Hercules 1940s Explosion a Harbinger of Threats to Our Democracy Today

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW 

I was listening to Rachael Maddow's podcast, Ultra, yesterday and was shocked that episode 3 opens with the 1940 explosion that leveled the Hercules Powder Plant in Kenvil, New Jersey. Fifty-one (or two) people were killed, and hundreds were injured. She gave a lot of detail that I didn't know. More importantly, Maddow puts to rest the idea that this disaster was an industrial accident or sabotage by German Nazy spies. It was, in fact, a planned attack by radicalized American fascists who trained and organized to overthrow the United States Government. It was an act of domestic terrorism. 

This group's plans to attack Hercules were publically revealed in Congressional hearings months before the attack. Congress forwarded the information to the FBI for investigation, but the allegations were not taken seriously. After the attack, the FBI suggested that the attack was probably an industrial accident. That story fell apart two months later when three similar coordinated attacks occurred within 20 minutes of each other in three other military manufacturing locations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania

The moral of the story is that we have been here before where militant authoritarian "patriots," supported in part by fascist dictators abroad, have attempted to destroy our democracy. Even now, the extent to which these radicals went is whitewashed and lost in our history. Those who died at Hercules that day in 1940 were working to strengthen our magnificent country in the buildup to war against global fascism. They are working-class heroes to be honored. 

ULTRA-Episode 3

Those now working to undo democracy are not patriots. They are seditionists. And the Justice Department alone cannot stop them because they are part of a large movement with lots of political power. It is up to the Constitutional loyalists and the power of the ballot to stop these seditionists from succeeding. Clear thinking, careful vetting of candidates for office, and strategic voting is how we truly honor those who sacrificed their lives to keep us free. 

Governmental integrity is being called into question. Our democratic institutions have been infiltrated by constitutional disloyalists seeking to make our systems look weak, unwieldy, and ineffective. There has been a longstanding counter-narrative that our government is the problem, that We-the-People are somehow not the government, and that we are powerless to control it. 

The intended implication is that we need a strong authoritarian to bring the government under control. There is an organized effort to alienate us from democracy, and I never knew what to make of it. (Note: this is in addition to the fact that both parties have ignored large swaths of the low-income electorate for far too long). 

In the past three decades, the result has been a growing inability to compromise, rancorous behaviors, unfathomable bureaucratic roadblocks that sour the good intent of the laws on the books, political gridlock, an inability to pass even the most popular legislation, and a false sense that our two parties are evenly divided even when the breakdown along specific policies shows a majority of voters mostly agree on what should be. Democracy hasn't been working as it should for some time because it is being sabotaged. The saboteurs are in both parties but don't yet have equal influence in each. The situation is precarious.