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Let’s talk about Fascism in America
By Ned | January 10, 2008
Since Jonah Goldberg seems so eager to jump into that discussion. As one blogger points out (via Andrew Sullivan) a guy who works at the National Review really has no right to be throwing charges of fascism around willy-nilly. After all, it wasn’t the Nation that was publishing love letters to Adolf Eichmann and Francisco Franco in the 60’s and 70’s.
But since we’re on the topic of the history of fascism in the United States, let’s talk about the Business Plot - an incident that is curiously absent from the current dialogue about the history of American fascism.
Here’s the Cliff Notes version: in the early to mid-30’s, a group of corporate leaders who weren’t big fans of the Roosevelt administration but thought that the Nazi Party was just swell tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a coup to overthrow the president of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship in his place. Unfortunately for them, they forgot rule #1 of fascist coups: never trust a man named Smedley to carry out your sinister conspiracy for you. It turns out that not only was Butler a patriot, but he had openly supported FDR in the 1932 election. Suffice to say, whoever’s bright idea it was to recruit him to lead the coup did not end up winning the 1934 Golden Cassius award for malevolent plotting. Butler ended up testifying to a congressional committee about the whole thing.
So who was involved in the whole thing? Turns out it was a bunch of hippie vegetarian liberals who didn’t think FDR was liberal enough. Gotcha! Actually, the chief backers, according to Butler, were the Du Pont family, funding it through a bipartisan but overwhelmingly pro-corporate organization called the American Liberty League. Butler also fingered Chase Bank, GM and Goodyear as having a part in the plot. Decades later, a documentary called The White House Coup alleged that Senator Prescott Bush was also part of the plot.
The Senate committee that Smedley Butler testified to acknowledged the existence of the conspiracy, but no convictions were handed down.
Just for kicks, here’s some campaign contributions made during this election cycle by individual members of the Du Pont family. And here’s some info about the Du Pont company’s PAC, which even with a Democratic majority in both houses and a more pickups in both the House and Senate forecasted this year (not to mention that presidential election we keep hearing everyone talk about), is still donating 64% of its contributions to Republican candidates.
Now look, I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to go running around screaming that Duncan Hunter’s a fascist just because a member of a wealthy family that was financially backing a US fascist coup donated money to Hunter’s campaign. Nor am I suggesting that George W. Bush is a neo-Nazi just because his grandfather may not only have had a hand in the coup but also had financial interests in Nazi Germany. All I’m saying is that Goldberg’s been throwing around similarly ridiculous accusations about the modern progressive movement based on evidence that basically amounts to: Liberals are unpleasant : fascism is also unpleasant : liberals are therefore fascist. Apply his rigorous and highly serious standards of historical research to the National Review’s history and the history of the Business Plot and you’ll find that the Hitler mustache is on the wrong face.
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January 11th, 2008 at 4:42 am
[…] Ned Resnikoff on a ’30s plot backed by rich conservatives, GM, Goodyear, Chase Bank, and perhaps Prescott Bush to overthrow FDR and install a glorious fascist regime in his place. […]