MacArthur - Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism

General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)

By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!

One can see why some of Wall Street’s fascist plotters saw MacArthur as their “Man on a White Horse” to lead a Croix de feu-like organization. MacArthur, was born for the job. Raised on Army bases by a high-ranking militarist, he had a good fascist disrespect for politicians.

MacArthur’s earliest memory was bugle call. It was 1884. He was four. His father, a fort Commander in New Mexico, was fighting Apache guerillas, like Geronimo. Douglas was indoctrinated from day one. Isolated at desolate outposts, he saw a violent but simple world where good fought evil and the military brought law, order and civilization to crush savagery.

Douglas was a chip off the old block. Arthur MacArthur II, son of a judge, was a hero of Civil War and Wyoming’s Indian Wars. In 1898, he projected his Wild West mentality and tactics onto the Far East as commander of an Expeditionary Force to the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He so ably crushed Philippine guerillas that President McKinley made him the colony’s Military Governor. Their undeclared counter-insurgency war was a blatantly imperialist affair, replete with unspeakable atrocities designed to terrorize those who, after waging a revolution against Spanish rule, now faced the likes of MacArthur’s colleague, General “Hell Roaring” Jake Smith. This veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre commanded U.S. soldiers to kill all Filipino males over the age of ten. He said: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me.”

A MacArthur blind spot was recognizing civilian authority over military forces. After frequent arguments with Civilian Governor William Taft, MacArthur was fired and sent to Japan as a military attaché. Returning to the U.S. in 1906, he was the Pacific Division’s Commander. When the Army’s top staff position came open, MacArthur was passed over because his old foe, Taft, was now President.

Meanwhile, Douglas was being groomed to fill his father’s boots. First in his West Point class (1903), he sailed to the Philippines. Touring the region with Dad, he saw the Russo-Japanese War. In 1906, he was President Teddy Roosevelt’s aide-de-camp. He joined the occupation of Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914 and then returned to Washington’s War Department.

In WWI, MacArthur began his meteoric rise, becoming the youngest ever: Army Brigadier General (1918), Divisional Commander, West Point superintendent (1919), General (1922) and U.S. Army chief of staff (1930).

By this time, with far-right politics deeply entrenched, he argued that “pacifism and its bedfellow, communism, are all about us. Day by day this cancer eats deeper into the body politic.” Such paranoia fueled MacArthur in 1932, when as Army Chief of Staff, he commanded Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton in the eight-hour “Battle of Anacostia Flats.” Hundreds were injured, two babies suffocated from tear gas asphixiation, a boy’s leg was run through by Army bayonet.

The enemy was a bedraggled and destitute “Bonus Army.” MacArthur rationalized his illegal military assault against these unarmed veterans by claiming they were a communist vanguard planning to overthrow the government. Saying “there is incipient revolution in the air” he had ordered Patton’s cavalry charge. In blatant contempt for presidential authority, MacArthur disobeyed Hoover’s orders and burned the protesters’ makeshift town to the ground!

Washington Post columnist, Drew Pearson, said MacArthur was a potential dictator. The General sued for $1.75 million saying it was libelous to call him “dictatorial, insubordinate, disloyal, mutinous and disrespectful of his superiors.” Charges were dropped when MacArthur paid to stop publication of love letters to a Philippine mistress he kept in Washington.

FDR, then Democratic presidential candidate, called MacArthur one of “the most dangerous men in America.” He saw MacArthur as a “potential man on horseback. Someone who in a time of terrible economic disarray come to the fore and would try to seize power by extra constitutional means” says historian Robert Dallek (MacArthur, PBS, 1999).

The firestorm of controversy around MacArthur helped FDR win the 1932 election. FDR kept him as Army Chief of Staff, and tried to enlist his help in civilian job creation. MacArthur was outraged that FDR planned cuts to military spending. He told FDR:

“When we lose the next war and an American boy is writhing in pain in the mud with a Japanese bayonet in his belly, I want the last words that he spits out in the form of a curse to be not against Douglas MacArthur but against Franklin Roosevelt.” FDR replied “Never speak to the President of the United States that way.”

In this acrimonious climate, Wall Street fascists brewed their plot. In General Butler’s Congressional testimony, he said Jerry MacGuire spoke of meeting, at Paris offices of J.P. Morgan and Hodges,’ to select their “Man on a White Horse” to lead a U.S. Croix de feu-like “superorganization.” MacGuire’s faction favoured Butler, but Morgan’s men wanted MacArthur:

"The Morgan interests say you cannot be trusted, you will be too radical... you are too much on the side of the little fellow;.... But our group tells them you are the only fellow in America who can get the soldiers together. They say, ‘Yes, but he will get them together and go in the wrong way.’... They are for Douglas MacArthur as the head of it. MacArthur’s term expires in November [1934], and if he is not reappointed it is to be presumed that he will be disappointed and sore.”

FDR did renew MacArthur’s term, until June 1935, when he was sent to lead a new Philippine Army that was collaborating with U.S. occupiers. Retiring in 1937, MacArthur became the colony’s top military adviser. He re-entered the Army in 1941 as Far East Commander and his intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby, was known as the “little fascist.”

In 1942, MacArthur presided over the worst defeat of U.S. forces ever. Before abandoning 70,000 troops who surrendered to Japan, he took a secret $500,000 payment from President Quezon, America’s puppet.

In 1944, MacArthur retreated from his campaign to capture the Republican presidential nomination when a letter of his became public. It exposed his support for “the fascist ramblings of a right-wing congressman who declared that Roosevelt’s New Deal threatened to ‘destroy the American way of life’” (Shannon Jones, 1999).

MacArthur ruled Japan as its Supreme Commander and organized a war crimes tribunal (1945-1950). Seven were hanged and many imprisoned but MacArthur covered up Emperor Hirohito’s complicity. In 1948, MacArthur and John Foster Dulles (then a Secretary of State advisor) began releasing Japanese war criminals and recruiting them to form the World Anti-Communist League. This terrifying paramilitary network of top fascists, aided by the CIA, spread to six continents. One released war criminal, billionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa, bragged “I am the world’s wealthiest fascist.” One of his protégés, Yoshio Kodama, feared leader of the black shirts, a mafia goon squad, used his fortune from Japan’s occupation of China to finance rightwing Japanese politicians.

In 1950, MacArthur led UN forces aiding the U.S.-backed dictatorship in South Korea in its war against the communist North. His forces firebombed many cities with napalm, used chemical and biological weapons and killed most of the three million who died. MacArthur, not satisfied with this limited anti-communist war, wanted it expanded into China using nuclear weapons. Thankfully, the president disagreed. Once again, MacArthur fought civilian authorities he did not respect. After repeated, inflammatory public statements against President Truman, he was fired in April 1951. A strong supporter of his insubordination was Senator Joe McCarthy who demanded Truman’s impeachment, saying he must have been drunk to sack MacArthur.

Upon his return to America, MacArthur was showered with adulation, but this hero worship didn’t translate into political power. With only 4 of 1,206 votes for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, he lost to the Eisenhower-Nixon team. But, his keynote speech at that year’s National Convention was well-received.

In 1951, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt had launched the “MacArthur for President” campaign with $150,000. He declared “We should do whatever our generals advise us to do.” Hunt, a Texas oil tycoon and reportedly America’s richest man, was certainly its most active, fascist propagandist. Various radio, TV and print campaigns in the 1950s cost him $2 million a year. He funded Joe McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, the John Birch Society and the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a CIA/mafia outfit wanting to oust Castro. He set up the intelligence-gathering International Committee for the Defence of Christian Culture. He is also suspected of complicity in JFK’s assassination. With $4 billion in 1963, Hunt was likely the world’s richest man.

In the 1952 election, MacArthur’s name was on the ballot. Gerald L.K. Smith, and other fascists, got his presidential nomination for the America First Party (AFP). His running mate, Harry Flood Byrd, was a Democratic Senator (1933-1965). The AFP had been formed in 1940 by the America First Committee.

The new President, Eisenhower, MacArthur’s loyal subordinate during the 1932 Battle of Anacostia, asked for his advice on Korea. MacArthur suggested attacking China and conducting “atomic bombing of enemy military concentrations and installations in North Korea and the sowing of fields of suitable radioactive materials.” Thankfully, he was ignored.

Despite the blatant contempt for democratic authority that permeated his career MacArthur was still seen as a hero. His last public appearance, a farewell address to Congress in 1951, was interrupted by thirty ovations and he uttered his famous line “Old soldiers don’t die they just fade away.” He then faded into the chairmanship of Remington Rand Corp., the first big computer company. It is now Unisys, a top war contractor.

In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, authors Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin say that, in 1961, MacArthur warned President Kennedy of a plot to destroy him:

"MacArthur warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street...and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.... Kennedy met MacArthur in...April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, ‘The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house.’"

If true, one wonders how MacArthur knew of the plot. Was he asked to play a part? The idea that MacArthur would “warn” JFK of such a plot seems out-of-character. Was it perhaps not a warning but a threat to stay in line?

References:

Wikipedia: Douglas MacArthur
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmacarthur.htm

Arlington Cemetary
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/amacart.htm

Key People Of The Spanish-American War
http://www.homeofheroes.com/wallofhonor/spanish_am/18_people.html

Shannon Jones, 27 May 1999
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/mac-m27.shtml

Sharon Delmendo, "The Battle of the Bells", 2003
http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/sctexts/two_bells.html

HISTORIC FORTS OF THE OLD WEST
http://www.ida.net/users/lamar/historicfort.html

Fort Robinson Timeline
http://www.nebraskahistory.org/sites/fortrob/timeline.htm

C. W. Tazewell (ed.), WALLER SCRAPBOOK: HERO OR BUTCHER OF SAMAR?
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/7933/waller.html

PBS movie: MacArthur
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/filmmore/transcript/transcript1.html

Bart Schneider, "Men Without Women," Ruminator Review
http://www.ruminator.com/hmr/bookbag/bookbag29.html

Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, 1973.

John Halliday and Gavan McCormack, Japanese Imperialism Today, 1973, and Jon Halliday, A Political History of Japanese Capitalism, 1975, cited by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 1994.

The Election of 1952
http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu/page2.htm

Haroldson L. Hunt
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhuntHL.htm

James Hepburn, Farewell America
http://www.voxfux.com/kennedy/farewell/farewell11.html

America First Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party_(1940)

Constitution Party
http://www.constitutionparty.com/

America First Party
http://www.americafirstparty.org/

The Last Circle, Chapter 7
http://www.american-buddha.com/last.circle.7.htm

Replies to website E-mail from Col. Fletcher Prouty
http://www.prouty.org/email.html

Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

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