Arms and the woman – Frank McNally on Irish-American writer Kathleen Norris’s controversial salute

Returning to the subject of that 1927 movie The Callahans and the Murphys (Diary, June 28th), one of the reasons it hit such a raw nerve with Irish-Americans is that coincided with an upsurge of protests by the Ku Klux Klan.

In May of that year, at a parade in New York, 1,000 robed Klan members rioted when police tried to prevent them marching. The NYPD was heavily Irish then, a fact not lost on the KKK.

Handbills posted in Queen’s after the riot bore the headlines: “Americans Assaulted by Roman Catholic Police of New York City. Native-born Protestant Americans clubbed and beaten when they exercise their right in the country of their birth.”

A little confusingly, the riots also involved Italian fascists, two of whom were killed in clashes with counter protesters and police.

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Arms and the woman – Frank McNally on Irish-American writer Kathleen Norris’s controversial salute

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So the same New York Times that reported the Klan’s anti-Catholic rhetoric gave details of the impending funerals of their fellow rioters, to be held at a Catholic church in the Bronx. “About one thousand Fascisti will attend,” predicted the paper.

As viewed from a century later, however, the most interesting detail of the 1927 riots may be that those arrested included one “Fred Trump, of 175-24 Devonshire Road, Jamaica.”

Although he was quickly released, without charges, this was enough to ensure that Fred Trump’s name would feature again when his son Donald fought and won the 2016 US presidential election on an anti-immigration ticket.

It was also later used to remind the Irish-Americans in Trump’s White House, including his press secretary Kellyanne Conway, where they came from.

News website The Intercept, for example, suggested Conway seemed “blissfully unaware that her own ancestors were once the target of the sort of nativist hatred her boss is currently ginning up”.

Trump had already denied his father’s involvement in the KKK protest – sort of. In a Bart Simpson defence, he first said: “It never happened.” Then he clarified: “It’s unfair to mention it, to be honest, because there were no charges.”

But there is a strange echo of this controversy in the life of Kathleen Norris, a popular novelist whose affectionate portrayals of Irish Catholic America included The Callahans and the Murphys (1924), the book on which the movie was based.

Some years later, at a 1941 New York rally opposing US involvement in the second World War, she was photographed alongside Charles Lindburgh and others giving what looks like a Fascist salute.

Apologists have suggested she was merely saluting the US flag, in the style associated with the pledge of allegiance.

There is even a theory that it was something called the “Bellamy salute”. Named for the man who wrote the pledge, that predated the Nazi one but was dropped in 1942 in favour of the hand-on-heart gesture.

Born in California to temperance-campaigning parents, Norris had long been a Democrat Party supporter until she broke with Franklyn D Roosevelt in 1933 over his decision to end prohibition.

But economically at least, her politics were also leaning right by then: even amid the Great Depression, she opposed FDR’s relief programme.

According to her biographer, Deanna Paoli Gumbina, Norris “firmly believed that any American who wanted to work could find a job, and to prove her point, dressed in worn clothing and imitating an Irish brogue, she applied for employment as a dishwasher in a private home during the early months of the Depression”.

With a letter of reference from “Mrs Charles G Norris” (her married name), she posed as “Mollie O’Connor” who had previously worked for the Norrises: “When she returned home, she told her startled family that there were plenty of jobs available if people only looked.”

Norris’s involvement in the America First campaign stemmed primarily from her pacifism and a belief that the war was a European problem.

And although Gumbina’s book tends to exonerate her from supporting the Nazis, she seems to have been culpable at least of turning a blind eye to the company she kept in pacifism’s cause.

The British journalist (and communist) Tom Driberg was in New York for the 1941 rally. He described the America First Committee as a “notoriously pro-Nazi outfit” and the crowd “as hysterical as any Hitler mob, but much more unpleasant”.

Driberg added: “They sang America First, Last, and Always but could not sing God Bless America because it was written by a Jew.”

As for the salute, debate has sometimes come down to a question of arm and hand angles. Along with Norris and Lindbergh, the trio in the photograph includes a Democrat senator for Montana, Burton K Wheeler.

And when the New York Review of Books used the picture to illustrate an essay on American fascism, a biographer of Wheeler counter-claimed that his was the Bellamy salute, and called the suggestion it was Nazi a slur.

In response, an NYRB editor conceded that while Wheeler’s gesture “appeared half-hearted and not very Nazi”, Lindbergh’s salute “looked full-on fash”. Stylistically, although it’s on the extreme right of the picture, Norris’s salute seems to be somewhere in between.