On March 1, 1954, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party sent a fusillade of automatic pistol fire raking the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Five members of The House were wounded. All recovered! The shooters, three men and one woman were all arrested and sentenced to from 50 to 75 years in jail. Jimmy Carter released all in 1979.
I mention this only to draw a parallel between the treatment of these terrorists, who luckily didn’t kill anyone, and the ones who overran the Capitol on 1/6/21 that are now being given sentences of a couple of months and time served to less than four years for trespassing. These sentences for activities that led to five deaths as opposed to the ones in ’54 in which no one died, would appear at best pathetic.
That was just a quartet of fanatic nationalists trying to call attention to their cause and I mention them only because of the length of their jail terms. The siege of 1/6/21 was a real attempt at a coup. It was Donald Trump’s shot at nullifying a legitimate election so that he could stay in the White House and further destroy our nation as he developed his plans to become a dictator.
To see its like, we have to go all the way back to 1933 when a coalition of far right conservatives, Wall Street millionaires and aspects of the military came together to seize the government from the newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt before he took office and, as they anticipated, installed a communist or socialist government.
The plot was foiled only because the man they chose to lead the military segment of the coup, Major General Smedley Butler, recognized the plot for the treason it was and turned everyone in to the FBI.
America was in the depths of the depression. 16 million people were out of work; half a million farms had failed along with five thousand banks, while hundreds of thousands of families had lost their homes. Unlike today, there were no government safety nets, no unemployment insurance, no social security or Medicare. There was panic in the streets and as in every such occasion, there were men poised to take advantage; men like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin who grabbed for power by attacking the new President while spewing anti-Jewish, pro-fascist vitriol, using “America First”, type slogans coined by the likes of publisher William Randolph Hearst.
Even as enormous crowds gathered at the Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration, rioting was predicted for cities throughout the nation and troops were stationed throughout DC in anticipation of the expected violence.
Roosevelt had already made clear his plans to try to drag millions of Americans out of poverty but there were many in industry and on Wall Street who saw only a tornado of communism and they were organizing to stop it before it got too big to control.
Today we have The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Then they had the Grey Shirts in NY, the Khaki Shirts in Philly and the Silver Shirts, an apocalyptic Christian militia operating in 46 states. So when Major General Butler claimed he had been recruited by a bunch of Wall Street types to lead a fascist coup, many people in serious positions believed him.
The problem then was the same as it is today when 700 punks have been arrested, but not one leader. Then it was men like Charles Lindberg, Henry Ford, Singer Sewing Machine’s Sterling Clark, several of the Dupont’s, S.B. Colgate, Elihu Root, Sewell Avery and Prescott Bush, father to George H.W. Bush, just as today it is The Claremont Institute, a far-right conservative on steroids think tank collecting money and power from the likes of Dick and Betsy DeVos, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley’s’ and a host of other far right billionaires. They are joined by the likes of Erik Prince head of the paramilitary Blackwater Organization and a host of media and government big wigs like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Kevin McCarthy and a number of Supreme Court Justices.
All these names; what do they mean? Power! They mean “power” and with that power comes money and a level of immunity that while patently un-American is still reality. The Wall Street Putsch died four years after if was revealed to the FBI by Major General Butler because a war was coming and even though its aim was to replace FDR he saw that he would need many of the same men who wanted to destroy him in order to win that war. So it all just went away, it all just became a conspiracy theory that almost everyone soon forgot.
It’s the same now. Sort of, only now we aren’t facing a war but the end of democracy, as we know it. And now there is a communication process that makes it a thousand times harder to just bury a story the way they could in the 1930’s.
The Wall Street Putsch never actually happened. It was killed before it could get off the ground so even though the groundwork had been laid, very few people knew about it. Today it’s different. Everyone knows what happened on 1/6. Those who have not followed Donald Trump down the rabbit hole understand what it means and they want retribution. Democracy cannot survive if justice is not served and that doesn’t mean just throwing a bunch of dumb punks to the wolves. That means the leaders of the coup, those who conceived, planned and financed the whole dirty scheme, from Trump on down, must be revealed tried and where guilty, convicted and jailed. Only then will justice be served and democracy and the constitution supported.
Democracy is a subtle concept that has so far survived in this nation, not because it is supported by a series of strong laws but because it balances precariously on the needle thin point of the belief that if our leaders recognize the difference between right and wrong and choose correctly, our government will work for the people. It’s when men like Richard Nixon, Dick Cheney and Donald Trump grab the power that democracy teeters on e edge of oblivion because to make the laws that will control them is to remove the powers of the presidency.
Yes, there is a subtle balance that can be found. Let’s hope that we are able to elect the men and women to our government that can achieve such governance.
Amen!!!!