by Sally Denton
Roosevelt also threw his support behind a U.S. Senate inquiry into the munitions industry and World War I war profiteering. Known as the Nye Committee, for its chairman, North Dakota Republican Gerald Nye, the probe targeted the DuPont, J. P. Morgan, and Remington Arms companies. The president sent a message to the Senate urging full cooperation with the committee and pledging executive backing. “The private and uncontrolled manufacture of arms and munitions and the traffic therein has become a serious source of international discord and strife,” he wrote.
The evils of the arms makers were the subject of numerous books, including the bestseller Merchants of Death and John Gunther’s Harper’s series “Slaughter for Sale.” The explosive hearings of the Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry were front-page news and continued for weeks as the committee attempted to determine whether Wall Street financiers “had nudged the United States into war in 1917,” as one official account put it, to profit from the production of ammunition, weapons, tanks, and other materiel. Dozens of hearings were held and hundreds of observers crowded into the Senate committee room, eager for the wealthy warmongers to be exposed. While the investigators affirmed that the munitions industry “depended to a large extent on ‘greasing the palms’ of public officials in Latin America, the Near East, and China,” they found that such bribery was not exclusive to the gun trade and no criminal prosecutions resulted.
“The time has come to take profit out of war,” Roosevelt said, pressing the committee to hold the arms makers accountable. Committee investigators examined the files and interrogated officers of J. P. Morgan and Company—“the financial angel of the Allied government of 1914–1917,” as an official history described it—which “brought a thunderous clap from across the Atlantic.”
Roosevelt also unleashed his Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department to go after his Wall Street adversaries. The Justice Department established a new division to investigate civil and criminal violations of the tax code, and one of its first high-profile targets was Andrew Mellon—Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary and the third-richest man in the world. The man who had pronounced the economy “sound and prosperous” at the time of the stock market crash in 1929, and who had once been celebrated as the greatest treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton, was investigated for tax fraud. Although a federal grand jury declined to indict the “caricature of capitalism,” as Amity Shlaes called the elderly Mellon, the civil and criminal cases dogged him until his death; he was posthumously exonerated. Widely seen as politically motivated—to counter Huey Long’s burgeoning anti–Wall Street movement—as well as driven by Roosevelt’s personal animus against his enemies, Roosevelt’s David-versus-Goliath battles were heralded in the hinterland.
Roosevelt was by all accounts genuinely baffled by the animosity and venom spewed at him by his “class.” He sincerely believed that he had saved the capitalist system and thought the hatred his actions had engendered was a remarkable “lack of appreciation for him and his policies … spiteful ingratitude and political and economic Neanderthalism.”
While Roosevelt realized that the road to recovery and reform would be long and complicated, he believed he was on the right track. In early 1934 he published a book outlining the course ahead and aptly titled On Our Way. In his first fireside chat of his second year in office, he asked simply: “Are You Better Off Than You Were Last Year?” The nation responded with a resounding yes, as evidenced by the Democratic landslide of the midterm elections, prompting William Randolph Hearst to begrudgingly note: “There has been no such popular endorsement since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.”
The journalist William Allen White said simply, “He has been all but crowned by the people.”
Epilogue
The Paranoid Style of American Politics
Now we are face to face once again with a period of heightened peril. The risks are great, the burdens heavy, the problems incapable of swift or lasting solution. And under the strains and frustrations imposed by constant tension and harassment, the discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land. Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people …
So let us not heed these counsels of fear and suspicion. Let us … devote more energy to organize the free and friendly nations of the world, with common trade and strategic goals, and devote less energy to organizing armed bands of civilian guerrillas that are more likely to supply local vigilantes than national vigilance.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, “THE CONSPIRACY SPEECH,” NOVEMBER 18, 1961
The business plot was not the end of General Smedley Darlington Butler. He was recruited for yet another bizarre plot, equally outrageous in its audacity and financial backing. In the summer of 1935, Butler received a telephone call from Father Charles Coughlin.
“Smedley,” Coughlin said, addressing him by his first name, though the two had never met. Then the bumptious priest, who had become one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most vicious and outspoken critics, launched into a tirade against the president. Roosevelt’s new “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America left Coughlin and his cohorts in the National Union for Social Justice no choice but to treat privately with Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas. Coughlin claimed that Cárdenas was a Communist who was condemning the Catholic Church. Coughlin boasted that he had the men and the guns necessary to overthrow the Mexican government and wanted General Butler to lead the expedition. The priest claimed, according to Butler, that he had the financial patronage of armament companies, including Remington and DuPont.
Butler told Coughlin that, as a retired Marine Corps general, he remained an officer of the U.S. government and that such a military force against an ally was in violation of American foreign policy and constituted treason. If such a movement was initiated, Butler told Coughlin, President Roosevelt would “call out the standing army to prevent them from getting very far.” Coughlin replied that he and his fellow conspirators were not worried about Roosevelt because “they would take care of him on the way down.”
Butler was reluctant to report this second attempt by the Fascist right-wing to recruit him, having been roundly humiliated and mocked during the previous fiasco. But his conscience got the better of him, and in August 1936 he met with J. Edgar Hoover, now director of the once-again renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation. “I pointed out to General Butler that his remaining silent might later be misconstrued if the story became known publicly,” Hoover wrote in a memorandum to Attorney General Homer Cummings.
Butler further reported to Hoover that he had evidence of the theft of more than a hundred Browning automatic rifles from the Raritan Arsenal in Edison, New Jersey, which were to be used in the Mexican coup. Butler told Hoover that Coughlin also alluded to armed insurrection in the United States, stating that the 1936 presidential election would be the last opportunity for Americans to vote and that a dictator would be installed afterward.
Since Cummings was away from Washington on an extended trip, Hoover took the matter directly to President Roosevelt on the very day that he met with Butler. Two weeks later Roosevelt summoned Hoover to the White House to discuss “subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” according to Hoover’s internal files.
Roosevelt “apparently promised to place a handwritten memorandum in his safe, containing a summary of his instructions to the FBI chief,” wrote Hoover biographer Curt Gentry, although “no such document has been found in the National Archives or among the Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park.”
In any case, the Mexican Plot, like the Wall Street Putsch, died a quiet death.
Despite the attacks against Roosevelt and his presidency, his trajectory was unstoppable. In the 1936 election, he and Garner defeated Kansas governor Alf Landon by a 60 percent margin, carr
ying every state except for Maine and Vermont. Backed by a coalition of forces that would effectively hold firm for three more decades, Roosevelt’s mandate was secure and public sentiment solidly behind him.
Roosevelt went on to an unprecedented fourth-term victory in 1944. By then, at sixty-two years of age, his paralysis and years of chain-smoking had led to numerous life-threatening ailments, and he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. Americans were grief-stricken at the death of the man who had led the country for twelve years—longer than any other president—and who had taken a nation on the verge of sinking and recharted its course.
In 2009, conservative online magazine Newsmax posted a column suggesting that a military coup to “resolve the Obama problem” was a distinct possibility. “Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation,” wrote columnist John L. Perry. “Skilled, military-trained nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.”
The resulting uproar led to the story’s immediate removal from the magazine’s Web site. What seemed to twenty-first-century American readers to be the peculiar musings of a right-wing extremist was a plotline directly descended from the ill-fated and little known 1933 intrigues against Roosevelt.
Responding to “several reader complaints,” Newsmax quickly distanced itself from “unpaid blogger” John Perry and assured its audience that it “would never advocate or insinuate any suggestion of an activity that would undermine our democracy or democratic institutions.”
There is not much difference between the forces aligned against President Franklin Roosevelt and those against President Barack Obama, as journalist and biographer Lou Cannon pointed out in Politics Daily. Referring to what historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style of American politics,” Cannon wrote that neither the paranoia nor the opposition “has changed as much as we might think.”
Plate Section
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
The tiny and defiant assassin, Giuseppe Zangara, railed against capitalists from the moment he was apprehended until he was put to death just weeks later. The anti-Fascist Italian immigrant was battered and bloodied by the crowd at Miami’s Bayfront Park after he fired shots at Roosevelt’s entourage. Police whisked him to the Dade County Jail where they kept him nude during interrogation. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)
Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the Nourmahal. During the long interregnum between the presidential election and the inauguration, Roosevelt waited impatiently to take office. For nearly two weeks in February 1933, he cruised the Caribbean with five wealthy friends. This is one of the few existing photographs of Roosevelt in a wheelchair. (Photograph by Robert Cross-Sailor/Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum)
On Inauguration Day, March 4, 1933, Roosevelt and a hostile President Herbert Hoover traveled in an open touring car from the White House to the Capitol. Despite Roosevelt’s trademark smile and efforts at conviviality, Hoover remained unmoved. As the spectators cheered and clapped, a beaming Roosevelt broke the tension between the two men and began waving his top hat.
Addressing one of the largest audiences to ever attend a presidential inauguration, Roosevelt gave his famously powerful first inaugural address. Castigating Wall Street’s “money changers,” he pleaded with the masses to band together in order to accomplish restoration and recovery. Vowing to put Americans back to work, to prevent foreclosures, and to regulate the nation’s banking industry, Roosevelt’s speech was a call to action. When he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” the phrase did not elicit applause. But it would later go down in history as one of the greatest presidential quotes of all time.
Destined to become the most controversial First Lady in the country’s history, Eleanor Roosevelt was a political force in her own right. Highly intelligent and fiercely independent, Eleanor bridled at performing the role of official presidential hostess, instead focusing her considerable energy on creating economic and political power for women.
Marine general Smedley Darlington Butler was famous for his daring exploits in China and Central America. But by the end of his career he had come to see himself as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business.” He reported to Congress in 1934 that he had been solicited to lead a veterans’ army in a Fascist coup d’état against President Roosevelt. Details of the putsch—allegedly conceived and financed by Wall Street brokers who opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal policies—shocked the nation. (U.S. Marine Corps/Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The “cruelest year,” as 1932 was called, epitomized the deepening crisis that had begun three years earlier with the stock market crash. In the absence of substantial government relief programs under the Herbert Hoover administration, free food was distributed by private organizations. Bread lines throughout the country, like this one in New York City, snaked for blocks through city streets.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt ascended to the presidency, a thousand homes per day were being foreclosed. That figure does not even include the half million farm foreclosures. Some farmers especially hard hit by the Depression engaged in “organized refusal” to market products for which they were being underpaid. Moved by their plight, Roosevelt saw them as a cornerstone for rebuilding the economy, and by executive order created an agency to provide desperately needed refinancing of farm mortgages.
The national banking system was beginning its final collapse during the first months of 1933 while Roosevelt waited to take office. Banks were closed, or on the verge of closing, in twenty-one states, unable to meet the demands of depositors trying to withdraw their money. Rumors swept the nation that banks were no longer safe, and panicked depositors, like these in New York City, rushed to retrieve their money.
Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) brought support to an estimated two and a half million self-sustaining farms. The parents of these children were part of a rehabilitation program in Arkansas designed to bring young farming couples back to the land.
During the Great Depression, with unemployment rising to sixteen million, hundreds of thousands of Americans—like this migrant worker on a California highway—wandered the country in search of jobs.
The ingenious Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was Roosevelt’s own idea and pet project to combine conservation with full employment. Roosevelt’s “Tree Army” was designed to get the destitute and troublesome young men of the cities to work in the national forests. These men working in Idaho were among the quarter million called into public service.
Acknowledgments
Every writer about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal finds an abundance of material from scholars and journalists who have mined the public record. Unfortunately, few have explored the two events that I chose to examine, which I think are crucial to understanding Roosevelt’s first term. The works that I found particularly brilliant and insightful about Roosevelt’s rise, the first hundred days, and the New Deal are the biographies written by Kenneth S. Davis, Frank Freidel, William E. Leuchtenberg, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest was a valuable resource on Huey Long and Father Coughlin, and George Wolfskill’s work on political extremism in America was enlightening, if a bit frightening.
Very little has been written about Giuseppe Zangara and his attempted assassination of Roosevelt, or about the thwarted Fascist coup d’état. Both incidents were further obscured by the fact that case files have been destroyed and vital documents either have been redacted or are missing altogether. Because both the assassination and coup attempts are surrounded in mystery and controversy, I chose to rely on the few primary sources available and selected my secondary sources very carefully. For
the assassination attempt and Zangara’s background and anti-Fascist, anti-capitalist political motivation, I depended on contemporaneous news accounts, investigative files from the FBI (which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act), and Zangara’s jailhouse memoir (reprinted in Blaise Picchi’s admirable account: The Five Weeks of Giuseppe Zangara). For the “Business Plot”—whose trail was even murkier than Zangara’s—I again sought the contemporaneous record, especially the hearings and findings of the House committee investigation. Also useful were Smedley Butler’s autobiography (as told to Thomas Lowell); Paul Comly French’s story about the plot, “$3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared”; the FBI files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, including J. Edgar Hoover’s personal memoranda; and Jules Archer’s The Plot to Seize the White House.
I am grateful beyond words to the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars for my research fellowship there. I am not exaggerating when I say that this book could not have been written without the extraordinary support of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Writing is a profoundly solitary venture, especially when done in the hinterland and without academic affiliation. So the community of scholars that welcomed me in Washington, D.C., breathed new life into my research and writing. Deep thanks to Lee Hamilton, Michael van Dusen, Lucy Jilka, Sonya Michel, Lindsay Collins, Kimberly Conner, Janet Spikes, and Dagne Gizaw. Sheldon Garon was helpful in my understanding of the Fascist impulse in 1930s America. Jamie Stiehm made my time at the center socially, as well as intellectually, rich. I especially want to thank my intern, Lennon Wetovsky, whose research and retrieval of key documents alleviated my workload immensely.
