I'm rereading Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here," (available as a
Buzzflash premium). The story about a president who wins election in 1936, then turns the US into a fascist state, complete with SA-like Minute Men, anti-Semitism and racism, crackdowns on media and higher education, summary execution of dissenters, etc., is not quite like what we face now, but close to what we faced then.
There was a fascist plot to overthrow FDR in 1933 and 1934, but the plotters got away scot free. Among them Robert Sterling Clark, a Singer heir and Wall Street financier, whose fine art museum in Williamstown, Mass., celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
More whitewashing of history below.
The Clark Art Institute is one of the great small museums in the country. The museum focuses on 19th-century French painting, but also has wonderful collections of American and European silver and paintings from all over Europe.
For its 50th, there's also a special exhibit about Robert Sterling Clark, telling about his travels, his art buying and even his breeding and racing of thoroughbreds.
But nary a word about his central role in the plot to have Marine Gen. and war hero Smedley Butler lead 500,000 American Legion members in a march on Washington.
(From The Fascist Plot to Seize Washington by John Spivak) In the summer of 1933, Butler was sounded out by a Morgan bond trader, Gerald MacGuire, on what Butler recalled, "what was tantamount to a plot to seize the Government, by force if necessary."
Butler said he wanted to meet principals of the plot, and MacGuire set up a meeting with Clark.
At the meeting, Butler said Clark proposed that he give a speech to the American Legion national convention advocating restoration of the gold standard.
According to Butler, Clark said: "I have $30 million. I do not want to lose it. I am willing to spend half of the $30 million to save the other half. If you go out and make this speech in Chicago, I am certain that they will adopt the resolution and that will be one step toward the return to gold, to have the soldiers stand up for it. We can get the soldiers to go out in great bodies to stand up for it."
In a subsequent meeting with MacGuire, Butler said he got more specific about the coup: "Don't you understand the setup has got to be changed a bit? ... Did it ever occur to you that the President is overworked? We might have an Assistant President ... to take the blame; and if things do not work out, he can drop him." He said that it did not take any Constitutional change to authorize another Cabinet official, to take over the details of the office, take them off the President's shoulders. He mentioned the position would be a secretary of general affairs - a sort of super-secretary. "You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President's health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second."
A Congressional committee half-heartedly investigated the coup attempt, which MacGuire denied under oath. Soon afterward, he conveniently died "of natural causes." Clark and the other principals behind the plot were not called to testify, and the corporate media downplayed the whole thing.
Butler later came to see his Marine service in Cuba, the Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti and France as part of the "war racket ... possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
Butler died in 1940, leaving an estate of $2,000, hardly enough to endow the care of a pet, much less a museum like the Clark.
Despite his attempt to bankroll a fascist coup, Clark lives on as a hero, at least in Williamstown.