More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jules Archer
Read between
August 25 - November 3, 2020
However, it was the President’s desire to abandon the gold standard that stunned both the super-rich, who had felt fairly insulated from the Depression, and a significant number of average Americans who believed that Roosevelt was flirting with Bolshevism.
The general American public was reeling from the depression. Roosevelt's way out was government spending - The New Deal. The rich and big business saw this as a doorway to Bolshevism. They were so afraid of the tenets of the New Deal that they started plotting a way to remove Roosevelt from the White House through a coup using a paramilitary. They approached the wrong man to lead this paramilitary force.
The only nations which seemed to provide a degree of order and stability for their people were Italy and Germany, but they were under the thumb of Fascist dictatorships.
Some were the same men who had fought under Smedley Butler in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines campaign, the Boxer Rebellion, the Caribbean interventions, the Chinese intervention of 1927–1928, and World War I.
It was the government, however, that unleashed the violence. Under orders from President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur led troops in driving the Bonus Army out of Washington at bayonet point and burning down their shacktowns.
Freedom of speech interrupted . White vets run out of Washington by federal troops . Trump was not the first.
That November lifelong Republican Smedley Butler took the stump for Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped turn Herbert Hoover out of the White House.
Banks would be paid back in cheapened paper dollars for the gold-backed dollars they had lent.
Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist out to destroy private enterprise by sapping the gold backing of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.
Butler pumped him about Colonel Murphy’s connection with the plan. Murphy, MacGuire revealed, was one of the founders of the Legion and had actually underwritten it with $125,000 in 1919 to pay for the organizational field work.
Tall, heavyset, Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy * not only operated one of Wall Street’s leading brokerage houses but was also a director of Guaranty Trust, a Morgan bank, and had extensive industrial and financial interests as a director of Anaconda Copper, Goodyear Tire, and Bethlehem Steel. A West Point graduate, Murphy was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I with the rank of colonel.
The Legion had then solicited funds and support from industrialists. Swift and Company executives had written other firms, “We are all interested in the Legion, the results it will obtain, and the ultimate effect in helping to offset radicalism.”
The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920’s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency.
When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were Communists trying to create national cha...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The American Civil Liberties Union later reported, “Of the forces most active in attacking civil rights, the ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Some business leaders envied their counterparts in Italy, who had financed Mussolini’s rise to power. Il Duce’s efficiency in “making the trains run on time” was highly lauded, along with the dictatorial control of labor unions by his corporate state. Thomas Lamont, a J. P. Morgan partner, praised the dictator for his methods of providing low-paying jobs, cutting the public debt, and ending inflation.
The nation was rapidly becoming polarized between the forces of Left and Right. Demagogues with apparently inexhaustible funds for propaganda and agitation led “patriotic” crusades against Communists, Jews, and “Jewish bankers,” who were alleged to be behind the New Deal.
whole new series of New Deal acts that crippled stock
speculation, set up watchdog agencies over the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries, stopped farm foreclosures, prevented employers from hindering unionization and ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In Italy MacGuire had found that Mussolini’s real power stemmed from veterans organized in his Black Shirts; they had made him dictator and were the chief protectors of his regime.
But when Butler pressed him on its purpose, MacGuire denied emphatically any intention to frighten the President. In fact, he explained, the whole idea was really to support and help Roosevelt, who was obviously overworked, by providing him with an “Assistant President” to take details of the office off his shoulders. It was quite constitutional,
Then the President’s status would become like that of the President of France, a ceremonial figurehead, while the Secretary of General Affairs ran the country.
MacGuire revealed that he now had $3 million in working funds and could get $300 million if it were needed. He added that in about a year Butler would be able to assemble 500,000 veterans, with the expectation that such a show of force would enable the movement to gain control of the government peacefully in just a few days.
MacGuire also informed Butler that James Van Zandt, the national commander of the V.F.W., would be one of those asked to serve as a leader of the new superorganization.
One of them, MacGuire revealed, would be none other than former New York Governor Al Smith, who had lost the 1928 presidential race to Hoover as the candidate of the Democratic party.
Could it really be possible that a leading standard-bearer of the Democrats was committed to help overthrow the chief Democrat in the White House? In slight shock Butler asked MacGuire why Smith was involved. MacGuire replied that Smith had decided to break with the Roosevelt Administration and was preparing a public blast against it which would be published in about a month.
In September, 1934, the press announced the formation of a new organization, the American Liberty League,
discontented captains of industry and finance. They announced their objectives as “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” Denouncing the New Deal, they attacked Roosevelt for “fomenting class hatred” by using such terms as “unscrupulous money changers,” “economic royalists,” and “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties.”
Heading and directing the organization were Du Pont and J. P. Morgan and Company men.
Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E. F. Hutton Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter
of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society, was a generous patron, along with other members of the Pew family, of extremist right-wing causes. Other directors of the league included Al Smith and John J. Raskob.
Its members labeled the New Deal “Jewish Communism” and insisted “the old line of Americans of $1,200 a year want a Hitler.”
“The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League,” the New York Post subsequently charged, “are in turn spawning Fascism.”
Butler was now genuinely alarmed. For the first time it dawned upon him that if the American Liberty League was, indeed, the “superorganization” behind the plot that it seemed to be, the country’s freedom was in genuine peril.
Such money and power as the men behind the League possessed could easily mobilize a thinly disguised Fascist army from the ranks of jobless, embittered veterans and do what Mussolini had done in Italy
with the financial support of the Itali...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
He grew increasingly incensed at what he considered the ingratitude of the nation toward its veterans. Once the war crisis was over and Americans felt safe, he reflected, the shattered heroes of yesterday were ignored as the “bums” of today. He was particularly embittered by the indifference of big business toward the men in uniform who had so often been called upon to spill blood for corporate profits.
The government was wrong, he finally decided, in trying to legislate morality.
The Volstead Act, he now declared, was “a fool dry act, impossible of enforcement.” It was, furthermore, “class legislation,” because the rich could avoid it and the poor could not.
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 in 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 [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. . . . I had . . . a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. . . . I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The
...more
Butler’s antagonism toward big business intensified. On February 14, 1932, the United Press quoted him as saying, “I’ve about come to the conclusion that some American corporations abroad are, in a measure, responsible for trouble with the natives simply because of the way they treat them. . . . I’ve
seen hundreds of boys from the cities and farms of the United States die in Central American countries just to protect the investments of our large corporations.” How could Washington criticize Japan for its takeover in Manchuria, he demanded, when we ourselves had been just as imperialistic?
The attempt by conservatives to smear “anyone who utters a progressive thought” as a Red, he pointed out, was
helping a “handful of agitators in their vain efforts to foment disorder and discontent with our form of government.” He branded Republican warnings that a Democratic victory would turn America socialist an absurd myth.
A week before Election Day Butler made a slashing attack on Hoover in a speech to an enthusiastic rally of Queens, New York, veterans, describing
himself as “a member of the Hoover-for-Ex-President League because Hoover used gas and bayonets on unarmed human beings.”
Sound familiar - Trump did same for protesters at White House. Reason - he needed to walk across the street to hold up the bible outside a boarded up church.
American big business, he accused, had been responsible for United States entry into World War I and was now “getting ready to start another one in the East.”
Less than three weeks before the President-elect’s inauguration, an unsuccessful
attempt was made to assassinate him at Miami. Could the assassin’s bullet possibly have been negotiated for, Butler speculated, by a big-business cabal that hated Roosevelt and dreaded a New Deal?
Roosevelt declared at his inauguration on March 4, 1933, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
noted with satisfaction that the bankers and industrialists of the nation were horrified.
