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[photo] German troops march along the Champs Elysees, June 1940
A troubling disregard for democracy
In 1936 the American ambassador in Berlin William Dodd wrote to the American President Franklyn Roosevelt. There is, wrote Dodd, ‘a clique of US industrialists [that] is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.’
Can Dodd possibly have been correct? Or was he getting things out of proportion?
After all the historian Richard Overy has commented that western firms don’t nowadays stop doing business with China (or we might add, for example, Russia or Saudi Arabia) because they have morally repugnant governments. There’s a long, disgraceful and continuing tradition of businesses and their political friends propping tyrants up for the money. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were among the worst. Apartheid S.Africa, Pinochet in Chile, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, Saddam Hussein and the Khmer Rouge...
But the American Ambassador Dodd had sensed something important. The businesses that were dealing with the Nazis in the 1930s had not only a nose for profits, but also a troubling disregard for democracy, just as they had a dark indifference to morality.
#86 'Hell-bent to supplant our democratic government' - Ep 5 Trading with the Enemy
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[photo] cartoon featuring Raskob, Al Smith, and a flag with dollars on it
The Liberty League for American Millionaires
Now, there have been some wild and - so far as any historian has discovered - unsubstantiated claims about this group – that it was planning a military coup against the American government.
It was in fact supposed to be a business lobby above partisan politics. In practice it attempted to sway Americans to vote against President Roosevelt’s second term in 1936. They believed that his New Deal would interfere in their businesses. Which indeed it did, in the interests of the 99% of Americans who were not among the Liberty League millionaires.
The people who’d funded the Liberty League like JP Morgan, Pierre du Pont, JJ Raskob (the GM Chrysler financial chief and builder of the Empire State Building) agreed with the CEO of General Motors (which had invested heavily in Nazi Germany.) He declared in his April 1936 quarterly report that ‘industry must assume the role of enlightened industrial statesmanship… It must aggressively move forward and attune its thinking and its policies toward advancing the interest of the community at large.’
In other words, these men believed that they were not only running their businesses, but also the rest of the world.
The League collapsed after the 1936 Presidential Election having been denounced by both Democrats and Republicans as unwarranted interference. So much for being above party politics. Roosevelt was re-elected.
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If there is peace, it will be created by trade [with the enemy] - What?!
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