The Wall Street Putsch
"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." - Groucho Marx
Everything is going to hell!
Let’s look on the brighter side of things.
The end is near!
How about that silver lining?
Where are we going? And, why am I in this hand basket. . . ?
It could always be worse. . .
~~~
Have you heard of the coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt that failed due to the coup plotters thinking they could count on a highly ranked general to go along with their sinister intentions? It was called—if it was called anything because, frankly, it got swept so far under the historical rug, it was only found when the rug was removed—the ‘Business Coup’. Alternatively, the Business Plot, the Wall Street Putsch and the White House Putsch.
You have three guesses for why it was called the ‘Business Coup’. First two don’t count.
It was 1933. FDR won his first term as president. He was re-elected three more times. If you are a conservative, it was because he stole every single one of those elections. If you are the beneficiary of many of his populist ideas (hydropower, social security, well-shaded public venues), it was the will of the people.
Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957. It was a paean to industrialist wealth and, in her mind, their can-do attitude. The triumph of capitalism. A love letter harkening back to the turn-of-the-century titans of industry. The Gilded Age where robber barons—the likes of which had never been seen—strode across America and the entire world.
Those robber barons did not cotton to FDR’s ideas. They could tolerate the Hoovervilles. There were no ‘grapes of wrath’ for the well-to-do. If America’s bread basket was a Dust Bowl, let the peasants eat the cracked earth and they’ll simply double down on the lobster bisque until the rains return.
Many of the biggest names in business were privy to this traitorous act. You might recognize a few: Heinz, Dupont, Hearst, Rockefeller, Mellon, Morgan. And, let’s not forget, G.W.’s grandaddy, Prescott Bush. Who also—ostensibly—had a connection to the Nazi Party. If I’m not mistaken—and I might be—it had to do with gun-running.
In FDR’s first 100 days in office he was hyperkinetic for a man bound to a wheelchair.
• Federal Emergency Relief Administration to provide immediate help to the ill-fed and ill-housed;
• Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), putting unemployed men to work on forest and soil conservation efforts;
• Agricultural Adjustment Act, to raise the prices of farm commodities;
• National Industrial Recovery Act, to counter the effects of the deflationary depression;
• Tennessee Valley Authority, to create a series of Federally built and operated dams to produce hydroelectric energy and thus stimulate agricultural output in poor areas of the rural Upper South.
FDR was also dealing with bank failures across the nation. It was the Great Depression after all.
The mighty industrialists of the time were unhappy about anything that fucked with their bottom line and these were times when millions were out of work, homeless, hungry, penniless and—all the while—a climate catastrophe was ravaging middle America.
Remember the Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life? This was those times.
The scions of the Gilded Age thought they could persuade Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to set off the plot, coup or putsch and they would finance an army of a half million to back him up. This was late in the summer of FDR’s first year in office. Instead, the Major General took the information to a Congressional committee called the McCormack-Dickstein Committee. Which—interestingly enough—was one of the first House Un-American Activities committees. (You might remember hearing about House Un-American Activities committees after they jumped the shark and started going after screenwriters, producers and directors in Hollywood, along with thousands of ‘little people’ led by a megalomaniac politician from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy (R-Of Course). He was the recipient of this much-coined phrase during one of these HUAC hearings—“You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”)
If there ever was an un-American activity being advanced, this was it. A fascist military coup.
So, what became of it? What do you think? None of us ever heard about it in our history classes, I’d wager to bet. Wikipedia says this:
In their final report, the Congressional committee supported General Butler's claims on the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.
So, in conclusion, we’ve been here before, and we haven’t been here before. Some people like to say that history doesn’t repeat, but it does like to rhyme.
I posted an article a couple of days ago where the author posited that The Former Wise-Guy will win in 2024 and—if he does—America will splinter. I ended that column by saying make sure your passport is up-to-date. I have my eyes on progressive-minded Uruguay.
Today I read Thom Hartmann’s well-written article about how every 80 years or so Americans rise up and push back against oligarchy—the American Revolution, The Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII and FDR. . . and now another rise of nationalism globally sparked by inequities and money pooling at the top. Hartmann surmises it might have to do with the fact that after about 80 years almost everyone with a memory of what happened is gone. I’m thinking that perhaps we should record history accurately the first time around and teach history accurately going forward rather than allowing the “robber barons” to always have a hand in writing it in their favor. Perhaps AI, perhaps the hive mind of the internet, will interrupt this historical rhyming glitch.
Or hiccup.
Or skip.
Who knows?
I just wanted to contribute a bit of a positive on the heels of negative. Vacillating my way through the world.
Fantastic photos of birds. Audubon’s Award winners from 2021. Don’t quit scrolling until you see the hawk in flight. Enjoy!
Also, AAR Nancy Enz Lill sent me this wonderful article about America’s favorite Western movie “bad guy” (read Native American) - Wes Studi. You may not know the name, but you’ll recognize his face. It’s iconic.