Plotting Against The Presidency

Written by Dr. Michael P. Riccards

Dr. Michael P. Riccards is Executive Director of the Hall Institute of Public Policy – New Jersey. Riccards is a former college president and a presidential scholar who has authored 15 books.

Author Sally Denton has written an interesting volume called, “The Plots against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.”  If you are not careful, you would think that Roosevelt was Barack Obama.

In 1933, capitalism was in a state of total collapse as FDR took over the presidency from the hapless Republican engineer, Herbert Hoover.  The banks were insolvent and closing all over the nation; the stock market had bottomed out; about 25% of the working population was out of a job.  Family farms and homes could not survive mortgage obligations.  People were literally starving.  Teachers were paid in scrip because the school districts had their money in the ailing banks.  FDR insisted that the only thing the nation had to fear was fear itself—which was objectively absurd.  Later the Pecora Committee investigated Wall Street and found abuses, corruption and greed unleashed.  Roosevelt in short time closed the banks, and then reopened most of them quickly.  He created a Securities Exchange Commission to reform Wall Street practices, and named Joseph P. Kennedy to chair it.  As he charmingly observed—he appointed a thief to catch the thieves.

The Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to protect the banks from comingling funds, a prohibition  that protected banks and investors until Clinton and Bush II eviscerated the Act.  He moved to establish production codes, begin collective bargaining, set farm prices, and later established the TVA and Social Security.

When FDR saved the banks, he was celebrated as the savior of capitalism.  He rejected pleas to nationalize the banks, as Obama did later.  FDR established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to guarantee deposits –a coverage that Obama expanded in his financial crisis.

The nation loved FDR’s actions, and praise was heard in Congress, the newspapers, and even business.  They got what they wanted—just like Obama gave Wall Street a massive bailout, protecting capitalist failures in 2008-2009.  They were “too big to fail”—they cried out, exactly the sort of capitalist marketplace ethos that is supposed to allow success and failure.

After four months or so, the forces of big business and conservative Democrats began to join ranks and attacked viciously the very man they had promulgated as savior.  As they said in the country clubs, patrician well born FDR was a “traitor to his class.”  At first FDR was amused, but then confused and then angry.  What happened?  What happened was the rich got their benefits and reassurance, and then when the president turned from relief to recovery and reform.  They did not want reform; they did not want to see benefits include collective bargaining for workers, aid to the working class, or assistance to black tenant farmers.  Each of those reforms would impact on the established balances of power, especially in the South.  The forces of selfishness turned on the president, but in 1936 he bested them enormously.  They founded a special tea party-like group--the American Liberty League funded mainly by the DuPonts, General Motors, and the Pew families.

Obama is the man who  two years ago saved GM and Chrysler.  Rather ironic.  Roosevelt had to deal with anti Semitic preachers like Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest and with Senator Huey Long, a populist demagogue from Louisiana.  Roosevelt carefully moved against Coughlin by getting Joe Kennedy and Archbishop Francis Spellman to appeal to the Vatican on the priest’s pro Fascist broadcasts.  And Long was assassinated.  FDR moved eventually embracing Social Security to take over some of the left wing’s platforms.

To deal with huge social problems, he created make work jobs, revamped the nation’s infrastructure, and controlled food  prices and distribution.  Government intruded into people’s lives in areas they needed.  He created 1,500 CCC camps for young men to replenish the nation’s forests and open spaces.  It was his personal idea, and the nation loved it, except for some critics who saw it as emulating Mussolini’s youth programs.  Three million men went though those experiences—mostly white, urban kids about 19 years old.

While Obama’s greatest triumphs and trials have been in foreign policy, FDR’s first term did not deal as often or as adroitly as his successor has.

The right hates Obama who oddly enough does not have a strong polarizing presence.  But neither did FDR until the attacks began in 1933-34.  Then he turned more personal and to the left. The angry right tries to demonize reformers by charging they are not like us.  Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Even Donald Trump told us! But what of FDR who came from one of the oldest patrician families in the nation.  Elements of the right insisted that he was really from Dutch Jewish blood, a charge the Nazis picked up.  FDR simply responded that he was from Dutch forbearers; he didn’t think that they were Jews but if so he would be proud of that.

There are patterns of hatred from the right that consistently reappear in American history; the great historian Richard Hofstadter called it the paranoid style of American politics.  I am sure that one can lay out patterns of leftist hatred, but it would require a different set of assumptions and historical examples.  Do you wish me to do that column?  Respond to in the talkback below.

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