Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Everybody knows that Hollywood’s a hotbed of liberal-left elitism, pumping out virtue-signaling propaganda in films and ceremonies, right?

So the idea of a movie celebrating fascist dictatorship as the answer to America’s dilemmas seems, at the least, highly improbable.


But that is exactly what a mostly forgotten movie offered 85 years ago amid the throes of economic upheaval—a time that is more like our own than you might think. It also offers us significant insights into what tempts countries to travel down an authoritarian road.

In the early spring of 1933—with a quarter of Americans out of work and banks failing by the day, threatening a complete collapse of the financial system, as farmers watched their crops rot in the field—“Gabriel Over the White House” premiered. The film, directed by Gregory La Cava, had been rushed into production with the financial help of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, and it was designed as a clear message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he might need to embrace dictatorial powers to solve the crisis of the Great Depression. (It was an idea embraced by establishment types like columnist Walter Lippmann, and the influential editorial pages of the New York Herald-Tribune.)

The movie stars Walter Huston as newly elected President Judson Hammond, a smug, glad-handing politician in the model of Warren Harding—complete with a private secretary-mistress and blissfully indifferent to the sufferings of the country. Unemployment? The spread of organized crime, with mobsters like Al Capone effectively controlling the Chicago Police Department? “Local problems,” Hammond says.

But one night, driving back to the White House at excessive speed, Hammond crashes the car; as he lies near death, the curtains of his bedroom riffle while mysterious music plays. Soon he rises from his bed, with fire in his eyes, driven by divine intervention. (We never see it, but later, his secretary and mistress intuits that “the angel Gabriel“ has entered the body of the president.)

Confronted by a million-man march of the unemployed—drawn from the real life “Bonus Army” of 1932—he rejects his Cabinet’s plan to crush them and instead promises to turn them into a government-financed “Army of Reconstruction.” When Congress, appalled by his outlandish idea, threatens impeachment, he marches into the halls of the Capitol, assails their fecklessness and tells them he will “rule by martial law.” In a series of radio speeches, he declares an end to mortgage foreclosures, announces a plan to shore up the banks and farms and repeals Prohibition by fiat. He organizes a secret army to round up the crime kingpins, try them in courts-martial and execute them by firing squad as the Statue of Liberty looms in the background. He summons the leaders of the world, threatens them with a super-weapon and then pressures them into universal disarmament. With that, the divine force leaves his body and he dies.

The movie was welcomed by, among others, FDR, who told the filmmakers “it would do a lot of good.” (It was more than coincidental that the fireside chats, the public works programs and banking reforms all became part of FDR’s “first 100 days.“) “Gabriel Over the White House” was both a critical and commercial hit. The New York Times called it “a curious, somewhat fantastic and often melodramatic story, but nevertheless one which at this time is very interesting.” It turned a tidy profit of some $200,000. But it faded into obscurity, in large measure because the idea of a “benevolent dictatorship” seemed a lot less attractive after the degradation of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.



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So what can we learn from this oddest of political films, almost surely the only openly pro-fascist film?

First, the impulse toward strongman rule is fed, more often than not, by a legitimate sense of grievance against the “powers that be.” When Hammond confronts Congress, he strikes a populist note. “A plant cannot be made to grow by watering the top alone and leaving the roots to dry,” he declares. “You have wasted precious days and weeks and years in futile discussion. We need action! Immediate and effective action!”

When he is told that Congress is not willing to give up on democracy, he thunders in Sorkin-esque indignation: “You have given it up. You have turned your backs. You’ve closed your ears to the appeals of the people. You’ve been traitors to the concepts of democracy on which this country was founded.”

This—the warnings about subversive enemies undermining the nation—is a theme common to many of today’s autocrats, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. (It is also a theme in populous appeals here at home, used by candidates from George Wallace to Donald Trump. In his closing ad in 2016, Trump talked about “replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment … who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind … a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”)

Second, Hammond—the president in the film—argues that his seizure of power is a patriotic move, true to the core traditions of America. He rails that he believes in democracy “as Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln” did, and says, “If what I plan to do makes me a dictator, then it is dictatorship based on Jefferson’s definition of democracy, a government for the greatest good for the greatest number.” This is inherent in the appeals of autocrats, who embrace the “blood and soil” idea that true patriotism lies in restoring some lost “greatness,” even if it means eroding an independent judiciary, banning candidates from the ballot or jailing or exiling “traitorous” opponents.

Third, the disastrous conditions in the United States in 1933 may have made Hammond’s “benevolent dictatorship” appealing, but the movie should alert us to the unhappy reality that disillusion with a deliberative, slow-moving political process can raise doubts even without a Great Depression. In particular, younger citizens in recent years—both in the U.S. and elsewhere—have expressed increasing skepticism about democracy and an increasingly favorable view of the idea of a “strongman” leader, even one prepared to scrap some of the core elements of a free society.

This low-grade fever of discontent should be seen in the context of a political climate in which, more and more, partisans on the other side not only as wrong, but evil. A Pew Research survey found that nearly 40 percent of Republicans and more than one-third of Democrats would be upset if a child married someone from a different political party; a generation ago, the numbers were closer to 5 percent for each party.

No one should look at “Gabriel Over the White House” as a warning of an impending lurch toward autocracy. The guardrails that kept FDR from packing the Supreme Court, that compelled Richard Nixon to turn over the tapes that doomed him, offer considerable comfort. But, just as a low-grade fever can suggest an infection, a low-grade fever of alienation from democratic norms poses not a clear and present danger, but the potential for real trouble.