won his Silver Star? --------------------------------
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Posted on 08/25/2004 9:26:34 AM PDT by untenured
Interesting, but one plotter name is possibly omitted. One that makes sense. One that would have been needed.
Hearst.
If you are going to take over the government, you need the most powerful press baron in the country on your side.
Oliver Stone is supposedly working on a movie of these events.
Clayton Cramer is a very well informed historian who makes his living writing software (and teaching at nights). His writing is first rate and his knowledge of original sources is impeccable. In fact, it was that familiarity with the original sources which let him to fact check Bellesiles' "Arming America". He was among the first to call BS on Michael Bellesiles academic fraud with direct evidence which led Emory University to investigate and the Bancroft Committee to withdraw their prize. His blog is at http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/blogger.html
MacGuire and friends had a small army of unemployed World War I veterans training in the California desert. When Butler understood what was really going on, he called J. Edgar Hoover, tipped him off, and a small army of FBI agents raided the camp and carried off the weapons. Nobody was arrested.
The fascists won in their coup d'etat when the gold standard was repealed.
won his Silver Star? -------------------------------- To print out and wear as a Campaign Button, go HERE. Feel free to reuse this anywhere you wish...
I wonder why not?
This is an interesting story, though I can't help you with your research.
I think the danger we might face here is if we should get too many totalitarian figures in government. In which case, if they become uncontrollable, a simple sanction (hopefully at the ballot box) would solve the problem. No need to have a civil war or to slow traffic down in Washington.
A juvenile mistake would-be revolutionaries make is thinking that a coup can happen by force or by merely occupying a building. That's passe for a nation of armed Citizens under self-rule who will defend the Constitution and our governmental structures. The military and LEO's are our family members, don't forget -- all sworn the same as the we are. At least the veterans are, and that will be sufficient. IMO
Oliver Stone indeed. The MacGuire incident is interesting, but the article seems to try to piece together various anti-New Deal elements into a conspiracy that does remind me of the film JFK, or, even worse, Michael Moore's bilge. The New Masses, from which the author draws heavily, was an organ of the Communist Party, rather than simply a "leftist magazine," and it became standard practice for the magazine to play up a large, corporate-oriented fascist movement spreading its tentacles across the country in hopes of recruiting leftists into the CP. Al Smith did have a falling out with Roosevelt following the 1928 election, but the American Liberty League hardly was a subversive organization. Sure, the departure from the gold standard angered a lot of people--both conservative Republicans and elements of the old progressive wing of the Democratic Party. This hardly rises to the level of a coup d'etat, though.
A more simple explanation of the "silence" of the mass media on MacGuire was that the incident simply did not warrant that much coverage. Ickes's book on the press was but one of many works that appeared in the period bemoaning the corporate consolidation of the newspaper industry. Roosevelt had friends in the media, but he also had his opponents, too. Interesting stuff, yes. A bit overblown? I think so.
A return to the gold standard will happen, with or without US fiat currency being involved.
That's one of the questions I have. How often do these occur? One reads all the time about cranks of one sort or another who want to overthrow the government, so I wonder if this is just another of hundreds of similar small-bore plots.
If/when that happens, you better have your financial seatbelt fastened, because you will an economic contraction that will make the great depression look like a beer bust.
Regards,
The question about why the liberals have not publicized this is interesting ...
...especially when you also have to ask WHY are the liberal presidents, who have direct control over the USMC, always trying so hard to destroy the Marines. ????
Maybe a result of this coup was the Marines #1 job is to CONTROL the presidency - that it does not turn into a dictotorship?
Is that why the leftist liberals HATE the Marines so?
Points to ponder - those that even if true, you would nevern know - unless it failed.
Bump for later.
Other alleged 'coup attempts' I've heard of:
Were Washington and/or Hamilton planning a coup against President Adams with the Army Adams managed to never form?
Was Nixon planning a coup with the Marines, as some say Kissinger and Shlesinger arranged for the 82nd Airborne to counter?
An old thread on the Butler conspiracy with some good freeper input: Oliver Stone Sets Sights on Roosevelt (GOP conspiracy against FDR)
If the corporate press was so unified in getting FDR, then why did he never have a picture of him in a wheelchair shown? Otherwise, an interesting topic.
In The Nation in 1933 a prominent leftist blamed the spread of fascism in Europe on excessive civil liberties and urged the United States not to make the same mistake. Lewis Mumford, a prominent liberal intellectual, called for a ban on fascist literature from the mails and exile or imprisonment for the fascist leaders. The University of Miami removed literature regarded as pro-Nazi or profascist from its library, Several states passed group libel or hate-speech laws making it a crime to print or speak in a derogatory fashion about any ethnic group, measures usually aimed at anti-Semetic speech. Virtually every one of the tactics used in the 1930s and early 1940s to harass fascist and suspected of left-wing sympathies.When Louisiana’s Huey Long began to attack President Roosevelt, the liberal journalist Gram Swing asserted that Long had plans to become the Hitler of America. Although the American Legion was one of the Bund’s chief opponents, Swing denounced it along with the Fraternal Order of Elks for their “pattern of fascist action.” The liberal writer George Seldes asserted that the American Legion was really part of the “Fascist International” and that the Reader’s Digest was covertly fascist.
- John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, Chicago: Ivan R Dee, Inc, 1996, pg 26, 27
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