In March of 1933, the US was sinking further into the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt took office, and Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. It was also the month the Aryan Book Store opened in Los Angeles. It had a restaurant, meeting room, and beer garden on the first floor, which wasn't unusual for bookstores, which were seen as meeting places for intellectuals. This one had a distinct agenda, which they never hid. After all, Americans knew little about Nazis then, and certainly had no idea what their activities would lead to. New customers would be given a free newspaper and were introduced to the group Friends of New Germany. They would be told about antisemitism and anticommunism, which were treated as the same thing, because people suffering from the dire economics of the time would need someone to blame.
Other Nazi bookstores opened in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and the Aryan Bookstore moved to a larger location. American authorities paid little attention to these propaganda outlets, because they were busy fighting communist ideology, and the Nazis were anticommunist. Read about the Aryan Book Store in an excerpt from The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting
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