[NYTr] 1934: The Plot Against America (Harper's)

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Tim Murphy (activ-l)

Harper's - Jul 28, 2007
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651 

DEPARTMENT: No Comment

1934: The Plot Against America

By Scott Horton 

I'm back from the land of heather and thistles, not to mention wee
drams and lukewarm ale, but on my way out a friend at the BBC alerted
me to this http://tinyurl.com/2cc7af  a not-to-miss program on the BBC
this morning, accessible over the next several days by internet. It's
the story of the Plot Against America. I don't mean the Philip Roth
novel, nor even the Sinclair Lewis book, It Can't Happen Here, but
rather the historical events upon which these two works of fiction were
based. 

In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot
involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall
Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and
install a fascist dictatorship. Roth's novel is developed from several
strands of this factual account; he assumed the plot is actually
carried out, whereas in fact an alert FDR shut it down but stopped
short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of
the plot involved a retired prominent general who was to have raised a
private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the
whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was
heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist
forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other
newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committ! ee was
created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were
scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only
recently been made available. 

The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants
under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a
few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of
the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the
business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations
throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power
in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears
that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new
German government. 

Prescott Bush, of course, went on to service as a U.S. Senator from
Connecticut, and his son, George H.W. Bush emerged from World War II as
a hero. 

The Plot Against America portrayed in this episode of the BBC series
"Document" gives fascinating insight into a dark and little known piece
of American history in which the nation stood on the brink of betrayal.
The role of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation's
history in this whole affair is shocking. 

BBC Link http://tinyurl.com/2cc7af