Weekend Edition

October 3 - 5, 2008

*FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him *

By ALAN NASSER

Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S.
political history is virtually unknown to the general public,
including most scholars of American history.

In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to
conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to
topple the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and
replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolf
Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the
investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National
Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a
few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story
disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional
findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the
recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report
that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.

The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the
foremost members of the economic elite, many of them household
names at the time, had indeed hatched a meticulously detailed
and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America.
The plotters represented prominent families - Rockefeller,
Mellon, Pew, enterprises like Morgan, Dupont, Pew, Remington,
Anaconda, Bethlehem and Goodyear, along with the owners of
Bird’s Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz. Totaling about twenty four
major businessmen and Wall Street financiers, they planned to
assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely
of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the
armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this
in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would
provide the material resources required to sustain the new
government.

The plotters hoped that widespread working-class discouragement
at the stubborn persistence of the Great Depression would have
sufficiently disenchanted the masses with FDR’s policies to make
the coup an easy ride. And they were appalled at Roosevelt’s
willingness after 1933 to initiate economic policies that
economists and businessmen considered dangerously Leftist
departures from economic orthodoxy. Only a fascist-style
government, they thought, could enforce the kind of economic
“discipline” that would reverse the Great Depression and restore
profits.

Interestingly, it was a military man, Major General Smedley D.
Butler*, assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who
blew the whistle after uncovering the details of the operation
he was asked to lead. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud.

The president might have used the occasion to alert the public
to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the
capitalist class. But this would only have bolstered the
fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other anti-capitalist
political tendencies here, which were already gaining some
ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of
working people. It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in
the 1930s was replete with Communist-inspired sentiment.

And we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat
renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him.
While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way
that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like
Keynes’s) to the “free enterprise” system was unconditional. He
had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a
public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He
therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive
measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the
day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee cooperated by
refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters.

Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of
the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop
unhindered by mass political mobilization.

Might this grisly episode have important implications for our
understanding of the current political moment? One may be
inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the
architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of
George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had
maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new
German government of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, and was designated
to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with
that government.

While I highly recommend Bush-bashing, the implications of this
unsettling piece of history for contemporary politics run deeper
than many –especially soi disant “oppositional” liberals- would
like to think. There is the temptation to point triumphantly to
George W. Bush’s commitment to the irrelevance of the
Constitution, his corresponding contempt for hitherto
taken-for-granted fundamental human rights, his Hobbesian notion
of unbridled sovereignty, his militarized notion of political
power - there is the temptation to regard these fascist elements
as the most significant contemporary remnant of the 1934 conspiracy.

But no less important is the utter absence in 1934 of liberal
attempts to educate the public to, and mobilize the population
against, the fascist threat. FDR stood down.

Although Rooseveltian/New Deal liberalism is dead, contemporary
Democrats do sustain one of FDR’s least seemly qualities, namely
his refusal to encourage effective mass opposition to fascist
and imperialist politics. John Kerry boasted of having
contributed to the drafting of the Patriot Act. And in the first
round of legislation regarding continued funding of the war in
Iraq, after the 2006 elections gave the Democrats a majority in
the House and the Senate, the Democrats gave Bush everything he
wanted. All the major presidentail contenders of both parties
support a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. None has repudiated
the conceit that Uncle Sam is the permanent global hegemon. And
most importantly, no mainstream Democrat has repudiated the
Neoliberal Consensus, the notion that the market should be left
to operate as “freely” as the public can be persuaded to allow
it to act, and, crucially, that this is a model that should be
imposed globally through the power of the U.S. working in tandem
with such global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and the
WTO.

To the extent that this policy has been successful, inequalities
between national classes and between the global North and South
have widened dramatically since the decline of the Keynesian
consensus in the mid-1970s. Since the Mondale candidacy, no
Democrat has had a full-employment plank in his presidential
platform. The median wage has been in secular decline since
1973, and the distribution of national income between capital
and labor has not been as skewed toward capital since the Great
Depression. But no Democrat has made a major issue of this.

These tendencies toward ever-widening inequality and the
increasing immiseration of the working population will surely be
exacerbated by the deepening slow-motion recession (depression?)
that is certain to follow the unfolding financial meltdown.
These conditions, and the deep resentment felt by masses of
working people toward the lords of Wall Street and their
political henchpersons, threaten to generate social
“instability” in the form of increasing crime rates and a host
of direct and indirect forms of resistance to the claimed
legitimacy of the political order. The emergence of what Mike
Whitney has called “soup kitchen America” requires a response
from our rulers. And they are prepared with (literally) fascist
legislation already in place for situations just like this.

Developments over the last day or two in connection with
Monday’s House rejection of the bailout package for Wall Street
indicate that allegations of fascist tendencies in U.S.
political culture are in these times not to be taken lightly.
Influential voices in the U.S. media have lamented the
susceptability of the political leadership to the will of the
people. On Tuesday the Washington Post ran a piece by Michael
Gerson, Bush’s former speechwriter, complaining that “It is now
clear that American political elites have lost the ability to
quickly respond to a national challenge by imposing their
collective will.” The same day Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London
headlined a column “Congress is the Best Advert For
Dictatorship.” And yesterday Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California),
who voted against the bailout bill, was quoted in the Los
Angeles Times as saying “I’ve seen members turn to each other
and say if we don’t pass this bill, we’re going to have martial
law in the United States.” “going to have”? We’ve already got
it, at least on the books.

On October 17, 2006, Bush signed three Acts that instantly
transformed the republic into a police state. The John Warner
Defense Authorization Act (DAA) effectively repeals the 1878
Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits military operations directed
against the American people. The DAA declares that “the
president may employ the armed forces to restore public order
and enforce the laws of the United States when…[among other
reasons]… the President determines that domestic violence has
occurred to such an extent thet the constituted authorities of
the State or possession are incapable of (or “refuse” or “fail
in”) maintaining public order --- in order to suppress, in any
State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful
combination, or conspiracy.”

There is of course nothing in the legislation that specifies
what precisely may count as “insurrection, domestic violence,
unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The lone Democrat to
express reservations about DAA was Senator Patrick Leahy
(D-Vermont), who entered into the Congressional Record that the
Act “[makes] it easier for the president to declare martial law…
[T]he implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are
enormous…Using the military for law enforcement goes against one
of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Nothing was made of
Leahy’s protestations by complicit Democrats.

The Military Commissions Act permits the President, in order to
“suppress public disorder”, to assign military troops anywhere
in the United States in order to trump the authority of
state-based National Guard units, and without the consent of the
governer.

Finally, the National Defense Authorization Act allows the
President to declare martial law, dispatch National Guard units
around the country and authorize military action against the
domestic population should His Majesty identify a “national
emergency”.

Liberal Democrats, upon being apprised of these developments (of
which the vast majority are ignorant) will declare themselves
shocked, shocked that Bush has “declared himself dictator”. But
Bush has not signed legislation which expires when he passes
from office. Every future President will have these powers.
Would President Obama seek to erase these abominations? Don’t
bet on it. Obama has not jettisoned the entire legacy of FDR.
Like Roosevelt, Obama will stand down.

· Butler underwent a major political epiphany shortly before his
retirement from the Marine Corps in 1931. In that same year, he
addressed an American Legion convention on his assessment of his
career. His audience was stunned by his reflections: “I spent 33
years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall
Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for
capitalism…. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make
Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests
inb 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American
sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent
place for the National City boys to collect revenue in. I helped
in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the
benefit of Wall Street.” It remains a mystery why the
conspirators would approach this man. But they did.

*Alan Nasser* is professor emeritus of Political Economy and
Philosophy at The Evergreen State College.