With that, the divine force leaves his body and he dies. He summons the leaders of the world, threatens them with a super-weapon and then pressures them into universal disarmament. 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.
(We never see it, but later, his secretary and mistress intuits that “the angel Gabriel“ has entered the body of the president.)Ĭonfronted 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. Soon he rises from his bed, with fire in his eyes, driven by divine intervention. Unemployment? The spread of organized crime, with mobsters like Al Capone effectively controlling the Chicago Police Department? “Local problems,” Hammond says.īut 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. 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. (It was an idea embraced by establishment types like columnist Walter Lippmann, and the influential editorial pages of the New York Herald-Tribune.)
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. 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. It also offers us significant insights into what tempts countries to travel down an authoritarian road. 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.
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