In the first half of the twentieth century, radical bookstores took many forms and often served as part of larger, multichannel campaigns. Nazis, as well as Communists and Socialists, organized festivals and parades, dances and concerts, and schools and camps to disseminate critiques of American democracy and American capitalism. Bookstores served as their intellectual hubs, the places where ideologies circulated—and places granted at least a veneer of respectability.
Indeed, the Aryan Book Store was much more than a place to buy something. It was the de facto headquarters of American Nazism.
The Aryan Book Store opened in March of 1933, the same month Franklin Delano Roosevelt took presidential office and, across the Atlantic, when an Austrian-born, middle-aged antisemite rose to power. Hitler’s message of hate was spun and spread by an elaborate propaganda machine, a machine with its official heart in Germany and limbs stretching across the globe via an army of enablers. The goal was international revolution, a restored German Empire, an earth peopled by an Aryan race.
To win over Americans, they focused on Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular. Although Nazis were more famous for burning books, they also sold them. Destroying books and establishing bookstores were both a tacit acknowledgment of the same truth: books have power.
The bookstore made no secret of its aims. On the ground floor, it was the most visible part of the South Alvarado Street operation that also featured a restaurant, beer garden, and meeting room. The eating, drinking, socializing, and guest lectures, along with the reading, discussing, and browsing, were all intended to recruit Californians to the Nazi cause.
As the Depression unfolded, curious passersby, including unemployed wanderers, popped in, looked around, and chatted with booksellers, who gave them easy explanations for the root cause of their suffering. Most of the theories fundamentally boiled down to this: the Jews control everything, and the Jews ruin everything.
The store described its specialties as anti-Communism and antisemitism, which it defined as one and the same. One woman remarked that the bookstore “really opened her eyes to the Jewish-Communistic conditions in our country.”
On a typical Friday evening, twenty-five people visited, mostly men in their twenties who drove Pontiacs, Buicks, and Studebakers. We know these details, as well as their plate numbers and the exact times at which they arrived and departed, because just around the corner was a spy.
Although the authorities downplayed the Nazi threat, American Jews did not. The same year that the Aryan Book Store opened, a Jewish lawyer named Leon Lewis established a team of undercover operatives, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, to expose Nazi plots—plots to take over Hollywood and ultimately America.