The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

by Jules Archer

The Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities still intends to get to the bottom of the story of a Wall Street plot to put Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler at the head of a Fascist army here, Representative Samuel Dickstein, vice chairman, said yesterday.

On December 3, 1934, Time magazine ran a first-page story that attempted to ridicule Butler under the headlines “Plot Without Plotters.”

An unflattering photo of Butler in civilian clothes, with his finger reflectively in one ear, was labeled, “He was deaf to a dictatorship.” The pose subtly suggested that the general, as the copy broadly hinted, was a bit daft.

The author asked McCormack in 1971 about Time’s fairness in reporting the Butler hearing. The answer was a snort of disgust. “Time has always been about as filthy a publication as ever existed,” he said emphatically. “I’ve said that publicly many times. The truth gets

no coverage at all, just sensationalism, whatever will sell copies.”

Ten days later McCormack announced that Albert Christmas had returned from Europe and would testify in two or three days in an executive session. Clark’s attorney was not questioned, however, until the final day of the committee’s life, January 3, 1935, after which no further investigatory action could be taken by the committee.

In his book Facts and Fascism he wrote, “Most papers suppressed the whole story or threw it down by ridiculing it. Nor did the press later publish the McCormack-Dickstein report which stated that every charge Butler made and French corroborated had been proven true.”

Speaker McCormack told me, “The Times is the most slanting newspaper in the world. I would not expect anything else from them. They brainwash the American people. It’s an empire.”

On January 31 a New Jersey veteran wrote Butler, “General, at this time I can say you have 95 percent of the New Jersey veterans in back of you in anything you do.” Two weeks later Dickstein declared that he intended to seek a new congressional appropriation to press a thorough investigation into Butler’s charges. “General Butler’s charges

The country should know the full truth about these reputed overtures to General Butler. If there are individuals or interests who have ideas and plans such as he testified to, they should be dragged out into the open.”

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 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 asserts that any efforts based on lines as suggested in the foregoing and leading off to the extreme right, are just as bad as efforts which would lead to the extreme left.

Armed forces for the purpose of establishing a dictatorship by means of

Fascism or a dictatorship through the instrumentality of the proleteriat, or a dictatorship predicated on racial and religious ha...

Worst of all, no one involved in the plot had been prosecuted.

Spivak went to the Department of Justice and pointed out that MacGuire had denied essential

parts of Butler’s testimony, which the committee itself reported it had proved by documents, bank records, and letters. Did the department intend to file a criminal prosecution against MacGuire for perjury or involvement in the plot?...

Which is, of course, only to emphasize the nature of our government as representative of the interests of the controllers of property. Violence, even to the seizure of government, is excusable on the part of those whose lofty motive is to preserve the profit system.

The Record condemned phony “popular” movements like the National Economy League, a front for big business, and added: Some of the same interests behind the League, according to General Butler, are behind this effort to use him and his soldier following in defense of special privilege in America. The same

people who succeeded in slashing aid to veterans would like to use those same veterans as their pawns in a war on democracy. The folk who want Fascism in this country are the same folk who made profit while others bled and who would rather see the veteran starve than unbalance the budget, i.e., add to the burden of taxes on great wealth. They did it in Italy. They did it in Germany. They did it in Austria. They will try to do it in America. . . . General Butler has nipped one such movement in the bud.

The takeover plot failed because though those involved had astonishing talents for making breathtaking millions of dollars, they lacked an elementary understanding of people and the moral forces that activate them.

And with incredible ineptitude, they had selected the wrong man.

The formation of the American Liberty League had been announced precisely at the time MacGuire had predicted the emergence of an organization of “big fellows” who were in the background of the Fascist putsch. Its treasurer had been none other than Colonel Grayson M.-P. Murphy. One of its financial backers was Robert S. Clark. Two of the largest contributors had been the J. P. Morgan Associates and the Du Pont interests. John W. Davis was a member of the National Executive Committee.

Morgan and Du Pont men were directors. And MacGuire had told French that the putsch could obtain arms and equipment from the Remington Arms Company, in which the Du Ponts held a controlling interest, on credit through the Du Ponts.

One night when the President was scheduled to arrive in Chattanooga, Christians threatened to cut off the city’s electric power and warned grimly, “Lots of things can happen in the dark!” This protégé of the American Liberty League was kept under surveillance by the Secret Service.

As James Farley would later say, the American Liberty League ‘ought to be called the American Cellophane League’ because ‘first it’s a Du Pont product and second, you can see right through it.’”

Finally, one must consider the outlook of the conspirators against the background of the times. During the feverish atmosphere of the early New Deal days, big business was horrified by Roosevelt’s

drastic surgery on the broken-down machinery of the capitalist system. The savage hatred of “that cripple in the White House” represented the most bitter animosity big business had ever manifested toward any President in American history. Their hate campaign was echoed by the vast majority of newspapers, like the Hearst press, which had originally supported the President, then denounced him as a dictator. Roosevelt had been compelled to turn to...

That it did not happen here could be credited largely to the patriotism and determination of one courageous American—Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.

War is a racket to protect economic interests, not our

country, and our soldiers are sent to die on foreign soil to protect investments by big business.”

So great had the fear of communism and ‘Red propaganda’ become that even editors who did not swallow all of it themselves went along because it was the popular attitude.”

Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape.

$3,000,000 was “on the line” and that $300,000,000—and that’s a lot of money even today—was in view to put over this plot to bluff the government.

Do you think it could be hard to buy the American Legion for un-American activities? You know, the average veteran thinks the Legion is a patriotic organization to perpetuate the memories of the last war, an organization

promote peace, to take care of the wounded and to keep green the graves of those who gave their lives. But is the American Legion that? No sir, not while it is controlled by the bankers. For years the bankers, by buying big club houses for various posts, by financing its beginning, and otherwise, have tried to make a strikebreaking organization of the Legion. The groups—the so-called Royal Family of the Legion—which have picked its officers for years, aren’t interested in patriotism, in peace, in wounded veterans, in those who gave their lives. . . No, they are interested only in using the veterans, through their officers.

Butler was incredulous when he read that Colonel William E. Easterwood, national vice-commander of the Legion, while visiting Italy in 1935, had pinned a Legion button on Mussolini, making him an “honorary member,” and had invited the dictator to the next Legion convention in Chicago.

What would be the public gain from delving deeper into a plot which was already exposed and whose principals could be kept under surveillance?

“There was no doubt that General Butler was telling the truth,” he replied. “We believed his testimony one hundred percent. He was a great, patriotic American in every respect.”

I asked him about Colonel Murphy’s role in the plot. “Grayson Murphy was a number-one kingmaker in the Legion. His firm had clients of great wealth. Those fellows were afraid that Roosevelt would take their money away by taxes. They were desperate and sought to take power and frighten Roosevelt into doing what they wanted. But they made the mistake of approaching the wrong man to do the job.”

McCormack reflected a moment, then said, “Well, we were in the depths of a severe depression, and we had a good man, Roosevelt, in the White House, and he’d revived the hopes and confidence of the American people. The plotters definitely hated the New Deal because it was for the people, not for the moneyed interests, and they were willing to spend a lot of their money to dump Mr. Roosevelt out of the White House.”

“Mr. Speaker, why were the plotters so insistent that General Butler accept their proposal that he be the one to head the Fascist march on Washington they planned?” “They chose Smedley Butler because they needed an ‘enlisted man’s general,’ not a ‘general’s general.’ They had to have a colorful figure half a million or more veterans who had been privates

and noncoms would follow. General Butler was the most popular one.”

“And we might have gone Fascist?” “If the plotters had got rid of Roosevelt, there’s no telling what might have taken place. They wouldn’t have told the people what they were doing, of course. They were going to make it all sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and a plan to make it all sound like a good American program. A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority, as Adolf Hitler did.

Finally I asked him, “Then in your opinion America could definitely have become a Fascist power had it not been for General Butler’s patriotism in exploding the plot?” “It certainly could have,” McCormack acknowledged. “The people were in a very confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction. Mass frustration could bring about anything.”

The committee had brought about passage of the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act to smoke out hidden Nazi and Soviet agents into the limelight.

“He knew that this was a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of rich men who wanted fascism.”

Speaking to a Y.M.C.A. in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in February, he accused the big industrialists of America of fattening on the blood of soldiers. He pointed out that the average profit of the Du Ponts from 1910 to 1914 had been only $6 million, but had soared to $58 million between 1914 and 1918. The jump in the same periods for Bethlehem

Steel had been $6 to $49 million; for International Nickel, $4 to $73 million. “It makes you feel proud,” he said bitingly. “A lot of the stockholders are members of the National Economy League, and, after I complete my investigation, I will probably find they are also members of the American Liberty League.”