American democracy is in dire peril. Enraged at the establishment’s cowardly response to external threats, a megalomaniac demagogue rides a wave of popular support, appearing before a series of fervently attended political rallies. He threatens to oust an old, sickly, unpopular president, and seize power. Once in control, he clearly means to rule as a strongman.
Sixty years have passed since movie audiences first got to see this scenario played out in the Hollywood thriller Seven Days in May, which starred Burt Lancaster as a mutinous general, and Kirk Douglas as the officer who thwarts his would-be coup. Today, as fears intensify about what Donald Trump plans to do if he recaptures the presidency, the anniversary is a reminder that the nightmare of American dictatorship did not begin with Trump, or the attack on the Capitol. The fear goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence, which warned of the ‘absolute Tyranny’ that George III was supposedly plotting to impose on the colonists. Such spectres have haunted America ever since.
Seven Days in May was based on a novel by two political journalists, written to dramatise the creeping fear of the early 1960s that elements in the military posed a serious threat to American democracy. President Eisenhower left office in 1961, warning of the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex: the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” could, he said, “endanger our liberties”. The generals bitterly resented the new President Kennedy’s assertion of control over spending, strategy and troop indoctrination.
Liberal public figures denounced senior officers’ scarily anti-democratic statements. One congressman cried: “We want no military czars in this country. We want no men on horseback.” President Kennedy himself took the threat seriously enough to encourage the director John Frankenheimer to turn Seven Days in May into a movie, to alert America to the threat.
Burt Lancaster’s ‘General Scott’ was inspired partly by a former general, Edwin Walker, who Kennedy forced out of the army for trying to indoctrinate his troops with far-right propaganda. Walker denounced Kennedy as a communist and, for a time, seemed to be the ‘man on horseback’ that right-wing extremists yearned for. But Scott was also based on the ferocious chief of the air force, General Curtis LeMay, who clashed with Kennedy over the botched covert invasion of Cuba in 1961, and his terrifyingly gung-ho approach to nuclear war.
So why didn’t the movie’s nightmare scenario actually happen? One reason was that, as ever when fact inspires fiction, messy reality becomes overly neat and simple. There was a crucial difference between the two men the movie melded together. One was a general, the other a former general. Walker became a public demagogue, but was not powerful; LeMay was powerful, but did not turn demagogic while in uniform. Eventually, he did take part in a far-right push for power – as the presidential running-mate of the segregationist George Wallace. But when they lost, he accepted the result.
So on one level, Seven Days in May was simply a centrist nightmare that did not come to fruition. Its lesson is that you can’t watch over democracy by looking for vague spectres; you have to be specific about the nature of the threat. But with that in mind, eternal vigilance remains the price of liberty.
This vigilance has proven to be a price worth paying under a new Trumpian paradigm. It’s little surprise that fears of military coups and civil wars have crept back into the cultural landscape: take A24’s bluntly titled “Civil War” slated to release this year. Perhaps, the film’s trailer leads us to believe, a dystopian future of gun-toting secessionist militias is closer to becoming reality than we’d like to think.
If he wins in November, Trump seems prepared to deploy soldiers against protestors. Today, the military’s willingness to disobey the president may yet become a hot political issue once again: this time, not to destroy democracy, but to save it.
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