Hollywood’s forgotten love letter to American fascism in the 1930s

This growing cynicism reflected a sense of gnawing despair around the world. Around the same time that brownshirts were marching in Munich, and blackshirts had long conquered Rome, large segments of the American public were flirting with imagining alternative forms of government, whether it was some on the far left calling “Uncle Joe” Stalin and the Soviet Romanticize the Union, or members of the far right who look jealously at the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s.

Over the course of Hoover’s first and only term in the White House, stocks lost nearly 40 percent of their value after the 1929 crisis, the unemployment level rose from nine to 23 percent before the 1932 presidential election, and the Hoover administration’s confidence on tariffs to Combating the Depression only made it worse. Despite all this, the US government refused to provide much assistance to its fellow citizens, with Hoover viewing government aid as a slippery slope ‘towards socialism and collectivism’.

So when a “bonus army” of American World War I veterans – estimated to consist of about 12,000 to 14,000 impoverished citizens who served their country – marched on Washington DC in 1932 to demand a bonus promised to them during the war, that shouldn’t happen. It was a surprise that Congress refused to pay. Half of the demonstrators went home, but when the other half remained stationed in the country’s capital, the US army was ordered by President Hoover to drive them out, including by using tear gas and tanks.

America’s happy Hollywood fascist

The shadow of the Bonus Army’s catastrophe also hangs heavy Gabriel on the White House. In the film, a populist march by the self-styled ‘Army of the Unemployed’ is the first major crisis facing the fictional President Hammond, who is repeatedly advised by his cabinet to send the real army to round up these ‘anarchists’. But after the populist leader of the demonstrators, who leads his men in the constant refrain of “John Brown’s body is rotting in the grave,” is murdered by Nick Diamond’s henchmen, the rising American autocrat seizes his opportunity.

The fictional president arrives in Baltimore to address the so-called mafia and comes with promises instead of weapons. Even months before the real New Deal takes effect, he embodies a leader who finally hears the pain of his citizens and offers relief instead of cold comfort. “At one time or another we gave millions of tons of food to the starving Russians, to the starving Chinese and to the starving Belgians,” Hammond tells one of his subordinates with disgust before heading to Baltimore. “Now we can feed our own people.”

On paper, this indicates a reasonable pivot for US policy in times of crisis. Indeed, his promises to the unemployed on the doorstep of the capital vaguely resemble Roosevelt’s New Deal policies… yet even this early on, they arrive on the scene with a militaristic slant.