#Smedley butler americas series#
In 2007, Jules Archer published his exposé, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR (Skyhorse Publishing) and now, a plucky team of Bay Area writers and artists, is mainstreaming this long-suppressed story in a stunner of a book that combines the visual panache of graphic novel with the visceral punch of a nonfiction bombshell.ĭevil Dog, the first book in David Talbot’s “Pulp History” series from Simon & Schuster, celebrates the life of Smedley Darlington Butler, a unique American hero who single-handedly prevented the overthrow of representative government in the USA. In the nearly eight decades since the plot was hatched (and a quarter-century since the publication of Nader’s tome), only two books have dared to tackle this dark chapter in our country’s long-festering secret war between its citizenry and the superrich. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History by Hans Schmidt.) “It was in a 1987 book by Ralph Nader called The Big Boys.” (Another book that dates from the same year is Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. “I’ve only seen one reference to this,” he replied. I asked a colleague at Mother Jones magazine about this remarkable page that had apparently been torn from of our national history and shredded. How could we not have heard of this? Why was there no mention of this in our schoolroom history books? Why was it that, in the official transcripts of the McCormak-Dickstein HUAC hearings, the names of the corporate conspirators had been blacked out? My heart was in my throat as I read about the plan for a corporate-backed military coup planned for 1933. To my amazement, the transcripts of those first hearings revealed how, in its original inception, HUAC was convened, not to hunt down “Com-symps,” but to investigate a fascist plot to topple President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a patrician Democrat derided by the country’s financial Upper Crust as “a traitor to his class.” See the documentaries: “Operation Abolition” and “Berkeley in the Sixties.”) It was Mandel who introduced his refusal to cooperate by addressing the Congressmen as: “Honorable beaters of children.” (Just outside the hearing room, protesters were being beaten in the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda while high-powered water hoses sent others flying down the hard marble staircase. Up to that point, I had associated HUAC with the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s and the Bay Area anti-HUAC demonstrations that pitted congressional fear-mongers against the righteous wrath of Berkeley’s indomitable Bill Mandel. HUAC’s initial alarm was focused on a plot bankrolled by the owners of major US corporations - including Goodyear, US Steel, JP Morgan, Heinz, and Maxwell House. The records revealed an organized conspiracy to overthrow the US government but it was not one hatched by a secretive Moscow-directed Communist cell. What I discovered was shocking beyond belief.
It was more than 25 years ago, while researching a story in a dark alcove of UC Berkeley’s little-visited newspaper library, that I chanced upon some transcripts from the first hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
‘Pulp History’ Reveals a Corporate Plot to Overthrow American Democracy
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