Since I discovered I have access to the JSTOR periodical database through the public library, I've been poking around in some older periodicals. Though the organization lingered on until 1940, its main activity ended with the 1936 election, in which they "unofficially" supported Landon against That Man Roosevelt. Roosevelt's landslide victory against Republican Alf Landon pretty much took the wind out of the Liberty League's sails. The Liberty League's main influence was in its anti-New Deal propaganda and its support for legal action against pro-labor legislation, primarily from its founding in 1934 through the Presidential election of 1936. And it's not clear how serious the plot was, although the people directly involved seemed to have taken the idea very seriously. He claimed that it was the some of the same people who went on to form the Liberty League that was behind the plotting.Īpparently, there is no hard evidence that the people guiding the Liberty League were directly involved in the plot testified to by Butler. He testified before a Congressional Committee about being approached by a representative of wealthy plotters wanting him to front a military coup against the federal government. Smedley Butler, who was a popular figure at the Bonus Army protest during the Hoover Administration which had been put down by troops under the command of Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. The most dramatic event involving the Liberty League, at least indirectly, was a charge made by antiwar retired Gen. In August, 1934, some of them formed a lobby group called The American Liberty League to defend the interests of the "economic royalists", as FDR came to call them. When Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933 and it quickly became apparent that he didn't plan to restrict his economic recovery measures to balancing the federal budget and preaching optimism, a lot of the most wealthy Americans got very nervous about this whole "New Deal" business. The American Liberty League and coup plottingĪntiwar general Smedley Butler ratted on wealthy American fascist wannabes
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