When German-American Bund rallies and Silver Shirt organizing spread through the 1930s, the police protected the fascists and arrested their opponents. At the Bund's 20,000-strong 1939 "Pro-American Rally" in Madison Square Garden — swastikas beside Washington — the plumber Isadore Greenbaum rushed the stage against George Lincoln Rockwell's forerunners, was beaten by stormtroopers and police alike, and fined for disorderly conduct: the night's only person charged. Outside, mounted police clubbed fifty thousand anti-fascist protesters.

In Minneapolis, Teamster Local 544's union defense guard — organized by the same Trotskyists later jailed in the first Smith Act case — broke the Silver Shirts' organizing drive in 1938 without a single arrest of a fascist; the union's armed self-defense became, instead, evidence in the government's 1941 prosecution of its leaders. The pattern — anti-fascists in the dock, fascists under escort — is the movement's founding grievance.