The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right

About this book

In March 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally became the nations thirty-second president. The man swept in by a landslide four months earlier now took charge of a country in the grip of panic brought on by economic catastrophe. Though no one yet knew it-not even Roosevelt-it was a radical moment in America. And with all of its unmistakable resonance with events of today it is a cautionary tale. The Plots Against the President follows Roosevelt as he struggled to right the teetering nation armed with little more than indomitable optimism and the courage to try anything. His bold New Deal experiments provoked a backlash from both extremes of the political spectrum. Wall Street bankers threatened by FDRs policies made common cause with populist demagogues like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin. But just how far FDRs enemies were willing to go to thwart him has never been fully explored. Two startling events that have been largely ignored by historians frame Sally Dentons swift tense narrative of a year of fear: anarchist Giuseppe Zangaras assassination attempt on Roosevelt and a plutocrats plot to overthrow the government that would come to be known as the Wall Street Putsch. The Plots Against the President throws light on the darkest chapter of the Depression and the moments when the fate of the American republic hung in the balance.