The final rally of Windrip’s campaign takes place in Madison Square Garden two days before the election, an affair sometimes compared to the mass demonstrations at the Berlin Sportpalast organized by Joseph Goebbels on Hitler’s behalf—but Lewis was also prescient. On October 3, 1937, nearly two years after publication of his novel, more than a thousand Storm Troopers rallied at Madison Square Garden in New York, and to mark Washington’s Birthday in February 1939, some twenty thousand members of the German-American Bund and other fascists met in Madison Square Garden to hear a speech by Fritz
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