Old-fashioned Coup Attempt from the Outside In,
Before They Wised Up, Moved Inside, and Bought Us Out
See also Smedley Darlington Butler history in The Corporation
One of the greatest unknown stories in US political history, The Plot to Seize the White House reveals the nation’s closest brush with dictatorship in the twentieth century. After languishing out of print for over 50 years, this long buried bombshell was just re-released in March 2007, partially in reaction to the coup now underway.
In the Thirties the corporate elite teamed with the far right and white supremacists and plotted to install a fascist regime in Washington by force. The conspiracy was ultimately foiled by the courage and patriotism of a single man, Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, the most decorated military man in US history, whom the plotters had approached to lead their coup. Butler blew the whistle to Congress which launched an inquiry that aborted the putsch, but refused to prosecute the powerful plotters many of whose business empires survive to this day. The mainstream press generally shunned the inquiry, conducted no investigations of its own, and helped induce the great forgetting as soon as the hearings closed.
The lessons for our era plentiful and clear: the anti-democratic threat of conjoined corporate wealth and fundamentalist street power, the pusillanimous response to elite treachery by Congress and the mainstream press, the rapidity of establishment amnesia regarding inconvenient truths, etc. All in all an excellent reference for our work in Santa Cruz. See the book’s original cover shots below.
Amazon Book Description
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Best read in tandem with War is a Racket, Gen. Butler’s classic expose of US military adventures in the service of corporate greed.
Buy the book here. Read it online here.
Cover Flap Text
$7.95
THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE
BY JULES ARCHER
Americans can no longer be shocked by the: discovery that information directly affecting their personal freedom is withheld from news media to protect’ persons with governmental influence. But it still comes as a shocking revelation that in 1933 there was an actual attempt to make a fascist’ puppet of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Now, more than forty years later, the. public still remains ignorant of the story behind The Plot to Seize the White House
The fact that the plot was a failure and: our present government is still a democracy, is directly attributable to Major General Smedley Darlington Butler; one of the most remarkable generals in American history.. A veteran of 35 years in the Marine Corps and twice a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Butler finally decided that “war is a: racket!” His reputation for patriotism, integrity, and dedication to democracy, coupled with his proclivity to speak the truth as he saw it irrespective of official policy made him a seemingly perfect front for the men who hated Roosevelt They were people with a: determination, if it were impossible to replace the president, to manipulate him through the person of an American Mussolini. Their short-sightedness prevented their realizing that Butler was obviously the wrong choice for the job.
Jules Archer quotes testimony from the McCormack-Dickstein House Committee on un-American Activities hearings (including testimony that was subsequently censored from public record) that details how Butler was’ approached by representatives of the arch-conservative American Liberty League; how they tried to persuade him to lead an army of veterans in demonstration against Roosevelt’s silver standard; how Butler quickly concluded that the silver standard controversy was being used as a subterfuge to lead American veterans against Washington for truly sinister purposes; and how this hero, patriot, and Republican democrat, upon uncovering the full dimensions of the conspiracy, determined to go to Washington and blow it wide open. John L Spivak, a reporter assigned to cover the committee hearings, calls the story “one of the most fantastic plots in American history. What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories. It would be regrettable if historians neglected this episode and future generations of Americans never learned of it.”
Born In New York City, Jules Archer is a graduate of City College of New York. Dur- ing World War II he served four years in the Pacific with the Army Air Corps and was also a freelance correspondent by order of General Macarthur. He is the author of many books on political events and personalities, including Mao Tse-tung, The Dictators, Hawks, Doves and the Eagle, The Extremists, and Chou En-lai.
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