The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right

310 Pages·2012·2.41 MB·English

by  Sally Denton

Contents
Prologue: A Beleaguered Capital
Part One: Interregnum of Despair
1. Lofty Aspirations
2. Rebuild His Broken Body
3. A New Deal for the American People
4. The Tombstone Bonus
5. The Forgotten Man
6. Warriors of the Depression
7. Happy Days Are Here Again
8. Brain Trust
9. Winter of Our Discontent
10. Year of Fear
11. American Mussolini and the Radio Priest
12. The Nourmahal Gang
13. Magic City
14. I’m All Right
15. Too Many People Are Starving to Death
16. Typical of His Breed
17. The Bony Hand of Death
18. Fear Itself
19. Bank Holiday
20. I Want to Keel All Presidents
21. Old Sparky
Part Two: To Kill the New Deal
22. A Good Beginning
23. Time for Beer
24. A Gang of Common Criminals
25. Traitor to His Class
26. A Balanced Civilization
27. Hankering for Superman
28. That Jew Cripple in the White House
29. We Don’t Like Her, Either
30. The Shifty-Eyed Little Austrian Paperhanger
31. A Rainbow of Colored Shirts
32. Maverick Marine
33. I Was a Racketeer for Capitalism
34. We Want the Gold
35. Coup d’État
36. The Bankers Gold Group
37. The Investigation
38. Are You Better Off Than You Were Last Year?
Epilogue: The Paranoid Style of American Politics
Plate Section
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
For my mother and father
In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental
art, but in times of danger … we need to know what
kind of firm ground other men … have found to stand
on.
JOHN DOS PASSOS, THE THEME IS FREEDOM
Prologue
A Beleaguered Capital
When dawn broke in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 4, 1933, the
atmosphere was celebratory, if anxious. Slate gray and ominous, the sky
suggested a calm before the storm. Even before the sun rose, more than a
hundred thousand people had gathered on the east side of the Capitol. General
Douglas MacArthur was in command of the inaugural parade, and he habitually
expected the worst. By that morning, American depositors had transferred more
than $1.3 billion in gold to foreign accounts, millions of people had been turned
away from their banks, and rioting was expected in cities throughout the nation,
prompting some state governors to predict a violent revolution.
Army machine guns and sharpshooters were placed at strategic locations
along the route. Not since the Civil War had Washington been so fortified.
Journalist Arthur Krock likened the climate to “that which might be found in a
beleaguered capital in wartime.” Armed police guarded federal buildings, and
rumors swirled that Roosevelt was going to appropriate dictatorial powers and
impose martial law. But if he had ever really entertained such a notion—as
unused drafts of an inaugural address indicated—he abandoned it. Despite
efforts made by William Randolph Hearst, Walter Lippmann, Bernard Baruch,
and others to convince him of the necessity for a benevolent despot to seize
control of the country, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was unswayed.
Hearst, the nation’s most powerful publisher, went so far as to produce a
Hollywood movie—Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston—to
instruct both Roosevelt and the American public how to succumb to dictatorship.
Even though Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Fascism were enormously popular and
highly regarded in America at the time, Roosevelt distrusted autocracy, did not
believe that one could count on a benevolent dictator to remain so, and,
especially, maintained an absolute commitment to the U.S. Constitution. “We
could have had a dictator … and we would have had one but for the President
himself, to whom the whole idea was hateful,” a U.S. Army general later said in
a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Instead, Roosevelt
determined to incite the public to action rather than to capture extra-
constitutional authority for himself. He wanted not to assume enhanced powers,
not to take advantage of a quavering nation to elevate his own stature, but rather
to ignite the citizenry to banish apathy and recapture a spirit of confidence and
achievement. He sought not to issue comforting bromides—as his predecessor,
Herbert Hoover, had done incessantly—but to raise a battle cry, a call to arms for
Americans to overcome their fear and march bravely into the unknown. His
overarching message: If they had lost faith in themselves, he would restore it.
But he was not content to stop there. Even as he hoped to inspire and
invigorate, he also intended to hold accountable those who had failed the nation
and sent it plunging into its abyss. “When millions lived close to starvation, and
some even had to scavenge for food, bankers … and corporation executives …
drew astronomical salaries and bonuses,” as one account described the disparity
between the poor and the wealthy. In a profound departure from Hoover,
Roosevelt promised not only to bring relief to the victims but also to punish the
perpetrators of the catastrophe. He would make clear that the departure of
Herbert Hoover signified the end of the old order.
Part One
Interregnum of Despair
I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than
Roosevelt’s calm.
RAYMOND MOLEY, “BANK CRISIS, BULLET CRISIS,”
SATURDAY EVENING POST, JULY 29, 1939
Chapter One
Lofty Aspirations
Born January 30, 1882—“a splendid large baby boy” weighing ten pounds—
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was descended from gentility, if not American
aristocracy, on both the maternal and paternal sides. He was the sole issue of the
marriage between James Roosevelt and his second wife, Sara Delano, both
members of New York’s oldest and richest families.
James Roosevelt had practiced law with a distinguished Manhattan firm
before becoming a financier invested in coal, railroads, and canals, and
ultimately a gentleman farmer at Hyde Park, his Hudson River Valley estate.
Like the rest of the Oyster Bay branch of his family, which included first cousin
Theodore Roosevelt, he lived a life of sailing and fishing, horse breeding and fox
hunting, skating and sledding, and a dabbling in politics—first with the Whig
and then the Democratic Party. His wife Sara was twenty-six years his junior, the
daughter of a neighbor and friend, who had been raised in the same rarefied
world of the “River families.” They were married four years after the death of
his first wife, and he “brought his young bride back past the ivied stone columns
and the broad lawns down the long drive through the magnificent trees to his
comfortable country house at Hyde Park,” as historian and biographer Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. described the couple’s return from their monthlong European
honeymoon.
For her part, Sara was the offspring of the fabulously moneyed Delanos—a
French Huguenot clan that had immigrated to America on the Mayflower. Her
father, Warren Delano II, had made a fortune in the Chinese tea and opium
trades, and she had been raised on an estate in Hong Kong and in a fashionable
apartment in Paris. She had attended finishing school in Germany, had
vacationed in England and France, and slipped seamlessly into the leisurely
lifestyle provided by her new husband.