political campaign signs just in Suffolk these days. Their main purpose: familiarizing voters with the names of candidates.

Then there are fliers and newspaper ads—material in print which highlight the positions on issues of candidates and their backgrounds.

And then have come political TV commercials, and today these commercials are increasingly running on the internet, too. They aim at striking a different chord: appealing to feelings and emotions. This is done mainly by having candidates seem likeable. The commercials also often feature negative attacks on opponents of the nominees illustrated with unflattering photos and videos of them. 

In New York State, we are flooded this year with many political TV commercials for incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul and Suffolk Congressman Lee Zeldin in their contest for governor. In Suffolk, candidates for Congress are using TV commercials.

Political TV commercials are expensive. Indeed, paying for them is a big part of the finances of any campaign utilizing them.

The model for the political TV commercial was launched 70 years ago.

It was 1952, and a Madison Avenue advertising man, Rosser Reeves, convinced Dwight Eisenhower to use TV commercials in his run for the presidency. Four years earlier, Reeves tried to interest the prior Republican presidential candidate, Thomas Dewey, in the approach. But Dewey “did not buy the idea of lowering himself to the commercial environment of a toothpaste ad,” relates Robert Spero in his book “The Duping of the American Voter, Dishonesty & Deception in Presidential Television Advertising.”

The Eisenhower commercials were coordinated with what became the campaign slogan: “I Like Ike.” Reeves had an early understanding that television best communicates feeling and emotion, not information. 

Thus, the Eisenhower commercials presented the former five-star general grinning and appearing likeable—getting to voters’ feelings and emotions and making the strongest use of the TV medium.

The Democratic candidate, former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, tried to counter the blitz of 15-second Eisenhower spots. He embarked on a series of half-hour lectures on TV. Stevenson tried to, as he reflected, “talk sense to the American people.” As National Public Radio has noted, Stevenson “was an old-fashioned intellectual who believed in long speeches and the power of words…So he bought 30-minute blocks on TV, but nobody tuned in to watch.” 

I wrote a thesis as a graduate student in the Media Studies Program at the New School for Social Research titled: “The Political TV Commercial as a Pivotal Component in American Presidential Politics.” I analyzed every presidential campaign from the Eisenhower-Stevenson races through each presidential contest up until 1980 (as I received my degree in 1981).

The final race I wrote about was the 1980 presidential run of Ronald Reagan. Many voters might have disliked his policies, but a substantial number liked Reagan—based on the image he projected through television. With the ability to perform on TV having become a necessary attribute of a presidential candidate, the Republican Party had chosen an actor to run for president. He had been governor of California but previously, for eight years, Reagan performed on TV as host of “General Electric Theatre.”

So, it has gone—highlighted in recent years by Barack Obama, a master at speaking, smiling and being likeable through television, and, for some, Donald Trump, who earlier, for 14 years, performed on TV as host of “The Apprentice.”

I’ve long wondered how George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln would have fared in presidential races which rely on a candidate’s likeability as transmitted in political TV commercials. 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.