The Plot to Overthrow FDR

A 6-minute NPR broadcast from 2012 is highly relevant to America's polarized politics today. The language people used was apocalyptic about the end of America and the Constitution. There was a real plot to overthrow FDR as president and replace him with a dictator.

The broadcast includes this introduction:

“It was a dangerous time in America: The economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system. The newly elected president pursued an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. ‘This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty,’ one senator wrote to a colleague. ‘The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom.’” -- Republican Sen. Henry D. Hatfield (R-WV) criticizing FDR’s policies, 1933