Sent to me by Claudia:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_01/005541.php#430779%20
Sadly, nothing has changed since the 1930's. Not the rhetoric, goals or tactics. Here Roosevelt is referring to the American Liberty League an ultra-rightist think thank which tried to recruit General Smedley Butler to overthrow the presidency in a coup d'état.
They seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.
Yes, there are still determined groups that are intent upon that very thing. Rigorously held up to popular examination, their true character presents itself. They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to carry the property and the interests entrusted to them into the arena of partisan politics. They seek - this minority in business and industry - to control and often do control and use for their own purposes legitimate and highly honored business associations; they engage in vast propaganda to spread fear and discord among the people - they would gang up against the people's liberties…
Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people. Give them their way and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past - power for themselves, enslavement for the public.
Their weapon is the weapon of fear. I have said, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That is as true today as it was in 1933. But such fear as they instill today is not a natural fear, a normal fear; it is a synthetic, manufactured, poisonous fear that is being spread subtly, expensively and cleverly by the same people who cried in those other days, Save us, save us, lest we perish.
Franklin RooseveltJanuary 3, 1936
Posted by: bellumregio on January 29, 2005 at 11:58 PM PERMALINK
