Roosevelt: Not Enough Like Mussolini

There seems to be a bit of blog buzz over the BBC documentary which rehashes the story of the coup plot against Franklin Roosevelt and in particular, the part that Prescott (“grandpa”) Bush may have played in it. I haven’t a lot to add except to marvel over how a story like this—which has, after all, been around for quite a while—takes on legs as if new.

But I will offer one addendum that maybe nobody else has picked up on yet. That is: the standard criticism of Roosevelt today is that he was given to all kinds of batty and ill-considered forms of market intervention like, in particular, the National Recovery Administration (which, so far as I know, nobody alive defends today). IOW, he should have been more like Ron Paul.

But even a cursory skim of the coup story will show that the coup plotters had a diametrically different agenda. Indeed, their complaint about Roosevelt was that he should have been more like Mussolini.

Now, if you are looking for batty and ill-considered interventionist schemes, I should think that Mussolini’s Italy is exactly the first place you would want to look (Hitler is a poor second: in execution, some of his schemes were actually efficient). So; the wingnut line of the 30s is just about 180 degrees out from the wingnut line of today.

Fn.: Whether Ron Paul is, in fact, in any way remotely like Ron Paul, is a question I leave for another day. I mention him only because any mention of "Ron Paul" gooses my blog hits.

Reference: A Google Blog Search for “BBC Roosevelt Prescott Bush Mussolini” at 9:05 pm pst tonight yielded 170 hits.