“In the huge gathering . . . there were, according to the official estimate . . . 1,250,000 persons. So far as available records indicated last night, this was the largest crowd that has ever assembled at a single point anywhere in the world.” This New York Times report from May 1942 refers not to a military parade in Nazi Germany but to a celebration in New York City. “The magnet that drew this astonishing turnout to Central Park, where it filled out not only the five acres of the Mall but the thirteen acres of the sheepfold, was the local observance of ‘I am an American Day,’ which, by proclamation of President Roosevelt, was marked yesterday in hundreds of other American communities, great and small.”