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Hunter College Students Listen to Speech by Representative of American Nazi Party

Apr. 11, 1962 - Four hundred students at Hunter College in the Bronx listened today to an exposition of American Nazism by a stand-in for its founder, George Lincoln Rockwell (pictured). Hundreds of mounted and foot policemen and detectives guarded the campus to protect three Rockwell aides from survivors of Nazi death camps and other pickets. Mr. Rockwell, who faces arrest for disorderly conduct on a court warrant, remained in New Jersey. The substitute lecturer was Seth D. Ryan, who said he was a “captain” under “Commander Rockwell.” He was accompanied by Roy James, a “lieutenant,” and Schuyler Ferris, a “trooper.” The meeting had been arranged by a student group, the Competency party, as the first of a series to hear representatives of splinter organizations “out of the mainstream” of American politics. Ryan said the party believed that the white race, in which it did not include members of the Jewish faith, was the bearer of civilization, that the races should be strictly separated, that capitalism should be replaced by national socialism or a system he called “free enterprise,” and that government should be authoritarian. A thin-faced, high-strung man in his early twenties, Ryan told the students that his party favored execution in the gas chamber of all whom it considered “Communists,” a class in which he included President Kennedy.

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