Smedley Darlington Butler, about 1928īut General Butler took his story to Congress and the coup failed. The attempt was foiled by Smedley Darlington Butler, a retired US Marine Corps brigadier general and much-decorated military hero whom the cabal tried to recruit to lead the coup, unseat FDR, and become the titular dictator. Rachel and her producer Isaac Davey Aronson begin this episode with the Business Plot, a little-known failed coup attempt by a cabal of wealthy, powerful businessmen against President Franklin D. But this first episode of Deja News, “Riot at the Gates (Again),” held a special interest for me. I always find important and intriguing historical intersections in her work. I especially appreciate Rachel’s habit of pulling parallel events from history and using them as a template for thinking about our current challenges. The first episode of her latest podcast- Deja News-was released last week, and I listened with interest and then read the transcript.
I’ve read her books ( Drift, Blowout, Bag Man) and listened to her first two podcasts ( Bag Man and Ultra) more than once. I’ve been a fan of Rachel Maddow since 2008. this is 75 years later, and some of these same impulses continue.I think I’ll file this under “six degrees of separation.” See what you think. "And I don't know what that is in the impulse of the American body politic, but. "It seems to me that going through history here, there are times that we need to have a demon, somebody that's not of us, in order to solidify our fears and our anxieties," Denton says. For example, a cottage industry much like the birther movement grew up around proving that the Dutch-descended Roosevelt was actually a secret Jew. "But he saw it as treason and he reported it to Congress."ĭenton says that as she was writing the book, she was struck by the parallels between the treatment of Roosevelt and that of Barack Obama. "Had he been a different kind of person, it might have gone a lot further," Denton says. The conspirators had several million dollars, a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler, to lead their forces. "It was a cockamamie concept," she adds, "and the fact that it even got as far as it did is pretty shocking." "They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government," Denton says. The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers. Though it's barely remembered today, there was a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the president. Some of Roosevelt's opponents didn't stop at talk. Critics on the left complained his policies didn't go far enough. "There was just this sense that he was upsetting the status quo," Denton says.Ĭritics on the right worried that Roosevelt was a Communist, a socialist or the tool of a Jewish conspiracy. When Roosevelt finally took office, he embarked on the now-legendary First Hundred Days, an ambitious legislative program aimed at reopening and stabilizing the country's banks and getting the economy moving again. Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression.
"There were suggestions that capitalism was not working, that democracy was not working," she says. Though it's hard for us to imagine today, she says fascism, communism, even Naziism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills. It could have gone very different directions," Denton says. She says that during the tense months between FDR's election in November and his inauguration in March 1933, democracy hung in the balance. Hatfield of West Virginia, bemoaning the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.ĭenton is the author of a new book, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.
In fact, author Sally Denton tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, they come from a letter written in 1933 by Republican Sen. Those words could be ripped from today's headlines.
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