National Portrait Gallery
Did
you know that in 1933 a group of financiers and fascists attempted overthrow
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and stop the New Deal? The coup leaders
thought Mussolini and Hitler offered governments that America should emulate.
Militias sprang up in the country—following the example of Mussolini’s Blackshirts
and Hitler’s Brownshirts, these groups of conservative veterans called
themselves Gray Shirts, Silver Shirts, Khaki Shirts, depending on the city of
their origin.
Retired
US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley
Darlington Butler was recruited to lead an army of veterans, funded by the
American Liberty League, whose membership included such Wall Street figures as JP
Morgan, Jr, Irénée du Pont, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine
fortune, and the chief executives of General Motors, Birds Eye, and General
Foods. Instead, he reported the plan to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, who
reported it to FDR. Some critics suggested it was a hoax, insisting that there
was a great gap between contemplation and execution, but others claimed that if
Butler had not been such a loyal patriot, the coup might well have succeeded—and
American history would have been dramatically different.
Then of course there was Watergate in 1972,
another time when the country was deeply divided, then over Vietnam. President
Richard Nixon, anticipating a hard-fought battle for re-election, sanctioned
members of his Committee to Re-Elect the President to break into Democratic
headquarters in D.C., steal top-secret documents, and bug the phones. After two
break-ins (the phone bugs didn’t work at first), Nixon was re-elected,
defeating Democrat George McGovern in a landslide. Nixon gave hush money to the
burglars and tried to get the CIA to block the FBI investigation of the
break-in. Before a grand jury, several of Nixon’s aides testified to his crimes
and revealed that Nixon had taped every conversation in the Oval Office. Special
investigator Archibold Cox demanded the tapes, and the Supreme Court ordered
Nixon to release then. He stalled. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for
obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up, nd several
violations of the Constitution.
Nixon resigned and was
pardoned by President Gerald Ford, but his attorney general and several high-power
aides went to prison. General Alexander Haig, then White House Chief of Staff,
is credited with persuading Nixon to resign and was apparently the one who held
the government together in the last chaotic days before Nixon left office.
So Trump wasn’t even making
up his own script. He had a playbook to follow with his aborted coup. The
country survived two major acts of treachery, which encourages me to think it
will survive again as a democracy for all people. And in the Watergate case,
some people even went to prison--that could happen again too!
And a sort of unrelated illustration
of history repeating itself: our minister, Russ Peterman, is preaching a series
he calls “Fierce,” about women of the Bible. This morning he preached on the
story of Ruth. Most of us know the Ruth, a Moabite widow, insisted on following
her Hebrew mother-in-law, Naomi, back to Bethlehem. It was a time when women
had no rights—their lives were determined by men. That resonated with me today
when men are trying to take women back to the past instead of forward to the
future. But what really struck me was the Naomi feared for Ruth, a Moab, in
Bethlehem, because she would be an outsider, and it was a time when prophets in
Israel were trying to cleanse the population of outsiders, people who were different.
Sound familiar today? Of course it does. That story ends well too—Ruth married
again and is considered the great-grandmother of David (perhaps great-great?)
Maybe there are reasons I’m
a cock-eyed optimist! History lesson for the day is over.
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