In the end the system worked
In the introduction to his brilliant new book, Soul of America, historian Jon Mecham describes what occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017 where hundreds gathered to protest the decision by city leaders to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a public park. There was an ensuing confrontation between civil rights groups and white supremacists, which ended tragically when a car was rammed into a crowd of counter-protestors and Heather Heyer was killed. In the aftermath of the tragedy President Trump was quoted as saying “I think there is blame on both sides.”
President Trump, who Mecham calls “an heir to the white populist tradition of [Strom] Thurmond and George Wallace” is taken to task by Mecham for even suggesting that “there were more than one side to a conflict between neo-Nazis who idolized Adolf Hilter and Americans who stood against Ku Klux Kkansmen and white nationalists.” I have; no doubt, that Mecham would have been even more appalled by the President Trump’s posting a video calling the rioters he had incited to storm the Capital as “very special” and saying that he loves them.
Mecham puts the President’s Charlottesville comments in the context of history when he writes: “For many, that we have arrived at a place in life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment. History, however, shows us that we are frequently vulnerable to fear, bitterness, and strife. The good news is that we have come through darkness before.”
Mecham makes the point that in a period of economic and social stress and anxiety, like we are experiencing today, it is not uncommon for leaders to play to our fears and employ “extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism.” He adds that “there’s a natural tendency in American political life to think that things were always better in the past.”
Mecham provides a big dose of historic reality as he details the devastating affects that “white fear of color and of immigrants have played” in our history and “that our national greatness was built on explicit and implicit apartheid.” Further, his details the resurgence of the KKK, the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, the isolationism of the America First movement and anti-democratic communist witch-hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, making it abundantly clear that America has had to triumph over a wide range of adversaries and adversities throughout its history and that we have come through bad times.
I was familiar with the lowpoints that Meacham writes about with one exception – the “Wall Street Putsch,” in which a small group of wealthy Wall Streeters launched a plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt by attempting to convince, a respected veteran, the retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler, to raise an army, and march on Washington, and take the capital. According to Mecham, “Fearful of Roosevelt and his reform the “Wall Street Putsch” conspirators were planning to impose a Fascist state. (The episode was also known as the “Business Plot.”) Butler was an unwilling traitor…. The retired general then told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about the planned conspiracy. Reports about the Wall Street cabal’s machinations soon leaked, and the threat fell apart.”
In late 1934, at a series of secret Congressional committee meetings it was determined that Butler had been approached by well-funded intermediaries to lead a military takeover. Years later Congressman John McCormick, who headed the Committee, revealed “If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded, having in mind the conditions existing at that time.”
As David Brooks recently wrote, “there are dark specters running through our nation – beasts with shaggy manes and feral teeth. They have the stench of Know-Nothingism, the hot blood of the lynchers, and they ride the winds of nihilistic fury.”
In retrospect, we should not have been shocked by President Trump rallying-up a mob and attempting to stage a violent coup to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win. As noted historian Michael Beshloss wrote in the aftermath of the invasion of the Capital, “This day has been foreshadowed by every hour of the [Trump] Presidency.”
There were reports that rightwing groups like “We the People Convention” had petitioned President Trump to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution, silence the media and have the military oversee a national re-election. The petition was retweeted by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the President, after lying to the FBI about his contact with then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Flynn’s re-tweet ended with a threat of violence, calling on Trump “to boldly act to save our nation….We will also have no other choice but to take matters into our own hands, and the defend the rights on our own, if you do not act with your powers to defend us.”
I believe there is silver-lining behind the atrocious insurrectionists’ assault on the Capital. While the siege temporarily stopped the certification of the electoral process, it did not thwart it. In the end, the system worked and democracy prevailed over insanity - the madness of Trumpism.
John Mecham would, no doubt, tell us to read our history books. Insanity is not new to American politics. We’ve been there before and we have survived.