The potent and volatile combination of high capital and popular radicalism, plutocracy and populism, characteristic of the American Right is a heritage of the global political and economic turmoil of the 1930s. This was the era when the American Right made “common cause with an enduring global Right forged in the age of fascism.”
So argues historian Joseph Fronczak in his reinterpretation of American conservatism, in which a “transnational intellectual traffic” of “ideas, claims, and practices” during the Great Depression translated European fascism into its American form: a popular, militant base in the precarious lower middle class finding common cause with elites in the defense of property, big money dependent on “white supremacy, Christian fundamentalism, and vigilante justice.”
The birth of this “popular Right” as counterrevolutionary force was made manifest in the business/vigilante combination that attacked, literally, labor organizing efforts across the country during the 1930s.
Fronczak also spotlights broker Gerald MacGuire’s early 1930s trip to Europe at the behest of a committee of Wall Street bankers to study the use of paramilitary groups as the tip of the dictatorial spear. The squadristi, or Blackshirts, who marched on Rome under Mussolini and Germany’s Freikorps and Sturmabteilung, or Brownshirts, of the Nazi Party became MacGuire’s models of the brute force necessary for the “mass political mobilization, anti-democratic and capitalistic” that could roll back the New Deal. (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s modest reforms of a capitalism run amok were nothing less than Bolshevism for some conservatives).
MacQuire is notable because he’s the person Smedley Darlington Butler said approached him in the summer of 1934 to lead a private army of veterans to overthrown FDR. Butler was a highly decorated retired Major General of the US Marines, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the Banana Wars in Central America. Butler would ultimately disparage his own career over three decades of virtually permanent warfare as a “high class muscle man for Big Business” and a “gangster for capitalism.”
Historians have debated the extent, details, and composition of what’s been called the Business Plot and Wall Street Putsch conspiracy. James Van Zandt, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, acknowledged the existence of the conspiracy; years later as a Republican Congressman, Van Zandt would declare Americans should delete the communist-corrupted word democracy from their vocabulary. Neither Van Zandt nor the head of the American Legion, Frank Belgrano, were called to testify in what Fronczak calls the “disquietingly quiet death” of the official Congressional investigation of affair. Belgrano, as it happened, belonged to the committee that sent MacGuire to Europe and worked for banker Amadeo Giannini—whose Bank of Italy became what it is still called today, Bank of America, in 1930—and who was a prominent Mussolini supporter. MacGuire himself was avowedly enthusiastic about fascism.