Dave Emory’s interview with Jules Archer on his The Plot to Seize the White House (1973)

[Paul Rigby]

Dave Emory’s interview with Jules Archer on his Plot to Seize the White House (1973)

Wonderful!

http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2007/07/f...house.html

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

FTR #602 The Plot to Seize the White House: Interview with Jules Archer

Recorded July 1, 2007

REALAUDIO

NB: This stream contains both FTR #602 followed by a rebroadcast of FTR #448. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.

Supplementing previous coverage of the fascist coup attempt of 1934, this broadcast is an emotional professional milestone for Mr. Emory. When first undertaking this field of research, he read investigative reporter, author and anti-fascist Jules Archer’s The Plot to Seize the White House, published in hardcover by Hawthorne books. A chronicle of the coup attempt, the book is excerpted in AFA#10—available from SPITFIRE—as well as FTR#448. After learning that Mr. Archer was alive, well and 90-years young, Mr. Emory was delighted to find out that The Plot to Seize the White House is being republished in paperback by Skyhorse Publishing. This interview commemorates Mr. Archer’s work and celebrates the publishing of the paperback edition of his book.

Program Highlights Include: Discussion of the Liberty League, a consortium of wealthy and powerful industrialists and financiers who were the core of the coup plot; the coup plotters’ enthusiastic support for Hitler and Mussolini; the nomenclature of the members of the coup cabal; an overview of the career of General Smedley Butler, the patriotic hero who betrayed the coup plot; the media’s suppression of accurate reportage on the coup plot; the role of a small number of investigative reporters who brought the coup to light; the suppression of part of the report of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee [formed to investigate the coup].

1. This program constituted something of an “old home week” for Mr. Emory. When first undertaking this field of research, he read investigative reporter, author and anti-fascist Jules Archer’s The Plot to Seize the White House, published in hardcover by Hawthorne books. A chronicle of the fascist coup attempt of 1934, the book is excerpted in AFA#10—available from SPITFIRE—as well as FTR#448. After learning that Mr. Archer was alive, well and 90-years young, Mr. Emory was delighted to find out that The Plot to Seize the White House is being republished in paperback by Skyhorse Publishing. This interview commemorates Mr. Archer’s work and celebrates the publishing of the paperback edition of his book.

2. Beginning with analysis of the career of Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, the program highlights Butler’s singular popularity among enlisted men. “A soldier’s general” Butler stood up for the “grunt” and didn’t automatically favor the “Brass” [the officer corps]. This quality made him the choice to be “The Man on the White Horse” to lead the coup attempt. Men who served with Butler [such as former Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup] praised Butler in the most extravagant terms. It is worth noting that Butler was a practicing Quaker who came to feel that war, in general, was “a racket.”

3. After noting Butler’s extraordinary career, the discussion sets forth two issues that might be unfamiliar to younger listeners: the “bonus” from World War I and the Gold Standard. Soldiers who enlisted in World War I were promised a cash bonus, which they never received. When the Great Depression struck, many of the veterans organized and mobilized in order to pressure the government to grant them the bonus to which they were entitled. A march by the “Bonus Army” in Washington, D.C. was violently broken up by troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the first choice of the plotters to lead the coup. Franklin Delano Roosevelt removed the U.S. from the Gold Standard, a decision which alienated many of the wealthy. The coup plotters wanted Smedley Butler to make a speech at an American Legion convention in favor of the Gold Standard, the theory being that Butler could present this as desirable to the bonus marchers. Their “bonus” would then be backed by gold.

4. Much of the program highlights points of information set forth in FTR#448 about the coup attempt itself. In particular, this portion of the broadcast centers on the Liberty League, a domestic fascist organization that was the backbone of the coup plot. (For information about the relationship of the Bush family to the Liberty League and the milieu of the 1934 coup plot, see FTR#’s 475, 481.) “ . . . 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. . . . Two organizations affiliated with the league were openly fascist and antilabor. One was the Sentinels of the Republic, financed chiefly by the Pitcairn family and J. Howard Pew. Its members labeled the New Deal ‘Jewish Communism’ and insisted ‘the old line of Americans of $1,200.00 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.’”

(The Plot to Seize the White House; by Jules Archer; Copyright 1973, 2007 by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.; Skyhorse Publishing [SC]; ISBN-13: 978-1-60239-036-2; p. 31.)

5. An important point of information for younger listeners concerns the American Legion. Originally formed as a reactionary organization used by the National Association of Manufacturers to break strikes, the American Legion eventually cast off its reactionary leadership and became the respectable veterans organization that it is to this day. In Butler’s time, the Legion was seen as a possible recruiting ground for soldiers for the coup plot.

6. Jules highlights some of the key figures in this drama including: coup figure Gerald McGuire (a wealthy bond salesman who was selected by the coup plotters as their primary contact with Smedley Butler); Robert S. Clark (another coup plotter who had known Butler when serving in the military in China); Grayson M-P.Murphy (another of the wealthy coup plotters, Murphy was a Morgan partner and had been decorated by Benito Mussolini); Hanford McNider (a wealthy former leader of the American Legion, seen as a possible second choice to Butler to lead the coup.)

7. In addition, Jules Archer sets forth some of the journalists who worked to expose the coup: Philadelphia Record journalist Paul Comly French (assigned to help cover the story as it was being revealed by General Butler); George Seldes (the venerable anti-fascist writer whose work has been accessed by Mr. Emory for decades, Seldes was an early and prolific writer about the coup attempt); John L. Spivak (another early anti-fascist writer who revealed that the report of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee contained key omissions about the coup plot).

8. Sadly, the mainstream media did not give effective coverage to the coup attempt—in fact they helped to cover it up. Jules Archer cites The New York Times and Time as two of the many publications that exercised willful censorship of the coverage of the coup plot. It is also worth noting that American academia has also remained largely oblivious to this pivotal event.

9. Two video productions are being generated by a couple of documentary filmmakers. One is a DVD of a three-lecture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Relationship Between Fascism and Religion.” To learn more about this, visit The Anti-Fascist YouTube.com page. In addition, there will soon be a documentary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fascist.” For more about this project, visit theantifascist.com.

Posted by FTR Summary at 7/10/2007 12:00:00 AM

[Magda Hassan]

This is great Paul. Thanks for posting it. The whole story is made for a fantastic block buster move but I am surprised (not) that Hollywood has never touched it.
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[Paul Rigby]

This is great Paul. Thanks for posting it. The whole story is made for a fantastic block buster move but I am surprised (not) that Hollywood has never touched it.
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I have it in the back of my transom, Magda, that there was a US TV movie made and shown in the early 1970s based, more or less, on this fascinating episode. I raise the possibility for utterly selfish reasons - I want a copy, if such exists!

More seriously, I look at FDR's backers - Astor et al - and wonder how such a plot, albeit one with the enthusiastic endorsement of an equally splendid array of pro-fascist multi-millionaires, could have succeeded.

Paul

[Charles Drago]

There almost was a movie made on the Butler affair -- one that would have been based on only the second book-length investigation of the plot exposed by Butler. A book that almost was published.

From the New York Post in 2000:

Writers William Corson and Joseph Trento have pulled a literary reverse. A year ago, they sold film rights to a nonfiction project called "The Last President"- about a real-life plot to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 - to producer Arnold Copelson. Copelson has since gotten Oliver Stone and 20th Century Fox interested in the project.

Now, with Stone said to be well along in writing the script, the authors have turned around and sold the book proposal to Simon & Schuster's Free Press imprint for an estimated $200,000.

According to Free Press editor Chad Conway, the book will detail how some of the nation's leading capitalists - alarmed by the election of FDR and his plans to introduce radical reforms during the Great Depression - tried to engineer a military coup to overthrow the government. The plotters first talked to General Douglas MacArthur and then to General Smedley Darlington Butler, Conway says. "Butler eventually exposed the plot," he says.

FDR started public hearings but then quashed them. "He thought the nation was going through enough turmoil," Conway says. But, he adds, FDR used the information to keep the plotters in line for the rest of the New Deal. "FDR comes off looking even more Machiavellian and heroic than we thought," Conway says.

Corson is a writer and former FBI agent, and Trento works for the Public Education Center.

"Corson's father was one of the guys involved with investigating the original plot," Conway says.

The Free Press is planning a 100,000 print run for the book for fall 2002.

Too close to home, I'm afraid.

There is much to discern about the sponsorship level -- the highest level -- of the JFK hit from a close study of the Butler affair.

[Jack White]

Charles...you left us in suspense. Was the book ever published? I never heard of this.

Jack

[Charles Drago]

Alas, Jack, the book has yet to appear.

Let's recall that Trento's The Secret History of the CIA -- published in 2003 and as sophisticated an exercise in disinformation as we're likely to encounter -- saw the light of day only after an earlier incarnation titled The Boys from Berlin was announced and even appeared, with dust jacket art, pre-publication on Amazon in 1999.

I've reproduced below some of the book's early teaser copy originating with Cahners Business Information.

We are left to imagine the reasons for the delay and changes to the title -- at least -- and what we might discover by a comparison of the manuscripts.

So on at least two occasions a Trento volume has been teased and withdrawn-- or perhaps "suppressed" is the more accurate word.

I'll give Trento his due: On another forum he has written, "'Conspiracy theorist' is a charge the right and establishment uses as McCarthy and his henchman used 'commie sympathizer.'"

Concise, on-target, devastating.

And Widows -- in particular the chapter on the John Paisley affair -- is invaluable to our efforts. Especially if we are cognizant of and able to utilize for analyses the "negative template" tool.

One is left to wonder if Yakterina Fursetseva and James Jesus Angleton ever were seen at the same time.

*****

Spying is probably the world's second oldest profession, and as a young country the United States got involved later than most Western nations. Trento, a journalist and screenwriter, delves into the murky past of the CIA's main base of spying operations, established in Berlin in the early 1950s. His main point is that the Russians quickly infiltrated the Berlin facility with their own agents and counteragents, leading to a compromising of our intelligence information and allowing such unwelcome surprises as the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Trento presents a dizzying array of characters, some famous (Richard Helms, Allen Dulles), others obscure. Relying on numerous interviews with former agentsAsome of whom had axes to grindAhe sprinkles his endnotes with secondary literature, most of it over a decade old. Thus, we are told a secret history whose source is mostly people expert at keeping secrets. How much of this to believe will be left up to the readerAthe truth remains hazy. For larger collections.AEdward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A damning indictment of the CIA, Trento's book is based largely on conversations he had with the widely criticized James Jesus Angleton, the former CIA counterintelligence maven who has been reviled for ruining many innocent lives in his zeal to root out Soviet moles. Angleton was right or so argues Trento in a book that by his own account "contains Angleton's version of what happened and the evidence he had to reach those conclusions." In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA used an operations base in Berlin as its primary training facility. The Berlin Operating Base was a prestige assignment for those anointed to form the backbone of U.S. intelligence. According to Trento (Widows, etc.), however, the German base was fatally corrupted, ruined by arrogance and infiltrated by Soviet spies. It left a legacy of venality and incompetence that spread throughout the entire agency, ultimately affecting specific operations and more sweeping errors of analysis, notably the CIA's failure to detect the imminent fall of the Soviet Union. Incompetence led to immorality, according to Trento, as the CIA developed a preference for risky, unproductive and flat-out illegal covert operations. In addition, Trento makes a case that agency blunders made possible the ascent to power of such future U.S. headaches as Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Trento writes well, and his fluid prose may lure readers into overlooking his tendency to blame every foreign policy failure of the past 50 years on the CIA. Still, this is a well-researched Molotov cocktail of a book, sure to raise hackles at Langley and to provoke spirited replies. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

[Jack White]

Interesting. Freedom of the press, hah!

Thanks.

Jack

[Paul Rigby]

Dave Emory’s interview with Jules Archer on his Plot to Seize the White House (1973)

Wonderful!

http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2007/07/f...house.html

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

FTR #602 The Plot to Seize the White House: Interview with Jules Archer

Recorded July 1, 2007

REALAUDIO

NB: This stream contains both FTR #602 followed by a rebroadcast of FTR #448. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.

Supplementing previous coverage of the fascist coup attempt of 1934, this broadcast is an emotional professional milestone for Mr. Emory. When first undertaking this field of research, he read investigative reporter, author and anti-fascist Jules Archer’s The Plot to Seize the White House, published in hardcover by Hawthorne books. A chronicle of the coup attempt, the book is excerpted in AFA#10—available from SPITFIRE—as well as FTR#448. After learning that Mr. Archer was alive, well and 90-years young, Mr. Emory was delighted to find out that The Plot to Seize the White House is being republished in paperback by Skyhorse Publishing. This interview commemorates Mr. Archer’s work and celebrates the publishing of the paperback edition of his book.

http://www.counterpunch.org/nasser10032008.html

Weekend Edition
October 3 - 5, 2008

A Paradigm for Today's Democrats?
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him

By Alan Nasser

Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. political history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history.

In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries.

The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the foremost members of the economic elite, many of them household names at the time, had indeed hatched a meticulously detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America. The plotters represented prominent families - Rockefeller, Mellon, Pew, enterprises like Morgan, Dupont, Pew, Remington, Anaconda, Bethlehem and Goodyear, along with the owners of Bird’s Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz. Totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street financiers, they planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to sustain the new government.

The plotters hoped that widespread working-class discouragement at the stubborn persistence of the Great Depression would have sufficiently disenchanted the masses with FDR’s policies to make the coup an easy ride. And they were appalled at Roosevelt’s willingness after 1933 to initiate economic policies that economists and businessmen considered dangerously Leftist departures from economic orthodoxy. Only a fascist-style government, they thought, could enforce the kind of economic “discipline” that would reverse the Great Depression and restore profits.

Interestingly, it was a military man, Major General Smedley D. Butler*, assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after uncovering the details of the operation he was asked to lead. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud.

The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class. But this would only have bolstered the fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other anti-capitalist political tendencies here, which were already gaining some ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of working people. It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in the 1930s was replete with Communist-inspired sentiment.

And we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like Keynes’s) to the “free enterprise” system was unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee cooperated by refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters.

Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political mobilization.

Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government.

While I highly recommend Bush-bashing, the implications of this unsettling piece of history for contemporary politics run deeper than many –especially soi disant “oppositional” liberals- would like to think. There is the temptation to point triumphantly to George W. Bush’s commitment to the irrelevance of the Constitution, his corresponding contempt for hitherto taken-for-granted fundamental human rights, his Hobbesian notion of unbridled sovereignty, his militarized notion of political power - there is the temptation to regard these fascist elements as the most significant contemporary remnant of the 1934 conspiracy.

But no less important is the utter absence in 1934 of liberal attempts to educate the public to, and mobilize the population against, the fascist threat. FDR stood down.

Although Rooseveltian/New Deal liberalism is dead, contemporary Democrats do sustain one of FDR’s least seemly qualities, namely his refusal to encourage effective mass opposition to fascist and imperialist politics. John Kerry boasted of having contributed to the drafting of the Patriot Act. And in the first round of legislation regarding continued funding of the war in Iraq, after the 2006 elections gave the Democrats a majority in the House and the Senate, the Democrats gave Bush everything he wanted. All the major presidentail contenders of both parties support a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. None has repudiated the conceit that Uncle Sam is the permanent global hegemon. And most importantly, no mainstream Democrat has repudiated the Neoliberal Consensus, the notion that the market should be left to operate as “freely” as the public can be persuaded to allow it to act, and, crucially, that this is a model that should be imposed globally through the power of the U.S. working in tandem with such global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

To the extent that this policy has been successful, inequalities between national classes and between the global North and South have widened dramatically since the decline of the Keynesian consensus in the mid-1970s. Since the Mondale candidacy, no Democrat has had a full-employment plank in his presidential platform. The median wage has been in secular decline since 1973, and the distribution of national income between capital and labor has not been as skewed toward capital since the Great Depression. But no Democrat has made a major issue of this.

These tendencies toward ever-widening inequality and the increasing immiseration of the working population will surely be exacerbated by the deepening slow-motion recession (depression?) that is certain to follow the unfolding financial meltdown. These conditions, and the deep resentment felt by masses of working people toward the lords of Wall Street and their political henchpersons, threaten to generate social “instability” in the form of increasing crime rates and a host of direct and indirect forms of resistance to the claimed legitimacy of the political order. The emergence of what Mike Whitney has called “soup kitchen America” requires a response from our rulers. And they are prepared with (literally) fascist legislation already in place for situations just like this.

Developments over the last day or two in connection with Monday’s House rejection of the bailout package for Wall Street indicate that allegations of fascist tendencies in U.S. political culture are in these times not to be taken lightly. Influential voices in the U.S. media have lamented the susceptability of the political leadership to the will of the people. On Tuesday the Washington Post ran a piece by Michael Gerson, Bush’s former speechwriter, complaining that “It is now clear that American political elites have lost the ability to quickly respond to a national challenge by imposing their collective will.” The same day Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London headlined a column “Congress is the Best Advert For Dictatorship.” And yesterday Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California), who voted against the bailout bill, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying “I’ve seen members turn to each other and say if we don’t pass this bill, we’re going to have martial law in the United States.” “going to have”? We’ve already got it, at least on the books.

On October 17, 2006, Bush signed three Acts that instantly transformed the republic into a police state. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act (DAA) effectively repeals the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits military operations directed against the American people. The DAA declares that “the president may employ the armed forces to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when…[among other reasons]… the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent thet the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (or “refuse” or “fail in”) maintaining public order --- in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

There is of course nothing in the legislation that specifies what precisely may count as “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” The lone Democrat to express reservations about DAA was Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), who entered into the Congressional Record that the Act “[makes] it easier for the president to declare martial law… [T]he implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are enormous…Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.” Nothing was made of Leahy’s protestations by complicit Democrats.

The Military Commissions Act permits the President, in order to “suppress public disorder”, to assign military troops anywhere in the United States in order to trump the authority of state-based National Guard units, and without the consent of the governer.

Finally, the National Defense Authorization Act allows the President to declare martial law, dispatch National Guard units around the country and authorize military action against the domestic population should His Majesty identify a “national emergency”.

Liberal Democrats, upon being apprised of these developments (of which the vast majority are ignorant) will declare themselves shocked, shocked that Bush has “declared himself dictator”. But Bush has not signed legislation which expires when he passes from office. Every future President will have these powers. Would President Obama seek to erase these abominations? Don’t bet on it. Obama has not jettisoned the entire legacy of FDR. Like Roosevelt, Obama will stand down.

• Butler underwent a major political epiphany shortly before his retirement from the Marine Corps in 1931. In that same year, he addressed an American Legion convention on his assessment of his career. His audience was stunned by his reflections: “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 inb 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 boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.” It remains a mystery why the conspirators would approach this man. But they did.

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College