Blog #54 Did You Know, A Plot was made to overthrow FDR?
Who was Major General Smedley Butler, and why did he blow the whistle on the alleged coup to overthrow FDR?
In 1933, Wall Street elites asked America’s most decorated Marine, Major General Smedley Butler, to lead a 500,000-man army to overthrow FDR. They picked the exact wrong man.
Known as "Old Gimlet Eye," Butler was a military legend. He fought in the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, and throughout the "Banana Wars" in Central America. He was a two-time Medal of Honor recipient and immensely popular with veterans.
At the time, the U.S. was in the throes of the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just taken office and abandoned the gold standard, alarming wealthy industrialists. They feared FDR's New Deal policies were a slide into communism and believed their wealth was under attack.
A group of these elites, allegedly represented by bond broker Gerald MacCGuire, approached Butler with a radical proposal. Their plan, now known as the "Business Plot" or "Wall Street Putsch," was to use Butler's influence to rally an army of veterans to march on Washington. They wanted FDR to become a figurehead, forced to appoint a "Secretary of General Affairs"—a fascist dictator modeled after Mussolini—to run the country on behalf of corporate interests.
The plotters misjudged Butler. They assumed his military background made him a natural authoritarian and his popularity with veterans made him the perfect tool.
Butler, however, was a firm believer in democracy and a populist. He sympathized with the working class and the veterans, having vocally supported the Bonus Army marchers—World War I veterans who protested in Washington for early payment of bonuses, whom other generals like Douglas MacArthur had violently dispersed.
Furthermore, Butler had grown cynical about the corporate interests driving American foreign policy. He realized his military career had often served as "a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers," a sentiment he detailed in his 1935 book, War Is a Racket. To him, the Business Plot was an attempt to bring the same corporate exploitation he had enforced abroad back to American soil.
Butler played along long enough to gather evidence, then blew the whistle to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, a congressional committee investigating subversive activities. The committee's final report corroborated his claims and confirmed that a march on Washington was indeed discussed, though no one was ever prosecuted. The plot dissolved the moment Butler dragged it into the light.