by William Gleed

On Saturday, August 19, Boston became the site of the latest protests between the alt-right and its opponents. This is the story of one man’s attempt to see history up close.

I went to the Boston Common on Saturday.  I wanted to see these alt-right neo-Nazis I’d heard about who were coming out to defend American history, heritage, and culture from the big, bad city elders of Boston and the week before in Charlottesville, Virginia.

You see, where I live, you don’t get to see real-life Klansmen and Nazis very often.  You read about them in history books and hear about them on the TV.  But real life Nazi sightings are about as rare as a solar eclipse.  And I might get to see both in one week!

To start my hunt for the rare, white neo-Nazi, I took the MBTA commuter train into town.  People on the platform had signs, but none of them were pro-KKK white nationalist signs.  I was a little surprised.  A young lady on the platform was saying she could see her friend years from now talking about how unbelievable their future selves would find the memories they were going to make today.  Imagine Nazis in 2017, she said.  I hoped she was right. I figured I’d have to get all the way to the urban jungles of Boston to spot a real Nazi.

We got on, and the train pulled out.  More sign carriers got on at every stop.

I got to North Station and headed out on foot to the Common.  Boston is a walking city, and the weekend street crowds were swirling. But there were no swastikas anywhere.  I saw a girl wearing a T-shirt with an image of Elizabeth Warren riding a unicorn over the rainbow.  I thought she might be poking fun at a liberal icon like an alt-right neo-Nazi would.

“Pocahontas, right?”  But she said no.  She just liked the shirt.

I got to the corner of Bowdoin and Derne Street, by Suffolk University Law School.  Boston cops go to law school there at night.  I knew there would be no Nazis gathering there.  On the front steps of a condo on Bowdoin Street sat two older gentlemen.

“He lost me when he started talking about the fake news,” one said, and the other grunted in agreement.  How could they be talking like that and be Nazis?  Nope, I surmised, just two more normal people.

I trudged up the hill and around the corner past the statue of Gen. Joseph Hooker that sits perched next to the Statehouse.  Hooker was a Union general who commanded of the Army of the Potomac for a hot minute in the winter of 1863.  Among his legacies, he saved countless soldiers’ lives from dysentery by issuing the order that put the mess hall at one end of camp and the latrine at the other (no shit). Legend has it that young ladies known as Hookers’ girls followed him everywhere, a kind of 19th century Charlie Sheen.  On the battlefield, Lee beat Hooker at Chancellorsville in May that year, and Lincoln summarily fired him. Still, I was certain I’d find white nationalists protecting the statue of a man who gave his name to an entire profession…and the oldest profession, at that!

But apparently Joe Hooker doesn’t have the same modern press operation as Robert E. Lee. The only person by the statue was a young female Massachusetts state trooper.  I told the trooper the story of Hooker’s girls and the order about latrines, and she did her best not to seem too bored.

I guess Civil War history, heritage, and culture are aren’t for everyone.

I turned down Beacon Street and was stopped in my tracks.  There was Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial to the 54^th Massachusetts, the first black troops to serve as US soldiers. If you’ve seen the movie Glory, you’ve seen the monument.  There had to be Nazis protecting that monument.  I mean, that’s what they do, right?  Protect history?  And yet not a Nazi was in sight.

I did meet three young black men, though, and they told me the story of their great, great-grandfather who served in the 54^th. One was a veteran, too.

What was going on?  I had read in the media that Nazis and white nationalist would be in the Common today.  Could the press have fallen for faked news?

I asked a young woman in a yellow volunteer vest.  She hadn’t seen any Nazis.  I asked a married couple with a nasty woman sign.  No luck.  I ran into a group of maybe two hundred Quakers.  Not even a hint of a Nazi, but they said they’d heard they were over by the bandstand.  So I headed for the bandstand.

Lo and behold, there they were!

There were maybe ten alt-right protesters there on the bandstand, with a few others scattered nearby.  They looked kind of silly compared to the throngs of counter-protesters.  Due to the heavy police barricades, I couldn’t get closer than a hundred yards.  The few Nazis in Boston seemed freaked by the 40,000 folks that came to see them and taunt them.  They were outnumbered a thousand to one.

That sounds about the right ratio for the rest of America, too.  I mean, in this day and age of open-minded tolerance and brotherhood, those types must be just a fraction of a fraction, right?  No?  (Please apply a tone of heavy sarcasm to your reading of this paragraph.)

I decided to go home.

On the train out of the city, I heard that the president claimed we were anti-police protesters in Boston. I was sitting with a fellow traveler from the demonstration, and we laughed about how silly that sounded.  We were anti-fascists, not anti-police.  He was eighty years old, a school crossing guard, a Boy Scout leader, and a double amputee above the knee from the Korean War.  He was hard to see as anti-police, but I’ve been wrong before.

The truth is, I never did see a sight like the hateful skinheads photo at the top of this page. The scenes I saw were more like this…

…thousands of good, fair-minded people showing up to defend American values and freedom, and in the process send a message to those who stoke hatred and fear as their own personal monument.

I never did see a Nazi up close.  Maybe we just don’t have many Nazis around here.

But I did see thousands of peaceful, passionate activists who turned out on a Saturday in Boston to say no to bigotry, no to hate.  The type of Americans who truly deserve a monument built to them.

William Gleed has taught writing and literature at Southern New Hampshire University, Franklin Pierce University, Middlesex Community College, and Northern Essex Community College in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He’s been a correspondent for the Portsmouth, NH Herald and Seacoast Newspapers. He received a graduate degree in  poetry writing from the University of New Hampshire in 1995.