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donald Trump’s elaborate plot to overthrow the democratically elected president was neither impulsive nor uncoordinated, but straight out of the playbook of another American coup attempt – the 1933 “Wall Street putsch” against newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

America had hit rock bottom, beginning with the stock market crash three years earlier. Unemployment was at 16 million and rising. Farm foreclosures exceeded half a million. More than five thousand banks had failed, and hundreds of thousands of families had lost their homes. Financial capitalists had bilked millions of customers and rigged the market. There were no government safety nets – no unemployment insurance, minimum wage, social security or Medicare.

[Many are disillusioned with American democracy. Can Joe Biden win them over? Francine Prose

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/07/biden-trump-capitol-attack-riot-democracy)

Economic despair gave rise to panic and unrest, and political firebrands and white supremacists eagerly fanned the paranoia of socialism, global conspiracies and threats from within the country. Populists Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin attacked FDR, spewing vitriolic anti-Jewish, pro-fascist refrains and brandishing the “America first” slogan coined by media magnate William Randolph Hearst.

On 4 March 1933, more than 100,000 people had gathered on the east side of the US Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration. The atmosphere was slate gray and ominous, the sky suggesting a calm before the storm. That morning, rioting was expected in cities throughout the nation, prompting predictions of a violent revolution. Army machine guns and sharpshooters were placed at strategic locations along the route. Not since the civil war had Washington been so fortified, with armed police guarding federal buildings.

FDR thought government in a civilized society had an obligation to abolish poverty, reduce unemployment, and redistribute wealth. Roosevelt’s bold New Deal experiments inflamed the upper class, provoking a backlash from the nation’s most powerful bankers, industrialists and Wall Street brokers, who thought the policy was not only radical but revolutionary. Worried about losing their personal fortunes to runaway government spending, this fertile field of loathing led to the “traitor to his class” epithet for FDR. “What that fellow Roosevelt needs is a 38-caliber revolver right at the back of his head,” a respectable citizen said at a Washington dinner party.

In a climate of conspiracies and intrigues, and against the backdrop of charismatic dictators in the world such as Hitler and Mussolini, the sparks of anti-Rooseveltism ignited into full-fledged hatred. Many American intellectuals and business leaders saw nazism and fascism as viable models for the US. The rise of Hitler and the explosion of the Nazi revolution, which frightened many European nations, struck a chord with prominent American elites and antisemites such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. Hitler’s elite Brownshirts – a mass body of party storm troopers separate from the 100,000-man German army – was a stark symbol to the powerless American masses. Mussolini’s Blackshirts – the military arm of his organization made up of 200,000 soldiers – were a potent image of strength to a nation that felt emasculated.

A divided country and FDR’s emboldened powerful enemies made the plot to overthrow him seem plausible. With restless uncertainty, volatile protests and ominous threats, America’s right wing was inspired to form its own paramilitary organizations. Militias sprung up throughout the land, their self-described “patriots” chanting: “This is despotism! This is tyranny!”

Today’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have nothing on their extremist forbears. In 1933, a diehard core of conservative veterans formed the Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia and recruited pro-Mussolini immigrants. The Silver Shirts was an apocalyptic Christian militia patterned on the notoriously racist Texas Rangers that operated in 46 states and stockpiled weapons.

A divided country and FDR’s emboldened powerful enemies made a plot to overthrow him seem plausible

The Gray Shirts of New York organized to remove “Communist college professors” from the nation’s education system, and the Tennessee-based White Shirts wore a Crusader cross and agitated for the takeover of Washington. JP Morgan Jr, one of the nation’s richest men, had secured a $100m loan to Mussolini’s government. He defiantly refused to pay income tax and implored his peers to join him in undermining FDR.

So, when retired US Marine Corps Maj Gen Smedley Darlington Butler claimed he was recruited by a group of Wall Street financiers to lead a fascist coup against FDR and the US government in the summer of 1933, Washington took him seriously. Butler, a Quaker, and first world war hero dubbed the Maverick Marine, was a soldier’s soldier who was idolized by veterans – which represented a huge and powerful voting bloc in America. Famous for his daring exploits in China and Central America, Butler’s reputation was impeccable. He got rousing ovations when he claimed that during his 33 years in the marines: “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

Butler later testified before Congress that a bond-broker and American Legion member named Gerald MacGuire approached him with the plan. MacGuire told him the coup was backed by a group called the American Liberty League, a group of business leaders which formed in response to FDR’s victory, and whose mission it was to teach government “the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property”. Members included JP Morgan, Jr, Irénée du Pont, Robert Sterling Clark of the Singer sewing machine fortune, and the chief executives of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods.

The putsch called for him to lead a massive army of veterans – funded by $30m from Wall Street titans and with weapons supplied by Remington Arms – to march on Washington, oust Roosevelt and the entire line of succession, and establish a fascist dictatorship backed by a private army of 500,000 former soldiers.

As MacGuire laid it out to Butler, the coup was instigated after FDR eliminated the gold standard in April 1933, which threatened the country’s wealthiest men who thought if American currency wasn’t backed by gold, rising inflation would diminish their fortunes. He claimed the coup was sponsored by a group who controlled $40bn in assets – about $800bn today – and who had $300m available to support the coup and pay the veterans. The plotters had men, guns and money – the three elements that make for successful wars and revolutions. Butler referred to them as “the royal family of financiers” that had controlled the American Legion since its formation in 1919. He felt the Legion was a militaristic political force, notorious for its antisemitism and reactionary policies against labor unions and civil rights, that manipulated veterans.

The planned coup was thwarted when Butler reported it to J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who reported it to FDR. How seriously the “Wall Street putsch” endangered the Roosevelt presidency remains unknown, with the national press at the time mocking it as a “gigantic hoax” and historians like Arthur M Schlesinger Jr surmising “the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable” and that democracy was not in real danger. Still, there is much evidence that the nation’s wealthiest men – Republicans and Democrats alike – were so threatened by FDR’s policies that they conspired with antigovernment paramilitarism to stage a coup.

The final report by the congressional committee tasked with investigating the allegations, delivered in February 1935, concluded: “[The committee] received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country”, adding “There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

As Congressman John McCormack who headed the congressional investigation put it: “If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded … When times are desperate and people are frustrated, anything could happen.”

There is still much that is not known about the coup attempt. Butler demanded to know why the names of the country’s richest men were removed from the final version of the committee’s report. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape,” Butler said in a Philadelphia radio interview in 1935. “The big shots weren’t even called to testify. They were all mentioned in the testimony. Why was all mention of these names suppressed from this testimony?”

While details of the conspiracy are still matters of historical debate, journalists and historians, including the BBC’s Mike Thomson and John Buchanan of the US, later concluded that FDR struck a deal with the plotters, allowing them to avoid treason charges – and possible execution – if Wall Street backed off its opposition to the New Deal. The presidential biographer Sidney Blumenthal recently said that Roosevelt should have pushed it all through, then reneged on his agreement and prosecuted them.

What might all of this portend for Americans today, as President Biden follows in FDR’s New Deal footsteps while democratic socialist Bernie Sanders also rises in popularity and influence? In 1933, rather than inflame a quavering nation, FDR calmly urged Americans to unite to overcome fear, banish apathy and restore their confidence in the country’s future. Now, 90 years later, a year on from Trump’s own coup attempt, Biden’s tone was more alarming, sounding a clarion call for Americans to save democracy itself, to make sure such an attack “never, never happens again”.

If the plotters had been held accountable in the 1930s, the forces behind the 6 January coup attempt might never have flourished into the next century.

This article was amended on 12 January 2022 to rewrite a sentence in line with Guardian style guidance.

Sally Denton is the author of The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. Her forthcoming book is The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land

From HNN:

The Art Collector Who Wanted to Stage a Fascist Coup Against FDR By Nicholas Fox Weber Nicholas Fox Weber is the author of The Clarks of Cooperstown, on which the foillowing article is based.

It sounds like a fabrication whenever I mention that, in researching the great art collector Robert Sterling Clark—proud owner of thirty-nine Renoirs and of the only significant altar piece by Piero Della Francesca in America, and founder of a fine and well-known public art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts—I discovered that, in 1934, he apparently devoted considerable energy to an attempt to have President Franklin Delano Roosevelt overthrown and replaced by a Fascist dictator. The evidence, however, is clear; the only real mystery is why more attention has never been given to the attempted putsch in the White House. Sterling—as everyone called him—had approximately thirty million dollars at the time, in addition to a valuable art collection, sumptuous houses in America and France, and vast holdings of silver, rare books, vintage Burgundies, and other collectables. He was a bon vivant who took great pleasure in acquiring things and in living well; he was also a man given to intense and consuming rages. A lot of his fury was directed toward his three brothers, with whom he had had a violent dispute concerning family trusts; Sterling was enraged that he could not secure more of the family’s fortune for his wife and her daughter.

The problem was that only direct descendents of his parents could eventually inherit the bulk of his wealth, which consisted mostly of Singer Sewing Machine stock (the Clark brothers’ grandfather had been Isaac Singer’s lawyer, and had, in the middle of the 19th century, taken leadership of the company and made his fortune with it.) Sterling’s vitriol toward his siblings had begun in the early 1920s; a decade later, a lot of his rage was directed at the president he privately referred to as “Rosenfart,” who infuriated Clark because of his attitude toward the gold standard. Sterling was heard to say more than once that he would “spend half of his fortune to save the other half.”

The fifteen million dollars he was apparently willing to spend would go toward payments for an army of retired soldiers—half a million of them—whom he hoped to hire with a number of other rich and prominent Americans. The story behind the plot is complex, but its essence is that Sterling, through intermediaries, had hoped to persuade a retired U.S. General, Smedley Darlington Butler, to head the coup, and that he had indeed funded a lot of research into the formation of Fascist armies abroad. The example that most impressed the man whose trip to Europe he financed was the Croix de Feu, a group of French soldiers who had succeeded in ousting a president.

The story was told in the pages of the New York Times and Time Magazine. The accounts often have a mocking tone, especially about Butler, who was the man who spilled the beans at hearings held by the U.S. House of Representatives in private sessions, where Congressman John McCormack skillfully, and often in outrage, investigated the matter. Names of people associated with the Morgan bank, members of the DuPont family, and the well-known politician Al Smith were also linked to the attempted coup. It became clear that many of these people really thought that Roosevelt, his vice-president, and the secretary of state could all be coerced into stepping down, and then a hand-picked replacement would take charge.

That the putsch did not come about is not itself astonishing. But that it is such a neglected chapter of American history—in spite of books and films devoted to the subject—remains the great surprise. Roosevelt himself wanted to hear little about it; it was as if taking it to heart would make it too real. Perhaps that is still the fear behind the relative silence.

AN 9 24

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Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push

In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise....

https://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr

was a dangerous time in America: The economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system.

The newly elected president pursued an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum.

"This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty," one senator wrote to a colleague. "The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."

Those words could be ripped from today's headlines. In fact, author Sally Denton tells weekends on All Things Consideredhost Guy Raz, they come from a letter written in 1933 by Republican Sen. Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia, bemoaning the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Denton is the author of a new book, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.

She says that during the tense months between FDR's election in November and his inauguration in March 1933, democracy hung in the balance.

"There was a lot at play. It could have gone very different directions," Denton says.

Though it's hard for us to imagine today, she says fascism, communism, even Naziism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills.

"There were suggestions that capitalism was not working, that democracy was not working," she says.

Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression.

When Roosevelt finally took office, he embarked on the now-legendary First Hundred Days, an ambitious legislative program aimed at reopening and stabilizing the country's banks and getting the economy moving again.

"There was just this sense that he was upsetting the status quo," Denton says.

Critics on the right worried that Roosevelt was a Communist, a socialist or the tool of a Jewish conspiracy. Critics on the left complained his policies didn't go far enough. Some of Roosevelt's opponents didn't stop at talk. Though it's barely remembered today, there was a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the president.

The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers.

"They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government," Denton says.

"It was a cockamamie concept," she adds, "and the fact that it even got as far as it did is pretty shocking."

The conspirators had several million dollars, a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler,to lead their forces.

"Had he been a different kind of person, it might have gone a lot further," Denton says. "But he saw it as treason and he reported it to Congress."

Denton says that as she was writing the book, she was struck by the parallels between the treatment of Roosevelt and that of Barack Obama. For example, a cottage industry much like the birther movement grew up around proving that the Dutch-descended Roosevelt was actually a secret Jew.

"It seems to me that going through history here, there are times that we need to have a demon, somebody that's not of us, in order to solidify our fears and our anxieties," Denton says.

"And I don't know what that is in the impulse of the American body politic, but... this is 75 years later, and some of these same impulses continue."

Erologue: A Beleaguered Capital

When dawn broke in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 4, 1933, the atmosphere was celebratory, if anxious. Slate gray and ominous, the sky suggested a calm before the storm. Even before the sun rose, more than a hundred thousand people had gathered on the east side of the Capitol. General Douglas MacArthur was in command of the inaugural parade,and he habitually expected the worst. By that morning, American depositors had transferred more than $1.3 billion in gold to foreign accounts, millions of people had been turned away from their banks, and rioting was expected in cities throughout the nation, prompting some state governors to predict a violent revolution.

Army machine guns and sharpshooters were placed at strategic locations along the route. Not since the Civil War had Washington been so fortified. Journalist Arthur Krock likened the climate to "that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime." Armed police guarded federal buildings, and rumors swirled that Roosevelt was going to appropriate dictatorial powers and imposemartial law. But if he had ever really entertained such a notion — as unused drafts of an inaugural address indicated — he abandoned it. Despite efforts made by William Randolph Hearst, Walter Lippmann, Bernard Baruch, and others to convince him of the necessity for a benevolent despot to seize control of the country, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was unswayed.

Hearst, the nation's most powerful publisher, went so far as to produce a Hollywood movie — Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston — to instruct both Roosevelt and the American public how to succumb to dictatorship. Even though Italy's Benito Mussolini and Fascism were enormously popular and highly regarded in America at the time, Roosevelt distrusted autocracy, did not believe that one could count on a benevolent dictator to remain so, and, especially, maintained an absolute commitment to the U.S. Constitution. "We could have had a dictator ... and we would have had one but for the President himself, to whom the whole idea was hateful," a U.S. Army general later said in a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Instead, Roosevelt determined to incite the public to action rather than to capture extra-constitutional authority for himself. He wanted not to assume enhanced powers, not to take advantage of a quavering nation to elevate his own stature, but rather to ignite the citizenry to banish apathy and recapture a spirit of confidence and achievement. He sought not to issue comforting bromides — as his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had done incessantly — but to raise a battle cry, a call to arms for Americans to overcome their fear and march bravely into the unknown. His overarching message: If they had lost faith in themselves, he would restore it.

But he was not content to stop there. Even as he hoped to inspire and invigorate, he also intended to hold accountable those who had failed the nation and sent it plunging into its abyss. "When millions lived close to starvation, and some even had to scavenge for food, bankers ... and corporation executives ... drew astronomical salaries and bonuses," as one account described the disparity between the poor and the wealthy. In a profound departure from Hoover, Roosevelt promised not only to bring relief to the victims but also to punish the perpetrators of the catastrophe. He would make clear that the departure of Herbert Hoover signified the end of the old order.

uber1:

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1909

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[Many are disillusioned with American democracy. Can Joe Biden win them over? Francine Prose

Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/07/biden-trump-capitol-attack-riot-democracy)

A divided country and FDR’s emboldened powerful enemies made a plot to overthrow him seem plausible

If the plotters had been held accountable in the 1930s, the forces behind the 6 January coup attempt might never have flourished into the next century.

This article was amended on 12 January 2022 to rewrite a sentence in line with Guardian style guidance.

Sally Denton is the author of The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. Her forthcoming book is The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land

...Gerald MacGuire

:{:{The credibility of MacGuire's claims was reinforced when he produced evidence of considerable cash resources and made some eerily accurate predictions regarding personnel changes in the White House. He also accurately described the still-secret but soon-to-be-announced American Liberty League, a high-profile group whose stated purpose was to "defend and uphold the Constitution."

The League's principal players were comprised of wealthy Americans, including the leaders of DuPont, JP Morgan, US Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Colgate, Heinz Foods, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire. There are some who claim that Prescott Bush-- father to the 41st US President and grandfather to the 43rd-- was also entangled in the scheme.}:}:

On 22 August 1934, upon his return from a fact-finding trip to Europe, Gerald MacGuire dropped all pretense when he met with General Butler at an empty hotel restaurant. He indicated that his financial backers aimed to assemble an army of half a million disgruntled veterans, sown from the seeds of the original Bonus Army. He also stated that the group would like Butler to be the leader of this force."We've got three million [dollars] to start with on the line," MacGuire claimed, "and we can get three hundred million if we need it."

According to MacGuire, the League's members could easily manipulate the media to provide public approval. He went on to suggest that the League planned to protect the country from communism by mimicking the methods of Benito Mussolini, a dictator who had risen to power a decade earlier with the support of a veteran militia. Mussolini's fascist government had successfully restored Italy's industrial viability, so it was deemed as an ideal model for repairing America's impoverished economy. According to the plan, Roosevelt and other existing US leadership would be allowed to remain as figureheads, while the true policy-making power would fall to a new cabinet position which Smedley Butler would occupy: The Secretary for General Affairs.

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jim h

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ever heard of it? Few have, for the financial establishment–along with its media and political henchmen–rushed out, clucking like mother hens to bury the story and protect the gentlemen of Wall Street implicated in the plot. But what a story! It was capitalist skullduggery by a few self-entitled Lords of Wealth trying to overthrow the government and enthrone a fascist regime friendly to themselves.

Fortunately, a real patriot was able to expose them, nipping their coup d’etat in the bud. Nonetheless, their attempt reveals the threat of concentrated wealth and the ever-present danger that the imperious rich pose to majority rule. Not only should this real-life drama be highlighted in our history books, but it would also make a blockbuster movie:

THE SCENE

The Great Depression was at full force in 1933, spreading mass unemployment, waves of bankruptcies, and abject poverty. The people’s boiling political anger was scaring the aloof denizens of Wall Street silly, as more and more people joined in open rebellion against things the plutocrats considered sacrosanct: Unfettered capitalism and–scariest of all–against rich people themselves!

THE CAST

The President By promising a New Deal for millions of Americans impoverished by the Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt had scored a landslide victory in 1932 over Wall Street’s man, Herbert Hoover. Then, in 1933, to the bankers’ horror, the new president launched myriad new government policies and programs to help people get back on their feet–including new taxes on wealth to fund the recovery.

The conspirators Such Wall Street multimillionaires as Grayson M.P. Murphy (banker and Anaconda Copper Mining head), Thomas Lamont (J.P. Morgan partner), and Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune) were enraged by FDR’s moves. Class war, they wailed, claiming that their “liberty” to grab as much profit as they could was being shackled–and for no better reason than to fund “socialism!” Calling Roosevelt a traitor to his class, these men would later be named as instigators of the putsch to replace FDR with a military-backed government of capitalists–i.e., themselves.

The hero Smedley Darlington Butler–a name made for a Hollywood thriller! A retired Marine general, he became a well-known, influential advocate for veterans. The conspirators considered Butler the perfect choice to lead their takeover of Washington, and they spent a year wooing him, gradually laying out their plan.

THE PLOT

Apparently, being super-rich doesn’t make you super-smart, for the scheme these millionaires devised was hapless and cockamamie: They planned to oust Roosevelt by enlisting and arming a private military force made up of thousands of destitute World War I vets who were protesting their failure to receive federal bonus payments they had been promised. But how to engage them in the plot?

Gerald MacGuire, Grayson Murphy’s bond salesman, was an ex-soldier and an active member of the American Legion veterans’ organization, so he was the one who first contacted the soldiers’ champion, Smedley Butler. After several meetings spent discussing veterans issues, MacGuire finally got down to business, explaining that the financial powers he represented wanted Butler to create a paramilitary corps of 500,000 vets and march on Washington to force FDR from the White House.

As Butler later related, MacGuire told him that the Wall Street cohort, plus a new group called American Liberty League (made up of the right-wing bosses of such corporate giants as DuPont, Colgate, General Foods, and GM), would fund the cause to the tune of $300 million–that’s $5.6 billion in today’s money! MacGuire also claimed that the Remington Arms Company would supply the weapons. As investigative journalist Sally Denton wrote in her 2011 book, The Plots Against the President, the conspirators were so out of touch with reality that they actually expected Roosevelt to accept the takeover without a fight. They figured that (1) he knew he was in over his head as president, so he’d welcome these stronger people taking control, and (2) as a member of the patrician class himself, FDR would happily agree to become a ceremonial figurehead, while the financiers and militarists installed a “secretary of general affairs” to run the country. Who was their choice to become this authoritarian SGA? General Smedley D. Butler.

A HERO

…to the rescue! They chose the wrong general.

Butler, a patriot and lifelong soldier for democracy, was astounded and repulsed by the hubris and treachery of these American would-be aristocrats. He felt a duty to stop them.

The general enlisted Paul Comly French, an investigative reporter he knew and trusted, to help gather proof of the bankers’ intent. French even got an interview with MacGuire, who was surprisingly unguarded: “We need a Fascist government in this country,” he blurted to French, “to save the Nation from the communists who want to tear it down. The only men who have the patriotism [!!] to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader.”

Evidence in hand, Butler got a US House “Special Committee on Un-American Activities” to conduct a two-month investigation, which convinced its members that, as Time magazine later reported, “General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.” The committee opened public hearings on November 20, 1934, with Butler giving detailed testimony. The next morning, French’s expose ran in both the Philadelphia Record and New York Post. The story was out and Butler’s gutsy stand had halted the putsch.

THE COVER-UP

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