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

Posted by FTR ⋅ December 30, 2008Post a comment Email This Post Email This Post Print This Post Print This Post
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MP3: Side 1 | Side 2 (FTR 448)REALAUDIO
NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #602 fol­lowed by a FTR #448. Each is a 30 minute broad­cast. Orig­i­nally recorded July 1, 2007

PREFACE, DECEMBER 30, 2008: With an appar­ent new Great Depres­sion bear­ing down upon us and a Demo­c­ra­tic reform President-elect wait­ing in the wings, it is vital to remem­ber what tran­spired dur­ing the first Great Depres­sion and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first admin­is­tra­tion. Dom­i­nant ele­ments of the Amer­i­can power elite attempted to stage a fas­cist coup. It is note­wor­thy that many of these same indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions sup­ported and financed Hitler and Mus­solini. The Bush fam­ily was part of the milieu that birthed the coup attempt. The Bush family’s sup­port for the Third Reich con­tin­ues to be a source of con­tro­versy, despite the fact that it is well doc­u­mented.

(For a brief and inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal syn­op­sis of the coup attempt, lis­ten to the BBC Radio pro­gramme: The White House Coup.)

Sup­ple­ment­ing pre­vi­ous cov­er­age of the U.S. 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.

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. 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.”

2. 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.

3. 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.

“ . . . 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.)

4. 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.

5. 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.)

6. 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).

7. 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.

Discussion

3 comments for “Repost: FTR #602 The Plot to Seize the White House — Interview with Jules Archer”

  1. Actu­ally what many don’t real­ize is that this attempt is being made at this time. I was in a fam­ily for more than 26 years who are directly involved. They joined in the later 70’s and were part of laun­der­ing money for those involved. in the 90’s they admit­ted to fam­ily mem­bers includ­ing myself for what the “fam­ily” is involved in. Many of us knew from rumors and talk around the fam­ily but to hear them admit it was shock­ing since many of us didn’t believe what we saw.

    Meet the fam­ily:
    Mex­ico drug plane used for US ‘ren­di­tion’ flights: report
    Sep 4, 2008
    http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j6QonBKKMo2gw1e3ql-xUcQEZbVg

    Clyde O’Connor is my ex-sister-in-law’s brother. Her hus­band, my ex-wife’s brother is the money mann behind Clyde. Notice that Clyde was fly­ing Ren­di­tion flights and under­stand the fam­ily often bragged about being a CIA Asset when ques­tioned by me for why they aren’t wor­ried about being pros­e­cuted. Being con­nect like this means you can get away with any­thing even if it is murder.

    Chicago gets a qweekly $100 mil­lion dol­lar drug ship­ment that is split with Florida and New York. Other cities get ship­ments as well. The drug pro­ceeds are being used to FUND Black-Op’s for sup­port of another White House Coup. As told to me by the family.

    This is a huge crim­i­nal sys­tem involv­ing far too many to count. It involves many large Banks and cor­po­ra­tions. That big banks have an inte­gral part in the coup.

    And so does the Mil­i­tary:
    Pen­ta­gon is Muscling In (Mil­i­tary takeover of US Gov) WaPo
    http://www.opednews.com/populum/link.php?id=79146

    I shuold warn every­one that the involve­ment extends fur­ther than many real­ize. It reaches directly into every­one homes under the cloak of being enter­tain­ment. Their inten­tion is to “micro-snoop on every­one” in sup­port of when what they call “The Change” comes. The Change is when our gov­ern­ment switches over to be a Dic­ta­tor­ship. That is when the “Deten­tion Camps” open up and we start mim­ic­ing what hap­pened dur­ing Hitlers time. The exter­mi­na­tion areas have been in oper­a­tion for decades using com­mon ser­vice areas with mishaps to cover up what hap­pened to the deceased. Chicago has had three in oper­a­tion for decades and there may be more oper­at­ing at this time. I heard about all of this dur­ing the 90’s.

    The fam­ily threat­ened me dur­ing the 90’s that if I should talk about this I would end up being setup to be put away inde­fi­nat­tely just like what was hap­pen­ing in Texas while Pres Bush was Gov­er­nor. I was told that all of this was being pre­pared and to start after some­thing BIG was sup­posed to hap­pen. At that time, they were review­ing three sites with New York being one of them (Twin tow­ers). After a while, our econ­omy was to col­lapse start­ing with the Lend­ing area with Homes and build­ing. The Big Banks were part of the plan­ning with set­ting this up.

    The Police have an involve­ment as well...
    More Groups Than Thought Mon­i­tored in Police Spy­ing
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/03/AR2009010301993_pf.html

    Gang Stalk­ing is a big part of their early oper­a­tions on some­one. I’ve been stalked for years by not less than three peo­ple at any one time. After a few weeks of study that is when I start to encounter trou­ble with dri­ving or while in my office or while out with friends. Setup car acci­dents work­ing along with cor­rupt Police help elim­i­nate you.

    Every­thing they do is done to not draw atten­tion and must end up look­ing like an acci­dent. I know about many mur­ders and attempted mur­ders. Lawyers with judges along with law enforce­ment work together. If you end up in an acci­dent, the per­son that hits you gets away scott free and the insur­ance com­pany won’t help you. Lawyers that once helped me refused to help me after my trou­bles increased where there was a focus to get rid of me.

    How Intel Agen­cies Do Gang Stalk­ing
    http://www.rense.com/general84/howintel.htm

    They com­monly use poi­son are one of their weapons of choice. Acci­dents especi­cally with cars is their favorite because it’s easy for them to arrange that it was an acci­dent. Since this mainly involves a Polit­i­cal Mafia where there is access to all records you can’t feel safe any­where. They have access to your home records to know wher the power is and water shut off is. The ongo­ing prob­lems involv­ing tricks and other things never stop. There are breakins that hap­pen weekly or more fre­quently. They usu­ally leave a mes­sage with smok­ing cig­ars or pulling the bat­ter­ies from your clocks or some­thing to let you know they were there. They will unplug your freezer so in a few days all of your food turns bad and more. You really end up feel­ing that you aren’t safe any­where and espe­cially if you ven­ture out­doors, they imme­di­ately start up with the car acci­dents to harm you.

    Is this REALLY a SUICIDE?
    Real estate mogul found fatally shot in sub­ur­ban wildlife pre­serve
    STEVEN L. GOOD | Body dis­cov­ered in Kane County pre­serve with self-inflicted gun wound, police say
    http://www.suntimes.com/business/1362848,steven-good-fatally-shot-wildlife-preserve-010509.article

    This is com­monly how they get rid of some­one who is a threat and there isn’t any other way to make it look like an acci­dent. Or you may be shoved out a win­dow mul­ti­ple floors up and the news will say you were men­tally ill.

    Guess who setup the family’s drug ship­ping busi­ness in Florida?
    Dur­ing Rezko’s trial it sur­faced that he invited Obama to work at the law firm. But remem­ber, Rezko didn’t own the law firm... Clyde O’Connor and his fam­ily were over at my house and him and my brother-in-law were talk­ing in front of me of start­ing the ship­ping busi­ness. How­ever, it was men­tioned that Clyde had to be aware that they were work­ing along with a group who didn’t play around. Research on Clyde O’Connor and Fleet of 100 planes for ship­ping drugs.

    I asked my brother-in-law if he was con­cerned about how his busi­ness was setup. His reply was that he wasn’t wor­ried since he had the best involved. He said more but what he was explain­ing was that the law firm had some­one spe­cial who assisted them with set­ting up the busi­ness. Guess who that may have been? Obama. The fam­ily worked closely with the law firm that Obama worked for and that Rezko worked along with. To my dis­may, my youngest son is directly involved with Rezko.

    In Chicago they call this crim­i­nal sys­tem “the Com­bine”, but it’s bet­ter known as “The Shadow Gov­ern­ment” but best known as “The Polit­i­cal Mafia” and extends all the way up into the high­est lev­els of the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment. It also extends down into the lower areas includ­ing towns.

    How the fam­ily got started is another story that can explain how this group works. Being Polit­i­cal, they study peo­ple to gen­er­ate a pro­file so they know your hot but­tons and are able to manip­u­late you to do what they want.

    Sadly there have been many State Spon­sored Ter­ror­ism over the years that we are led to beleive is by a lone per­son or peo­ple who are men­tally ill. At the time, the fam­ily knew about a few as we were told NOT to go to cer­tain places when out.

    There is more but for another time....

    Marty Didier
    North­brook, IL

    Posted by Marty Didier | January 7, 2009, 1:49 pm

  2. Here are some of the orig­i­nal NYT arti­cles in pdf format:

    http://ce399fascism.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/a-plot-of-wall-st-interests-to-establish-a-fascist-dictatorship-nyt-21111934/

    http://ce399fascism.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/inquiry-pressed-in-fascist-plot-nyt-22111934-pdf-file/

    http://ce399fascism.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/further-background-on-fascist-coup-attempt-of-1934-and-native-us-fascist-groups-nyt-1621935/

    Posted by ce399 | December 16, 2011, 3:53 pm

  3. There’s an inter­est­ing piece in today’s NY Times about emer­gence of “Chris­t­ian lib­er­tar­i­an­ism” from the same “Amer­i­can Lib­erty League” folks that brought us the 1934 Coup plot:

    Jan­u­ary 17, 2012, 9:00 pm
    For God So Loved the 1 Per­cent …
    By KEVIN M. KRUSE

    Prince­ton, N.J.

    IN recent weeks Mitt Rom­ney has become the poster child for unchecked cap­i­tal­ism, a role he seems to embrace with rel­ish. Con­cerns about eco­nomic equal­ity, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

    “When you have a pres­i­dent encour­ag­ing the idea of divid­ing Amer­ica based on the 99 per­cent ver­sus 1 per­cent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this coun­try which is entirely incon­sis­tent with the con­cept of one nation under God.”

    Mr. Rom­ney was on to some­thing, though per­haps not what he intended.

    The con­cept of “one nation under God” has a noble lin­eage, orig­i­nat­ing in Abra­ham Lincoln’s hope at Get­tys­burg that “this nation, under God, shall not per­ish from the earth.” After Lin­coln, how­ever, the phrase dis­ap­peared from polit­i­cal dis­course for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th cen­tury, under a much dif­fer­ent guise: cor­po­rate lead­ers and con­ser­v­a­tive cler­gy­men deployed it to dis­credit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

    Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, the pres­tige of big busi­ness sank along with stock prices. Cor­po­rate lead­ers worked fran­ti­cally to restore their pub­lic image and simul­ta­ne­ously roll back the “creep­ing social­ism” of the wel­fare state. Notably, the Amer­i­can Lib­erty League, financed by cor­po­ra­tions like DuPont and Gen­eral Motors, made an aggres­sive case for cap­i­tal­ism. Most, how­ever, dis­missed its efforts as self-interested pro­pa­ganda. (A Demo­c­ra­tic Party offi­cial joked that the orga­ni­za­tion should have been called “the Amer­i­can Cel­lo­phane League” because “first, it’s a DuPont prod­uct and, sec­ond, you can see right through it.”)

    Real­iz­ing that they needed to rely on oth­ers, these busi­ness­men took a new tack: using gen­er­ous financ­ing to enlist sym­pa­thetic cler­gy­men as their cham­pi­ons. After all, accord­ing to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in Amer­ica, min­is­ters had more to do with mold­ing pub­lic opin­ion” than any other.

    The Rev. James W. Fifield, pas­tor of the elite First Con­gre­ga­tional Church of Los Ange­les, led the way in cham­pi­oning a new union of faith and free enter­prise. “The bless­ings of cap­i­tal­ism come from God,” he wrote. “A sys­tem that pro­vides so much for the com­mon good and hap­pi­ness must flour­ish under the favor of the Almighty.”

    Chris­tian­ity, in Mr. Fifield’s inter­pre­ta­tion, closely resem­bled cap­i­tal­ism, as both were sys­tems in which indi­vid­u­als rose or fell on their own. The wel­fare state, mean­while, vio­lated most of the Ten Com­mand­ments. It made a “false idol” of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, encour­aged Amer­i­cans to covet their neigh­bors’ pos­ses­sions, stole from the wealthy and, ulti­mately, bore false wit­ness by promis­ing what it could never deliver.

    Through­out the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gion, eco­nom­ics and pol­i­tics that one observer aptly anointed “Chris­t­ian lib­er­tar­i­an­ism.” Mr. Fifield dis­tilled his ide­ol­ogy into a sim­ple but pow­er­ful phrase — “free­dom under God.” With ample sup­port from cor­po­rate patrons and busi­ness lob­bies like the United States Cham­ber of Com­merce, his gospel of godly cap­i­tal­ism soon spread across the coun­try through per­sonal lec­tures, weekly radio broad­casts and a monthly magazine.

    In 1951, the cam­paign cul­mi­nated in a huge Fourth of July cel­e­bra­tion of the theme. For­mer Pres­i­dent Her­bert C. Hoover and Gen. Dou­glas MacArthur head­lined an orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee of con­ser­v­a­tive all-stars, includ­ing celebri­ties like Walt Dis­ney and Ronald Rea­gan, but largely com­pris­ing busi­ness titans like Con­rad Hilton, J. C. Pen­ney, Har­vey Fire­stone Jr. and J. Howard Pew.

    ...

    Posted by terrafractyl | January 19, 2012, 12:28 pm

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