American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [12]
Even if Booth’s was the only smoking gun, we can safely say that the first presidential assassination in American history involved much more than first meets the eye. Almost a century and a half later, historians are still uncovering new evidence about the plot. Clearly, with the conviction of eight other coconspirators, who knows how far it went? That was just where the buck happened to stop.
Just like it did a hundred years later with Lee Harvey Oswald.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
Let’s start by getting some honesty into our school textbooks about the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of our greatest president. Our kids should know that groups can and have engaged in plots to pursue their own nefarious ends and undermine our democracy.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BIG-MONEY PLOT TO OVERTHROW FDR
THE INCIDENT: A coup attempt by some of the titans of Wall Street, to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 and put a military man in charge of the country.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: The plotters were foiled when the man they selected, Major General Smedley Butler, blew the whistle to Congress.
MY TAKE: This was an attempt to turn America into a fascist country run by corporate powers, but it’s been ignored in most official histories of the Great Depression.
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
I would think that a coup to overthrow our government and turn us into a fascist state ought to make it into our history books. That way, we could read about it and hopefully learn from it, so that we don’t live to repeat it. But this certainly wasn’t taught in any public school curriculum that I saw. You learned about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Never did I hear about leaders of business during that era literally setting out to have a coup! I don’t consider myself dumb or not well-read, but researching this book is the first I’ve come across this story. That was when I came across a book originally published in the Seventies called The Plot to Seize the White House,1 by an investigative journalist named Jules Archer. Yet back in the 1930s, the plot had been fully documented in congressional hearings, although in the end they decided not to name certain names. It was also documented by some of the big media, even though they downplayed the whole thing.
I find it interesting that we do learn about some traitors in American history—Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr come to mind—but, once again, they’re more of the “lone nut” variety. Rich and powerful titans of finance wouldn’t stoop to such a thing, right? Well, if it hadn’t been that they tried buying off the wrong man to be their puppet, quite possibly we’d have been living in a country not that far removed from Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. That man was Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the great unsung heroes in our history—but he’s not exactly a household name, is he?
A little background first: FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, started implementing his New Deal. He took on the stock speculators and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures, and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions. And he took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed and provide loans. That outraged some of the conservative financiers. FDR went even further and started talking about raising their taxes to help pay for these