In 1933, a group on businessmen conspired to unseat President Roosevelt and overthrow the government. One man stopped them…

Still from Universal newsreel footage of Smedley Butler describing his 1934 congressional committee testimony (Wikimedia Commons)

Toward the climax of director and screenwriter David O. Russell’s new historical drama Amsterdam (2022), Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) narrates a line that is not only central to the film’s plot and themes, but also one of the most telling quotes in recent American film history. Burt and his friends have begun to uncover the shadowy and sinister plan at the film’s center, a plan by powerful moneyed figures to overthrow the president of the United States and replace him with an unelected dictator. And Burt asks both himself and the audience, in the voiceover narration to which the film returns frequently, “What’s more un-American than a dictatorship built by American business?”
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The Baltimore Washington Monument. Emblazoned on the sides are important dates in the Revolutionary War, including December 23, 1783. At the top, Washington resigns his commission.

In Baltimore, Maryland stands one of the first monuments erected to the memory of George Washington. The 180-foot monument was finished in 1829, before the Washington Monument in D.C. was even begun. The impressive stone pillar is topped with a large statue of the General. Unlike most other statues of George Washington, the statue in Baltimore does not depict the Revolutionary War hero on horseback with his sword drawn, or as the First President of the United States. Instead it shows Washington, in his military uniform, simply extending a hand holding a piece of paper. Despite the simplicity of the scene, it is representative of one of the most important moments in the founding of the American nation: Washington resigning his military commission.

On November 1, 1783, Washington learned that the Treaty of Paris had been signed and the Revolutionary War was over. Continue reading →

The days of New York City’s Tammany Hall and the Windy City’s “Chicago Machine” may be technically over, but that doesn’t mean Democrats have given up trying to rig and steal elections in a neverending power grab that would make Mayor Daley blush. Not by a long shot. In fact, you can bet the farm that virtually any cockamamie proposal put out there by anyone with a D beside their name is specifically designed to do one thing and one thing alone – get votes.

Oh, I know they like to pretend they’re all about “virtue” and “values” and helping the “disenfranchised,” the downtrodden, and the disaffected, but these modern day Bolsheviks have “more power” scrubbed into their DNA, and it defines EVERYTHING they do. Continue reading →

“I charge you to protect his fame. It is all that he has left.”

NEW YORK, New York, July 14, 1804 – All that Alexander Hamilton might have wished to have said of him in life was poured forth today in a moving funeral oration by Gouverneur Morris, diplomat and former colleague of Mr. Hamilton both in the Continental Congress and on the Committee that framed the Constitution.

He spoke over the open coffin holding the body that collapsed in sudden death only four days ago on the Weehawken Heights, across the Hudson River in New Jersey, when Mr. Hamilton engaged in a duel with Aaron Burr.

Today no words were spoken of the controversies over politics and finance that culminated in this tragic event. Neither did Mr. Morris mention the fugitive Burr. Continue reading →

Andrew Jackson stares down the national bank and wins.

“Jackson Slaying the Many-Headed Monster,” 1828. Private collection, Peter Newark American Pictures / Bridgeman Art Library

On July l0, 1832, President Andrew Jackson sent a message to the United States Senate. He returned unsigned, with his objections, a bill that extended the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, due to expire in 1836, for another fifteen years. As Jackson drily noted, the bill was presented to him on the Fourth of July, a day freighted with portent.

Today Jackson’s Bank Veto and the political conflagration known as the “Bank War” that it touched off seem arcane and nearly incomprehensible. While misdeeds among the rich and powerful still garner headlines and incite congressional inquiries, the core instruments of our economic system-the network of banks capped by the Federal Reserve; the corporate form of business enterprise; the very dollars in our wallets, issued and guaranteed by the federal government – are utterly taken for granted. That these could have been the subject of controversy, that anyone could seriously contemplate organizing American capitalism differently, seems nearly unthinkable. Andrew Jackson is recalled today, when recalled at all, for other things, primarily as the architect of forced Indian removal. His face on the $20 bill is a mystery to many, an outrage to some, and, to the knowing, a curious irony. Continue reading →

Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Commonwealth Club Speech” (September 23, 1932)

In this speech, delivered in the depths of the Great Depression, ­ presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt sought to explain the dramatic ideological differences between himself and the Republican President Herbert Hoover, ‘the Great Engineer.’

In this speech Roosevelt attempts to distinguish the role of government as addressing public policy goals, in serving the public good, rather than simply administering some predetermined economic principles handed down by ‘the market’ and a class of professional economists and financiers.

The speech and the candidate were not well received by the media and the movers and the shakers of the day, the very serious and very comfortable people largely untouched by the economic hardship of the collapse of the stock bubble in 1929, who derided it as ‘too Socialist.’
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Learning more about the first Ukrainian American and his contributions to a foundational American story helps remind us that America has been profoundly transnational at every stage of its history.

The first settlers arriving in Jamestown (National Park Service)

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unfolded over the last few weeks, most Americans have certainly been united in their support for the Ukrainian people and condemnation of Russia’s increasingly brutal attacks and tactics. But one area where there has been significantly less consensus is the question of whether and how the U.S. and its allies should intervene in the conflict. Among the arguments for the U.S. maintaining its distance from this unfolding European war is that this conflict is ultimately unrelated to the United States and that it concerns two foreign nations from whom we would do well to remain isolated.

There are various ways to challenge such isolationist arguments, including highlighting the historic moments when isolationism not only failed to end unfolding world wars, but also led directly to belated and more fraught U.S. involvement in those conflicts.

But there are also stories of early Americans who found their way to the continent from across the globe; these stories contradict any perspective on the U.S. as isolated from seemingly foreign nations like Ukraine. Learning more about the first Ukrainian American and his contributions to a foundational American story helps remind us that America has been profoundly transnational at every stage of its history. Continue reading →

The story of the Roanoke Colony is one of the most enduring mysteries in American history. In the late 16th century, a group of English settlers established a colony on Roanoke Island, located off the coast of present-day North Carolina. However, when a supply ship returned to the colony in 1590, all its inhabitants had vanished without a trace. This puzzling event has captivated historians and researchers for centuries, with various theories and speculations attempting to unravel the fate of the lost Roanoke Colony. Continue reading →

“Would it be possible for government to have credit, without having the power of raising money?”

RICHMOND, Va., June 6, 1788 – James Madison, second only to Thomas Jefferson as architect of the new Federal Constitution, today urged ratification of that document in most compelling terms, as he addressed the Convention of Virginia on the need for a responsible, powerful central government but one to be held in check by a care~y contrived diversification of protections for the individual states.

His speech pointed up the vagaries of arguments mustered against the Constitution since its completion by the Philadelphia Convention a year ago. As he spoke here, the principal argument to be overcome was the fear that Virginia, already having assumed responsibility for its debts incurred in the Revolution, would be made the tax dupe of other and less provident states in future tax laws by the Federal Government. This fear was not unlike the arguments advanced in the New York Convention one year ago, when Alexander Hamilton was attempting to allay similar fears on the part of New York’s vested interests.

Mr. Madison, at 33 years of age, has few of the arts of oratory, but he already has shown by his writings his capacity to muster argument with cogent words, as when he stated, “Direct taxes will only be recurred to for great purposes.”
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On Nov. 19, 1863, at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Abraham Lincoln spoke these words:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Continue reading →

Because of the US Supreme Court, the 14th Amendment’s greatest impact is not the protection of citizens’ rights, though it is cited for that purpose. It is and has been the granting of human rights to corporations – an exercise not founded in the Constitution itself nor in the Amendment itself, nor in any other part of the Constitution. It was an extension of power to corporations that the Court, without any explicit foundation, allowed to be promulgated in a summary of its 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway by the Court’s reporter. Continue reading →

The hoax’s never seem to end…

Gold speculators in New York. (image from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1964)

It was May, 1864. Grant was closing in on Lee in Virginia. New Yorkers were growing hopeful that the long, terrible ordeal of the Civil War would soon be over.

But their hopes were dashed when on Wednesday, May 18 they read in two of their morning papers, the New York World and the Journal of Commerce, that President Lincoln had issued a proclamation ordering the conscription of an additional 400,000 men into the Union army on account of “the situation in Virginia, the disaster at Red River, the delay at Charleston, and the general state of the country.” Continue reading →

James Monroe (c. 1819) by Samuel Morse (1791-1872)

Whatever his failings as an imaginative thinker, President James Monroe’s own convictions were rooted deeply in the spirit and the letter of the U.S. Constitution. As he entered the White House in March 1817, he had little (well, less) use for James Madison’s newfound love of nationalism. While he entered the presidency too late to stop the Second Bank of the United States from forming, he could and did make sure that the government’s role in creating public works was limited. If the people truly wanted the government building more canals and roads, he thought, they would need to get an amendment to the Constitution passed, as the Constitution of 1787 did not allow for such things, he believed. And, though a Virginian and in sympathy with many of the Old Republican beliefs of John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline, he was not one of them, and he feared the creation of any parties or factions. Continue reading →

Munition workers painting shells at the National Shell Filling Factory No.6, Chilwell, Nottinghamshire in 1917. This was one of the largest shell factories in the country, circa 1917. (Photo by Horace Nicholls/ Imperial War Museums)

As they did over a century ago ahead of World War I, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded. Continue reading →

President Abraham Lincoln

In a recent column, I discussed an argument about secession made by Abraham Lincoln and sympathetically expounded by Michael P. Zuckert in his important book A Nation So Conceived. Lincoln maintained that a nation once formed could not allow secession because doing so would open it to unlimited fissiparous tendencies, culminating in anarchy. This argument did not address the problem of slavery, surely relevant to the concrete circumstances of the Civil War. Zuckert has a suggestive, though in my view mistaken, discussion of Lincoln’s view of secession and slavery, and in this week’s article, I’ll try to explain Zuckert’s position and the difficulties he faces defending it.

Zuckert’s position is this: Lincoln considered slavery to be morally wrong and contrary to the Declaration of Independence, which he took to state universally valid truths that were binding on the American nation. Continue reading →