Many people are not aware that a coup d’etat was planned against FDR in the summer of 1933 by many of America’s leading capitalists. It was secretly financed and organized by leaders of the Du Pont and Morgan business empires. The plan was to remove FDR and replace him with the popular general Smedley Butler.
The plotters attempted to recruit General Smedley Butler to lead the coup. They selected him because he was a war hero who was popular with the troops. The plotters felt his good reputation was important to make the troops feel confident that they were doing the right thing by overthrowing a democratically elected president. However, this was a mistake: Butler was popular with the troops because he identified with them. That is, he was a man of the people, not the elite. When the plotters approached General Butler with their proposal to lead the coup, he pretended to go along with the plan at first, secretly deciding to betray it to Congress at the right moment.
What the businessmen proposed was dramatic: they wanted General Butler to deliver an ultimatum to Roosevelt. Roosevelt would pretend to become sick and incapacitated from his polio, and allow a newly created cabinet officer, a “Secretary of General Affairs,” to run things in his stead. The secretary, of course, would be carrying out the orders of Wall Street. If Roosevelt refused, then General Butler would force him out with an army of 500,000 war veterans from the American Legion. But MacGuire assured Butler the cover story would work:
“You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second�”
The businessmen also promised that money was no object: Clark told Butler that he would spend half his $60 million fortune to save the other half.
And what type of government would replace Roosevelt’s New Deal? MacGuire was perfectly candid to Paul French, a reporter friend of General Butler’s:
“We need a fascist government in this country� to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”
Indeed, it turns out that MacGuire travelled to Italy to study Mussolini’s fascist state, and came away mightily impressed. He wrote glowing reports back to his boss, Robert Clark, suggesting that they implement the same thing.
This is an interesting episode from history. Smedley Butler is a fascinating character. He wrote a good piece called War is a Racket which is amazingly relevant to our current situation. Here’s a quote from it:
- I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
I first read about Smedley Butler and the plot against FDR in the excellent Studs Terkel oral history of the great depression, Hard Times. I was really surprised I had never heard of it. After I looked into it I became less surprised. The corporations and elites that run this country would not be very comfortable with the implications of that story. That business and capital would ever try to destroy freedom and democracy. Well, they do it every day. The fascists in America have gotten smarter in the intervening years since 1933. Now they just make sure the guy they choose to be president is bought and can be easily controlled. Both Gore and Bush were no threat to the status quo. Like in 1933, big business has a stranglehold on the media only this time they have their tentacles in television and the internet in addition to radio and the newspapers. Corporate lobbyists make a mockery of the legislative process by providing proposed legislation that business has written on its own. Washington “think-tanks” and policy centers are nothing but places to spend corporate cash under cover. They make it look like these think-tanks are independent organizations. They are far from it.