The Forgotten Coup Against a U.S. President
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Once upon a time a group of super wealthy businessmen got together in secret because they didn’t like the direction the American government was heading. Too many people were being helped, and too much social good was afoot. They didn’t like that. “None of this helping people crap,” they said. So they did what any self-respecting business leader would do and decided to overthrow the government.
And no, I’m not talking about what’s happening right now in front of our eyes, but the parallels to current events are eerie and we’ll see a lot of things that sound very familiar if you’re paying attention. And if you haven’t absorbed all the details about the psuedophilosophy behind why all that’s happening with the rich tech bros now, I did a video on that and you can find it here.
But right now we’re here to talk about the attempted coup of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the early 1930s. This completely forgotten episode of American history is full of political intrigue and outright stupidity, which, again, seems very current. It was called the Business Plot, and it was perpetrated by a lot of people with last names you’re going to recognize, and we’re about to unravel its spicy tendrils that came close to changing the course of American history forever.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the time before the current time that corporate America was trying to overthrow the government.
The early 1930s were a tumultuous time in the United States. We just went through the Wall Street crash of 1929, which thrust the nation directly into the Great Depression and inspired complete financial panic and the devastation of financial institutions, and George Bailey doesn’t get to go on his world travels or go to college because he has to stay at the savings and loan and keep things smoothed over in Bedford Falls. God, it’s so sad.
But the Great Depression wasn’t a joke, of course. It was a ten-year period that resulted in a 30% loss of GDP in America, a 50% reduction in global trade, and massive unemployment around the world that reached as high as 33% in some places. The U.S. Congress passed a gigantic tariff act that or course only hastened the economic downturn, so someone might want to tell the current government about that before it’s too late. (maybe just image of a headline and me with a frustrated face/noise)
In 1932, FDR defeated Herbert Hoover’s reelection bid, and Roosevelt became the 32nd President of the United States. Historians believe that FDR’s New Deal had a hand in helping the U.S. recover, but that it actually wasn’t aggressive enough to have been a major contributor. Which is fascinating and news to me, since all you hear about these days is how the New Deal-era policies were communist plots to make Americans lazy or dependent or just nicer, which is also a morally horrific situation according to a lot of vocal business types.
Some of those very business leaders were motivated enough to act on their feelings, though, and that’s where our story truly begins. These New Deal policies were making the privileged upper crust elites very nervous, and they stood to lose out on the extremely effective exploitative status quo they’d been leeching off since the rise of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. There was more of America to plunder, and some key figures were not about to sit around while that opportunity was taken away from them. And FDR’s abandonment of the gold standard was particularly worrying to a lot of them, because they feared it would upset the system of debt and loan repayment and they’d lose out on a lot of money that was owed to them. They saw that FDR wanted to use the power of government not to enrich himself and his friends, but to actually govern and take care of the citizens of the nation, eliminate poverty, reduce unemployment, and yes, even redistribute the nation's wealth so that it wasn’t accumultating in the hands of the very few. He upset bankers, industrialists, Wall Street, wealthy socialites, and just about everybody with a net worth in the 1930s. They didn’t want runaway government spending to cut into their personal assets. So they had FDR labeled as a “traitor to his class,” which was a common slur thrown at him at the time. One quote that’s commonly reported from an unknown guest at a dinner party reads, “What that fellow Roosevelt needs is a 38-caliber revolver right at the back of the head.” So, you know, they didn’t seem to like him very much.
According to the documentation we have available today, some of the men who came together to begin plotting the overthrow of Roosevelt were Grayson M.P. Murphy, a wealthy banker with his own company who served on the boards of Bethlehem Steel, Goodyear Tire, and others; Robert Sterling Clark, an heir to the Singer sewing company fortune; the DuPont family; John W. Davis, a democratic candidate from the 1924 presidential election who lost by a whole lot to Calvin Coolidge, who also happened to be a lawyer who represented J.P. Morgan Jr.; and Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush. It was a who’s who of American elite at the time.
Of course they didn’t debase themselves enough to get their hands dirty, so they had others do it for them. There were two main actors who facilitated the orchestration of the Business Plot and these men were bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire and Bill Doyle, who was the commander of the Massachusetts American Legion. It was their job to research the rise of a new and exciting political structure that the business world was really taken with, and it was beginning to take root in Europe and run rampant in key nations like Germany and Italy, and there were strong tendrils of it taking root right at home in America. That political philosophy that had these business guys soiling their own knickers was a fun little thing called fascism. They were particularly interested in these silly little guys called Nazis who were effectively marrying corporate power to the state and these American business leaders began to believe very strongly that embracing fascism was the only way to save America.
The Business Plotters didn’t come at this out of nowhere. The 1930s were filled with pro-Nazi and pro-fascist sentiment and propaganda in America, and it was coming from prominent figures like Henry Ford and American heroes like Charles Lindbergh. William Randolph Hearst, the media mogul who founded Hearst Communications, was the one who coined the term “America First.” The business world watched from across an ocean at the building of a superpower of conglomerate capital and force of might and they did not sit back and allow themselves to feel the emasculation that threatened their egos and empty hearts, but they stood up and acted out their capitalist fever dreams.
MacGuire toured Europe on a trip paid for by Murphy, and he reported back via postcard on all the amazing things he saw and how they could be incorporated into U.S. politics and society. They were doing their research, amassing their resources and financial backing for the plot as we’ll soon see, and they were figuring out how exactly to execute the whole thing. What solidified the execution for them was when MacGuire came across a French nationalist group called the Croix-de-Feu. I don’t know, it’s French--you don’t pronounce any of the letters. The CF was made up of World War One veterans who fell right into the group’s far-right ideologies and fear-mongering propaganda that centered around xenophobia, antisemitism, eugenics, and imperialism. They felt they were a new race of Algerian Europeans and they believed that mainstream French society was weak and degenerate. The Business Plotters sought to prop up their own group of disgruntled veterans and fund them from the shadows the same way wealthy interests in France were funding the Croix-de-Feu. They had all the money in the world to buy these veterans’ loyalty and set up an organization that could emulate what they saw in Europe, but what they lacked was a charismatic leader who could lead their veteran army.
And the only reason the plot failed to get off the ground was because of the man they ultimately chose.
This is where Major General Smedley Butler enters our tale. Smedley! Listen, how come all these really disappointingly mundane names have stood the test of time like John, and Eric, and Paul, and Tom. Where are the Smedleys? I want to see more of them walking around. Smedley, where have you gone??
Known as “the fighting hell-devil marine” and “old gimlet eye” -- oh god the nicknames are even better -- Major General Smedley Butler was one of the most decorated servicemembers of all time. He was one of the very very few to have won the Medal of Honor not just once, but twice. I didn’t even know that was a thing you could do. I mean, I haven’t even gotten one yet. Butler served in World War One as the commander of the 13th Regiment. He was also all over the world, getting caught up in countless operations in places like Mexico, the Phillipines, Haiti, China, Nicaragua, and Honduras.
In the 1930s, this guy was about as close to a real-life Captain America you could get. He was super famous in a time when not just movie stars were national celebrities but public figures who actually like did cool stuff. He was constantly lauded by the media and Hollywood was obsessed with him and presidents loved him. Teddy Roosevelt called Smedley “the ideal soldier.”
Smedley Butler grew up a Quaker in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is an interesting background to have considering his career choices. But peace was likely not on his mind as he served his just over 33 years in the Marine Corps. He participated in multiple global conflicts, spreading American hegemony and empire all over the globe, which he came to deeply resent and even despise. After he retired from the corps he became an activist for veterans’ rights and famously supported the “Bonus Army” - which was a group of WWI veterans and allies who marched on D.C. in 1932 in order to secure bonuses they’d been promised by the passing of the Adjusted Compensation Act.
The Bonus Army camped out in the Anacostia Flats for weeks, where Butler came to deliver speeches and encouragement. But the Bonus Army’s march became a violent confrontation when then President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army to clear out the protestors and burn down the camp. The order was heavily criticized and was one reason that Hoover wasn’t reelected in 1932. FDR had also visited the camp and followed the situation, and in 1933 he offered the veterans jobs through the new Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. And that’s one of the policies that the business guys didn’t like.
But the Bonus Army incident was actually one of the primary motives for choosing Smedley Butler as the leader of their coup, because the Business Plot needed someone who could lead a strong veteran Army, and Smedley had done exactly that. And it’s possible that they assumed his advocacy work was a referendum against the current government and the direction of American politics, which made them think Butler would be on their side and readily accept their offer. Unfortunately for them, he was pissed at the exact things they were pushing, and his opinion of the betterment of America was on the opposite side of the spectrum from theirs. Butler had become a staunch opponent of capitalism, believing that it only fanned the flames of war. He published a short book in 1935 called “War is a Racket,” which would go on to receive some acclaim and is still read widely today.
So when he was approached by the plot's shadowy facilitators, Gerald MacGuire and Bill Doyle, he was extremely alarmed. But he kept that alarm to himself in order to not play his hand and string them along so he could find out more information behind the burgeoning coup attempt. In their first meeting in Butler’s hotel room, the pair used their American Legion connection to try to win him over, and they told him they just wanted him to give a speech at a Legion convention in Chicago. They told him things like how they had specific issues with the organization and its leadership. They tried to play into his advocacy work and attempted to convince him that they were all in on veterans’ rights and fixing the broken benefits structure. Then they pulled out a suitcase and tossed it on the bed and unzipped it to reveal $2 million dollars in today’s money. They told Butler he was going to use that money to bring in friendly supporters to watch his speech and get on board with the cause. Smedley was absolutely shocked when he saw the money, and he immediately knew that it would be impossible for these two sleazy dudes to have gotten all this cash themselves. You see, Butler was used to instigating coups and overthrowing governments because he’d been doing it himself for over three decades and he knew exactly what that looked like. His suspicions were confirmed when he got his hands on a draft of the speech they wanted him to give, because it had little to do with the American Legion and was actually all about how awful FDR was and how moving away from the gold standard was a huge mistake.
When Butler pushed back a bit and tried to get more information about what the men were doing, they set up a meeting with him and Robert Sterling Clark, who again was an heir of the Singer Sewing company fortune. Butler knew Clark, and knew that he’d been involved at a high level in the Boxer Rebellion in China, and knew that people referred to him as “the millionaire lieutenant.” During their chat, Clark admitted to Butler that he wanted to preserve the gold standard, and that personal financial security was the real goal here. He told Butler that he “had $30 million, and was willing to spend half of the $30 million to save the other half.” At this point, Butler told Clark he wouldn’t be giving the speech. But that wasn’t the end of it. Perhaps the plotters figured they could eventually talk him into it, so they didn’t leave him alone after that.
MacGuire began sending postcards to Butler during his travels through Europe while he was doing recon on the growing fascist sentiment and the Croix-de-Feu. When he came back, he met with Butler again and admitted that the $2 million he’d thrown on the hotel bed had been given to him by the business leaders behind the plot.
It was at this point that Butler contacted Paul Comly French, a writer at the Philadelphia Record. The two men then met with MacGuire together, and MacGuire was transparent again about his plans and told French he and the rest of the plotters thought that fascism was the only answer for America’s problems. He also reiterated that Butler was the ideal leader for their purposes, and that he would lead a march on Washington and replace the current government with one run by the wealthy businessmen, and leaving FDR in place as a figurehead. The plotters had tried to tell Butler at one point that FDR was just, ya know, tired and overworked, and had problems related to his health concerns, so he just wasn’t cut out for the job and he needed someone to help, and that someone might be called a “secretary of general affairs,” and that could be Butler. Of course it was all really a thinly veiled fascist military junta.
Smedley had been collecting evidence and keeping records the whole time he was being groomed for this, and he finally thought he had enough proof to act. He took all his records and notes along with the joint testimony of Paul Comly French and brought it to the McCormack-Dickstein committee, better known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities.
Unfortunately, the committee members didn’t exactly believe him at first. He was making really wild and extreme accusations about famous, wealthy people who had a lot of influence in society and government. The press got a hold of this immediately and they had an absolutely field day debunking his claims and dragging Smedley through the mud as a bit of a fallen hero. The New York Times wrote a story two days after the committee meeting calling the whole thing “a gigantic hoax.” Even General Douglas MacArthur, who rumors suggest was going to be the backup target to lead the veteran army if Smedley dropped out, said it was “the best laugh story of the year.” Now, after all the investigating was complete and all the evidence was reviewed, the final committee report wasn’t made public, so Butler’s claims were laughed at for a long time, and that didn’t really change until the report was released into the public domain decades later, and at that point none of it even mattered.
You can read the full report right now if you want and I linked to it below in the didgeridoo, but the highlights are that the investigators ultimately found no reason to doubt Butler’s testimony and in fact verified all the intel included in his claims. The report states in part, “In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. 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.” The head of the congressional investigation, Congressman John McCormack, echoed that sentiment and went ever further when he said, “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.”
In the end, not a single person was prosecuted. The names of the wealthy businessmen behind the plot were stricken from the record and not included in the final report. Butler was enraged by this, because he’d put in the work to see justice be met and the actual plotters just totally got away with it. There are various theories about why this happened, one of which is just because the rich are above the law in America. Another theory put forth by historians speculates that FDR may have made a deal with the plotters to back off their criticism of the New Deal in exchange for letting them off the hook. But honestly, we don’t know. All we know is that nothing ever came of the report or the potential coup that fortunately never got off the ground.
They say that history rhymes. I don’t know who says that because all I see is that it kind of stays the same forever and ever, and that doesn’t make a great poem, to be honest. Maybe things happen just far enough apart so that we simply forget the last time the same exact thing took place. Maybe I just feel exceedingly cynical these days. Because here’s something that took place just long enough ago that we’ve forgotten, while it may or may not be happening again right before our eyes. So let’s do some f*cking good about holding wealthy business interests accountable while they try to circumvent the authority of the United States government.
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