Remembering when bankers tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictator
Though we know today that his policies eventually ended the Great Depression, FDR's election was seen as disastrous by some.
A group of wealthy bankers decided to take things into their own hands; they plotted a coup against FDR, hoping to install a fascist dictator in its stead.
Ultimately, the coup was brought to light by General Smedley Butler and squashed before it could get off the ground.
When we look back at history, we have the benefit of knowing how things turned out — not true for those who were living through history's tensest moments. At key inflection points in history and in response to crises, most of the actors had no idea what would happen or what the right thing to do was. Sometimes, this uncertainty can drive people to bold and ill-advised actions.
Take the Great Depression. Something had to be done, but nobody knew what for certain. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected on a campaign that promised to abandon the gold standard and provide government jobs for the unemployed, many in the grips of the crisis thought that this was certainly the wrong way to go.
"This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty," wrote Republican Senator Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia to a colleague. "The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of democracy but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."
Again, it was clear during the time that something drastic had to be done. However, it was not clear, for many, that FDR's plan of action was the right kind of drastic.
The allure of fascism
Fascism had reared its head in Europe, and the world had yet to make up its mind what it thought about it — that would come later, in World War II. Many thought that the best way to pull America out of the Great Depression was to install a dictator — even the New York Herald-Tribune ran a headline called "For Dictatorship If Necessary." Although the newspaper's article was in support of FDR, a group of wealthy financiers believed that America should indeed have a dictator, just not in the form of FDR, who was suspected of being a communist. So, they began to plot a coup d'état that would later come to be known as the Business Plot, or the Wall Street Putsch.
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the pukes back then were just a few decades ahead of their time. Surely they would be applauding where we are now, with an installed fascist president.
