From the Archives: The Day when Bankers and Businessmen Betrayed a Nation

by Nomad

Scouring the archive again.
In a 2015 post, This Day in History: When Bankers and Big Business Betrayed a Nation, we examined the willing complicity of the German industrialists and how the fascist leader's seduced the people who once had underestimated him.

On February 20, 1933, - exactly 84 years today- something extraordinary happened in Europe. Of course, nobody knew about it and few could have understood the significance at the time.

This was the day that Chancellor Adolf Hitler made his pitch to the leaders of banking and industry.
On that day, Hitler held a secret meeting aimed at allocating campaign financing for the Nazi party in the crucial upcoming elections.
It was for the captains of industry a moment of decision, a time to choose between the good of the country or supporting an extremely ambitious man with deeply dangerous ideas.

Political Theater: How Orson Welles Used Julius Caesar to Warn Against The Rise of Fascism

by Nomad

This post will take us on a merry ride through history, both ancient and modern. It involves a murder of a tyrant and a play about that murder and how that play served as a warning about the rise of another, more ruthless, dictator.

Like a Colossus

When the 22-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre players took on a Broadway production of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, he made some interesting changes. 

Only a man like Welles would have had the audacity to "streamline" Shakespeare, but he dared to do so for a very good reason. 

In fact, anybody coming to see a Shakespeare play or yearning for a play of spectacle and diversion would have been in for a shock. For one thing, a modern-dress with sparse stage decoration.  But it wasn't just about costumes.

Remember When Reagan Nominated an Anti-Labor Lobbyist of a Neo-Nazi, Pro-KKK Propaganda Machine?

by Nomad

Early in Reagan's first term, the administration suffered a minor setback with one of its nominations. The problem? The nominee's work with an organization that had long been a propaganda machine for the most extreme right wing and dangerous organizations.

Beware The Ides of March

On 30 March 1981, two events in Washington occurred: one  of them stunned the nation. The other event was completely overshadowed the other and is largely forgotten today.

On that rainy afternoon, at about 2:30. President Reagan was leaving a speaking engagement at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington. Waving to the small crowd, the president stepped out onto the sidewalk on his way to his limo. Before he got there, an attempt was made on his life. 

Reagan and three others were shot and wounded by demented attacker John Hinckley, Jr.

The FBI said the weapon was a Saturday Night Special that Hinckley purchased last October for about $25 in a pawn shop in Dallas - the city where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

It was not immediately apparent how seriously Reagan's injuries were.

Only a few days before the assassination attempt, vice president George H. W. Bush received the assignment of running crisis management in case of emergency.
On that day, Bush was out of Washington, in Ft. Worth/Dallas as it turned out. Believing that the president had escaped intact, Bush flew on to make a speech in Austin.

With the vice president on his way back, the Secretary of State  Alexander Haig, in an effort, to calm things down told reporters that he was in control.  

As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.

As a war hawk, Haig's declaration sent a shiver down the spines of a lot of people. With his long military history in wars like Korea, Vietnam and as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe commanding all U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, his words should have been a comfort.

The world held its breath.

Reagan's hawkish comments about the Soviet Union had some world leaders uneasy and with this attempt on his life, nobody was ready to predict the US reaction.

An Hour Earlier

Less than an hour before the attempt on the president' life, something far less earth-shaking had happened. As was expected, the White House spokesman announced the nominations for many of the second-tier positions in various agencies.

Fascism Made in the USA: The Night Nazis Fought on the Streets of New York City

by Nomad

The United States has had its share of fascist groups that have come and gone. One of those was the American Nazi Party, the Bund Party. Here's the story of its 1939 rally and how it led to its collapse. 

A "Pro-American" Rally

On The night of 20 February 1939, something occurred that became an interesting footnote in American history. Today it is mostly a forgotten bit of the history of New York City. And for many, it could be a period they would rather not recall.

That evening, Madison Square Garden was the venue for the American- German Bund party Washington's Day celebration, hosted by American-German Bund party. 

You may not be familiar with the Bund party, it was better known as the American Nazi party. 

Advertised as a "Pro-American Rally" it was attended by somewhere between 17,000 and 22,000. It was one of the largest gatherings of American Nazis of its time.

From the photographs of the event, there were the usual Nazi rally fixtures, flags, the swastikas, and uniforms. In order to establish its brand as true blue American, a forty-foot portrait of George Washington graced the stage. That was more than just window dressing. The organization had declared that Washington was "the first Fascist" who did not believe democracy would work. 

The meeting opened with a salute to the flag and the playing of the "Star-Spangled Banner." (It was to end with the Nazi anthem, however.)

This Day in History: When Bankers and Big Business Betrayed a Nation

 by Nomad

When we look back at this date- February 20- we see it was a critical day in modern history. Eighty-two years ago today,  Hitler made his pitch for campaign financing to the leaders of banking and industry. It turned out to be a smashing success.

On this day in 1933, the Nazi party arranged a secret meeting between Adolf Hitler and 20 to 25 industrialists at the official residence of Hermann Wilhelm Göring, the minister of the interior in Hitler's government, 

The aim of this secret meeting was to allocate campaign financing for the Nazi party in the crucial upcoming elections. 

A German economist, banker, liberal politician Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht acted as a liaison/host for the event. As a fierce critic of his country's post-World War I reparation obligations, Schacht became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. He served in Hitler's government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. 

Until his fall from grace in 1937, Schacht proved to be a useful tool for the regime and its rise to absolute power.

The Roots of Right Wing Religious Extremism: The Winrod Legacy 1/2

by Nomad

Most Americans have not heard of the name Winrod but decades ago, Reverend Gerald Winrod was at one time a charismatic voice of right-wing dissent, His anti-Semitic message spread through the Midwest by radio at a time when the Nazi party in Germany were rising to power. 

This two-part post traces his rise and fall and his ideological rebirth through his son, a man who took the message to the next level.

Of all the books of the Bible, the Book of Revelations holds a particular spell over right-wing Fundamentalists. I suppose there's a good reason. It is colorfully written and vague enough to mean nearly anything, depending on current events, the mood of the preacher and the target of the sermon. And for the more literal- minded Christians it instills a sense of imminent unalterable doom and fear. A proven motivator. 

In our times, we have heard suggestions that Obama is somehow related to the coming of the Anti-Christ, the devil-incarnate from the biblical prophecies. 

However, Obama is hardly unique in this regard. In fact evangelists have used the prophecies to point fingers at well-known leaders nearly from the time the book was included in the official canon of Scripture. 

In this post, I want to examine the biographical history of the nearly forgotten Reverend Gerald Burton Winrod. Winrod used this particular technique against the president and against the progressive movement in general.

Reverend Gerald Winrod vs. Franklin Roosevelt

In the 1930s, for Christian fundamentalists, all the signs of the end times were obvious. It was a time of great -almost unbearable- tension and apprehension. The rise of totalitarianism in Europe and a world-wide depression unlike anything anybody had ever seen were just two signs that of the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies.

Matt Sutton, Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, notes that in the 1930s, a few influential Christian leaders began to impose their own view on political events.

Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal quickly emerged as the object of their most intense domestic scrutiny. Fundamentalists sensed something sinister in the thirty-second president. His consolidation of power, his controversial policies, and his internationalist sensibilities seemed consistent with biblical descriptions of politics and international relations in the last days.

As a result, fundamentalists did not interpret the growth of the modern liberal state in the U.S. as a reasonable response to the growing global economic depression but instead viewed it in conjunction with Mussolini’s visions of empire and Hitler’s Antisemitism. In short, fundamentalists across the continent came to believe that New Deal liberalism was the means by which the U.S. would join the legions of the Antichrist.

One of the more notable preachers that took this view was Rev. Gerald Burton Winrod in Wichita, Kansas.