Portside

Did Wall Street Try to Overthrow FDR?

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, IS THE 90th ANNIVERSARY of alarming congressional testimony about plans for a fascist takeover of the United States. 

The testimony came from retired Marine Corps general and war hero Smedley Butler, who told a House investigating committee that he had been recruited to lead hundreds of thousands of military veterans to take over the government by surrounding the Capitol and the White House. Butler said that had soured on the idea, but before doing so he had learned the coup was being planned and bankrolled by some of the richest men in the U.S., including J.P. Morgan and Robert Sterling Clark.

At the time Butler made his charges, the U.S. was in the depths of the Great Depression, Wall Street was furious with the Roosevelt administration for having abandoned the federal government’s adherence to the gold standard, thereby putting the value of U.S. dollars at risk, and millions of military veterans were enraged because the Roosevelt administration was making plans to drastically cut their pensions in a desperate effort to balance the federal budget.

Of course, the coup attempt never took place. The rich and famous men Butler named all denied everything, and no official with the power to subpoena records or compel testimony ever made a serious attempt to get to the bottom of his charges. 

The committee that heard Butler’s charges was satisfied to eventually declare "there is no question that these [coup] attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient" and to leave it at that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

A first first for the First Lady of Song

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, IS THE 90th ANNIVERSARY of the beginning of one of popular music’s biggest success stories. Ella Fitzgerald, who was 17 years old in 1934 and way down on her luck – having just finished stays in the Bronx Colored Orphan Asylum and a New York State Reformatory for Girls – sang two songs – "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection" – at the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night and won first prize. 

Even so, Fitzgerald was not an overnight success, but by the end of 1935 she had recorded her first hits with Chick Webb’s orchestra, and the rest is history. You can listen to a 1968 Fitzgerald rendition of one of the songs she sang at the Apollo, “The Object of my Affection” here https://youtu.be/ZtcQNjLYRYM?si=cyaXKKL8DySBnWHD

Tamir Rice Would Be 22

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, IS THE 10th ANNIVERSARY of the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun when he was shot by Cleveland police. No one was ever charged with a crime, but Rice’s family sued and won a $6 million settlement. For the distressing details of Rice’s killing, visit https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/23

Women Workers Stand Up and Win

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, IS THE 115th ANNIVERSARY of the mass meeting that led to one of the biggest and most important strikes in U.S. history, which is remembered as the Uprising of the 20,000.

In 1909, New York City was the capital of the U.S. garment industry and the headquarters of the 9-year-old International Ladies Garment Workers Union.  The young union had contracts with only a few of the more than 600 clothing factories in the city. 

In September 1909 the union struck three of those factories, but the employers were using scab labor and refusing to bargain. When the union called a public meeting to discuss the dire situation, the Cooper Union’s Great Hall was jammed with both union members and women whose efforts to join the mostly-male union had been unsuccessful. The crowd loudly supported a general strike of garment workers, union members or not. Perhaps as many as 30,000 joined the strike, which lasted 11 weeks and succeeded in winning union contracts, or at least increased pay, shorter hours and improved working conditions at hundreds of non-union shops. https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9594/uprising-of-the-20,000

AFL Jump-Starts the Cold War   

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, IS THE 80th ANNIVERSARY of the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) creation of its so-called Free Trade Union Committee.

The year was 1944, and World War 2 – in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies in the fight against Germany – was far from over. But with the allied victory in sight, the AFL was determined to stymie any attempt by anti-capitalists to play a role in the reconstruction of the western European trade unions that had been destroyed by the Nazis. 

The AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee was designed as an obstacle to the growth of any international trade union organization that would welcome the participation of both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist union activists, such as soon coalesced in the form of the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Hence, years before East-West antagonism would develop into the Cold War, the AFL and its Free Trade Union Committee went on a Cold-War like offensive to try and prevent anti-capitalists from playing a significant role in western European labor unions, an objective that was achieved by the early 1950s. Despite the fact that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies fighting on the same side at the time, the AFL designed the FTUC to begin fighting the Cold War before the Cold War had even begun. For a detailed look at how the FTUC fit in with the AFL's anticommunism, visit https://jacobin.com/2024/09/afl-cio-cold-war-cia

Standing Up for Press Freedom

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, IS THE 95th ANNIVERSARY of the first time that the newly published novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, was declared to be obscene in the U.S. 

A district court judge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, found the owner of a bookstore and a store clerk guilty of obscenity for selling it. The owner and the clerk were ordered to pay fines and serve jail sentences of four months and two weeks, respectively. 

It was not until 1959 that the courts ruled that the First Amendment, in combination with "redeeming social or literary value," were a defense against obscenity charges. https://portside.org/anti-obscenity-laws

The Gap Just Gets Bigger

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of a bleak report by the United Nations Environment Program. The program's 2019 Emissions Gap Report showed, not surprisingly, that the world had failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists, and that the two biggest polluters, China and the U.S., had further increased their emissions in the previous year.

According to the report, the world’s 20 richest countries, responsible for more than three-fourths of worldwide emissions, needed to take the biggest, swiftest steps to move away from fossil fuels. Oh that it had been so! https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019

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