Could America have turned into a dictatorship if not for FDR?

How about because there was no such plot in the first place?


Consider the proposal for a vast march of veterans on DC as a key point in the conspiracy, the plotters somehow oblivious to such an event having actually taken place when the Bonus Expeditionary Force came to town.


Or the same plotters being unaware of Butler's publicly known positions, and then thinking MacArthur would be a good second choice, under the delusion that MacArthur enjoyed great popularity with American veterans when, after his handling of the BEF, the average veteran might sooner shoot MacArthur than listen to the man.
 
IMHO its authoritarian traits could have turned much nastier, but it won't turn into a dictatorship for a single, crude reason: the absence of a large, modern standing army and traditions associated with it. Without one enforcing a dictatorship is almost impossible. The native US variant of authoritarianism, however, could have turned extremely nasty.

Snake Germany didn't turn into a dictatorship because of its 100,000 strong army.

In this possible TL the President makes his own large several million strong verson of the brownshirts and likely grows the military as well out of the huge ranks of unemployed and doesn't make a play for power until the nation is faced with an existential threat from the outside where the public will be blindly backing him.

It's not so much it can't happen here, but that at times where it most likely could have happened we had men of principle in power like Washington, Lincoln and FDR who weren't willing to take those steps or at least enough of those steps to put the U.S. on the path to dictactorship.
 
Snake Germany didn't turn into a dictatorship because of its 100,000 strong army.

In this possible TL the President makes his own large several million strong verson of the brownshirts and likely grows the military as well out of the huge ranks of unemployed and doesn't make a play for power until the nation is faced with an existential threat from the outside where the public will be blindly backing him.

It's not so much it can't happen here, but that at times where it most likely could have happened we had men of principle in power like Washington, Lincoln and FDR who weren't willing to take those steps or at least enough of those steps to put the U.S. on the path to dictactorship.

No, it did so because of the 1.2 million strong Stormtroopers.
 
Surely a prerequisite would be disenchantment with the democratic process? In the German elections of the late 20's early 30's people voted for parties at both political extremes with the avowed goal of doing away with democracy. Could you reach a position with no New Deal where the US public is willing to tolerate some sort of 'temporary' suspension of the electoral system while some 'emergency government' resorts to extreme measures to get the economy going?
 
Surely a prerequisite would be disenchantment with the democratic process? In the German elections of the late 20's early 30's people voted for parties at both political extremes with the avowed goal of doing away with democracy. Could you reach a position with no New Deal where the US public is willing to tolerate some sort of 'temporary' suspension of the electoral system while some 'emergency government' resorts to extreme measures to get the economy going?

In America the system is more entrenched so it would take a slower undermining of it or a worse depression like Germany had. A slower undermining of it such as using the New Deal programs to create idological loyalists who back the President ahead of the rest of the government.

Then Pearl Harbor offers the perfect oppritunity for a would be dictactor to try to grab power with massive internment camps, taking control of the media, political enemies being reported to have been killed by German and Jap spies or that they are found to have been passing secrets to the enemy.

The President demanding Congress give him emergency powers for the duration of the war to deal with the threats at home, powers he never gives up.

During the war he can stack the top level of the Army with his ultra loyalists which would hamper military effectiveness, but make sure the Army is behind him. After Germany and Japan is defeated he could then use Stalin as the next threat and start WW3 keeping the military, the political class and the public under his thumb.
 
And, the President here would have several million armed ultra loyalists willing to fight and die for him that he built out of the ranks of the unemployed in the 30s.

No he wouldn't. The USA had its last experience with Freikorps-style movements in the 19th Century, and much had changed in the USA since then. The KKK of the 1920s was not an organized paramilitary movement in Freikorps fashion, either, not enough Americans had seen combat in the Western Front to have a reservoir to create one, where the post-Civil War South OTOH very much had that cadre.
 
Just the testimony of several journalists infront of the McCormack–Dickstein Committee, which apparently found enough evidence and corroborating testimony to find Butler's testimony credible, and then there's the group that approached James E. Van Zandt.

That's a whole lot of nothing.

The only know members of the business plot were Gerald MacGuire and Robert Sterling Clark, based on correspondence between the two. There's no evidence that any of the other men that MacGuire told Butler were involved were actually involved.
 
Well have FDR murdered and Garner reeally screw up. plus had DC Stephenson either bribed and threatened more effectively or chosen a different victim to abuse a few years earlier....
 
In America the system is more entrenched so it would take a slower undermining of it or a worse depression like Germany had. A slower undermining of it such as using the New Deal programs to create idological loyalists who back the President ahead of the rest of the government.

Then Pearl Harbor offers the perfect oppritunity for a would be dictactor to try to grab power with massive internment camps, taking control of the media, political enemies being reported to have been killed by German and Jap spies or that they are found to have been passing secrets to the enemy.

The President demanding Congress give him emergency powers for the duration of the war to deal with the threats at home, powers he never gives up.

During the war he can stack the top level of the Army with his ultra loyalists which would hamper military effectiveness, but make sure the Army is behind him. After Germany and Japan is defeated he could then use Stalin as the next threat and start WW3 keeping the military, the political class and the public under his thumb.

Far too much of a direct parallel with Weimar Germany here. The Weimar Constitution allowed for such emergency powers in the first place, the US Constitution does not. US culture took great pride in denigrating the kind of martial virtues any self-respecting dictatorship spares no expense to inculcate in its population at that time.
 
FDR was a borderline dictator as it was. He, via his leftist congress, confiscated legally held gold from the people and their economic policies held the country in the Depression till after WW2. Then there's the 90% tax rates denying the rich the ability to give of themselves on their own terms or according to Christian principles. They attacked pastors who were helping the people to be more God and self reliant as oppose to being reliant on government (eg. Aimee Semple McPherson)
 
Nope. Not unless you posit a much more severe depression, and outright revolution, and a somewhat different US - say a US founded on French revolutionary principles not an evolution of the British system. Probably the closest the US came to a "dictatorship" was during the US Civil War when the Lincoln administration assumed wide powers to fight an actual armed rebellion. Even then the trappings of the democratic system remainsed are were immediately restored once the rebellion was crushed.
 
FDR was a borderline dictator as it was. He, via his leftist congress, confiscated legally held gold from the people and their economic policies held the country in the Depression till after WW2. Then there's the 90% tax rates denying the rich the ability to give of themselves on their own terms or according to Christian principles. They attacked pastors who were helping the people to be more God and self reliant as oppose to being reliant on government (eg. Aimee Semple McPherson)

Sorry but....what?
 
It's just part of a certain strand of far right wing thinking that requires FDR and all his works to be demonized, they are basically a variety of conspiracy theorist and not really worth trying to argue with.

Thanks, for a moment i thinked that i was in a alternate timeline;)
 
FDR was a borderline dictator as it was. He, via his leftist congress, confiscated legally held gold from the people and their economic policies held the country in the Depression till after WW2. Then there's the 90% tax rates denying the rich the ability to give of themselves on their own terms or according to Christian principles. They attacked pastors who were helping the people to be more God and self reliant as oppose to being reliant on government (eg. Aimee Semple McPherson)

No he wasn't. This Dominionist bushwhah doesn't measure up to existing reality. Are you seriously claiming FDR was equal to even the tinpot dictators of the time like those in Central Europe and the ROC?
 
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