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The Business Plot – Did American Billionaires Really Plan a Fascist Coup?

“a coalition of america’s wealthiest industrial magnates allegedly hatched a scheme to topple the roosevelt administration.”.

DONALD TRUMP ADDED a touch of levity to the U.S. Presidential election last November , albeit unintentionally.

As the major news networks declared an Obama victory the night of Nov. 6, the notorious billionaire and one-time White House wannabe took to Twitter to register his outrage over the result.

“We should have a revolution in this country!” Trump tweeted.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty!” he added moments later.

While the outbursts were roundly mocked in the days following the vote, Trump isn’t the only American one-percenter to have advocated the overthrow of a democratically-elected president. In the early 1930s, a coalition of America’s wealthiest industrial magnates allegedly hatched a scheme to topple the Roosevelt Administration and replace it with a fascist dictatorship.

Known as the Business Plot , the plan was supposedly dreamed up by a prominent tycoons and Wall Street big shots who controlled many of the country’s major corporations like Chase Bank , Maxwell House , General Motors , Goodyear , Standard Oil , Dupont and Heinz , as well as other noted Americans, including Prescott Bush , grandfather of former U.S. president George W. Bush. [ 1 ] [ 2 ]

The conspirators were fuming over the 1932 election victory of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once in office, FDR pledged a raft of measures to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression, which were known collectively as the New Deal . America’s 32nd president was also an advocate for the abandonment of the gold standard , something that horrified many elites. Critics condemned the White House for placing the country on what they saw as a slippery slope to outright Bolshevism .

In 1933, the conspirators planned to recruit half a million military veterans from the First World War through various American Legion branches. They even pledged $3 million to buy weapons for their army so the troops could capture and hold the American capital. Once the seat of power was theirs, the plotters would install an ultra-nationalist, business-friendly regime modelled after Mussolini’s Italy. (Many conspirators were also admirers of Hitler even before the Nazis came to power, largely because of his ardent anti-communism).[ 3 ]

The cabal planned to offer command of their rebel army to a celebrated U.S. Marine general by the name of Smedley Butler . The 52-year-old veteran of the war in France had also fought counter-insurgencies in Latin America and the Philippines and was perhaps the most respected military leader in the country at the time.

Just a year earlier, that very same Smedley Butler had publicly voiced support for a march on Washington by Great War veterans who were demanding the government make good on its promises to provide benefits. On the orders of then-president Herbert Hoover, this so-called Bonus Army was eventually broken up by another well-known military leader of the day, General Douglas MacArthur . The Business Plotters felt that Butler’s patriotism along with his popularity among veterans would make him an ideal leader for their putsch.

Little did the conspirators realize, Butler had long-since become a critic of corporate greed, seeing it as an engine that drove many of America’s foreign wars. In fact, in 1935, he committed his thoughts on the matter to a famous book entitled War is a Racket .

In 1933, American Legion leaders involved in the plot approached Butler, offering him command of the rebel army. The decorated war hero immediately alerted Washington of the conspiracy, which admittedly hadn’t progressed much beyond the discussion phase. Nevertheless, a Congressional committee was struck in 1934 to look into the matter.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee , which would go onto become the House Committee on Un-American Activities , examined the allegations, declaring that there was some evidence of a scheme by Wall Street elites, anti-communists and fascist sympathizers. Even though the findings were declared by Congress to be “alarmingly true,” no charges were ever laid against anyone involved.

“The [committee] 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,” Congress declared. [ 4 ]

Many blasted the committee’s findings as pure make-believe. The New York Times declared it a “giant hoax,” while historians since have argued that there is little proof that any plot ever posed a threat.

To listen to a full BBC podcast on the Business Plot, click here .

9 thoughts on “ The Business Plot – Did American Billionaires Really Plan a Fascist Coup? ”

About a decade ago Micheal Moore asked for help from the UN in one of his books to help free the US from an unelected president. And from a democratic point of view, he had more of a pint there than Trump. 😉

Believe Clinton did away with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and now we do not have any safeguards and the Organized Criminals have indeed overthrown our Constitution in their continued effort to form their NWO 🙁 Boo Hiss

Have you ever read the Constitution? There is not a single word defining our system as a capitalist system, but, it definitely accepts the slavery system. HUAC was an extension of the Slavery

“a democratically-elected president” ! Yeah Right ! One that got 200% of the vote in numerous voting precincts throughout the U.S. Yeah, democratically-elected by imaginary and dead people.

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Are we ever going to accept the fact that slavery was wrong, and had to end?

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The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools

By Jonathan M. Katz

Jonathan M. Katz

Award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire , is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American military imperialism in the early twentieth century. At its center is one of the United States’s most fascinating yet little-known characters — Gen. Smedley Butler, a Marine who fought in nearly every U.S. overseas war in the early twentieth century. In this exclusive excerpt, Katz documents how Butler played a pivotal role in an equally little-known episode, in which a cadre of powerful businessmen tried to overthrow the government of the United States, in an episode that anticipated the events of Jan. 6 , 2021. Read the exclusive excerpt below.

Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved in many himself. He had overthrown governments and protected “friendly” client ones around the world on behalf of some of the same U.S. bankers, lawyers, and businessmen apparently now looking for his help.

For 33 years and four months Butler had been a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict back to the war against Spain in 1898. Respected by his peers, beloved by his men, he was known as “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s Friend,” and the famous “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. Bestselling books had been written about him. Hollywood adored him. President Roosevelt’s cousin, the late Theodore himself, was said to have called Butler “the ideal American soldier.” Over the course of his career, he had received the Army and Navy Distinguished Service medals, the French Ordre de l’Étoile Noir, and, in the distinction that would ensure his place in the Marine Corps pantheon, the Medal of Honor — twice.

Butler knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio Somoza — men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He had done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. P. Morgan, and the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. Murphy.

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And now a bond salesman, who worked for Murphy, was pitching Butler on a domestic operation that set off the old veteran’s alarm bells. The bond salesman was Gerald C. MacGuire, a 37-year-old Navy veteran with a head Butler thought looked like a cannonball. MacGuire had been pursuing Butler relentlessly throughout 1933 and 1934, starting with visits to the Butler’s converted farmhouse on Philadelphia’s Main Line. In Newark, where Butler was attending the reunion of a National Guard division, MacGuire showed up at his hotel room and tossed a wad of cash on the bed — $18,000, he said. In early 1934, Butler had received a series of postcards from MacGuire, sent from the hotspots of fascist Europe, including Hitler’s Berlin.

In August 1934, MacGuire called Butler from Philadelphia and asked to meet. Butler suggested an abandoned café at the back of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

First MacGuire recounted all he had seen in Europe. He’d learned that Mussolini and Hitler were able to stay in power because they kept soldiers on their payrolls in various ways. “But that setup would not suit us at all,” the businessman opined.

But in France, MacGuire had “found just exactly the organization we’re going to have.” Called the Croix de Feu, or Fiery Cross, it was like a more militant version of the American Legion: an association of French World War veterans and paramilitaries. On Feb. 6, 1934 — six weeks before MacGuire arrived — the Croix de Feu had taken part in a riot of mainly far-right and fascist groups that had tried to storm the French legislature. The insurrection was stopped by police; at least 15 people, mostly rioters, were killed. But in the aftermath, France’s center-left prime minister had been forced to resign in favor of a conservative.

MacGuire had attended a meeting of the Croix de Feu in Paris. It was the sort of “super-organization” he believed Americans could get behind — especially with a beloved war hero like Butler at the helm.

Then he made his proposal: The Marine would lead half a million veterans in a march on Washington, blending the Croix de Feu’s assault on the French legislature with the March on Rome that had put Mussolini’s Fascisti in power in Italy a decade earlier. They would be financed and armed by some of the most powerful corporations in America — including DuPont, the nation’s biggest manufacturer of explosives and synthetic materials.

The purpose of the action was to stop Roosevelt’s New Deal, the president’s program to end the Great Depression, which one of the millionaire du Pont brothers deemed “nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.” Butler’s veteran army, MacGuire explained, would pressure the president to appoint a new secretary of state, or “secretary of general affairs,” who would take on the executive powers of government. If Roosevelt went along, he would be allowed to remain as a figurehead, like the king of Italy. Otherwise, he would be forced to resign, placing the new super-secretary in the White House.

Butler recognized this immediately as a coup. He knew the people who were allegedly behind it. He had made a life in the overlapping seams of capital and empire, and he knew that the subversion of democracy by force had turned out to be a required part of the job he had chosen. “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers,” Butler would write a year later. “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

And Butler knew another thing that most Americans didn’t: how much they would suffer if anyone did to their democracy what he had done to so many others across the globe.

“Now, about this super-organization,” MacGuire asked the general. “Would you be interested in heading it?”

“I am interested in it, but I do not know about heading it,” Butler told the bond salesman, as he resolved to report everything he had learned to Congress. “I am very greatly interested in it, because, you know, Jerry, my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.”

Eight decades after he publicly revealed his conversations about what became known as the Business Plot, Smedley Butler is no longer a household name. A few history buffs — and a not-inconsiderable number of conspiracy-theory enthusiasts — remember him for his whistleblowing of the alleged fascist coup. Another repository of his memory is kept among modern-day Marines, who learn one detail of his life in boot camp — the two Medals of Honor — and to sing his name along with those of his legendary Marine contemporaries, Dan Daly and Lewis “Chesty” Puller, in a running cadence about devotion to the Corps: “It was good for Smedley Butler/And it’s good enough for me.”

I first encountered the other side of Butler’s legacy in Haiti, after I moved there to be the correspondent for the Associated Press. To Haitians, Butler is no hero. He is remembered by scholars there as the most mechan — corrupt or evil — of the Marines. He helped lead the U.S. invasion of that republic in 1915 and played a singular role in setting up an occupation that lasted nearly two decades. Butler also instigated a system of forced labor, the corvée, in which Haitians were required to build hundreds of miles of roads for no pay, and were killed or jailed if they did not comply. Haitians saw it for what it was: a form of slavery, enraging a people whose ancestors had freed themselves from enslavement and French colonialism over a century before.

Such facts do not make a dent in the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Most Americans prefer to think of ourselves as plucky heroes: the rebels who topple the empire, not the storm troopers running its battle stations. U.S. textbooks — and more importantly the novels, video games, monuments, tourist sites, and films where most people encounter versions of American history — are more often about the Civil War or World War II, the struggles most easily framed in moral certitudes of right and wrong, and in which those fighting under the U.S. flag had the strongest claims to being on the side of good.

“Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.

And it is. It was no coincidence that thousands of young men like Smedley Butler were convinced to sign up for America’s first overseas war of empire on the promise of ending Spanish tyranny and imperialism in Cuba. Brought up as a Quaker on Philadelphia’s Main Line, Butler held on to principles of equality and fairness throughout his life, even as he fought to install and defend despotic regimes all over the world. That tension — between the ideal of the United States as a leading champion of democracy on the one hand and a leading destroyer of democracy on the other — remains the often unacknowledged fault line running through American politics today.

For some past leaders, there was never a tension at all. When the U.S. seized its first inhabited overseas colonies in 1898, some proudly wore the label. “I am, as I expected I would be, a pretty good imperialist,” Theodore Roosevelt mused to a British friend while on safari in East Africa in 1910. But as the costs of full-on annexation became clear, and control through influence and subterfuge became the modus operandi of U.S. empire, American leaders reverted seamlessly back to republican rhetoric.

The denial deepened during the Cold War. In 1955, the historian William Appleman Williams wrote, “One of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American Empire.” It was essential for the conflict against the Soviet Union — “the Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan would call it — to heighten the supposed contrasts: They overthrew governments, we defended legitimate ones; they were expansionist, we went abroad only in defense of freedom.

As long as the United States seemed eternally ascendant, it was easy to tell ourselves, as Americans, that the global dominance of U.S. capital and the unparalleled reach of the U.S. military had been coincidences, or fate; that America’s rise as a cultural and economic superpower was just natural — a galaxy of individual choices, freely made, by a planet hungry for an endless supply of Marvel superheroes and the perfect salty crunch of McDonald’s fries.

But the illusion is fading. The myth of American invulnerability was shattered by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The attempt to recover a sense of dominance resulted in the catastrophic “forever wars” launched in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. The deaths of well over half a million Americans in the coronavirus pandemic, and our seeming inability to halt or contend with the threats of climate change, are further reminders that we can neither accumulate nor consume our way out of a fragile and interconnected world.

As I looked through history to find the origins of the patterns of self-dealing and imperiousness that mark so much of American policy, I kept running into the Quaker Marine with the funny name. Smedley Butler’s military career started in the place where the United States’ overseas empire truly began, and the place that continues to symbolize the most egregious abuses of American power: Guantánamo Bay. His last overseas deployment, in China from 1927 to 1929, gave him a front-row seat to both the start of the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists and the slowly materializing Japanese invasion that would ultimately open World War II.

In the years between, Butler blazed a path for U.S. empire, helping seize the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, and invading and helping plunder Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and more. Butler was also a pioneer of the militarization of police: first spearheading the creation of client police forces across Latin America, then introducing those tactics to U.S. cities during a two-year stint running the Philadelphia police during Prohibition.

Yet Butler would spend the last decade of his life trying to keep the forces of tyranny and violence he had unleashed abroad from consuming the country he loved. He watched the rise of fascism in Europe with alarm. In 1935, Butler published a short book about the collusion between business and the armed forces called War Is a Racket . The warnings in that thin volume would be refined and amplified years later by his fellow general, turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, whose speechwriters would dub it the military-industrial complex.

Late in 1935, Butler would go further, declaring in a series of articles for a radical magazine: “Only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria, and the African attack of Mussolini.”

Butler was not just throwing stones. In that article, he repeatedly called himself a racketeer — a gangster — and enumerated his crimes:

I helped make Mexico and 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 benefit of Wall Street.…

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

Butler was telling a messier story than the ones Americans like to hear about ourselves. But we ignore the past at our peril. Americans may not recognize the events Butler referred to in his confession, but America’s imperial history is well remembered in the places we invaded and conquered — where leaders and elites use it and shape it to their own ends. Nowhere is more poised to use its colonial past to its future advantage than China, once a moribund kingdom in which U.S. forces, twice led by Butler, intervened at will in the early 20th century. As they embark on their own imperial project across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Chinese officials use their self-story of “national humiliation” to position themselves as an antidote to American control, finding willing audiences in countries grappling with their own histories of subjugation by the United States.

The dangers are greater at home. Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-20th-century imperial chestnuts — militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood — with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made, by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.

To those who did not know or have ignored America’s imperial history, it could seem that Trump was an alien force (“This is not who we are,” as the liberal saying goes), or that the implosion of his presidency has made it safe to slip back into comfortable amnesias. But the movement Trump built — a movement that stormed the Capitol, tried to overturn an election, and, as I write these words, still dreams of reinstalling him by force — is too firmly rooted in America’s past to be dislodged without substantial effort. It is a product of the greed, bigotry, and denialism that were woven into the structure of U.S. global supremacy from the beginning — forces that now threaten to break apart not only the empire but the society that birthed it.

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.”

Smedley Butler revealed the Business Plot before a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities. The executive session was held in the supper room of the New York City Bar Association on West 44th Street. Present were the committee chairman, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, and vice chairman, Samuel Dickstein of New York.

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. “He says: ‘You watch. In two or three weeks you will see it come out in the paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera.’” 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.

Among the Liberty League’s principal founders was the multimillionaire Irénée du Pont, former president of the explosives and chemical manufacturing giant. Other backers included the head of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, as well as executives of Phillips Petroleum, Sun Oil, General Foods, and the McCann Erickson ad agency. The former Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and John W. Davis — both of them foes of FDR, the latter counsel to J.P. Morgan & Co. — were among the League’s members as well. Its treasurer was MacGuire’s boss, Grayson Murphy.

Sitting beside Butler in the hearing room was the journalist who wrote the Post article, Paul Comly French. Knowing the committee might find his story hard to swallow — or easy to suppress — Butler had called on the reporter, whom he knew from his time running the Philadelphia police, to conduct his own investigation. French told the congressmen what MacGuire had told him: “We need a fascist government in this country, he insisted, 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.”

MacGuire, the journalist added, had “continually discussed the need of a man on a white horse, as he called it, a dictator who would come galloping in on his white horse. He said that was the only way to save the capitalistic system.”

Butler added one more enticing detail. MacGuire had told him that his group in the plot — presumably a clique headed by Grayson Murphy — was eager to have Butler lead the coup, but that “the Morgan interests” — that is, bankers or businessmen connected to J. P. Morgan & Co. — were against him. “The Morgan interests say you cannot be trusted, that you are too radical and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow,” he said the bond salesman had explained. They preferred a more authoritarian general: Douglas MacArthur.

All of these were, in essence, merely leads. The committee would have to investigate to make the case in full. What evidence was there to show that anyone beside MacGuire, and likely Murphy, had known about the plot? How far had the planning gone? Was Butler — or whoever would lead the coup — to be the “man on a white horse,” or were they simply to pave the way for the dictator who would “save the capitalistic system”?

But the committee’s investigation would be brief and conducted in an atmosphere of overweening incredulity. As soon as Butler’s allegations became public, the most powerful men in media did everything they could to cast doubt on them and the Marine. The New York Times fronted its story with the denials of the accused: Grayson M.P. Murphy called it “a fantasy.” “Perfect moonshine! Too unutterably ridiculous to comment upon!” exclaimed Thomas W. Lamont, the senior partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. “He’d better be damn careful,” said the ex-Army general and ex-FDR administration official Hugh S. Johnson, whom Butler said was mooted as a potential “secretary of general affairs.” “Nobody said a word to me about anything of the kind, and if they did, I’d throw them out the window.”

Douglas MacArthur called it “the best laugh story of the year.”

Time magazine lampooned the allegations in a satire headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” The writer imagined Butler on horseback, spurs clinking, as he led a column of half a million men and bankers up Pennsylvania Avenue. In an unsigned editorial, Adolph Ochs’ New York Times likened Butler to an early-20th-century Prussian con man.

There would only be one other witness of note before the committee. MacGuire spent three days testifying before McCormack and Dickstein, contradicting, then likely perjuring himself. He admitted having met the Croix de Feu in Paris, though he claimed it was in passing at a mass at Notre-Dame. The bond salesman also admitted having met many times with Butler — but insisted, implausibly, that it was Butler who told him he was involved with “some vigilante committee somewhere,” and that the bond salesman had tried to talk him out of it.

There was no further inquiry. The committee was disbanded at the end of 1934. McCormack argued, unpersuasively, that it was not necessary to subpoena Grayson Murphy because the committee already had “cold evidence linking him with this movement.”

“We did not want,” the future speaker of the House added, “to give him a chance to pose as an innocent victim.”

The committee’s final report was both complimentary to Butler and exceptionally vague:

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 but that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

The committee said it had “verified all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.” But it named no one directly in connection with the alleged coup.

Was there a Business Plot? In the absence of a full investigation, it is difficult to say. It seems MacGuire was convinced he was a front man for one. (He would not live long enough to reveal more: Four months after the hearings, the bond salesman died at the age of 37.)

It seems possible that at least some of the alleged principals’ denials were honest. MacGuire’s claim that all the members of the Liberty League were planning to back a coup against Roosevelt does not make it so. The incredulity with which men like Thomas Lamont and Douglas MacArthur greeted the story could be explained by the possibility that they had not heard of such a plan before Butler blew the whistle.

But it is equally plausible that, had Butler not come forward, or had MacGuire approached someone else, the coup or something like it might have been attempted. Several alleged in connection with the plot were avid fans of fascism. Lamont described himself as “something like a missionary” for Mussolini, as he made J.P. Morgan one of fascist Italy’s main overseas banking partners. The American Legion, an alleged source of manpower for the putsch, featured yearly convention greetings from “a wounded soldier in the Great War … his excellency, Benito Mussolini.” The capo del governo himself was invited to speak at the 1930 convention, until the invitation was rescinded amid protests from organized labor.

Hugh S. Johnson, Time ’s 1933 Man of the Year, had lavishly praised the “shining name” of Mussolini and the fascist stato corporativo as models of anti-labor collectivism while running the New Deal’s short-lived National Recovery Administration. Johnson’s firing by FDR from the NRA in September 1934 was predicted by MacGuire, who told Butler the former Army general had “talked too damn much.” (Johnson would later help launch the Nazi-sympathizing America First Committee, though he soon took pains to distance himself from the hardcore antisemites in the group.)

Nothing lends more plausibility to the idea that a coup to sideline Roosevelt was at least discussed — and that Butler’s name was floated to lead it — than the likely involvement of MacGuire’s boss, the banker Grayson M.P. Murphy. The financier’s biography reads like a shadow version of Butler’s. Born in Philadelphia, he transferred to West Point during the war against Spain. Murphy then joined the Military Intelligence Division, running spy missions in the Philippines in 1902 and Panama in 1903. Then he entered the private sector, helping J.P. Morgan conduct “dollar diplomacy” in the Dominican Republic and Honduras. In 1920, Murphy toured war-ravaged Europe to make “intelligence estimates and establish a private intelligence network” with William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan — who would later lead the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. This was the résumé of someone who, at the very least, knew his way around the planning of a coup.

Again, all of that is circumstantial evidence; none of it points definitively to a plan to overthrow the U.S. government. But it was enough to warrant further investigation. So why did no one look deeper at the time? Why was the idea that a president could be overthrown by a conspiracy of well-connected businessmen — and a few armed divisions led by a rabble-rousing general — considered so ridiculous that the mere suggestion was met with peals of laughter across America?

It was because, for decades, Americans had been trained to react in just that way: by excusing, covering up, or simply laughing away all evidence that showed how many of those same people had been behind similar schemes all over the world. Butler had led troops on the bankers’ behalf to overthrow presidents in Nicaragua and Honduras, and gone on a spy run to investigate regime change on behalf of the oil companies in Mexico. He had risked his Marines’ lives for Standard Oil in China and worked with Murphy’s customs agents in an invasion that helped lead to a far-right dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, Butler had done what even the Croix de Feu and its French fascist allies could not: shut down a national assembly at gunpoint.

In his own country, in his own time, Smedley Butler drew a line. “My interest, my one hobby, is maintaining a democracy,” he told the bond salesman. Butler clung to an idea of America as a place where the whole of the people chose their leaders, the “little guy” got a fair shot against the powerful, and everyone could live free from tyranny. It was an idea that had never existed in practice for all, and seldom for most. As long as Americans refused to grasp the reality of what their country actually was — of what their soldiers and emissaries did with their money and in their name all over the world — the idea would remain a self-defeating fairy tale. Still, as long as that idea of America survived, there was a chance its promise might be realized.

The real danger, Butler knew, lay in that idea’s negation. If a faction gained power that exemplified the worst of America’s history and instincts — with a leader willing to use his capital and influence to destroy what semblance of democracy existed for his own ends — that faction could overwhelm the nation’s fragile institutions and send one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen tumbling irretrievably into darkness.

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. Among the thousands who heeded his call were white supremacists, neo-Nazis, devotees of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory, far-right militias, and elements of his most loyal neo-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. “It is time for war,” a speaker at a warm-up rally the night before had declared.

On the rally stage, the defeated president spoke with the everyman style and bluntness of a Smedley Butler. He mirrored the Marine’s rhetoric, too, saying his purpose was to “save our democracy.” But that was not really his goal. Trump, and his faction, wanted to destroy the election — to dismantle democracy rather than cede power to a multiethnic, cross-class majority who had chosen someone else. Trump lied to the thousands in winter coats and “Make America Great Again” hats by claiming he still had a legitimate path to victory. His solution: to intimidate his vice president and Congress into ignoring the Constitution and refusing to certify the election, opening the door for a critical mass of loyal state governments to reverse their constituents’ votes and declare him the winner instead. In this, Trump echoed the French fascists of 1934, who claimed their attack on parliament would defend the popular will against “socialist influence” and “give the nation the leaders it deserves.”

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.”

It was not just Trump’s personal embodiment of fascist logic and authoritarian populism that should have prepared Americans for the Jan. 6 attack. Over a century of imperial violence had laid the groundwork for the siege at the heart of U.S. democracy.

Many of the putschists, including a 35-year-old California woman shot to death by police as she tried to break into the lobby leading to the House floor, were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some wore tactical armor and carried “flex cuffs” — nylon restraints the military and police use for mass arrests of insurgents and dissidents. The QAnon rioters were devotees of a supposed “military intelligence” officer who prophesized, among other things, the imminent detention and execution of liberals at Guantánamo. A Washington Post reporter heard some of the rioters chanting for “military tribunals.”

Even many of those opposed to the insurrection struggled to see what was happening: that the boundaries between the center and the periphery were collapsing. “I expected violent assault on democracy as a U.S. Marine in Iraq. I never imagined it as a United States congressman in America,” Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote as he sheltered in the Capitol complex. George W. Bush, the president who ordered Moulton into Baghdad, observed: “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic.” Watching from home, I wished Smedley Butler was around to remind the former president how those “banana republics” came to be.

A few weeks after the siege, I talked to Butler’s 85-year-old granddaughter, Philippa Wehle. I asked her over Skype what her grandfather would have thought of the events of Jan. 6.

Her hazel eyes narrowed as she pondered: “I think he would have been in there. He would have been in the fray somehow.”

For an unsettling moment, I was unsure what she meant. Butler had much in common with both sides of the siege: Like Trump’s mob, he had often doubted the validity of democracy when practiced by nonwhites. (The most prominent Trumpist conspiracy theories about purported fraud in the 2020 election centered on cities with large immigrant and Black populations.) Like many of the putschists, Butler saw himself as a warrior for the “little guy” against a vast constellation of elite interests — even though he, also like most of the Capitol attackers, was relatively well-off. Moreover, the greatest proportion of veterans arrested in connection with the attempted putsch were Marines. An active-duty Marine major — a field artillery officer at Quantico — was caught on video pushing open the doors to the East Rotunda and accused by federal prosecutors of allowing other rioters to stream in.

But I knew too that Butler had taken his stand for democracy and against the Business Plot. I would like to think he would have seen through Trump as well. Butler had rejected the radio host Father Charles Coughlin’s proto-Trumpian brand of red-baiting, antisemetic conspiratorial populism, going so far as to inform FBI director J. Edgar Hoover of an alleged 1936 effort involving the reactionary priest to overthrow the left-leaning government of Mexico. When a reporter for the Marxist magazine New Masses asked Butler “just where he stood politically” in the wake of the Business Plot, he name-checked several of the most left-leaning members of Congress, and said the only group he would give his “blanket approval to” was the American Federation of Labor. Butler added that he would not only “die to preserve democracy” but also, crucially, “fight to broaden it.”

Perhaps it would have come down to timing: at what point in his life the attack on the government might have taken place.

“Do you think he would have been with the people storming the Capitol?” I asked Philippa, tentatively.

This time she answered immediately. “No! Heavens no. He would have been trying to do something about it.” He might have been killed, she added, given that the police were so unprepared. “Which is so disturbing, because of course they should have known. They would have known. They only had to read the papers.”

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The Conspiratorial Business Plot of 1933

This would-be coup aimed to overthrow FDR.

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, one-time Commander of the U.S. Marines, and Senator Homer T. Bone. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The year 1933 saw several consequential worldwide events brewing. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Engelbert Dollfuss dissolved the Austrian parliament and assumed dictatorial powers as Chancellor of Austria. Alejandro Lerroux came to power in the Spanish general election, igniting a brief and bloody insurrection attempt committed by the anarchist National Confederation of Trabajo.

Across the Atlantic, a similar insurgency attempted to destabilize the United States earlier that year. The Business Plot of 1933 was a failed attempt to overthrow FDR and install a dictator. And it was not led by a fringe group of working-class radicals, but covertly bankrolled by a Wall Street coalition of affluent businessmen.

Related: The Importance of FDR’s Fireside Chats

Leading up to the Business Plot, Western powers had been scrambling to alleviate the devastating effects of the 1929 stock market crash on tens of millions of workers. At the time, Farm Bureau Federation president Edward O'Neal famously told a Senate committee that "unless something is done for the American farmer, we will have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months."

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Thousands of unemployed World War I veterans were among those stifled by the Depression and the limited government intervention. In July 17 1932, tens of thousands of veterans and their families descended on Washington, D.C. to set up tent camps and demand immediate payment of the bonuses promised to them by the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924.

The veterans were dubbed th e Bonus Army by t he media, and after 11 days, US Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered that they be removed from all government property. Resistance ensued.

Major General Smedley Butler, a popular and decorated military figure at the time, appeared at the Bonus Army marches. Butler had emerged as a fervent public advocate against capitalist exploitation of the masses by that point. In the 1932 presidential election, he backed Roosevelt over Hoover.

Related: Black Tuesday: 1929's Stock Market Crash Signaled the Great Depression's Start

Many conservative businessmen were upset by Roosevelt's election because of his campaign promise to have the government provide jobs for the unemployed. Wealthy businessmen were concerned that he would introduce reckless spending and economic socialism. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, which addressed almost every sector of the economy in the form of regulations, social programs, and financial reforms, made him an ever-growing problem in the eyes of big business and banks.

Furthermore, the United States' adherence to the gold standard deteriorated with the onset of the Great Depression, even after Western European countries abandoned it. Roosevelt officially removed the United States from the gold standard when he signed the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which made most forms of gold illegal for the general public to possess. The end of the gold standard was said to have shocked Wall Street because they saw a currency that was not solidly backed by gold as inflationary, undermining both private and business fortunes. The 1973 book The Plot to Seize the White House notes that “Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist out to destroy private enterprise by sapping the gold backing of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.”

Smedley Butler in uniform.

This formidable class of disproportionate money and influence began plotting to take action for their grievances, a scheme that finally unraveled before public eyes in November 1934. In a series of allegations, General Smedley Butler revealed the existence of a political conspiracy by business leaders to depose President Roosevelt. A special House committee heard his testimony in private.

Butler testified under oath that Gerald P. MacGuire approached him about leading a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers funded by $300 million provided by a group of wealthy businessmen. MacGuire, a bond salesman with Grayson M-P Murphy & Co. and a member of the Connecticut American Legion, told Butler that he was to lead this coup d'état to overthrow the United States government and replace it with a system more favorable to big business interests.

According to Butler, Roosevelt was to be deposed and replaced by General Hugh S. Johnson, former head of the National Recovery Administration, with the J.P. Morgan banking firm financing the plot. The number of veterans outnumbered active duty service members at the time, and it was thought that such a large force could swiftly pull off a coup of that magnitude.

Related: 17 Remarkable Books About the Great Depression

Butler and MacGuire's meetings began in July 1933 and lasted until the first half of 1934. MacGuire's initial proposal seemed innocent; he asked Butler to run for National Commander of the American Legion, a well-known veterans' organization. When MacGuire steered the conversation toward getting the American Legion to pass a resolution in favor of restoring the gold standard, Butler’s suspicions grew. According to Butler, MacGuire's reasoning was that the gold standard was a veterans' issue because their bonuses would be "worthless paper'' if the currency was not backed by gold.

Eventually, MacGuire revealed the extent of the true plot to Butler. In return for his participation, Butler's mortgage and his children's college education would be paid for. MacGuire allegedly told Butler's former personal secretary that the plot's conspirators would meet at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention to plan their next steps, which Butler passed on to Veterans of Foreign Wars commander James E. Van Zandt.

Butler alleged that the entire scheme was backed by a new conservative lobbying group called the American Liberty League. This group included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont, and the CEOs of General Motors, Birds Eye, and General Foods, among others, with nearly $40 billion in assets—equivalent to $778 billion today.

In addition, the list of alleged conspirators included former presidential candidate John W. Davis, J. P. Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont, Prescott Bush, and numerous military leaders. Butler named Bill Doyle, the commander of the Massachusetts American Legion, as a co-conspirator, as Doyle apparently attended the first few meetings. Butler also gave the name Robert Sterling Clerk, who served as a second lieutenant under Butler during the Boxer Rebellion in China. He came from a wealthy family and was the heir to the Singer Corporation fortune, earning him the nickname "the millionaire lieutenant."

Instead of following through with MacGuire’s instructions and personal favors, Butler turned to the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in the fall of 1934.

All parties alleged to be involved, however, publicly denied Butler's story, dismissing it as a joke, fantasy, or slander. But Butler, a distinguished veteran and two-time Medal of Honor recipient, was the most decorated Marine in US history at the time and had no apparent motive to lie.

Related: Enriching FDR Biographies that Explore the President's Impactful Life and Legacy

After hearing Butler out and collecting additional information, the congressional committee informed Congress it “had received evidence 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.”

There were no further investigations or prosecutions. At the time, the plot was completely dismissed by the news media, with a New York Times editorial calling it a "gigantic hoax" and a "bald and unconvincing narrative." However, the publication swiftly changed its tune after the congressional committee released its last report. Today, most historians agree that the Business Plot was real. The only question is whether it was ever as close to execution as Butler claimed, or if it was merely a harebrained scheme brought up in discussions that never gained traction.

Butler was well-known for his book War Is a Racket , published shortly after the events of the Business Plot, in which he stated that he had named names, and that those names had been removed from his testimony before it was released to the public. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify,” he stated in a radio interview.

Sources: History.com , Time magazine , BBC , Washington Post

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clock This article was published more than 3 years ago

Wealthy bankers and businessmen plotted to overthrow FDR. A retired general foiled it.

The consternation had been growing in the months between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration, but his elimination of the gold standard in April 1933 infuriated some of the country’s wealthiest men.

Titans of banking and business worried that if U.S. currency wasn’t backed by gold, inflation could skyrocket and make their millions worthless. Why, they could end up as poor as most everyone else was during the Great Depression .

So, according to the sworn congressional testimony of a retired general, they decided to overthrow the government and install a dictator who was more business friendly. After all, they reasoned, that had been working well in Italy.

How close this fascist cabal got, and who exactly was in on it, are still subjects of historical debate. But as the dust settles after the pro-Trump attack on the U.S. Capitol , and as it becomes clearer how close lawmakers came to catastrophe, the similarities to the Business Plot are hard to ignore.

Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control

“The nation has never been at a potential brink as it was then up until, I think, now,” said Sally Denton, author of the book “ The Plots against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right .”

Smedley D. Butler was a highly decorated Marine Corps general who had received the Medal of Honor twice. He was beloved by his men before his retirement, and more so afterward when he spoke in support of the Bonus Army ’s fight for early bonus payments for World War I service.

“He was wildly popular and was an outspoken critic of fascism and Mussolini at a time when there was really an impulse toward that throughout the world, including in the United States,” Denton said.

Given his opposition to fascism, Butler might not have seemed like a good fit for the job of coup leader, but his support from veterans was more important to the Wall Street plotters. At the time, there were many more veterans than active-duty service members; if someone could summon them as a force of 500,000 to march on Washington, the government could fall without a shot being fired.

The scariest moment of a presidential transition: Six gunshots fired at FDR

In the summer of 1933, a bond broker and American Legion member named Gerald MacGuire approached Butler and tried to convince him that it would be in the Bonus Army veterans’ interests to demand their payments in gold. He then offered to send Butler and a group of veterans on a lavish speaking trip, all expenses paid, in support of the gold standard.

Butler was suspicious about where the money was coming from but strung MacGuire along over several months to glean more information. Eventually, MacGuire laid it all out: He was working for a group of mega-rich businessmen with access to $300 million to bankroll a coup. They would plant stories in the press about Roosevelt being overwhelmed and in bad health. Once Butler’s army rolled in, a “Secretary of General Affairs” would be installed to handle the real governance, while Roosevelt would be reduced to cutting ribbons and such. And they would take care of Butler, too.

Additionally, they “offered college educations for his children and his mortgage paid off,” Denton said. “A lot of people would have taken it.”

But Butler wanted to know who these businessmen offering him money and power were. According to the BBC radio show “ Document ,” MacGuire told him they would announce themselves shortly.

A few weeks later, news of a new conservative lobbying group called the American Liberty League broke. Its members included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont and the CEOs of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods, among others. Together they held near $40 billion in assets, Denton said — about $778 billion today.

Had Butler been a different sort of person and gone along with the plot, Denton thinks it would have been successful. Instead, in the fall of 1934, he went to J. Edgar Hoover, head of what would become the FBI. Congressional hearings were launched to investigate possible fascist sympathizers.

Details of the plot soon leaked to the press, who mocked Butler and declared it all a “ gigantic hoax .” If Butler wasn’t making it all up, journalists declared, then surely MacGuire was just a prankster fooling him.

The committee never released a report, but it told Congress it “had received evidence 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.”

Butler — who later published a book, “War Is a Racket,” in which he lamented that all the military conflicts he had ever been involved in were fought to benefit “millionaires and billionaires” — was somewhat vindicated. But he claimed that he had named names, and those names had been removed from his testimony that was released to the public. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify,” he said in a radio interview.

The committee maintained the names were kept under wraps until they could be investigated and verified. But no further investigation was ever conducted.

According to journalist John Buchanan , speaking to the BBC in 2007, that was probably because Roosevelt struck a deal with the backers of the plot: They could avoid treason charges — and possible execution — if they backed off their opposition to the New Deal. Denton thinks the press may have ignored the report at the urging of the government, which didn’t want the public to know how precarious things might have been.

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Sally Denton is also the author of The Pink Lady , American Massacre and The Bluegrass Conspiracy . Ursula Coyote/Bloomsbury hide caption

It 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 Considered host 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."

The True Story That Inspired 'Amsterdam'

The comedy thriller retells the almost-forgotten Business Plan: a shadowy operation that attempted coup d'etat on American soil.

The Big Picture

American history is often ambiguous and depends on perspective. The film Amsterdam attempts to retell an obscure episode in US history known as The Business Plot.
The 1930s were a serious and tumultuous time in America. The Great Depression caused widespread unemployment and hardship, while FDR's New Deal faced opposition from the upper class.
The Business Plot involved a covert political conspiracy to overthrow FDR. General Smedley Butler played a key role in uncovering the plot, and wealthy bond broker Gerald MacGuire was implicated.

Most American history is ambiguous. Compare Howard Zinn ’s The People’s History of the United States to any high school history textbook circulating in American public schools. Like the Banana Wars or the invention of the telephone, history depends on perspective and who’s telling it. The new film Amsterdam , starring Christian Bale , John David Washington , Margot Robbie , and Robert De Niro , attempts to retell an obscure episode in American history known as The Business Plot – a covert political conspiracy hedged to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt . Set in the early 1930s, seldom is this event included in history textbooks. Although director David O. Russell claimed the film covers “A lot of [what] really happened,” Amsterdam is more of a voyeurism exercise than a history lesson.

In the 1930s, three friends witness a murder, are framed for it, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history.

What Was America Like in the 1930s?

The film provides little context for how serious the times were during 1933. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The first thousand bullets were fired from a machine gun in Japan. In America, The Depression birthed hard times. The US reeled to rehabilitate its economy, which tanked after the 1929 stock market crash. Unemployment ballooned by 1933 with an estimated 15 million people losing their jobs. In Detroit, The Ford Motor Company, which in the spring of 1929 had employed 128,000 workers, cut over 90,000 jobs by August 1931 . Destitution and the Dust Bowl rocked blue-collar America. From Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri, over 300,000 flocked to California . Middle-class neighborhoods were abandoned and “Hoovervilles” sprung up in garbage dumps across the country. The leer of Florence Owens Thompson was ingrained in the nation for generations to come.

The film also doesn’t mention the state of the First World War veterans of the time, who were now jobless and incapable of feeding their families. In the spring and summer of 1932, up to 20,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington , later coined the Bonus Army, waving government bonus certificates, not due for years in the future, demanding Congress pay them off now. The unrest culminated in the 1932 presidential election, where Franklin D. Roosevelt won in a landslide over then-president Herbert Hoover .

This 1930s Film Was the First Comic Movie Nominated for Best Picture

FDR campaigned on the idea that Americans “needed a new deal" and upon election, summoned Congress into a 100-day special session , in which Roosevelt presented and passed a series of 15 major bills, as well as 76 separate laws. Distress swelled for the capitalists in America as Roosevelt's bills were passed over the “Hundred Days.” Executives, bank titans, and the upper class rejected most of FDR’s policies , begrudging reckless social spending would lead to a ballooned welfare budget. Perhaps the contention reached its height in April 1933 when Roosevelt eliminated the gold standard . Wall Street and wealthy businessmen panicked, asserting if U.S. currency wasn’t backed by gold, inflation could skyrocket, and leave their millions worthless.

What Was the "Business Plot"?

Throughout the film, details on the scheme itself are kept ambiguous with most of the film focusing on the atmosphere of the times . Even the main trio of characters played by Bale, Washington, and Robbie are completely made up, nor are the real-life inspirations directly tied to the real-life Business Plot. Robert De Niro’s character is closest to reality, playing General Gill Dillenbeck. The character is inspired by Smedley Butler, a dedicated Marine Corps general. In the film, Dillenbeck is portrayed wearing replicas of Butler's baby-blue, star-spangled ribbons, honors he received after his WWI service. De Niro also captures the gravity of this moment in Butler’s life, as he was the main component in unraveling The Business Plot. At the time, Butler was a fervent public figure in the fight for the veterans, even publicly supporting the Bonus Army . Wall Street executives viewed his alliance with the 500,000-strong veterans as a potential political demographic that, if focused carefully, could help bolster the favor of remaining on the gold standard.

Enter Gerald MacGuire, the only character who kept his real name. In the film he’s subtle, holding a briefcase, and gabbing in the background with the "Dillenbecks." In real life, MacGuire was a wealthy bond broker who approached Butler in the summer of 1933 . According to Butler, their meetings seemed innocuous at first with MacGuire proposing Butler run for National Commander of the American Legion. In later meetings, the proposals became exuberant, offering all-expenses-paid trips for Butler and other veterans to fly around the country for speaking conferences, pushing audiences to vote for the gold standard. As the offers grew so did Butler’s suspicions and, in November 1934, Butler met with FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and made a series of allegations against MacGuire, his associates, and their overthrow scheme.

'Amsterdam' Takes Liberties With the Real Life Plot

The film opens with this event portraying De Niro’s character publicly whistleblowing to reveal the scheme to the public. Then, an assassination attempt dismantles the speech and kick-starts the plot. None of this happened. In fact, when these allegations became public in 1934, Butler later testified in front of a House Committee that the group approached him to band the veterans together and lead a coup against Roosevelt, replacing him with a “Secretary of General Affairs.” This position would oversee major policy decisions while lending Roosevelt as a mere public figure. According to The Washington Post , in return for staging the coup, Butler was promised, “college educations for his children and his mortgage paid off.” According to The Washington Post , Butler also alleged the group was backed by a $300 million slush fund, raised by a conservative lobby called American Liberty League . Members of that lobby included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont, and the CEOs of General Motors and General Foods.

According to The Washington Post , ultimately, the committee found, “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.” However, no one was arrested, and no other investigations resulted from the Committee. And similarly, in the film, Butler was openly mocked by mainstream media outlets, particularly The New York Times rendering Butler’s accusations as, “bald and unconvincing narratives”. Today, most historians believe the event happened, but questions remain as to how close the plan was from unfolding.

Amsterdam is available to rent or buy on Apple TV+

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January 4, 2023

Considering History , History

Considering History: The 1933 Business Plot to Overthrow America

In 1933, a group on businessmen conspired to unseat President Roosevelt and overthrow the government. One man stopped them.

Ben Railton

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This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column contains spoilers for the new film Amsterdam .

Toward the climax of director and screenwriter David O. Russell’s new historical drama Amsterdam (2022), Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) narrates a line that is not only central to the film’s plot and themes, but also one of the most telling quotes in recent American film history. Burt and his friends have begun to uncover the shadowy and sinister plan at the film’s center, a plan by powerful moneyed figures to overthrow the president of the United States and replace him with an unelected dictator. And Burt asks both himself and the audience, in the voiceover narration to which the film returns frequently, “What’s more un-American than a dictatorship built by American business?”

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Amsterdam pulls together, fictionalizes, and at times troublingly misrepresents a number of threads from the 1930s and early 20 th century American history. But that sinister plan is based on very real 1933 histories: the so-called Business Plot. Those histories reveal that Burt’s quote is both profoundly wrong and inspiringly right about the battle for American identity and ideals.

Given the entirely justified recent attention to the history of American coups, past and present , it’s quite striking that the 1933 Business Plot isn’t yet better known ( Gangsters of Capitalism , a 2022 book by Jonathan Katz, who also wrote the Rolling Stone article “ The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools ,” is the place to begin learning a lot more). A group of prominent American businessmen , featuring such noteworthy figures as Robert Sterling Clark and Prescott Bush, had become dissatisfied with newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt’s responses to the Great Depression, including both government programs to counter unemployment (which these figures saw as creeping socialism) and the end of the gold standard for U.S. currency (which threatened their own wealth). These men and their allies began planning for a possible coup , supported by the military and based on the rationalization that Roosevelt’s physical infirmities made him unable to perform presidential duties.

So contrary to Burt’s quote, such a plan was conceived and could indeed have happened here in America. A main reason it did not was because of the man whom the plotters approached to serve as that unelected dictator: General Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940). At the time of his death Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history , having commanded the 13 th Regiment in World War I as well as serving in countless other military actions in the Philippines, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Haiti. But by the 1930s he had become disillusioned with both war and the U.S. government, delivering a series of impassioned speeches to veterans’ groups and other audiences that became the basis for his subsequent book War Is a Racket (1935). Perhaps those speeches and his increasingly anti-authoritarian views led the Business Plot leaders to assume that Butler would be on their side in opposing and helping overthrow the government.

Butler apparently shared the fictional Burt’s sentiments about the profoundly un-American nature of such plans, however. After leading the conspiracy’s members along for a time in an effort to learn more about their intentions, in November 1934 Butler began testifying about the plot to the House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (also known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee ). At first Butler’s claims were largely dismissed in the media, with the New York Times referring to the idea as nothing more than a “gigantic hoax.” But when the committee released its report in February 1935, after more than two months of testimony and other committee hearings and investigations, Time magazine noted that “a two-month investigation had convinced [the committee] that General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true” and that the committee “also alleged that definite proof had been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Butler, … was actually contemplated.”

Butler refused to lead and instead exposed that proposed march on Washington. Ironically, just a year earlier, he had supported a very different march on the nation’s capital. In the summer of 1932, a group of World War I veterans calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force marched from around the country to Washington, seeking long-delayed (and in the depths of the Depression, desperately needed) compensation for their military service. The participants in this “Bonus Army ” would camp in the city’s Anacostia Flats area for weeks, where they were visited and addressed by none other than Smedley Butler. Indeed, Butler and his son Thomas ate and spent the night with the veterans, and the next morning he gave an impassioned speech to the Bonus Army, calling them fine soldiers, praising their cause, and noting that they had every right to protest and lobby the government on its behalf. Unfortunately the Hoover Administration disagreed , and soon after Butler’s visit, the marchers were violently evicted and their camp was burned down. But in 1933 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (who had also visited the camp) offered them jobs with the newly created CCC. Amsterdam also incorporates the story of the Bonus Army; Burt and his friends are veterans themselves and advocates for veterans who had attended the 1932 Bonus March.

Both the Business Plot’s proposed march and the Bonus Army’s achieved one were tellingly part of 1932-33 America, so I can’t entirely agree with Burt’s perspective that “What’s more un-American than a dictatorship built by American business?” That alliance of business and Fascism ( abroad and at home ) was a frustratingly central element of America in the 1930s . But at the same time, in the battle for America, I entirely agree with Smedley Butler — that the Bonus Army represents the best of America, in direct contrast to such creeping Fascism. As this film helps remind us, those battles are crucial parts of our past and entirely ongoing in our present.

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Read Phillip Roth’s Novel, “Plot Against America,” probably based upon these historical facts!

Big Business has gotten its dictatorship in the last forty years, hasn’t it? The Democrat, Clinton, could have reversed much of it, but instead became its ally and advocate.

Smedley Butler’s revelation of the plot has been validated and accurately portrays the intention of the coup – to install a corporate-fascist dictatorship. My disagreement is that in no document I have read did it indicate that the plotters were looking to install Butler a in any political post. His role was to get the military forces (500,000) on board; he was chosen because he had the most loyalty and support of that group than anyone.

The most interesting fact in the “Fascists Plot” was the investigation only took two months with nothing more than testimonies. The most recent attempt to overthrow the government with video of the actual event and criminal prosecutions has gone on for two years. Even more alarming is the Congressional response is to conduct investigations against the minority party and no action on the results of the January investigation.

Business Plot -recruit half a million veterans into private army to overthrow government. I suspect the main source of it was Butler’s imagination following some wild talk!

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The Secret Economy of Conspiracy Theories

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Why do so many people love conspiracy theories and who’s profiting from spreading them? A special collaboration with Common Sense Education .

TEACHERS: Get your students in the discussion on KQED Learn, a safe place for middle and high school students to investigate controversial topics and share their voices. Click to see this video and lesson plan on KQED Learn .

What is a conspiracy theory?

Conspiracy theories are often defined as a belief that a group of people have a secret plot and are responsible for something happening. The theory part is that it’s unproven. Actual conspiracies are proven to be true with documented proof. And actual conspiracies exist, such as the FBI spying on Martin Luther King. There are FBI documents that prove this. Conspiracy theories don’t have actual proof; believers often point to misinformation as proof, or use the lack of proof as evidence of how good the coverup for the conspiracy is. Conspiracy theories can range from mostly harmless to harmful ones that promote hate or deny some form of reality.

Why do people love conspiracy theories?

Conspiracy theories can provide our brains with easy answers that jive with our preconceived notions and biases. They tend to appeal to “System One” thinking: our emotions, intuition, and gut reactions. According to psychologists, conspiracy theories play into some of our innate human desires, like the desire for certainty, security, and belonging. They tend to pop up in times of crisis.

Who’s profiting from conspiracy theories?

Conspiracy theories make the perfect clickbait. They can go wild on social media–making big profits for social media companies and media creators. A lot of that money comes from ad revenue. And media creators can use their views and popularity to sell other merch and products too–profiting even more off the conspiracy theories they are pushing. And when it comes to politics, politicians can push conspiracy theories to stoke fear and gain popularity. This has been happening for a long time in the U.S. In the past, it’s usually been a leader of a majority group claiming that some minority group is plotting against them. More recently, a lot of the conspiracy theories pushed by politicians are about the U.S. government and opposing political parties.

How can you prevent yourself from falling for conspiracy theories?

One way could be to just stop and think more deeply about a theory that you’ve come across, before liking or sharing. Cognitive reflection is your ability to override your emotions and gut reactions by stopping and thinking more carefully about something. Research shows that people who score high in cognitive reflection are less prone to falling for conspiracy theories on social media.

The Internet Fuels Conspiracy Theories… (The Conversation)

Why People Fall for Conspiracy Theories (FiveThirtyEight)

Why Some People Are Susceptible to Conspiracy Theories (Washington Post)

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories (Current Directions in Psychological Sciences)

Thinking Preferences and Conspiracy Belief (Front Psychiatry)

The Anti-Vaxx Industry (Center for Countering Digital Hate)

The Conspiracy and Disinformation Challenge on e-Commerce Platforms (Brookings Institution)

Social Media, Cognitive Reflection and Conspiracy Beliefs (Frontiers in Political Science)

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In small-town Wisconsin, looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory

Executive Senior Editor Steve Bonta, left, and former writer Daniel Natal, with the John Birch Society’s New American magazine, film a live broadcast at the organization’s headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. Back when the Cold War was looming and TV was still mostly in black and white, the Society was a powerful presence in American life. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Art Thompson, a retired John Birch Society CEO, right, and current CEO Bill Hahn, left, are reflected in a poster of George Washington hanging in Hahn’s office during an interview at the organization’s headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. At the John Birch Society, nearly everything is seen through the lens of a conspiracy that they believe reaches around the globe and deep into the heart of America. George Washington escaped the conspiracy more than 200 years ago, according to Society lore, when thugs under its command tried to hang him and seize control of the nascent U.S. government. (AP Photo/David Goldman

CEO Bill Hahn points to an old family photo of John Birch Society founder, Robert Welch, which hangs in a basement corridor connecting two buildings at their headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Pamphlets and brochures are displayed at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A chair sits at the end of a row of file cabinets at a library in the John Birch Society headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A portrait of John Birch Society founder, Robert Welch, hangs behind CEO Bill Hahn, left, and Art Thompson, a retired Society president, at the organization’s headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. “As Mr. Welch came out with on Day One: There is a conspiracy,” Hahn says. “It’s no different today than it was back in December 1958.” (AP Photo/David Goldman)

CEO Bill Hahn watches a live broadcast from a production booth at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

CEO Bill Hahn points to articles of the Constitution in his office during an interview at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Boxes of John Birch Society literature waiting to be distributed pamphlets and reports on a range of issues from COVID to inflation are stored in a warehouse at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Art Thompson, a retired John Birch Society CEO, left, speaks during an interview with current CEO Bill Hahn at the organization’s headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. Former President Donald Trump would never have never have been elected if the Birch Society hadn’t paved the way for him, says Thompson, an important figure inside the group. “The bulk of of Trump’s campaign was Birch,” Thompson says proudly. “All he did was bring it out into the open.” (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Wayne Morrow, vice president of the John Society, walks past a world map hanging in a warehouse storing the organization’s literature, stickers and buttons at its headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. “We have a bad reputation. You know, “You guys are insane,” says Morrow, standing in the warehouse amid 10-foot shelves of Birch literature waiting to be distributed. “But all the things that we wrote about are coming to pass.” (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A portrait of John Birch hangs in an office cubicle at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. The once-powerful John Birch Society is largely forgotten today, relegated to a pair of squat buildings along a busy commercial street in small-town Wisconsin. But that is only part of their story. Because outside those cramped little offices is a national political landscape that the Society helped forge. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

An employee walks through a library at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Historical photos hang along a basement corridor connecting two buildings of the John Birch Society at their headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A mission statement of the John Birch Society hangs above printed literature stored in a warehouse at their headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

The John Birch Society headquarters stands across from a restaurant on a commercial street in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

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APPLETON, Wis. (AP) — The decades fall away as you open the front doors.

It’s the late 1950s in the cramped little offices — or maybe the pre-hippie 1960s. It’s a place where army-style buzz cuts are still in fashion, communism remains the primary enemy and the decor is dominated by American flags and portraits of once-famous Cold Warriors.

At the John Birch Society, they’ve been waging war for more than 60 years against what they’re sure is a vast, diabolical conspiracy. As they tell it, it’s a plot with tentacles that reach from 19th-century railroad magnates to the Biden White House, from the Federal Reserve to COVID vaccines.

Long before QAnon , Pizzagate and the modern crop of politicians who will happily repeat apocalyptic talking points , there was Birch. And outside these cramped small-town offices is a national political landscape that the Society helped shape.

FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2016 file photo, Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., surrenders to police in Washington. Welch is set to be sentenced Thursday at a hearing in federal court in Washington. (Sathi Soma via AP, File)

“We have a bad reputation. You know: ‘You guys are insane,’” says Wayne Morrow, a Society vice president. He is standing in the group’s warehouse amid 10-foot (3-meter) shelves of Birch literature waiting to be distributed.

“But all the things that we wrote about are coming to pass.”

Back when the Cold War loomed and TV was still mostly in black and white, the John Birch Society mattered. There were dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and meetings with powerful politicians. There was a headquarters on each coast, a chain of bookstores, hundreds of local chapters, radio shows, summer camps for members’ children.

A chair sits at the end of a row of file cabinets at a library in the John Birch Society headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Well-funded and well-organized, they sent forth fevered warnings about a secret communist plot to take over America. It made them heroes to broad swaths of conservatives, even as they became a punchline to a generation of comedians.

“They created this alternative political tradition,” says Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and author of “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.” He says it forged a right-wing culture that fell, at first, well outside mainstream Republican politics.

Conspiracy theories have a long history in the United States, going back at least to 1800, when secret forces were said to be backing Thomas Jefferson’s presidential bid. It was a time when such talk moved slowly, spread through sermons, letters and tavern visits.

No more. Fueled by social media and the rise of celebrity conspiracists, the last two decades have seen ever-increasing numbers of Americans lose faith in everything from government institutions to journalism. And year after year, ideas once relegated to fringe newsletters, little-known websites and the occasional AM radio station pushed their way into the mainstream.

CEO Bill Hahn points to articles of the Constitution in his office during an interview at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Today, outlandish conspiracy theories are quoted by more than a few U.S. senators, and millions of Americans believe the COVID pandemic was orchestrated by powerful elites. Prominent cable news commentators speak darkly of government agents seizing citizens off the streets.

But the John Birch Society itself is largely forgotten, relegated to a pair of squat buildings along a busy commercial street in small-town Wisconsin.

So why even take note of it today? Because many of its ideas — from anger at a mysterious, powerful elite to fears that America’s main enemy was hidden within the country, biding its time — percolated into pockets of American culture over the last half-century. Those who came later simply out-Birched the Birchers. Says Dallek: “Their successors were politically savvier and took Birch ideas and updated them for contemporary politics.”

The result has been a new political terrain. What was once at the edges had worked its way toward the heart of the discourse.

To some, the fringe has gone all the way to the White House. In the Society’s offices, they’ll tell you that Donald Trump would never have been elected if they hadn’t paved the way.

Boxes of John Birch Society literature waiting to be distributed pamphlets and reports on a range of issues from COVID to inflation are stored in a warehouse at the headquarters of the John Birch Society in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

“The bulk of Trump’s campaign was Birch,” Art Thompson, a retired Society CEO who remains one of its most prominent voices, says proudly. “All he did was bring it out into the open.”

There’s some truth in that, even if Thompson is overstating things.

The Society had spent decades calling for a populist president who would preach patriotism, oppose immigration, pull out of international treaties and root out the forces trying to undermine America. Trump may not have realized it, but when he warned about a “Deep State” — a supposed cabal of bureaucrats that secretly controls U.S. policy — he was repeating a longtime Birch talking point.

A savvy reality TV star, Trump capitalized on a conservative political landscape that had been shaped by decades of right-wing talk radio, fears about America’s seismic cultural shifts and the explosive online spread of misinformation.

While the Birch Society echoes in that mix, tracing those echoes is impossible. It’s hard to draw neat historical lines in American politics. Was the Society a prime mover, or a bit player? In a nation fragmented by social media and offshoot groups by the dozens, there’s just no way to be sure. What is certain, though, is this:

“The conspiratorial fringe is now the conspiratorial mainstream,” says Paul Matzko, a historian and research fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “Right-wing conspiracism has simply outgrown the John Birch Society.”

Their beliefs skip along the surface of the truth, with facts and rumors and outright fantasies banging together into a complex mythology. “The great conspiracy” is what Birch Society founder Robert Welch called it in “The Blue Book,” the collection of his writings and speeches still treated as near-mystical scripture in the Society’s corridors.

Wayne Morrow, vice president of the John Society, walks past a world map hanging in a warehouse storing the organization's literature, stickers and buttons at its headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022. "We have a bad reputation. You know, "You guys are insane," says Morrow, standing in the warehouse amid 10-foot shelves of Birch literature waiting to be distributed. "But all the things that we wrote about are coming to pass." (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Welch, a wealthy candy company executive, formed the Society in the late 1950s, naming it for an American missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communist Chinese forces. Welch viewed Birch as the first casualty of the Cold War. Communist agents, he said, were everywhere in America.

Welch shot to prominence, and infamy, when he claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero general of World War II, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Also under Kremlin control, Welch asserted: the secretary of state, the head of the CIA, and Eisenhower’s younger brother Milton.

Subtlety has never been a strong Birch tradition. Over the decades, the Birch conspiracy grew to encompass the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, public education, the United Nations, the civil rights movement, The Rockefeller Foundation, the space program, the COVID pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and climate-change activism. In short, things the Birchers don’t like.

The plot’s leaders — “insiders,” in Society lexicon — range from railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt to former President George H.W. Bush and Bill Gates, whose vaccine advocacy is, they say, part of a plan to control the global population. While his main focus was always communism, Welch eventually came to believe that the conspiracy’s roots twisted far back into history, to the Illuminati , an 18th-century Bavarian secret society.

By the 1980s, the Society was well into its decline. Welch died in 1985 and the society’s reins passed to a series of successors. There were internal revolts. While its aura has waned, it is still a force among some conservatives — its videos are popular in parts of right-wing America, and its offices include a sophisticated basement TV studio for internet news reports. Its members speak at right-wing conferences and work booths at the occasional county fair.

Scholars say its ranks are far reduced from the 1960s and early 1970s, when membership estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. “Membership is something that has been closely guarded since day one,” says Bill Hahn, who became CEO in 2020. He will only say the organization “continues to be a growing operation.”

Today, the Society frames itself as almost conventional. Almost.

“We have succeeded in attracting mainstream people,” says Steve Bonta, a top editor for the Society’s New American magazine. The group has toned down the rhetoric and is a little more careful these days about throwing around accusations of conspiracies. But members still believe in them fiercely.

“As Mr. Welch came out with on Day One: There is a conspiracy,” Hahn says. “It’s no different today than it was back in December 1958.”

It can feel that way. Ask about the conspiracy’s goal, and things swerve into unexpected territory. The sharp rhetoric re-emerges and, once again, the decades seem to fall away.

“They really want to cut back on the population of the Earth. That is their intent,” Thompson says.

“Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it?” he responds. “It makes no sense. But that’s the way they think.”

Follow AP National Writer Tim Sullivan on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ByTimSullivan

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What is the Crime of Conspiracy?

Conspiracy involves an agreement between individuals to commit a crime. Conspiracy is a separate charge or crime than the crime agreed to by the parties.

What is required to prove a Conspiracy?

In a conspiracy, each member becomes the agent of the other member(s).

Each person in the conspiracy does not have to know all of the details.

Each person simply needs to understand that the plan is illegal and knowingly and willfully join in that plan on one occasion.

The conspiracy or conspired act does not have to be successful.

The formal elements of a conspiracy charge are as follows:

Multiple People - There must be 2 or more persons.
Mutual Understanding - In some way or manner, these people must come to a mutual understanding to try to accomplish a common and unlawful plan.
Willfulness - The defendant must willfully become a member of the conspiracy.
Overt Act - During the existence of the conspiracy, one of the conspirators must knowingly commit at least one of the overt acts described in the indictment (formal charge).
Purposeful Act - The overt act was knowingly committed in an effort to carry out or accomplish some objective of the conspiracy.

The essence of a conspiracy offense is the making of an agreement followed by the commission of any overt act in furtherance of that agreement.

While direct evidence is preferable, circumstantial evidence may be used to prove a conspiracy.

Whales Have an Alphabet

Until the 1960s, it was uncertain whether whales made any sounds at all..

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Carl Zimmer

Produced by Alex Stern , Stella Tan , Sydney Harper and Nina Feldman

Edited by MJ Davis Lin

Original music by Elisheba Ittoop , Dan Powell , Marion Lozano , Sophia Lanman and Pat McCusker

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher the lyrics.

But sperm whales don’t produce the eerie melodies sung by humpback whales, sounds that became a sensation in the 1960s. Instead, sperm whales rattle off clicks that sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door. Carl Zimmer, a science reporter, explains why it’s possible that the whales are communicating in a complex language.

On today’s episode

Carl Zimmer , a science reporter for The New York Times who also writes the Origins column .

A diver, who appears minuscule, swims between a large sperm whale and her cub in blue waters.

Background reading

Scientists find an “alphabet” in whale songs.

These whales still use their vocal cords. But how?

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

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Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column . More about Carl Zimmer

AZ lawmakers invited to COVID event health 'experts' who have spread medical conspiracies

Arizona GOP lawmakers heard hours of comments Thursday from a series of doctors, lawyers and other people known for disputing the use of vaccines and other public health measures to combat COVID-19 infections.

No representatives from hospitals or public health agencies that were involved with the response to COVID-19 are scheduled during the two-day Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee event, which continues Friday.

The committee is chaired by state Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise, a registered nurse who has said she lost a nursing job because she refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

The vice chair of the group is T.J. Shope, a Republican from Coolidge who previously co-owned a family business, Shope’s IGA Supermarket. The other member of the committee is state Rep. Steve Montenegro, R-Goodyear.

The six-member committee includes three U.S. Republican members of Congress from Arizona: Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and Eli Crane.

Facing a debt-ceiling debate in Washington, D.C., the three were not present Thursday.

Gosar and Biggs provided prerecorded comments that were shown at the event, and a spokesperson for Crane said he also provided such remarks to be shown at some point during the event.

Joining the committee Thursday were cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who earned a reputation for spreading misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Dr. George Fareed, who publicly promoted the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 , though they were never authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as effective treatments.

The other person at Thursday's event was Dr. Lela Lewis, an Arizona obstetrician/gynecologist who is part of a group called the Liberty and Health Alliance, which she told the committee helped people get religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Writing about the event Thursday, Rolling Stone noted that Lewis produced a YouTube video where she described the public health response to the pandemic as "Satan's Wholistic Healthcare Plan."

Event name, sponsor have ties to QAnon

The event has been labeled as a callout to people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories because of its name and it is partially funded by The America Project, which Montenegro works for. He listed the political nonprofit on his financial disclosure form last year .

The America Project has promoted a host of unfounded conspiracies about elections. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Mike Flynn, once national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, founded the group.

Flynn had his Twitter account suspended when the social media platform cut access to people spreading QAnon conspiracies after the storming of the U.S Capitol.

The official committee name would properly be abbreviated NCSIC, because "southwestern" is one word, not two. But when Shamp tweeted out an America Project flyer for the event, she included the acronym "NCSWIC" in her message. NCSWIC is a common slogan used by QAnon.

Officials from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and a researcher from Arizona State University noted that the bizarre name of the committee appeared to be a call out to QAnon believers.

Within the QAnon movement, the acronym "NCSWIC" stands for "nothing can stop what is coming" and is used as a reference for the end of the "deep state" that former President Donald Trump will supposedly bring about. All three state lawmakers involved declined to answer questions about who named the committee and whether they followed the QAnon movement.

Shamp told Thursday's meeting that some speakers from the medical community who were scheduled to speak at the event had to cancel "because they had concerns about malpractice insurance being collateral damage for participation here today."

There was a large loss of life during COVID-19 that Shamp characterized as "largely unavoidable," as well as an "unnecessary loss" of livelihoods and freedom during the pandemic, Shamp said.

Shamp also said she has never been tested for COVID-19 because she was worried about getting injured by putting a swab so far up her nose. But she said she has had symptoms consistent with a COVID-19 infection, she said.

"People have been canceled, people have been silenced and people have had their livelihoods threatened and their livelihoods lost, all in pursuit of standing up for what they believe to be true and right. I find it so saddening that these things are still happening," she said.

Montenegro told the committee, as well as dozens of members of the public who attended, that masking and vaccination requirements did not respect individuals' personal beliefs or medical autonomy. He referred to social distancing by using air quotes, which drew laughter.

"Many of us are asking, did we give up too much during this time?" Montenegro said, as choruses of "yes" came from several in attendance. "Did we give up too much of our personal independence? That was a rhetorical question...Did we let fear and the unknown not only influence the choices we made but also influence our very ability to make those choices? All too often, this is what happened during that time."

As of May 20, 33,502 Arizonans had lost their lives to COVID-19 according to data from the Arizona Department of Health Services and Arizona by several measures has had one of the worst COVID-19 death rates in the country.

A study published March 23 in The Lancet found that Arizona had the highest cumulative standardized COVID-19 death rate in the U.S. for a period between Jan. 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022. The study standardized death rates by adjusting for each state’s age profile and the prevalence of chronic health conditions such as cancer, diabetes and smoking rates. Authors of the study included researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Better management of the pandemic in Arizona, including human behavior, could have saved up to half the lives that were lost to COVID-19, said Dr. Bob England, who is interim director of The Arizona Partnership for Immunization and said he was not invited to speak at the GOP event.

England said misinformation about vaccines and masks cost lives and created a "preventable national tragedy" caused by politics.

"If you look at our death rate compared to other states in the pandemic. Without much more economic cost I think half of the deaths could have been prevented," England said. "We're up over 33,000 deaths. ... At least 10,000 probably closer to half (could have been prevented) had politics not been played. If it's half the deaths, it's half the hospitalizations, half the trauma. It's so frustrating to me."

The America Project solicits donations from event

Even though the Arizona Legislature offered a free webcast of the hearing, The America Project, which paid for the travel and accommodations of the speakers, also provided a webcast on its site, complete with a link to donate to the group.

Byrne, who was a major donor to the Arizona Senate GOP "audit" of the 2020 election, said his aim was not to raise money off the event.

"In general, these are at best breakeven events for us," he texted The Arizona Republic. "Are you kidding You're writing about them as if we're there, making money off them. We simply aim to educate the public and defray as much of our expense as we could with the meeting."

During the interlude for lunch, The America Project showed various promotional videos on its webcast. That included a discussion with men affiliated with an Oregon group called Citizens Restoring Liberty that protested various COVID mitigation efforts in their state, including protesting at the Bandon Dunes golf course.

After that they showed footage of former President Donald Trump discussing the federal Right to Try Act, signed in 2018 allowing patients access to experimental treatments.

Arizona Democrats also attempted to raise funds off the event, sending a solicitation during the hearing and calling it an "unbelievable waste of resources."

"This committee should consist of actual doctors, scientists, and public health experts. Instead, it’s a group of misinformation-peddling opportunists looking to pander," the email solicitation said.

Lawmakers intend to propose changes in law

Shamp said Thursday at the meeting that she intends to propose legislation to mitigate public harm should Arizona ever experience another, similar pandemic.

The Arizona Legislature already has limited the type of government response allowed to a pandemic with a law Gov. Doug Ducey signed last year .

Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, sponsored Senate Bill 1009, because she was troubled by governors who used their emergency powers during the pandemic to impose restrictions that had no clear end date.

Shamp and Montenegro asked how state officials could prevent federal overreach in another pandemic.

McCullough on Thursday suggested Arizona consider restraining medical boards to allow doctors more freedom when treating patients as they see fit.

Speakers disparage vaccines

The speakers, including McCullough, spent much of the day disparaging COVID-19 vaccines, as they have at previous appearances.

Montenegro shared a story of falling ill with COVID-19 in 2021 and, despite treating himself with vitamins and hydroxychloroquine, he wound up in the hospital. He said the doctor was rude to him because Montenegro was not vaccinated, and sent him home.

“She popped her head in. She says you have COVID pneumonia. You need to go home. If you make it out of this maybe you will think about getting vaccinated,” he said, to gasps from the audience.

Despite ending up with blood clots in his lungs he survived, he said.

Fareed suggested that perhaps Montenegro got so ill because he wasn’t taking the proper dose of hydroxychloroquine. McCullough said Montenegro’s story provides many teaching points, and suggested that had he gotten a COVID-19 vaccine after that affair it might have killed him.

In any risk benefit analyses, the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine have far outweighed any harms it might cause, England said. And he said deaths from the omicron variant would have been much lower had more people received a booster dose.

"The vaccine is spectacular," he said. "In January of 2022 in Arizona, that month with Arizona Department of Health Services data, if you were fully vaxxed and boosted you were at 1/180th at risk of dying as if you weren't vaccinated at all."

"We are incredibly fortunate to live in era where within a year we pumped out a vaccine for a pandemic and that's going to happen again the next time. But we also live in an era where we are so divided that people are willing to further conspiracies and cause people to take risks to their lives for political purposes."

Reach health care reporter Stephanie Innes at [email protected] or at 602-444-8369. Follow her on Twitter @stephanieinnes .

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COMMENTS

Business Plot
The Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch [1] and The White House Putsch, was a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator. [2] [3] Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen ...
The Business Plot
Known as the Business Plot, the plan was supposedly dreamed up by a prominent tycoons and Wall Street big shots who controlled many of the country's major corporations ... offering him command of the rebel army. The decorated war hero immediately alerted Washington of the conspiracy, which admittedly hadn't progressed much beyond the ...
The Business Plot Against FDR and America You Never Heard About
In an excerpt from Gangsters of Capitalism, Jonathan M. Katz details how the authors of the Depression-era "Business Plot" aimed to take power away from FDR and stop his "socialist" New Deal. By ...
The Business Plot: When A Group Of U.S. Bankers Staged A Fascist Coup
The Business Plot: The Little-Known Story Of The Wall Street Scheme To Launch A Fascist Coup In America. As FDR's New Deal worried Wall Street, a cadre of bankers decided to replace him with decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler as their fascist dictator. Here's how they failed. On Nov. 24, 1934, retired General Smedley Butler sat ...
The Conspiratorial Business Plot of 1933
Across the Atlantic, a similar insurgency attempted to destabilize the United States earlier that year. The Business Plot of 1933 was a failed attempt to overthrow FDR and install a dictator. And it was not led by a fringe group of working-class radicals, but covertly bankrolled by a Wall Street coalition of affluent businessmen. Related:
FDR coup: The business plot to oust President Franklin D. Roosevelt by
Some of the country's wealthiest men - furious with President Franklin D. Roosevelt - decided to install a dictator who was more business friendly, according to the congressional testimony of ...
When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR : NPR
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 ...
The True Story That Inspired 'Amsterdam'
The Business Plot involved a covert political conspiracy to overthrow FDR. General Smedley Butler played a key role in uncovering the plot, and wealthy bond broker Gerald MacGuire was implicated ...
Considering History: The 1933 Business Plot to Overthrow America
Amsterdam pulls together, fictionalizes, and at times troublingly misrepresents a number of threads from the 1930s and early 20 th century American history. But that sinister plan is based on very real 1933 histories: the so-called Business Plot. Those histories reveal that Burt's quote is both profoundly wrong and inspiringly right about the battle for American identity and ideals.
The Business Plot of 1933
Join us as we delve into the shadows of American history and uncover the chilling story of the Business Plot of 1933. In this captivating YouTube video, we e...
PDF Prosecuting Criminal Conspiracies
Cueto, 151 F.3d at 635.Indeed, courts are reluctant to parse the conspiratorial object too finely. In United States v.Goldberg, 105 F.3d 770 (1st Cir. 1997), for example, defendants argued that to sustain its bu rden of proof, the G overnment was required to show that either the coconspirators' intended to frustrate the IRS or that they intended to conceal some other crime.
Civil Conspiracy
Commonwealth, the Virginia Supreme Court found a plan to undermine someone else's business is a valid legal claim. This idea spread, with citations in other state courts and later federal district courts. ... Examples of Business Conspiracy. Business torts include a range of unlawful means that harm a business. This includes unfair competition ...
Even before the revolution, America was a nation of conspiracy
Today's conspiracy theories reflect that same distrust, and an unease with the rapid pace of economic, technological and environmental change. Think of claims that the 1969 moon landing was faked, that the government covered up evidence of extraterrestrials , or that the Sept. 11, 2001 , attacks were an inside job.
The Plan (Washington, D.C.)
The Plan is a conspiracy theory in Washington, D.C., which posits that since the enactment of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in 1973, white people have had a "plan to take back" the black-majority city and the offices of the local government. The theory asserts that the decline of low-income black residents and their replacement by wealthier whites from outside of Washington, D.C., is ...
The Secret Economy of Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories can provide our brains with easy answers that jive with our preconceived notions and biases. They tend to appeal to "System One" thinking: our emotions, intuition, and gut reactions. According to psychologists, conspiracy theories play into some of our innate human desires, like the desire for certainty, security, and ...
Inside the John Birch Society: Tracing the roots of modern American
In small-town Wisconsin, looking for the roots of the modern American conspiracy theory. Executive Senior Editor Steve Bonta, left, and former writer Daniel Natal, with the John Birch Society's New American magazine, film a live broadcast at the organization's headquarters in Appleton, Wis., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022.
Conspiracy as a Criminal Charge
The formal elements of a conspiracy charge are as follows: Multiple People - There must be 2 or more persons. Mutual Understanding - In some way or manner, these people must come to a mutual understanding to try to accomplish a common and unlawful plan. Willfulness - The defendant must willfully become a member of the conspiracy.
Who are conspiracy theory believers?
In short, conspiracy beliefs are common among the least and most educated, the low-income and the high-income, but less common among those who fall in-between. I suspected that race and gender were part of the story, given that white men are overrepresented among the highly educated. I then remade the same graphs but excluded white men, and the ...
The Succession Conspiracy
The lack of succession planning has been identified as one of the most important reasons why many first-generation family firms do not survive their founders. This paper explores some of the factors that interfere with succession planning and suggests ways in which these barriers can be constructively managed.
Whales Have an Alphabet
Featuring Carl Zimmer. Produced by Alex Stern , Stella Tan , Sydney Harper and Nina Feldman. Edited by MJ Davis Lin. Original music by Elisheba Ittoop , Dan Powell , Marion Lozano , Sophia Lanman ...
Federal judge found 'strong evidence' of crimes before Trump was
Months before Donald Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents, a federal judge said that investigators had "strong evidence" that the former president "intended" to hide ...
Plan, conspiracy Crossword Clue
Plan, conspiracy Crossword Clue. The Crossword Solver found 30 answers to "Plan, conspiracy", 6 letters crossword clue. The Crossword Solver finds answers to classic crosswords and cryptic crossword puzzles. Enter the length or pattern for better results. Click the answer to find similar crossword clues . Enter a Crossword Clue.
AZ lawmakers host COVID-19 event with conspiracy-touting 'experts'
As of May 20, 33,502 Arizonans had lost their lives to COVID-19 according to data from the Arizona Department of Health Services and Arizona by several measures has had one of the worst COVID-19 ...
Trump New York trial: Jury instructions could make or break hush ...
But the judge said the law does not require Bragg's team to show that Trump intended to orchestrate the conspiracy — rather, prosecutors must only show that by allegedly falsifying business ...
6 NATO Countries Plan 'Drone Wall' to Defend ...
AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File. Six NATO countries are planning a "drone wall" to defend against Russia. Finland, Norway, Poland, and the Baltic states want to prevent smuggling and Russian ...
How Red Lobster's misguided endless shrimp promotion drove it into
The change cost Red Lobster $11 million. Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy Sunday, and the bankruptcy filing sheds new light on Thai Union's role in the endless shrimp mishap. Red Lobster said it ...
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