Friday, July 27, 2007

The Wall Street Plot to Overthrow FDR

BBC's Radio 4 has an interesting audio program about the plotting by right wing business interests to overthrow FDR. The plot was largely ignored by establishment media of the time (there were articles in the Philadelphia Record, New York Post, and New York Times) . An official report by the precursor to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee stored in the bowels of the National Archives confirms that wealthy business and Wall Street interests were willing to finance a coup against the American federal government during the Great Depression. These interests were convinced that FDR's "New Deal" program represented a socialist threat to American private enterprise. A popular, decorated marine general was to lead a militia of 500,000 disgruntled WWI bonus veterans and fascist groups The goal of the coup was to force FDR to become a figurehead and hand over power to an "assistant president" or be killed (sounds like a job for Darth Cheney).

In 1934 a retired Marine major general,Smedley-Butler, informed the McCormack-Dickstein Committee that he had been approached by Gerald MacGuire, an heir to the Singer fortune and wealthy Wall Street bond salesman, to join the conspiracy. Rep. Dickstein called the planned coup "the most dangerous threat to American democracy" ever uncovered. Others, like New York Mayor LaGuardia, dismissed it as a "cocktail putsch". A front organization, the American Liberty League, had been formed by corporate leaders at Du Pont, General Foods, Colgate, Heinz, Bird's Eye, US Steel, and GM to finance the coup. The American Hamburg Steamship Line represented by Prescott Bush, the current President's grandfather, was also involved. The steamship company offered free passage to any journalist willing to write favorable stories about Hitler's Germany. Prescott Bush invested funds for Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen while an investment banker at Brown Brothers Harriman even after Pearl Harbor. The assets controlled by Bush were eventually seized by the government under the Trading With the Enemy Act. According to the BBC report, FDR struck a deal with top business leaders to excise their names from the Committee report in return for retracting their opposition to New Deal programs. Butler complained publicly that the names of high level plotters testified to in secret at the New York Bar's headquarters were never revealed to the public. The Committee was allowed to expire without any prosecutions being brought. Seems fascist sympathies run in the Bush genes.