the business plan 1933

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 before a closed session of the Congressional Special Committee on Un-American Activities in New York. Though he was a two-time Medal of Honor winner with a once unimpeachable reputation, Butler knew there were already those outlets, like the New York Times , who would call his story a “Gigantic Hoax.”

He also knew, however, that if he said nothing the Business plot, a coup of the country’s most wealthy designed to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt from office and replace him with a fascist regime, could only continue. Worse still, it might succeed.

“May I preface my remarks by saying, sir,” Butler began , “That I have one interest in all of this, and that is to try to do my best to see that a democracy is maintained in this country.”

Smedley’s testimony was ultimately dismissed. The conspirators were never prosecuted.

Smedley Butler: An Uncommon Marine

Wikimedia Commons Smedley Butler at his 1931 retirement ceremony.

Born to a Quaker family in 1881 Pennsylvania, Smedley Butler would rise from an underaged 16-year-old soldier in Cuba to one of the most well-respected military men in the United States.

Butler rose to Major General in the Marine Corps through his service in the Boxer Rebellion and across Central America before accepting his commission in the First World War.

As the commander of a fort in northern France, Butler oversaw the care of more than two million men and earned a reputation as someone who understood the common man. Following the Armistice in 1918, he had accepted command at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia and waded into politics and criticism of President Hoover. Naturally, the president grew to dislike Butler.

Butler finally retired in 1931 when the president snubbed him by giving the role of Commandant of the Marine Corps to a less senior officer.

Wikimedia Commons Victory parade celebrating the end of World War I. 1919.

It was just as well, by this time, Hoover’s presidency was riddled with problems.

At the end of World War I, more than three million American troops had returned from “the war to end all wars” in various states of disarray. The veterans were without support in an era before the official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder, the Veterans Affairs Bureau, or anything resembling a GI bill.

In 1919, most veterans had received $60 in mustering pay and a train ticket home for their trouble. The American Legion organization was consequently established to serve as a veterans’ union to increase their bargaining power in government and petition for aid.

In 1924, these efforts resulted in the passage of the War Adjusted Compensation Act, which promised World War I veterans bonus pay for their lost wages in the form of a bond that would be collectible after 20 years in 1945.

This had seemed like a reasonable compromise at first. But then, the stock market crashed in 1929.

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The battles of the bonus army.

Bettmann/Getty Images; Ryan Stennes One of the shanty towns, or “Hoovervilles,” in Central Park at the height of the Great Depression. 1933.

By 1932, “Hoovervilles” or tent cities for the homeless and downtrodden, were a common sight across the country.

When, however, a camp of around 15,000 veterans who called themselves “The Bonus Army” formed outside of Washington D.C., officials and politicians began to panic.

Backed by some U.S. politicians, the Bonus Army demanded immediate payment of their bond debts to assist their families and boost the economy. In total, this would have required more than two billion dollars, roughly half the Government’s budget for the year.

Library of Congress The Bonus Army protests in 1932 outside the Capitol for the wages they were promised before the Great Depression hit.

While President Herbert Hoover and his military advisors argued about what to do with this crowd, Smedley Butler — a newly private citizen making his living as a public speaker — gave a well-received broadcast from the Bonus Army camp.

“They may be calling you tramps now,” Butler declared, “but in 1917 they didn’t call you bums! … You are the best-behaved group of men in this country today. I consider it an honor to be asked to speak to you.”

Butler added that this gathering was “the greatest demonstration of Americanism that we’ve ever had” and urged the soldiers to remain orderly while preserving the country’s faith in its veterans.

Wikimedia Commons Line outside Chicago soup kitchen run by Al Capone. 1931.

Butler’s remarks made quite a contrast when, a few days later, Gen. Douglas McArthur and a cadre of armed troops broke up the camp.

Veterans and their families were chased from Washington with gas weaponry and bayonets as their tents were trampled and burned. At least two veterans died and many others were injured.

Angered by the Government’s “betrayal” of its troops, Butler publicly backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt for that November’s election to end Hoover’s presidency.

Butler’s principled stance and bombastic entrance into public consciousness caught America’s attention.

Wikimedia Commons Bonus Army members clash with Washington, D.C. police. 1933.

But it also caught the attention of a covert group of wealthy men who were particularly anxious about these tumultuous times.

A New Deal Threatens The Livelihoods Of The Rich

As part of his New Deal Platform, Roosevelt promised “bold persistent experimentation” to craft a country that worked for all Americans.

In mid-1933, this included taking the United States off the gold standard. The decision led Lewis Douglas, Roosevelt’s budget director, to resign in protest. Douglas called the decision “the end of western civilization” and a good number of people agreed with him.

Wikimedia Commons Contemporary political cartoon about Roosevelt consolidating power.

FDR was also relatively unpopular with the wealthy. His plans to employ the unemployed and open opportunity to all, intimidated conservative businessmen.

“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,” wrote Jules Archer in his biography, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR .

By this time, Butler had become accustomed to living as a public speaker and hired particularly to speak with veterans. So, when a mutual friend called to say two members of the American Legion wanted to meet with him, he was not too surprised.

But when, on July 1, 1933, these men — Gerald MacGuire and Bill Doyle — arrived in a chauffeured limousine, Butler grew suspicious about who exactly these “wounded veterans” worked for.

Butler’s First Intro To The Business Plot

Wikimedia Commons Announcement of Executive Order forbidding private gold ownership, part of Roosevelt’s economic policies.

The following information regarding Butler’s meetings with the men behind the Business Plot was obtained in his 1933 testimony on the matter.

According to Butler, over several visits, MacGuire – a World War I soldier-turned-banker — asked him if he would be interested in taking over the leadership of the American Legion at the upcoming convention that September.

Butler pointed out that he hadn’t been invited, but MacGuire said he was on the delegation committee and could have him brought in as a special guest from Hawaii.

After Butler declined, the banker offered some 300 to 400 men to disrupt the convention and demand that the general take the stage.

Butler was startled by this offer, but he decided to play along. He said wasn’t sure what he would say, or how so many struggling veterans were supposed to get to Chicago. MacGuire said his organization, the Committee for Sound Currency, had already written him a speech and produced bank statements for over $110,000, which is just under two million by today’s standards, “for expenses.”

American Legion Digital Archives Excerpt from American Legion guide article to 1933 convention. October 1933.

After Butler read the speech, he asked who had written it and why a speech about soldier’s bonuses focused so much on returning to the Gold Standard.

The banker answered that it had been written by John W. Davis, who was 1924’s Democratic Presidential Candidate, former Ambassador to the U.K., and current legal counsel to J.P. Morgan and Company.

Davis, MacGuire continued, was an associate of his direct employer who was also a soldier, financier Colonel M.P. Murphy. The “why,” MacGuire said, was very simple. They just wanted to make sure that the veterans received their bonuses with real, not “rubber” money.

MacGuire offered Butler checks from Murphy and another man named Robert S. Clark as a down payment to help get the necessary gang together.

Butler knew both of these men from back in the Boxer Rebellion. He also knew that Murphy was a multi-millionaire and had been one of the biggest backers of the American Legion’s founding, fronting $125,000 — so why would one of the Legion’s founders want him to overthrow their leadership?

Robert Clark’s Offer

Wikimedia Commons American Legion Convention, 1922.

Robert S. Clark had served under Butler in China known as the “millionaire lieutenant,” a young heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Now, he was a settled and successful financier.

When in New Jersey for a speaking engagement, MacGuire surprised Butler at his hotel to once again ask about gathering soldiers and giving a speech.

Butler, frustrated, said he didn’t believe that MacGuire actually had the money. The banker pulled $18,000 in thousand-dollar bills from his wallet and threw them onto Butler’s bed. Insulted, Butler said he was tired of dealing with middlemen. He demanded to speak with Robert Clark himself.

MacGuire agreed.

Just before the American Legion Convention in Miami that September, Clark traveled by train to his old commander’s home. The pair caught up, reminisced about the Boxer Rebellion, and then got down to business.

Clark reiterated the same pitch about gathering soldiers and getting back to the Gold Standard. Butler said it didn’t add up. Finally, the former officer came clean.

According to Butler, Clark told him that he had a fortune of $30 million. These were uncertain times, and if he had to spend half of his money to protect the other half, he would do it.

All of his partners would do this too, even if that meant paying the bonuses for every soldier themselves.

Getty Images Gerald MacGuire, his attorney N.L. Marks, and William MacGuire.

Roosevelt was on the verge of destroying everything with his inflation and overspending, Clark claimed. If Butler gave the speech and took control of the Legion, demanded a return to the gold standard, then perhaps they could persuade congress and the president to do so as well.

Butler’s Last Stand

Butler asked how Clark could be so sure that Roosevelt would abandon his own political platform.

Clark said that was simple. Roosevelt was from a rich family. He swam in the same circles as the conspirators. The president would have the backing of some very powerful friends, and so would Butler if he played along.

The retired general said he didn’t like seeing soldiers used as pawns to undermine democracy. Clark told him to stop being so stubborn and offered to pay his mortgage.

Wikimedia Commons Robert S. Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing fortune, horse breeder, and philanthropist — and a conspirator in the plot to overthrow FDR.

Furious, Butler took his guest down the hall to his study. He pointed around the room, indicating all the medals and honors he had been awarded in his career. Clark, seemingly sobered by the sentiment, asked to use the General’s phone.

Once MacGuire answered, Clark told him that Butler would not be joining them in Chicago and they should proceed with Plan B. The only other part Butler heard was “telegrams.”

Reading about the convention after the fact, Butler was horrified to discover that telegrammed pamphlets had fallen from the ceiling during. In them, a message argued for paying bonuses and returning to the gold standard.

They had inspired the Legionnaire’s to officially support gold-backed currency.

In October, MacGuire visited Butler again. The general was about to embark on a nationwide speaking tour on behalf of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. MacGuire bragged about the convention resolution, but Butler replied that the soldiers were no closer to their bonuses.

The banker offered to pay Butler $750 for every speech he mentioned the gold standard in, but Butler refused.

Wikimedia Commons Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, or Colonel M.P. Murphy of the Business Plot, in 1918.

MacGuire asked that he be allowed to come on the tour to recruit men. Again, Butler said no.

The Fascist Plot Revealed

He did not hear from MacGuire again until January. Then, he started receiving postcards from all over Europe.

The messages described a “family vacation” in Italy, the French Riviera, and Berlin. That summer, when Butler’s tour was finished, MacGuire asked to meet him again.

On Aug. 22, 1934, three days after Hitler officially became the Führer of Germany, Butler met MacGuire seated at a secluded table at his hotel restaurant.

Wikimedia Commons Mussolini marches with Blackshirts in Rome. 1922.

MacGuire started talking about getting soldiers together but then started talking obsessively about his travels. Butler kept waiting for him to get to the point but then he picked up on the pattern within the anecdotes.

In France, MacGuire had met with members of the Far-Right paramilitary veterans group, La Croix de Feu or “The Cross of Fire.” In Italy, he had studied the structure of Mussolini’s government and been enamored of the loyalty and power of Il Duce’s Black Shirts.

He’d also met with representatives of the new German government and admired their ambitions.

The time was right to try the same thing in America, MacGuire said. A new Secretary of General Affairs, one who would replace the Secretary of State and leave the President to “dedicate bridges and kiss children.”

For the first time, Butler understood what MacGuire wanted. MacGuire and his group wanted Smedley Butler to become America’s first fascist dictator, propped up by a devoted following of veterans.

The Times-Picayune , 1934. Butler’s claims made it to the front page of the Springfield Union , and various other papers.

Some members of his organization, MacGuire said, had wanted Douglas MacArthur to lead the revolution. But, he’d known since the break-up of the Bonus Army that MacArthur would never be as esteemed as Smedley Butler would be to the veterans.

MacGuire estimated that in all, they’d only need an army of about 500,000.

The general asked how they intended to pull all this off or even pay for it. MacGuire explained that the group would be announcing its presence publicly in the next few weeks. He wasn’t sure which name they’d settled on yet, but between the collaborators, they might have as much as $300 million to commit to “protecting the constitution.”

That is more than $5 billion in 2019 currency.

Whether Butler agreed or not, MacGuire said, once they got in touch with the right members of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign wars and acquired weaponry, it was only a matter to time until their plot was successful. Once again, he asked Butler to think about it.

Wikimedia Commons French Fascists march in Paris. 1934.

This time, Butler couldn’t stop thinking about it. Mussolini had proved strangely popular in the American media over the last decade. The press was similarly hopeful about Hitler.

In July, Fortune Magazine had run an editorial which asked “whether Fascism is achieving in a few years of decades such a conquest of the spirit of man as Christianity achieved only in ten centuries.”

The article went on, “the good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, Sacrifice.”

Butler decided to call a friend at the VFW and warn him about what he’d been hearing. As it turned out, there were other, similar rumors floating around.

Without proof, the conspiracy was not necessarily anything more than just a rumor.

The Conspirators Make Their Move

Wikimedia Commons FDR (second from left) with accused conspirators John W. Davis (second from right) and Al Smith (right). 1924.

When the American Liberty League (ALL), a group of conservatives who opposed FDR and his New Deal, became public, any notion that it was merely a rumor was abolished.

Among its members were Colonel M.P. Murphy, Robert S. Clark, and John W. Davis — every one of the conspirators MacGuire had mentioned.

There were other connections too. The members’ list of the American Liberty League was a who’s who of business and politics including members of both political parties opposed to the New Deal. Its stated purpose was to “protect the constitution.”

Butler realized something else, then, about himself.

Part of why he’d been the perfect candidate was that he was known for his temper and speaking out. If he went public with his accusations, people might think it was a publicity stunt. He needed more than his own word to inform the government.

So, he reached out to a journalist from the Philadelphia Record , Paul French, who agreed to help him collect evidence.

Wikimedia Commons Paul French of the Philadelphia Record , to whom Smedley Butler broke the story of the Business Plot.

French determined that ALL member Irenee Dupont, who would later do business with the Nazis well into World War II, owned a controlling stake in Remington-Colt which possibly provided the group with access to artillery.

Other members of ALL included Al Smith, former governor of New York and 1932 democratic presidential hopeful and turned rival of President Roosevelt; as well as other men whose connections ran back to the Klu Klux Klan and Pro-Nazi groups within the United States.

As the New York Post put it, “The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League are in turn spawning Fascism.”

Collecting The Evidence And Exposing The Truth

To build more evidence, Butler introduced French to MacGuire as a like-minded friend. Soon, MacGuire opened up to the reporter as well, in some cases being even more candid with French than he had been with the general.

Getty Images Gerald P. MacGuire was subpoenaed by the Congressional Committee On Un-American Activities. Here he is in court.

According to French’s account, MacGuire was convinced that “We need a Fascist government in this country…to save the Nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built — in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader.”

As French recalled, MacGuire continually discussed “a dictator who would come galloping in on his white horse… either through the threat of armed force or the delegation of power and the use of a group of organized veterans, to save the capitalistic system.”

And it was at around the time that French and Butler were building a case against MacGuire and his purported co-conspirators that the general was subpoenaed to discuss rumors of a fascist plot before Special Committee on Un-American Activities.

After Butler and French had testified, Gerald MacGuire was allowed to speak in his own defense.

The New York Times , 1934. The New York Times headline on Butler’s hearing.

For his part, MacGuire claimed Butler and French had made it all up. He had traveled to Europe for pleasure and had certainly never tried to buy Butler’s compliance in a coup.

Despite this, when letters which contained MacGuire discussing Croix de Feu training movements and plans were produced, he had no explanation for why he so closely described a far-right paramilitary veterans group.

Similarly, he had no explanation for $20,000 that went missing from his accounts during the same time frame that Butler claimed he’d been offered 18 $1,000 bills.

In the end, only MacGuire spoke to the committee. Robert S. Clark lived in France and could not be forced to appear in the United States. But no explanations were provided for the absence of Colonel Murphy, John W. Davis, or any of the other suspected conspirators.

They were never asked to testify at all.

Accusations Of A Government Cover-Up

When the court report was published, it concluded that a plot to overthrow the Roosevelt Administration and install a Fascist government in its place did indeed exist. How far it had gotten was never determined, however, and the investigations into the plot never officially looked into that anyway.

The names of the accused and the American Liberty League, itself, were redacted.

Amidst accusations from The New York Times that his story was “credulity unlimited,” Butler broke his silence once again. In a speech broadcast for radio and recorded for a newsreel, Butler repeated his accusations and openly asked why the named individuals were never called to testify.

Then, on March 25, 1935, Gerald MacGuire suddenly died of “pneumonia” at 37. His family publicly blamed the stress of Butler’s accusations for ending his life.

Regardless of the reasons, with MacGuire gone, the case went cold.

Newspapers.com Iowa Dispatch coverage of MacGuire’s sudden death in March 1935.

Butler went on to publish his book War is a Racket later that same year. As an anti-War classic, throughout the text, Butler laments his military roles in places like Nicaragua, Mexico, and China.

“I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Butler spent the rest of his life trying to draw attention to the ties between big business and the American military. A strident isolationist is his last years, Butler died of pancreatic cancer in June 1940. He was 58.

Alternate Explanations For The Business Plot?

In the decades since, doubters have asked why, if the scheme was real, didn’t President Roosevelt aggressively pursue it?

Would it have been wise for the president to allow a group of openly treasonous fascist sympathizers to continue to operate in Washington? On the other hand, if there was such a group, what could Roosevelt have done about it anyway?

Perhaps the best explanation on the matter to come from Roosevelt came in 1936 when he reaccepted the nomination of the Democratic Party. 

Speaking just after he defeated American Liberty League-backed rivals, Roosevelt declared :

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital — all undreamed of by the fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service, new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result of the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

Those accused represented the single most powerful subset of American society: the rich.

Within a decade, the alliances between business and government proved vital in World War II. After defeating the American Liberty League in 1936, the organization faded away, apparently peacefully by 1940.

But if MacGuire was more cautious or someone else was asked to ride the “white horse,” could the whole 20th century have been different? Could the United States have entered World War II as a fascist dictatorship?

The frightening reality here is that perhaps the only thing that prevented this was a retired Marine playing Paul Revere.

Next, read up on the death of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini . Then, see what life was like inside fascist Italy .

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The Business Plot, or When J.P. Morgan’s Pals Tried To Overthrow FDR

Smedley butler, a marine general, exposed the coup attempt.

In 1934, Hitlerite paramilitary groups made headlines goose stepping their way around New York. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got wind of Fascist conspiracies against the government. Then a Massachusetts congressman, 43-year-old John W. McCormack, had the unenviable task of investigating what came to be known as the Business Plot to overthrow the U.S. government.

Historical coverage of the Business Plot is thin, notes Grant Hamilton Stone in his 2021 thesis, Smedley D. Butler, Anti-Democratic Dissidence, and the Recession of the American Right 1932-1936. But he argues that it shouldn’t be overlooked.

The Man Who Exposed the Business Plot

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for  Wall Street  and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. 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 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make  Honduras  right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that  Standard Oil  went on its way unmolested.

Smedley Butler in China

His experience in China may have soured him on U.S. adventurism that benefited big business. Warring forces had set the Standard Oil plant on fire, and the marines put it out.  David Shoup, a decorated marine who served under him later recounted the China campaign.

“We didn’t know what the mission was,” Shoup said. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did. It was only some years later that I learned that General Butler had been thinking the same way.”

The Business Plotters

Jerry macguire, uncovering the business plot, a closed hearing.

The committee found Butler credible, MacGuire not so much. Dickstein, speaking with reporters, said, MacGuire was “hanging himself with contradictions and admissions” every day.

A Washington correspondent asked: “What can we believe?” Apparently anything, to judge by the number of people who lend a credulous ear to the story of General Butler’s 500,000 Fascists in buckram marching on Washington to seize the government.

Report on the Business Plot

…evidence was obtained 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.

Dickstein later said they didn’t pursue the matter because they didn’t have the time or the money. The death of MacGuire on March 25, 1935, would have complicated efforts to learn more.

Images:  Smedley Butler in China By USMC Archives from Quantico, USA – Smedley Butler Inspects Marine Barracks, Shanghai, China, 1927, CC BY 2.0 , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42678235.

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The Plots Against the President

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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 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.

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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.”

From Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Click here to pre-order.

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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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The 1933 ‘Business Plot’: Smedley Butler Blows the Whistle on Industrialists & Bankers Coup to Overthrow the Gov’t, or Ruse for FDR Support?

An outstanding Major General of the Marine Corps, Smedley Butler, became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists (including Goodyear, US Steel, JP Morgan, Heinz, and Maxwell House) were planning a military coup to overthrow the US government & FDR, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans, install a Fascist dictatorship ruled by business magnates with a private army of half a million US soldiers. However this coup was disrupted by Butler’s integrity and willingness to be one of the military industrial complex’s first whistle-blowers. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot and the media ridiculed the allegations. A final report by a special House of Representatives Committee (McCormack-Dickstein Committee (1934–1937)) confirmed most of Butler’s testimony, but what was the real story? The first 2 pages here outline the official story and page 3 is Dr. Henry Makow’s diagnosis that it was merely a bankers ruse to drum up support for their puppet, FDR. 

On July 1, 1933, Major General Smedley Butler met with MacGuire and Doyle for the first time. Gerald C. MacGuire was a $100-a-week bond salesman for Grayson Murphy & Company and a member of the Connecticut American Legion. Bill Doyle was commander of the Massachusetts American Legion. Butler stated that he was asked to run for National Commander of the American Legion.

On July 3 or 4, Butler held a second meeting with MacGuire and Doyle. He stated that they offered to get hundreds of supporters at the American Legion convention to ask for a speech. MacGuire left a typewritten speech with Butler that they proposed he read at the convention. “It urged the American Legion convention to adopt a resolution calling for the United States to return to the gold standard, so that when veterans were paid the bonus promised to them, the money they received would not be worthless paper.”

A year earlier, on July 17, 1932, thousands of World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., set up tent camps, and demanded immediate payment of bonuses due to them according to the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 (the original act made the bonuses initially due no earlier than 1925 and no later than 1945). Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant, led this “ Bonus Army “. The Bonus Army was encouraged by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler; as a popular military figure of the time, Butler had some influence over the veterans. A few days after Butler’s arrival, President Herbert Hoover ordered the marchers removed, and U.S. Army cavalry troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur destroyed their camps.

By 1933 Butler started denouncing capitalism and bankers, going on to explain that for 33 years he had been a “high class muscle man” for Wall Street, the bankers and big business, labeling himself as a “racketeer for Capitalism. ( Wikipedia )

Peter L. Bernstein wrote in The Power of Gold: the history of an obsession, that Roosevelt’s election was upsetting for many conservative businessmen of the time, as his “campaign promise that the government would provide jobs for all the unemployed had the perverse effect of creating … fears of socialism and reckless government spending.”

Huppi.com has the following on ‘The Business Plot’:

In the summer of 1933, shortly after Roosevelt’s “First 100 Days,” America’s richest businessmen were in a panic. It was clear that Roosevelt intended to conduct a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Roosevelt had to be stopped at all costs. The answer was a military coup. It was to be secretly financed and organized by leading officers of the Morgan and Du Pont empires. This included some of America’s richest and most famous names of the time: Irenee Du Pont – Right-wing chemical industrialist and founder of the American Liberty League, the organization assigned to execute the plot. Grayson Murphy – Director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and a group of J.P. Morgan banks . William Doyle – Former state commander of the American Legion and a central plotter of the coup. John Davis – Former Democratic presidential candidate and a senior attorney for J.P. Morgan. Al Smith – Roosevelt’s bitter political foe from New York. Smith was a former governor of New York and a co-director of the American Liberty League. John J. Raskob – A high-ranking Du Pont officer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party. In later decades, Raskob would become a “Knight of Malta,” a Roman Catholic Religious Order with a high percentage of CIA spies, including CIA Directors William Casey, William Colby and John McCone. Robert Clark – One of Wall Street’s richest bankers and stockbrokers. Gerald MacGuire – Bond salesman for Clark, and a former commander of the Connecticut American Legion. MacGuire was the key recruiter to General Butler. The plotters attempted to recruit General Smedley Butler to lead the coup. They selected him because he was a war hero who was popular with the troops. The plotters felt his good reputation was important to make the troops feel confident that they were doing the right thing by overthrowing a democratically elected president. However, this was a mistake: Butler was popular with the troops because he identified with them. That is, he was a man of the people, not the elite. When the plotters approached General Butler with their proposal to lead the coup, he pretended to go along with the plan at first, secretly deciding to betray it to Congress at the right moment.

What the businessmen proposed was dramatic: they wanted General Butler to deliver an ultimatum to Roosevelt. Roosevelt would pretend to become sick and incapacitated from his polio, and allow a newly created cabinet officer, a “Secretary of General Affairs,” to run things in his stead. The secretary, of course, would be carrying out the orders of Wall Street. If Roosevelt refused, then General Butler would force him out with an army of 500,000 war veterans from the American Legion. But MacGuire assured Butler the cover story would work: “You know the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everyone can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second…” The businessmen also promised that money was no object: Clark told Butler that he would spend half his $60 million fortune to save the other half.

The League was headed by the DuPont and J.P Morgan cartels and had major support from Andrew Mellon Associates, Pew (Sun Oil), Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Hutton Associates, U.S. Steel, General Motors, Chase, Standard Oil and Goodyear Tires.

And what type of government would replace Roosevelt’s New Deal? MacGuire was perfectly candid to Paul French, a reporter friend of General Butler’s: “We need a fascist government in this country… to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.” Indeed, it turns out that MacGuire traveled to Italy to study Mussolini’s fascist state, and came away mightily impressed. He wrote glowing reports back to his boss, Robert Clark, suggesting that they implement the same thing. If this sounds too fantastic to believe, we should remember that by 1933, the crimes of fascism were still mostly in the future, and its dangers were largely unknown, even to its supporters. But in the early days, many businessmen openly admired Mussolini because he had used a strong hand to deal with labor unions, put out social unrest, and get the economy working again, if only at the point of a gun. Americans today would be appalled to learn of the many famous millionaires back then who initially admired Hitler and Mussolini: Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, John and Allen Dulles (who, besides being millionaires, would later become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and CIA Director, respectively), and, of course, everyone on the above list. They disavowed Hitler and Mussolini only after their atrocities grew to indefensible levels. The plot fell apart when Butler went public. The general revealed the details of the coup before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which would later become the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. The Committee heard the testimony of Butler and French, but failed to call in any of the coup plotters for questioning, other than MacGuire. In fact, the Committee whitewashed the public version of its final report, deleting the names of powerful businessmen whose reputations they sought to protect. The most likely reason for this response is that Wall Street had undue influence in Congress also. Note : Further, the committee deleted all portions of the testimony involving other prominent persons: J.P. Morgan, the Du Ponts, the Rockefeller interests, Hugh Johnson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The final report issued by the committee in February 15, 1935 buried the story even further. John L. Spivak sums up the burial succinctly: “I… studied the Committee’s report. It gave six pages to the threat by Nazi agents operating in this country and eleven pages to the threat by communists. It gave one page to the plot to seize the Government and destroy our democratic system.” ( Source ) Even more alarming, the elite-controlled media failed to pick up on the story, and even today the incident remains little known. The elite managed to spin the story as nothing more than the rumors and hearsay of Butler and French, even though Butler was a Quaker of unimpeachable honesty and integrity. Butler, appalled by the cover-up, went on national radio to denounce it, but with little success. [box type=”shadow” ]While the Committee found that Gen. Butler was telling the truth, discrediting such a stalwart was problematic for the plotters. Quickly, the corporate press weighed in and sought to raise doubts about the war hero, settling on branding him naive. The discredit Knudsen meme was: “it was all idle cocktail party chatter.” This red herring was trumpeted under the Associated Press headline “The Cocktail Putsch.” New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia dismissed the plot as “someone at the party had suggested the idea to the ex-Marine as a joke.” From 1934 through 1936, the League got thirty-five pro-League front page stories in the  New York Times . TIME ridiculed Butler in a Dec. 3, 1934 cover story, even though Butler’s story was corroborated by VFW head James E. Van Zandt, who also said he was approached to lead the coup.  Though, TIME did put a footnote on an early 1935 article stating; “Also last week the House Committee on Un-American Activities purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler’s story of a fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.”[/box] Butler was not vindicated until 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the Committee’s internal, secret report. It clearly confirmed Butler’s story: In the last few weeks of the committee’s life it received evidence showing that certain persons had attempted 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 if the financial backers deemed it expedient… MacGuire denied [Butler’s] allegations under oath, but the committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made to General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principle, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various form of veterans’ organizations of Fascist character.

Continued on next page…

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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 .

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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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• Irenee Du Pont - Right-wing chemical industrialist and founder of the American Liberty League, the organization assigned to execute the plot.
• Grayson Murphy - Director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and a group of J.P. Morgan banks.
• William Doyle - Former state commander of the American Legion and a central plotter of the coup.
• John Davis - Former Democratic presidential candidate and a senior attorney for J.P. Morgan.
• Al Smith - Roosevelt's bitter political foe from New York. Smith was a former governor of New York and a codirector of the American Liberty League.
• John J. Raskob - A high-ranking Du Pont officer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party. In later decades, Raskob would become a "Knight of Malta," a Roman Catholic Religious Order with a high percentage of CIA spies, including CIA Directors William Casey, William Colby and John McCone.
• Robert Clark - One of Wall Street's richest bankers and stockbrokers.
• Gerald MacGuire - Bond salesman for Clark, and a former commander of the Connecticut American Legion. MacGuire was the key recruiter to General Butler.

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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Gerald MacGuire and the Plot to Overthrow Franklin Roosevelt

"General Smedley D. Butler leading the Marines from Quantico, VA to Gettysburg, PA." From the Herman Priebe Collection (COLL/1743), Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections.

By Andy Piascik

In 1933, retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler was visited at his Pennsylvania home by individuals from the American Legion to discuss upcoming Legion elections. Butler was one of the best-known military men in the country at the time. According to Butler, the visitors came with ulterior motives and chose to meet with him because of his reputation for being popular with everyday soldiers.

Gerald MacGuire

Gerald P. MacGuire, three-quarter length portrait – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Among the visitors was Gerald MacGuire, the Legion’s Connecticut commander. MacGuire was born in Rhode Island on May 10, 1897, served in the First World War , settled in Darien , and worked at a prominent Wall Street brokerage house. He and many of the moneyed men he worked with felt alarm at the proposed policies of Franklin Roosevelt, the country’s new president. According to testimony Butler later gave to Congress, MacGuire said he had large sums of money at his disposal to bankroll a run by Butler for the Legion’s top post.

A short time later, MacGuire traveled to Italy and Germany to study how veterans’ groups helped the fascists come to power there. When he returned, he met with Butler several more times and, according to Butler, stated that very wealthy, powerful men had 50 million dollars available to spend on a coup against Roosevelt. The American Legion would be the 500,000-strong vehicle to bring about the coup and they wanted Butler to lead it.

Besides MacGuire, Butler stated that he met with Robert Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company. According to Butler, Clark confirmed everything MacGuire had said and named other plotters, some of whom were among the most prominent and best-known industrialists, politicians, and military figures in the country.

Thomas Lamont (1918)

Clark reportedly told Butler that some of those who supported the plan and were willing to bankroll it were executives from the DuPont Corporation (including Irenee du Pont); the Democratic Party’s candidates for President in 1924 and 1928, John Davis and Al Smith; several people associated with the J. P. Morgan banking interests (including Thomas Lamont, great-grandfather of Connecticut governor Ned Lamont); and Grayson Murphy, a director of Goodyear Tire, Anaconda Copper, and Bethlehem Steel. Weapons and ammunition would be supplied by the Bridgeport -based Remington Arms company, or Remington UMC, which had recently been taken over by the DuPont Corporation.

Butler told the story of what became known as the Business Plot to Paul Comly French, a reporter for the Philadelphia Record . When contacted by French, MacGuire spoke openly about the plot and of his desire for a fascist America. He steered the reporter to some of his associates and French wrote an expose that appeared in both the Record and the New York Post . Butler, meanwhile, finally told MacGuire his true feelings about the plan: “If you get 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.”

Congressional Hearings

Report on 1934 Congressional Hearings

Butler reported the meetings to various government officials which led to Congressional hearings in 1934. All of those who Butler named as being involved denied the charge, including MacGuire. In part, because of a lack of concrete evidence, no charges were brought. President Roosevelt intervened to essentially suppress transcripts of the most damning testimony, apparently out of concern over the public outrage that likely would ensue. That testimony was not made public until journalist John Spivak unearthed and published it in 1967.

MacGuire died suddenly and, according to some reports, mysteriously, in Connecticut of pneumonia on March 25, 1935, shortly after the hearings. Catapulted to national fame, Butler became even more famous when he wrote War is a Racket a short time later. In the book, he said of his years as a military man: “I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business … a gangster for capitalism” who “might have given Al Capone a few hints.” He died in 1940.

The story of the “Business Plot” has been the subject of documentaries, television programs, and a BBC Radio documentary that implicated another prominent Connecticut man: Prescott Bush, a Wall Street executive living in Greenwich . Bush later became a US Senator and both his son and grandson became president of the United States. Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone announced in 2000 that he was planning to make a film about the Business Plot but he eventually scrapped the idea.

Bridgeport native Andy Piascik is an award-winning author who has written for numerous publications and websites over the last four decades and is the author of several books. He can be reached at [email protected]

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The Forgotten Coup of 1933

In 1932 WWI veterans laid siege to the U.S. Capitol demanding their service bonuses. Wealthy businessmen plotted to mobilize the disaffected soldiers and overthrow the newly elected FDR. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

That the American press largely ignored an attempt to forcibly overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt only months after his inauguration in 1933 seems less extraordinary in light of the right-wing media’s current efforts to dismiss a far more alarming—and televised—coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

Jonathan M. Katz resurrects that earlier effort in his just-released book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire . Author Sally Denton also did so in 2012 with her book The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, And the Rise of the American Right .

A week following the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Denton explicitly linked the two conspiracies. “The nation has never been at a potential brink as it was then—up until, I think, now,” she said. She reiterated her fears in an op-ed in the Post on the first anniversary of the attempted overthrow of the presidential election.

Smedley Butler Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler asserted that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow Roosevelt. In a 1935 video clip , Smedley Butler describes the foiled “fascist plot.” (1.22 minutes) 

The plot against FDR might well have succeeded had Retired Major General Smedley Butler not blown the whistle on it. The revered former Marine claimed that a representative of some of the nation’s wealthiest men had approached him to lead an army of half a million veterans against the president and install a dictator in his place. It resembled a game plan inspired by European fascists admired by those same men.

A Congressional committee took testimony from Butler, who fingered such titans as J.P. Morgan, Jr., Irénée du Pont and others as the plot’s financial backers, calling them “the royal family of financiers.” FDR echoed Butler when accepting his party’s nomination at Madison Square Garden on June 27, 1936, branding his foes “economic royalists” to wild applause and going so far as to assert, “they are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Thanks to Butler, FDR had good cause to know the lengths to which they would go, though few others did.  

On the campaign trail in 1932 FDR with daughter Anna and Mrs. Roosevelt. He defeated incumbent President Herbert Hoover in a landslide. Courtesy, Wikipedia Commons.

Roosevelt’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. confirmed that hatred in his tell-all autobiography Farewell to Fifth Avenue, in which he revealed that both of President Hoover’s Treasury Secretaries—Andrew Mellon and Ogden Mills—had privately tipped off leading members of their caste to the probability that the U.S. would go off the gold standard, giving them adequate time to move their assets to Swiss bank accounts while immeasurably worsening the Great Depression just before Roosevelt’s inauguration. Three months later, when the new President began the process by which the U.S. left the gold standard, they apparently moved more decisively against him.

The Business Plot , or “Wall Street Putsch,” today remains largely unknown and is seldom mentioned in Roosevelt biographies, perhaps because the nation’s major newspapers—whose owners largely opposed FDR—mocked it, if they mentioned it at all.

In its report, the Congressional committee charged with the investigation said it “had received evidence that certain people had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country,” but deleted the names of the people Butler had given it. The incensed Butler observed, “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify.” Without those names and further investigation, the report and plot sank into obscurity—until a violent mob stormed the Capitol 88 years later. 

It Can’t Happen Here Published in 1935, the height of fascism in Europe, Lewis’s book portrays the rise of totalitarian rule in the U.S. with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force. It was adapted into a play in 1936. Photo Credit: Courtesy, Wikipedia.

A 2007 radio documentary by BBC4 suggests that the plot is so little known because Roosevelt did not charge the conspirators with treason in exchange for a pledge by them not to oppose his New Deal policies. Whether that is true or Roosevelt simply felt that such a spectacular trial would even further divide the country at a time of crisis will probably never be known. That such a conspiracy happened, let alone was all but erased from public memory, seems far more conceivable after the events of January 6—not to mention Republicans’ attempt to block to any such investigation today.

The attack on the U.S. Capitol—not to mention the four years that preceded it—dealt a heavy blow to the American exceptionalism that Sinclair Lewis lampooned in his 1936 play, It Can’t Happen Here . “It” very nearly did in 2021, and may yet still.

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The 1933 Business Plot They Didn't Teach You About In School

The last few years of the American political scene have seen a fierce debate in America over the influence of corporations, debt currency, and insurrection (via New York Times ). But none of it has come to an serious, deliberate attempt to overthrow the government in recent years. But in the 1930s, America was in a similar state of political ferment and economic distress. During the Great Depression , President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 election and continued a series of controversial reforms begun under his predecessor Herbert Hoover to try and alleviate the crushing unemployment and poverty that had swept the nation.

But his reforms were not popular with everyone. America's elite decided that Roosevelt, a former member of their Old Boys' club, was messing with their wealth a little too much and had to be removed. Thus, they decided to emulate Europe's totalitarian dictators and seize the state through a proxy general. America had not faced a coup attempt since 1783 Newburgh Conspiracy , and it is unclear just how far this plot went. But it was a plot that involved the who's-who of high American society. Here is the story of the bizarre plot to turn America totalitarian.

The election of 1932

The origins of the Business Plot of 1933-'34 go back to 1929. That year on Black Tuesday (October 29), a massive stock market crash sent the United States into the Great Depression. When matters did not resolve by 1931-1932, President Herbert Hoover was facing criticism over his actions to curb the depression. Facing him was fresh-faced Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt , who promised to do things a bit differently from Hoover. Just not in the way one might expect.

Contrary to the popular narrative, Roosevelt ran on what today would be considered a fiscally conservative platform, according to the FDR Presidential Library . He promised to cut government spending to rein in Hoover's $3 billion deficit, balance the budget, and according to the Tax History Project , not repeat Hoover's 1932 tax increase. This was in response to Hoover's economic interventionism, contrary to the narrative that he was a do-nothing president that left Americans to starve. As University of St. Lawrence economics professor Stever Horwitz argued (via Economics Library ), Hoover attempted his own sort of New Deal, inserting the federal government in a U.S. economy that historically had embraced laissez-faire capitalism relatively free from government intervention. As his policies — mainly attempts to raise wages in times of deflation — worsened unemployment and businesses bled jobs, Hoover's chances of reelection plummeted.

The results of the 1932 election were a foregone conclusion. Roosevelt crushed Hoover in a 45-state landslide, winning 472 electoral votes (via 270towin ). Hoover only won 59, 36 of them from Pennsylvania. It would now be seen if Roosevelt would be any different than his predecessor.

FDR's economic platform

Once inaugurated in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the famous " 100 Days " of his presidency. According to the FDR Presidential Library , he jettisoned his conservative fiscal policy and turned half-heartedly to Keynesianist deficit spending. Thus, the United States would take on more debt to encourage consumption, which would keep money circulating in the economy. Although privately favoring a balanced budget (via Tax History Project ), America's 25% unemployment rate led him to embrace interventionism. Doing otherwise, per the FDR Library, was "a crime against the American people."

Thus, Roosevelt began a massive expansion of the federal bureaucracy that dwarfed his predecessor's attempt, although it came nowhere close to the spending seen these days. The two most important acts for the purposes of the Business Plot (via  History ) paid farmers to reduce agricultural output and forced unionized businesses to fix their wages above market level. The effects of these bills are hotly debated. Loyola University economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo (via the Mises Institute ) argues that the National Industrial Recovery Act forced businesses to pay higher wages than they could afford, which led to layoffs, while economists Greg Hannsgen and Dimitri Papadimitriou of Bard's Levy Institute have argued that the bill might have helped American workers survive hard times. But for America's capitalist class, the bills were a disaster. Not only did the regulations cut into their profits, Roosevelt threatened their hard money as well.

The gold confiscation of 1933

America's wealthiest were already concerned with possible "soak the rich" taxes. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst called them "despotic" and "discriminatory." But the increase in taxes was not the main reason for the conspiracy to remove Franklin Roosevelt from office. Many of the new taxes, in fact, did not kick in until 1935. For America's wealthy, especially sectors of the banking establishment, no policy irked them more than Roosevelt's 1933 gold confiscation under EO 6102 .

EO 6102 is one of Roosevelt's less-known yet most controversial executive orders. The order ordered all Americans to surrender all gold bullion (aka coins) and gold certificates over $100 to their nearest Federal Reserve bank or Federal Reserve System branch. Private ownership of gold was banned outside of a few exceptions. Americans, according to Investopedia , were "compensated" at $20.67 an ounce with intrinsically worthless Federal Reserve Notes (aka dollar bills). Once the gold was confiscated, the U.S. Treasury increased the price of gold to $35. Not only did this cheat Americans out of about $15, it also increased the Treasury's dollar holdings by $2.81 million that could be used to fund New Deal programs

Timeline notes that America's wealthiest, the banking class, had the most to lose from the gold confiscation. None wanted to have their bank loans repaid with Federal Reserve debt notes that could be devalued through printing. But instead of fighting what they deemed to be Roosevelt's "dictatorship" in Washington, a section of the American elite decided to replace him with one of their own.

Sympathy for fascism

America's elite class looked across the sea towards Europe for ideas on how to fight Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had empowered unions to their detriment and was now confiscating their hard money. According to socialist magazine Liberation School , the American elite was concerned with America's leftward turn. The magazine argues that Roosevelt's policies emboldened American socialists, who engineered a series of labor strikes in the early 1930's. They were inspired by the rising power of the Soviet Union, which the U.S. recognized in 1933. While the role of Soviet recognition is suspect, since capitalists such as Henry Ford had no problem doing business there (via History ), it is likely that labor agitation at home did threaten profits. So, the American elite looked to two regimes that had eradicated organized labor: Adolf Hitler 's Germany and Benito Mussolini's Italy.

Fascist Europe, whose most salient feature was the marriage of corporations with the state, was attractive to America's corporate elite (despite their socialist origins). According to economist Lawrence Samuels , Hitler and Mussolini had been incredibly successful at union busting, placing Italian and German corporations in the driver's seat with state sponsorship. These corporations wielded enormous power within their respective governments, often with financial partnerships with America's corporate elite. Fascist Europe's biggest financial supporters were Henry Ford, Prescott Bush (President G.W. Bush's grandfather), the DuPont family, and John D. Rockefeller, who, for business and eugenics interests, supported these regimes.

The key man: Smedley Butler

In 1933, not even a year into the Roosevelt Administration's first term, the corporate class allegedly began plotting to remove Franklin Roosevelt from office. With a focus on "allegedly," because the entire story of the plot rested upon the testimony of a single man, Marine Corps general Smedley Butler , whom the plotters selected to lead the coup. First, a little background is in order.

According to the USMC, General Butler was a true American patriot, Medal of Honor recipient, pacifist, and vehement opponent of America's capitalist elite. Best described as a constitutionalist firmly dedicated to the Bill of Rights, the American corporate foreign ventures thoroughly disturbed the general. His philosophy was simple: " War is a Racket . It always has been." Poor men fight, rich men profit. A 1933 speech explained that his career had been spent as an enforcer for corporate interests abroad. This clashed with his non-interventionist beliefs and America's profiteering elites (regardless of political loyalties), whom he accused of financing numerous 20th-century conflicts. He loathed European fascism, saving his worst criticisms for Italy's Benito Mussolini .

It is strange that the corporate and banking classes behind the Business Plot should have turned to a man who referred to them as parasitic war profiteers. But the plotters saw Butler's patriotism and love of the United States as something they could exploit, especially since Butler had clashed with the U.S. government in 1932.

The Bonus Army incident

Smedley Butler's choice as the leader of the plot is strange indeed. According to Arcadia Publishing , Butler came from a line of Republican politicians and had even run for Congress in 1932 as a Republican in Pennsylvania. But he broke with the Hoover Administration after a fiasco called the Bonus Army, which struck a nerve with the general, who had always been a strong supporter of veterans' rights.

According to the National Park Service , a 1924 U.S. government promise to pay bonuses to World War I veterans was still unpaid by 1932. In response, U.S. veterans camped out in Washington, D.C., in protest, demanding the money they had earned through risking their lives on Europe's battlefields. When Congress finally pushed a bill through to pay the bonuses and disperse the "Bonus Army," Hoover vetoed it. Instead, the president violently dispersed the mob, which was referred to as a collection of "tramps" after rumors that communist infiltrators had worked their way into the crowd.

According to NPR , Butler was enraged, and rightly so. First, the men in 1918 had been considered heroes, while now, when they were an inconvenience, they were "tramps." He had spoken before the Bonus Army urging it not to give up until the Congress paid what was owed. According to the book " Maverick Marine ," Butler allied himself with Franklin Roosevelt's campaign to depose Hoover. He cared little for Roosevelt's political leanings, but thought he might make a good president, presumably based on his 1932 campaign platform.

The alleged plot

The main movers of the plot, according to Smedley Butler's testimony to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (via libertariansism.org ) were Bill Doyle and Gerald MacGuire, higher-ranking America Legion members from New England. They invited Butler to speak at the legion's national convention in Chicago. Butler knew he had not been invited, and MacGuire and Doyle claimed he had actually been disinvited (by the president himself). But it did not matter. They offered to enter him as Hawai'i's representative, despite the obvious problem that Butler did not live there. Butler was to take 300 legionnaires to the convention, all paid for by MacGuire, who had somewhere between $42,000-$64,000 (more than $1 million today) at his disposal from various American Legion donors. These donors would become instrumental to the plot later.

To Butler, the whole thing was suspicious. Even more so when the two movers told him that they already had a speech prepared for him about veterans' benefits. The speech was not as subversive as presented. It urged the government to honor its commitments to veterans' benefits. But it called for the benefits to be paid in gold, not "rubber money or paper money," a reference to Roosevelt's confiscation under EO 6102 . The average veteran, Butler responded, did not understand the importance of the gold standard. Thus, they were pawns in MacGuire and his bosses' political games. Butler ultimately refused to go despite offers of the plot movers to pay his mortgage and any other debts.

This is where things got interesting. Although the plot is associated with conservative elements in American society, the man that was to get it going was none other than 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith  (above). According to Smedley Butler's testimony (via libertarianism.org ), Gerald MacGuire told the general that Smith, an old ally of Franklin Roosevelt, had split with him over the gold confiscation. He was prepared to wreck Roosevelt's reputation among veterans through an organization called the American Liberty League. However, no one would find him convincing unless Butler supported him. While Smith handled the PR, Butler was to "go around and talk to the soldiers" to gauge their willingness "to join a great big super organization to maintain the democracy."

Here, MacGuire reframed what was quickly becoming a plot against the executive branch. Suddenly, he cared for Roosevelt. "The president is overworked," he claimed. He needed a break. Naturally, this did not compute, as MacGuire had just discussed annihilating Roosevelt's reputation among veterans. Finally, MacGuire revealed the true scope of the plans. MacGuire (or his handlers) stated their concerns that much of the money in circulation that was used to pay working Americans and veterans was in government bonds. In other words, people were getting paid with IOU's, not actual money, a legitimate grievance against Roosevelt's administration. Thus, (via libertarianism.org ) Butler was to assemble 500,000 men, march on D.C., and force Roosevelt to put him in power. Keynesian debt-financing could not be allowed to become the U.S. government's main way of financing itself. The "dumb American people," meanwhile, would go along.

The European sojourn

While Gerald MacGuire's offer to Smedley Butler was concerning enough, a nine-month trip to Europe tipped Butler off to the plot's real objective (via libertarianism.org ). MacGuire told Butler that he had taken a nine-month vacation to Europe. But it had not been purely a pleasure trip. Among the places McGuire visited were Italy, Germany, France, and possibly the USSR. While he admired Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin's use of the armed forces to buttress their power, he was aware that the American public would never tolerate any sort of military rule. So in France, McGuire observed how right-wing veterans' organizations had been able to wield political power and decided to try that in America.

According to MacGuire, since veterans already occupied a respected place in the public's imagination, their participation was the key to doing to Franklin D. Roosevelt "what Mussolini [had done] with the king of Italy." This was a reference to the famous 1922 March on Rome that put Mussolini in power (above). Butler was to repeat that feat. No one would oppose an army of veterans demanding their benefits, and if Roosevelt would not cooperate, they would surely remove him. But the veterans were just an excuse. According to the congressional release (via libertarianism.org ), MacGuire thought that Roosevelt had fallen under communist influence. A fascist government was needed to save the America and prevent communism from tearing everything down as it had in the USSR. But ideology generally comes in second to power and ambition. As expected, there were much more powerful people pulling MacGuire's strings.

The real plotters revealed

Smedley Butler's testimony focused on Gerald MacGuire and Bill Doyle, but they were not the main plotters. While they were ideologically motivated, the real movers were likely powerful people who cared little for political ideologies or -isms. The identities of this shadowy cabal can be deduced through their connections to two suspects named in the congressional record (via libertarianism.org ) that did not testify: J.P Morgan & Co. executive Thomas Lamont and John W. Davis, founding member of the influential  Council of Foreign Relations , and Rockefeller Foundation  trustee since 1922. Through their positions, Davis and Lamont were linked to some of America's most powerful bankers and industrialists, who financed Al Smith's American Liberty League.

A  pamphlet published by American labor activist Grace Hutchins revealed the ALL's powerful backers, for whom Davis and Lamont were likely fronts. They included men such as Irenee DuPont (above), John D. Rockefeller (who was still alive) and his Rockefeller Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan, Howard Pew, Howard Heinz, and a raft of J.P. Morgan & Co. bankers. It is unlikely that these men were ignorant of the ALL's plans to remove Franklin Roosevelt, but nothing has ever been proven in court. Interestingly, Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents, was not named, but given his Union Banking Corporation involvement in stashing German gold in the U.S. (via The Guardian ) through Adolf Hitler ally Fritz Thyssen, he likely knew of the plot (via GWU ). As  Timeline  puts it, Roosevelt had messed with their gold and their banks. Now, they were going to mess with his presidency.

And then, nothing happened

Smedley Butler's testimony was for naught. According to Harper's Magazine , not one single alleged conspirator was called to testify, let alone arrested, tried, or imprisoned. The National Archives quickly scrubbed all records of the Committee (which are difficult to find even now) and the alleged perpetrators' links to totalitarian regimes in Europe, which continued into World War II. MacGuire denied all knowledge of the plot (via libertarianism.org ), while the actual plotters — those who had financed the American Liberty League — were left untouched. Today their names are associated with respected organizations such as Heinz Ketchup, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, DuPont Chemical, or Pew Research. Prescott Bush became a Connecticut senator while his descendants became presidents. This would have never been possible without the complicity of the media, which went into full cover-up mode.

According to Tablet Magazine , the New York Times, owned by the controversial Ochs-Sulzberger family , had just run a 1933 cover up the Soviet Holodomor genocide against Ukrainians. As soon as the Business Plot surfaced, the paper did it again: In a 1934 article , the paper argued that Butler's testimony did not "lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." It was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a gigantic hoax. And so, the only modern plot to overthrow the U.S. government vanished into the wind just as quickly as it had come. So completely was it scrubbed from public conscience, that most Americans are completely unaware of it today.

The True Story That Inspired 'Amsterdam'

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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

Long before the concept of superheroes became nearly synonymous with comic books, this 1931 comic film almost snagged an Oscar.

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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U.S. History

Under the leadership of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American people and the U.S. economy gradually rebounded from the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s calm, confident demeanor had much to do with restoring Americans’ faith that better days would be coming. The New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration brought immediate economic relief as well as reforms in industry, agriculture, finance, and labour, vastly increasing the scope of the federal government’s activities. Although the programs initiated by the New Deal had little direct expansionary effect on the economy, it remains an open question whether they may nevertheless have had positive effects on consumer and business sentiment. By 1941 real GDP in the United States had recovered to within about 10 percent of its long-run trend path. Therefore, the United States had largely recovered from the Great Depression even before World War II-related military spending accelerated.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration

Having defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt took office amid a terrifying bank crisis in early 1933. Declaring a bank holiday was just one of the dramatic steps taken in “The Hundred Days” (March 9–June 16, 1933) early in his administration during which a major portion of First New Deal legislation was enacted. In 1935 Roosevelt asked Congress to pass additional legislation, sometimes called the “Second New Deal.” Roosevelt also provided a source of hope and security through his “fireside chats” radio broadcasts. He was ably assisted by the popular first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a cabinet full of skillful, committed New Dealers.

Video: Franklin D. Roosevelt

Meet the New Deal president, who piloted the United States through the Great Depression and World War II

Franklin D. Roosevelt

U.s. presidential election of 1932, eleanor roosevelt, fireside chats, bank holiday, harry l. hopkins.

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The New Deal

The New Deal (1933–39) aimed to provide immediate economic relief and to bring about reforms to stabilize the U.S. economy during the Great Depression. The New Deal’s first objective was to alleviate the suffering of the huge number of unemployed workers. It also tried to regulate the country’s financial hierarchy so as to avoid a repetition of the stock market crash of 1929 and the bank failures that followed. In 1935 the New Deal’s emphasis shifted to measures designed to assist labour and other urban groups. Its programs, then, fell into three principal categories– relief, recovery , and reform —though several programs provided both relief and recovery.

Video: Works Progress Administration

Overview of the Works Progress Administration

The masses of unemployed and their families who soon overwhelmed the miserably underfinanced bodies that provided direct relief required urgent attention. In May 1933 Congress established a Federal Emergency Relief Administration to distribute half a billion dollars to state and local agencies. The Civil Works Administration provided temporary work for four million individuals but was dismantled in 1934 because of its rising costs. However, the New Deal established a range of other programs to provide a livelihood to the unemployed that had more lasting effects.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

Public works administration (pwa), work progress administration (wpa), wpa federal art project (wpa/fap), wpa federal writers’ project, wpa federal theatre project, video: the wpa and museums.

A discussion concerning why American museums flourished in the 1930s

• Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture
• Treasury Relief Art Project
• Public Works of Art Project

New Deal recovery programs were intended to help stabilize and rebuild the economy, especially its nonbanking sectors. Among other objectives, they sought to increase agricultural prices by holding down supply, to help people remain in their homes, and to foster long-term employment.

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)

Agricultural adjustment administration (aaa), tennessee valley authority (tva).

New Deal reform programs involved legislation that was intended to guard against an economic disaster like Great Depression ever recurring. In particular they targeted banking, the stock market, labour, and labour unions.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

Federal housing administration (fha), federal national mortgage association (fannie mae), securities and exchange commission (sec), national labor relations act (wagner act), social security act (1935), fair labor standards act (1938), political movements and challenges to roosevelt.

Those on the political right criticized the New Deal for undermining capitalism and creating a welfare state, but, at the same time, Roosevelt’s efforts to stabilize the American economy also faced challenges from the left and from populists. During the Great Depression a significant number of Americans flirted with Marxist movements and ideas—which seemed to explain the causes of capitalism’s collapse—as well as with the notion that the model for a more humane society could be found in the Soviet Union.

Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)

Huey p. long, father coughlin, townsend clubs, u.s. presidential election of 1936, court-packing scheme, u.s. presidential election of 1940.

FDR and the Business Plot of 1933

Fdr and the business plot on r/todayilearned.

TIL [today I learned] of The Business Plot of 1933, a failed attempt to overthrow FDR and install a dictator. Led by a covertly bankrolled Wall Street coalition of affluent businessmen[.]

“Then over time, they gradually implemented their takeover and the nation didn’t notice. We now live in an oligarchy run by these wealthy people and their descendants. One of their kids was President already.” “JP Morgan, DuPont, Prescott Bush. Let that sink in.” “And their grandkid, too. Prescott Bush was a Nazi sympathizer, and wanted america to side with Hitler.” “Yeah, Prescott Bush really won in the end. It just took his kid helping to kill one president and then his grandkid letting 9/11 happen. After that, everything he was trying to get in the 30s was implemented by [former Vice President Dick] Chaney and [former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] Rummy.”

“In part because there were no repercussions, this plot failed but their next plot succeeded. “Likely the most consequential and destructive moment in 20th century American politics was when a group of segregationist and pro-business conservative Democrats managed to block the re-nomination of Henry Wallace—FDR’s Vice President, the clear winner of the first ballot, and the most popular person in the history of Gallup polling to ever hold executive office—in favor of a racist, conservative puppet of corporate interests and staunch anti-Communist, Harry Truman, at the 1944 DNC. Wallace was polling at 91% approval, still the record, while Truman had the support of 2% of the population to be vice president and wasn’t even actively seeking the nomination. “All insiders knew Roosevelt’s health was failing and the VP would be our next president. Wallace opposed the Cold War, the arms race with the Soviet Union, and racial segregation. He was a strong advocate of labor unions, universal national health insurance, government funded higher education, public works jobs, and women’s equality. He called for an end to ‘military or economic imperialism,’ exploitation of nations and their workers worldwide, the ‘second-class citizenship’ of women and non-white Americans, and aggressive foreign interventionism. He wanted to create 60 million jobs to provide full employment to every American that sought work, all back in the 1940s. This made him anathema to the wealthy elite who conspired through bribery, backroom deals, coercion, and even pulling the fire alarm at the convention like something out of [the television show]  Veep to keep him off the ticket by any means necessary. “Had Americans’ will been exercised rather than thwarted by monied interests within the DNC, it is exceedingly likely that the Cold War and all its attendant atrocities would have never happened, we wouldn’t have dropped two atomic bombs on a nation actively suing for peace, there may be no military-industrial complex driving all foreign policy decisions and government spending, and we would have universal healthcare, racial integration, equality for women, free public college, and a robust jobs program enshrined in the laws of our nation over 70 years ago instead of still fighting for all those things today.”

They went home, regrouped and played the long game. Didn’t help they were aided by the weakest generation(boomers)

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal vs. Business Interests: Then and Now

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in full Franklin Delano Roosevelt, byname FDR, (born January 30, 1882, Hyde Park, New York, U.S.—died April 12, 1945, Warm Springs, Georgia), 32nd president of the United States (1933–45). The only president elected to the office four times, Roosevelt led the United States through two of the greatest crises of the 20th century: the Great Depression and World War II. In so doing, he greatly expanded the powers of the federal government through a series of programs and reforms known as the New Deal, and he served as the principal architect of the successful effort to rid the world of German National Socialism and Japanese militarism.

The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. Over the next eight years, the government instituted a series of experimental New Deal projects and programs, such as the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps], the WPA [Works Progress Administration], the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority], the SEC [Securities & Exchange Commission] and others.

Meanwhile, the New Deal itself confronted one political setback after another. Arguing that they represented an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court had already invalidated reform initiatives like the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In order to protect his programs from further meddling, in 1937 President Roosevelt announced a plan to add enough liberal justices to the Court to neutralize the “obstructionist” conservatives. This “Court-packing” turned out to be unnecessary—soon after they caught wind of the plan, the conservative justices started voting to uphold New Deal projects—but the episode did a good deal of public-relations damage to the administration and gave ammunition to many of the president’s Congressional opponents. That same year, the economy slipped back into a recession when the government reduced its stimulus spending. Despite this seeming vindication of New Deal policies, increasing anti-Roosevelt sentiment made it difficult for him to enact any new programs. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. The war effort stimulated American industry and, as a result, effectively ended the Great Depression.

The New Deal Roosevelt had promised the American people began to take shape immediately after his inauguration in March 1933. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government was needed to get the country out of the depression, the first days of Roosevelt’s administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. Later, a second New Deal was to evolve; it included union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers. Many of the New Deal acts or agencies came to be known by their acronyms. For example, the Works Progress Administration was known as the WPA, while the Civilian Conservation Corps was known as the CCC. Many people remarked that the New Deal programs reminded them of alphabet soup. By 1939, the New Deal had run its course. In the short term, New Deal programs helped improve the lives of people suffering from the events of the depression. In the long run, New Deal programs set a precedent for the federal government to play a key role in the economic and social affairs of the nation.

“… Gov. Heil [of Wisconsin] said he wanted to lower taxes, ‘but the trouble is everybody is on relief or a pensoon — nobody wants to work anymore.”

Key Senate Republicans disagree with cash payments to Americans There was significant debate and disagreement in the Senate Republican Conference lunch [on March 19 2020] over President Donald Trump’s proposal to provide most Americans with $1,000-plus checks to boost spending and stimulate the economy, stalled because of the coronavirus outbreak. Senior Republicans pushed back on the idea, arguing it would be more effective to use that money to support loans and grants to small businesses that keep their employees on the payroll and to boost funding for state unemployment systems. Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican who chairs the Appropriations Committee, said he didn’t understand the logic of sending cash to people who have not lost their jobs … Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina and ally of Trump, argued the direct payments might be better used later, once the virus is defeated and a stimulus might jump-start the economy. […] Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, said the loan program would have a “much bigger impact” than direct payments. “I think that has the greatest bang for the buck to be able to keep people employed. A one-time check that comes to someone is not as significant as knowing my job is going to be there,” Lankford said.

By March 24 2020, disgraced former U.S. President Donald Trump was  expressing grave fears for the safety of the economy, and other politicians followed his lead by focusing intensely on the effects of a novel pathogen on business, rather than on families or society at large:

Despite expert warnings that a two-week lockdown (which [wasn’t] even being fully implemented nationally [as of March 24 2020]) is not enough to halt the spread of the coronavirus, Trump said that he wanted to reevaluate things after that time was up (reasonable) and get people back to work, possibly reopening schools as well (which is less so), so that the economy could keep going. […] Trump did not put it in such glaringly explicit terms. But Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) did, going on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show and saying we need to get back to work now, level of death be damned. In the [Fox News] interview, Patrick said senior citizens needed to take a “chance” on their survival to keep America the way it is. “I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed… we can’t lose our whole country … let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living,” he said.

President Donald Trump is encouraging states to reopen and Republicans hope the gradual comeback will kickstart the economy, reducing the pressure for more pricey aid. “Now it’s time to go back to work,” Trump said Tuesday [May 5 2020] at the White House. Under strict social distancing guidelines, the Senate reconvened Monday [May 4 2020] for the first time since March [2020], while the House is staying away due to the health risks as the conflicted Congress reflects an uneasy nation. The Washington area remains a virus hot spot under stay-home rules. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opened the chamber defending his decision to focus the agenda on confirming Trump’s nominees rather than the virus outbreak. On Tuesday [May 5 2020], McConnell insisted that any new aid package must include liability protections for the hospitals, health care providers and businesses that are operating and reopening in the pandemic.

On May 15 2020, NPR’s “Debate Over Reopening Puts Partisan Divide On Full Display” articulated how a virus became a politically partisan issue in the space of under two months:

Many Republicans are taking a controversial stance by reopening without sufficient testing in place and are blaming Democrats for the country’s current economic woes. “The people want to go back, the numbers are getting to a point where they can, and there just seems to be no effort on certain blue states to get back into gear,” President Trump recently told reporters in the Rose Garden.

There’s a tension at the heart of all of the plans to reopen the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic: The economy needs Americans to get back to work, but workplaces need employees and customers to feel that coming back won’t endanger their health or their lives. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, seems to be concerned primarily with the first half. The biggest obstacle, as he sees it, is not a deadly disease but rapacious trial lawyers, capitalizing on the virus to chase ambulances and bankrupt American businesses. “If people don’t come and businesses are afraid to open because of the lawyers that are lurking on the curbside outside their doors, we won’t have the reopening we want,” he said late last month [of April 2020]. [McConnell] warned of “years of endless lawsuits” from employees and customers flooding the courthouses with claims that a business’s negligence infected them with the virus. He’s called this supposed wave of litigation a “second pandemic.” As Congress gears up for the next installment of its stimulus package, Mr. McConnell has drawn a line: No more money for anyone until businesses get immunity from liability during the pandemic. The demands being debated include making it harder to claim that a business is at fault for a worker’s or customer’s infection, protecting businesses that are making personal protective equipment like masks for the first time, and protecting employers against privacy lawsuits if they disclose a worker’s infection.

From the earliest days of the pandemic to its first peak in the summer of 2020, most developed countries disbursed aid packages to their citizens as a matter of course, and in response to global public health recommendations to do so. Politicians like McConnell consistently framed those common programs as a “disincentive” to earn money:

… negotiations [between Democrats and Republicans] are likely to be even more painful in [a second] round of talks, with Republicans and Democrats divided over what to do with billions of dollars in programs that are set to expire at the end of July [2020]. One such program — the extra $600 per week in jobless benefits — has been a financial lifeline for America’s 44 million unemployed, but the two sides can’t agree whether to renew it. Republicans argue that the program provides a disincentive to return to work. McConnell said [on June 30 2020] that “unemployment is extremely important” but added “that is a different issue from whether we ought to pay people a bonus not to go back to work.”

Debate over economic aid packages persisted as Republican lawmakers frequently asserted  that the small sums distributed to Americans were unneeded, and that they were furthermore a barrier to “work”:

… leading congressional Republicans, some Senate Democrats and a handful of Trump’s economic advisers have questioned the need for a second stimulus check, posing a potential challenge to the stimulus package set to be taken up by lawmakers in July [2020]. “A lot of the stimulus checks that have gone out right now — people have been saving money and putting it into their savings accounts,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told reporters this week. “For me, let’s get people back to work. I think that’s a better way.” There’s some concern among White House officials that Americans pocketed the money rather than spending it, according to The Washington Post, citing a person with knowledge of the internal discussions. Since the pandemic started, U.S. bank deposits have surged by $2 trillion, buoyed by the federal government’s massive relief efforts. In April [2020], the personal savings rate in the country climbed to 33 percent, according to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The IRS expects to start sending an initial wave of economic stimulus payments, worth up to $1,200 apiece, to some 60 million Americans the week of April 13 [2020], Treasury Department and IRS officials have told the House Ways and Means Committee. But it could take up to five months for the payments to land in the mailboxes of millions of other people who have to be paid by check. Taxpayers in the first wave have direct deposit information on file with the IRS from their 2018 or 2019 tax returns. Paper checks would start going out in May [2020] to people who don’t have direct deposit information on file with the IRS, which includes nearly 100 million Americans. About 5 million checks will be sent weekly, and it could take up to 20 weeks to distribute all of them.

A correction was later added to emphasize  that it could take “months” for some Americans to obtain their first “stimulus” payment:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report cited an incorrect time period. It could take up to five months for some people to receive stimulus checks by mail.

On the website for the nonpartisan Miller Center, FDR’s legacy and the New Deal were summarized as follows, describing progress for labor and workers in 1935:

Under FDR, the American federal government assumed new and powerful roles in the nation’s economy, in its corporate life, and in the health, welfare, and well-being of its citizens. The federal government in 1935 guaranteed unions the right to organize and bargain collectively, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established a mechanism for putting a floor under wages and a ceiling on hours that continues to this day. It provided, in 1935, financial aid to the aged, infirm, and unemployed when they could no longer provide for themselves. Beginning in 1933, it helped rural and agricultural America with price supports and development programs when these sectors could barely survive. Finally, by embracing an activist fiscal policy after 1937, the government assumed responsibility for smoothing out the rough spots in the American economy. Writ large, the New Deal sought to insure that the economic, social, and political benefits of American capitalism were distributed more equally among America’s large and diverse populace. The New Deal did this to a remarkable degree.

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.”

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) inflation calculator could not calculate sums as large as $300 million, so we calculated the difference between $300 (million) in 1933 and 2023:

“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.” […] [Author of a book about the conspiracy Sally Denton] says that during the tense months between FDR’s election in November [1932] 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.

Another uncomfortable contrast appeared in that February 2012 excerpt, where NPR posited that “suggestions” that “democracy was not working” were “hard to imagine today.” Although it might have been “hard to imagine” in 2012, that was not the case in 2023 — in May 2023 Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama)  floated the idea of canceling all elections in the United States, and two months earlier Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said the United States was “ not a democracy ,” and that’s not even counting the attempted coup on January 6 2021.

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.

In November 1923, Adolf Hitler led a violent coup against the democratic system of Germany’s Weimar Republic. The coup started in an unlikely spot — a beer hall in Munich, the Bürgerbräukeller, very far from the capital city of Berlin and its parliament. But at this beer hall, the political, military, and police leaders of the state of Bavaria were meeting. Hitler wanted to enlist them in a “March on Berlin” to overturn the democratic government. He went to the beer hall to give a speech. For five years, Hitler and others on the German right had been telling their followers a lie: that Germany had not really lost World War I. Instead, Germany had been “stabbed in the back,” betrayed by civilian politicians (democrats and socialists, controlled, Hitler said, by Jews). Bavaria became the center of a large network of right-wing militia groups who believed the lie and were ready to act on it. […] Hitler learned his lesson: A sophisticated modern state could not be overturned by a violent coup led by outsiders, against the police and the army. He realized he would have to work within the system. Over the following decade [after the Beer Hall Putsch], this is exactly what he did. The Nazis ran in elections until they were the largest party in Germany’s parliament, gridlocking legislative business. Even more insidiously, the Nazis worked to infiltrate crucial institutions like the police and the army. In 1931, Berlin police responded incredibly sluggishly to a massive Nazi riot in the center of the city. It turned out senior police officials silently sympathized with the Nazis and had colluded in hobbling the police response.

… Trump and the Republicans appear to be ahead of Hitler and the Nazis on intimidating opponents and sabotaging democratic institutions. While the Nazis mostly focused on breaking up meetings of communists and launching youth radicalization programs like Hitler Youth, Trump and the Republicans have taken intimidation to new levels. One tactic has been for sympathizers to harass local election officials, to force independent members to resign and replace them with loyalists, as part of a larger effort to undermine election results. Another has been for far-right and Trump-affiliated groups to disrupt local school committee meetings to oppose mask mandates and undermine public education. At some Republican events, the pressure for violence is nearly palpable. In Idaho, a supporter asked Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk this question: “When do we get to use the guns?… That’s not a joke…. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” We don’t know exactly how Trump will fare in another run for president, but the actual vote may matter little. In the recent book Hitler’s First Hundred Days , historian Peter Fritzsche writes that the power brokers who handed over dictatorial power to Hitler in January 1933, absent majority support, were focused on ending the ever-worsening polarization, inconclusive elections, and political gridlock, “because the divisions in the country had created political paralysis.… Better ‘an end with horror’ than ‘horror without end,’ asserted one Nazi leader.” Shirer quotes a speech from November 9, 1936, celebrating the 13th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, in which Hitler reflected on his elevation to chancellor: “In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up, and all that there remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State—and that took but a few hours.” As Republicans undermine America’s election system, it’s not difficult—absent a successful legal prosecution—to imagine Trump reflecting in a few years about just how easy his takeover of the United States turned out to be.

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 … [MacGuire] made his proposal: The Marine [Butler] 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.

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. […]

Butler was telling a messier story than the ones Americans like to hear about ourselves. But we ignore the past at our peril … 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.

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.

The planned coup was thwarted when Butler reported it to J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who reported it to FDR. How seriously the “Wall Street putsch” endangered the Roosevelt presidency remains unknown, with the national press at the time mocking it as a “gigantic hoax” and historians like Arthur M Schlesinger Jr surmising “the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable” and that democracy was not in real danger. Still, there is much evidence that the nation’s wealthiest men – Republicans and Democrats alike – were so threatened by FDR’s policies that they conspired with antigovernment paramilitarism to stage a coup. […] As Congressman John McCormack who headed the congressional investigation put it: “If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded … When times are desperate and people are frustrated, anything could happen.” There is still much that is not known about the coup attempt. Butler demanded to know why the names of the country’s richest men were removed from the final version of the committee’s report. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape,” Butler said in a Philadelphia radio interview in 1935. “The big shots weren’t even called to testify. They were all mentioned in the testimony. Why was all mention of these names suppressed from this testimony?” While details of the conspiracy are still matters of historical debate, journalists and historians , including the BBC’s Mike Thomson and John Buchanan of the US, later concluded that FDR struck a deal with the plotters, allowing them to avoid treason charges – and possible execution – if Wall Street backed off its opposition to the New Deal. The presidential biographer Sidney Blumenthal recently said that Roosevelt should have pushed it all through, then reneged on his agreement and prosecuted them.

If the plotters had been held accountable in the 1930s, the forces behind the 6 January [2021] coup attempt might never have flourished into the next century.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee “delet[ed] extensive excerpts relating to Wall Street financiers including Guaranty Trust director Grayson Murphy, J.P. Morgan, the Du Pont interests, Remington Arms, and others allegedly involved in the plot attempt. Even today, in 1975, a full transcript of the hearings cannot be traced.” “Journalist John L. Spivak, researching Nazism and anti-Semitism for New Masses magazine, got permission from Dickstein to examine HUAC’s public documents and was (it seems unwittingly) given the unexpurgated testimony amid stacks of other papers”, which he printed. ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ Text in Red is deleted excerpts from the Congressional record, as reported by John L. Spivak; click the ^ to see the deleted text. The first seven pages of Part 1 were not part of the Congressional record, but were found on Google Books (though difficult to ferret out, partially using quotes found by searching for “glazier” in articles found on newspapers.com for the dates on and just after December 29, 1934).

[Mr. FRENCH] September 13, 1934, I came to New York, went to his office on the twelfth floor of 52 Broadway. The whole floor is occupied by Grayson M.-P. Murphy & Co. At first he was somewhat cagey in talking, and then he warmed up. [The CHAIRMAN] You had this talk with MacGuire? [Mr. FRENCH] Gerald P. MacGuire in the offices of Grayson M.-P. Murphy & Co., the twelfth floor of 52 Broadway, shortly after 1 o’clock in the afternoon. [MacGuire] has a small private office there and I went into his office. I have here some direct quotes from him. As soon as I left his office I got to a typewriter and made a memorandum of everything that he told me. 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 over night. During the conversation he told me he had been in Italy and Germany during the summer of 1934 and the spring of 1934 and had made an intensive study of the background of the Nazi and Fascist movements and how the veterans had played a part in them. He said he had obtained enough information on the Fascist and Nazi movements and of the part played by the veterans, to properly set up one in this country. He emphasized throughout his conversation with me that the whole thing was tremendously patriotic, that it was saving the Nation from communists, and that the men they deal with have that crackbrained idea that the Communists are going to take it apart. He said the only safeguard would be the soldiers. At first he suggested that the General organize this outfit himself and ask a dollar a year dues from everybody. We discussed that, and then he came around to the point of getting outside financial funds, and [MacGuire] said that it would not be any trouble to raise a million dollars. He said that he could go to John W. Davis [attorney for J.P. Morgan & Co.] or Perkins of the National City Bank, and any number of persons and get it. Of course, that may or may not mean anything. That is, his reference to John W. Davis and Perkins of the National City Bank. During my conversation with him I did not of course commit the General to anything. I was just feeling him along. Later, we discussed the question of arms and equipment, and he suggested that they could be obtained from the Remington Arms Co., on credit through the du Ponts. I do not think at that time he mentioned the connections of du Pont with the American Liberty League, but he skirted all around it. That is, I do not think he mentioned the Liberty League, but he skirted all around the idea that that was the back door, and that this was the front door; one of the du Ponts is on the board of directors of the American Liberty League and they own a controlling interest in the Remington Arms Co. In other words he suggested that Roosevelt would be in sympathy with us and proposed the idea that Butler would be named as the head of the C.C.C. camps by the President as a means of building up this organization. He would then have 300,000 men. Then he said that if that did not work the General would not have any trouble enlisting 500,000 men.

[Butler] I said, “The President has got the whole American people. Why does he want them?” [MacGuire] said “Don’t you understand the set-up has got to be changed a bit? Now, we have got him—we have got the President. He has got to have more money. There is not any more money to give him. Eighty percent of the money now is in Government bonds, and he cannot keep this racket up much longer. He has got to do something about it. He has either got to get more money out of us or he has got to change the method of financing the Government, and we are going to see to it that he does not change that method. He will not change it. He is with us now. I said, “The idea of this great group of soldiers, then, is to sort of frighten him, is it?” “No, no, no; not to frighten him. This is to sustain him when others assault him.” He said, “You know, the President is weak. He will come right along with us. He was born in this class. He was raised in this class, and he will come back. He will run true to form. In the end he will come around. But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does.” I said, “Well, I do not know about that. How would the President explain it?” He said: “He will not necessarily have to explain it, because we are going to help him out. Now, did it ever occur to you that the President is overworked? We might have an Assistant President, somebody to take the blame; and if things do not work out, he can drop him.” He said, “That is what he was building up Hugh Johnson for. Hugh Johnson talked too damn much and got him into a hole, and he is going to fire him in the next three or four weeks.” I said, “How do you know all this?” “Oh,” he said, “we are in with him all the time. We know what is going to happen.”

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. No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European 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. This committee received evidence from Maj. Gen Smedley D. Butler (retired), twice decorated by the Congress of the United States. He testified before the committee as to conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the leadership of General Butler. MacGuire denied these allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various forms of veterans organizations of Fascist character.

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Late Night Business Safety Plan Program

Montgomery County is committed to establishing a uniform process for those businesses in areas experiencing higher than normal call volumes in the late-night hours. The business safety plan summarizes the establishment’s efforts to safely conduct operations for patrons and employee(s) consistent with County Executive Regulation 004-24. Consistent with this Regulation, the Montgomery County Department of Police (MCPD) has launched a Late-Night Business Safety Plan application portal.

Am I required ?

Beginning September 13, 2024, businesses required to submit a safety plan are those that have an “other tobacco products retailer” license, food license, license for on-site cannabis consumption, or liquor license where the products sold are consumed on-site at tables or other areas designated for consumption by the business, and that:

• Are open to patrons from 2:00am – 5:00am; or,
• Are open to patrons from 12:00am – 5:00am and have had two serious incidents within the previous 12 months. See the FAQs for the definition of a serious incident.

Applicable businesses will receive training at the business location from a MCPD officer within 30 days of the application submission. Upon submission of the application, the district station will be notified and an officer will contact the applicant to arrange the training. Training must be completed before the Safety Plan can be considered for approval.

How do I apply ?

Fill out our online form to apply for Montgomery County Late Night Business Safety Plan Program.

Online Application Form

Frequently Asked Questions

A business-specific written document summarizing the establishment’s efforts to safely conduct operations for patrons and employee(s) consistent with guidelines and training described in Montgomery County Executive Regulation 004-24.

According to Montgomery County Executive Regulation 004-24, Serious Incidents are defined as:

• Distribution of narcotics or other controlled dangerous substances;
• A sexual offense in the third or fourth degree under § 3-307 or § 3-308 of the Criminal Law Article of the Maryland Code; or
• A crime of violence as defined in § 14-101 of the Criminal Law Article, including:
• kidnapping;
• manslaughter, except involuntary manslaughter;
• human trafficking;
• sexual offense of any degree;
• use of a handgun in the commission of a felony or other crime of violence;
• an attempt to commit any of the crimes described in the preceding bullets of this list;
• assault in the first degree;
• assault against a law enforcement officer or emergency medical services provider in any degree; and, assault with intent of any type in any degree.

The Safety Plan Review Panel will receive and conduct a preliminary review of the late-night business safety plan within 30 (thirty) days of receipt of each safety plan.

• Businesses may appeal the disapproval of a safety plan or the requirement to produce a safety plan under the serious incident inclusion provision before the Montgomery County Board of Appeals.
• Appeals must be filed within 30 days of receipt of the decision disapproving a plan or notification of the requirement to produce a plan.

Funding availability is subject to appropriation by the Montgomery County Council.

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/exec/Resources/Files/Executive%20Regulation%20%23004-24_Late-Night%20Business(4).pdf

Businesses may appeal the disapproval of a safety plan or the requirement to produce a safety plan under the serious incident inclusion provision before the Montgomery County Board of Appeals. Appeals must be filed within 30 days of receipt of the decision disapproving a plan or notification of the requirement to produce a plan.

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/boa/

• Link to County Regulation 004-24
• News release : Link to press release

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