Aug 2, 2024
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On Nov. 20, 1934, readers of the New York Post were startled by a headline: “Gen. Butler Accuses N.Y. Brokers of Plotting Dictatorship in U.S.; $3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared; Says He Was Asked to Lead 500,000 for Capital ‘Putsch’; U.S. Probing Charge.”
[USMC Maj. General] Smedley Butler revealed the Business Plot before a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities. … For 30 minutes, Butler told the story, starting with the first visit of the bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire to his house in Newtown Square in 1933.
Finally, Butler told the congressmen about his last meeting with MacGuire at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. At that meeting, Butler testified, MacGuire had told him to expect to see a powerful organization forming to back the putsch from behind the scenes. … The bond salesman told the Marine this group would advertise itself as a “society to maintain the Constitution.”
“And in about two weeks,” Butler told the congressmen, “the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be.”
The Liberty League was announced on Aug. 23, 1934, on the front page of The New York Times. The article quoted its founders’ claim that it was a “nonpartisan group” whose aim was to “combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the Constitution.” Its real goal, other observers told the Times, was to oppose the New Deal and the taxes and controls it promised to impose on their fortunes.
...
Twenty-one U.S. presidential elections later, on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood before an angry crowd on the White House Ellipse. For weeks, Trump had urged supporters to join him in an action against the joint session of Congress slated to recognize his opponent, Joe Biden, as the next president that day. … Trump then did what the Business Plotters — however many there were — could not. He sent his mob, his version of Mussolini’s Black Shirts and the Croix de Feu, to storm the Capitol. “We fight like hell,” the 45th president instructed them. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Sleepy Joe at it agayn
heartbreaking: your favorite semi-obscure piece of US history was made into a film with a star-studded cast, but it's just meh
Major General Smedley Butler
Major General Smedley Butler
Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940) was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in…
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what are your thoughts on the 1934 business plot involving general butler? just a conspiracy?
The Business Plot -- for those who might not know -- was a supposed plot by business leaders to finance a fascist coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt early in his Presidency. It was exposed by General Smedley Butler, a highly-decorated American soldier who won not one but TWO Medals of Honor, and claimed that industrialists had approached him about leading disgruntled Army veterans (such as those who had participated in the Bonus March on Washington in 1932) in carrying out the coup.
I haven't read a whole lot about the Business Plot and my knowledge about it isn't much deeper than what I just explained. Like many historians, I don't think the plot was very close to being carried out but there does seem to have been some sort of planning or scheming going on by opponents of FDR and supporters of Mussolini-style Fascism. How far along those plans might have been is almost impossible to tell, even with investigations and studies since the 1930's, and there have never been credible names attached to the mysterious "wealthy industrialists" who were supposedly behind the planned coup. What gave the plot real credibility then and now was General Smedley Butler who was one of the bravest soldiers in American History and someone with a long and storied career of service to his country.