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, 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 committee 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.