Free The Plots Against the President by Sally Denton Page B

confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.”
    The fears were not unfounded. In New York City, thirty-five thousand men and women crowded into Union Square to listen to Communist Party agitators. A mass march on the Columbus statehouse by the Ohio Unemployed League threatened to “take control of the government.” Five thousand teachers in Chicago stormed the city’s banks. Dozens of American cities and towns were broke, their streets filling with garbage and protesters, their coffers empty of funds for sanitation or law enforcement. Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, where six hundred thousand men were out of work, told the Illinois State Legislature: “Call out the troops before you close the relief stations.” Leading citizens of Dayton, Ohio, organized a committee to plan the city’s survival if the power lines were cut and the railroads stopped running. Governors and mayors throughout the land worried about the spark that might ignite mob violence among the have-nots, while the haves became increasingly nervous and began to arm themselves. The wealthy—and even the simply comfortable—began stockpiling guns, ammunition, and canned goods and hoarding their money in case of a nationwide revolt. Farmers in Iowa, armed with clubs and pitchforks, were engaged in an “organized refusal” to market products for which they were being underpaid. Iowa dairy farmers went on strike, refusing to deliver milk to national distributors.
    The War Department concentrated its armed units near the country’s larger cities in case of a takeover by the “Reds,” as the Communists were called. The very “glue that holds societies together”—to use Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of institutions and authority—was disintegrating. “Capitalism is on trial,” the dean of the Harvard Business School pronounced, in what would have been a remarkably radical statement at any other time in American history. “And on the issue of this trial may depend the whole future of Western civilization.”
    â€œThe farmers will rise up. So will labor,” a Los Angeles banker predicted. “The Reds will run the country—or maybe the Fascists. Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.” Leaders of both major parties watched helplessly as the situation worsened, prompting Democrats and Republicans alike to call for Hoover to step down and let Roosevelt assume command.
    â€œThey weren’t paranoid,” William Manchester wrote years later of the vociferous alarmists who had cropped up. “The evidence strongly suggests that had Roosevelt in fact been another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims.”
    On January 30, 1933, Roosevelt’s fifty-first birthday, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. “I want,” Hitler said upon his ascendance, “precisely the same power as Mussolini exercised after the March on Rome.” The sudden explosion of the Nazi revolution frightened the other European nations, which heard horror stories of gangs of young Nazis terrorizing Jewish-owned businesses, beating the merchants and raiding the stores. With alarming swiftness, Hitler added sixty thousand storm troopers to the hundred-thousand-man German army, suspended civil liberties, and removed non-Nazis from official posts.
    In contrast to Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been in power since 1922 and who was considered the most prestigious political figure in the world, Hitler seemed a belligerent and unpredictable leader. Indeed, many thought a Mussolini-like leader a perfect counterweight to a dangerous radical like Hitler. “I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I saw that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” proclaimed one of President