The Plot to Seize the White House Quotes

“. As George Seldes told me, “If you are saying anything in general about the fight against fascism in America, it seems to me that a point to emphasize is that the entire Redbaiting wave which culminated in the McCarthy era was successful in inundating the anti-Fascists by making every anti-Fascist, whether liberal, socialist, or Communist, a Red.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“On August 21, 1931, invited to address an American Legion convention in Connecticut, he made the first no-holds-barred antiwar speech of his career. It stunned all who heard it or read it in the few papers that dared report it in part: I spent 33 years . . . being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. . . . I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. . . . I had . . . a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. . . . I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents. . . . We don’t want any more wars, but a man is a damn fool to think there won’t be any more of them. I am a peace-loving Quaker, but when war breaks out every damn man in my family goes. If we’re ready, nobody will tackle us. Give us a club and we will face them all. . . . There is no use talking about abolishing war; that’s damn foolishness. Take the guns away from men and they will fight just the same. . . . In the Spanish-American War we didn’t have any bullets to shoot, and if we had not had a war with a nation that was already licked and looking for an excuse to quit, we would have had hell licked out of us. . . . No pacifists or Communists are going to govern this country. If they try it there will be seven million men like you rise up and strangle them. Pacifists? Hell, I’m a pacifist, but I always have a club behind my back!”
― Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

“Navy Secretary Adams, a wealthy, polo-playing yachtsman, sent for Butler and delivered a blistering reprimand, declaring that he was doing so at the direct personal order of the President of the United States. Butler saw red. “This is the first time in my service of thirty-two years,” he snapped back, “that I’ve ever been hauled on the carpet and treated like an unruly schoolboy. I haven’t always approved of the actions of the administration, but I’ve always faithfully carried out my instructions. If I’m not behaving well it is because I’m not accustomed to reprimands, and you can’t expect me to turn my cheek meekly for official slaps!” “I think this will be all,” Adams said icily. “I don’t ever want to see you here again!” “You never will if I can help it!” Butler rasped, storming out of his office livid with anger. Just two days after his attack on the government’s gunboat diplomacy, which provoked a great public commotion, Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark privately submitted to Secretary of State Stimson the draft of a pledge that the United States would never again claim the right to intervene in the affairs of any Latin American country as an “international policeman.” The Clark Memorandum, which later became official policy—for a while at least—repudiated the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that Smedley Butler had unmasked as raw gunboat diplomacy.”
― Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

“Washington continued to permit American corporations to sell scrap iron and oil to Tokyo for its war machine. He also knew that there were over two billion dollars in American investments in Germany, which was being goaded by British diplomacy into attacking the Soviet Union.”
― Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“The McCormack-Dickstein Committee had exposed Ivy Lee, the noted public relations expert ostensibly employed by the German dye trust, but actually on the payroll of the Nazi Government to help them win favorable publicity in the American press.”
― Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“A veteran Washington correspondent told Spivak that he had heard the deletions had been made at the request of a member of the President’s Cabinet. The implication was that release of certain names could embarrass the Democratic party, because two had been unsuccessful Democratic candidates for the Presidency”
― Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“If we remember Major General Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States—and for making damned sure no one else did either.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“The conspiracy unquestionably inspired the novel Seven Days in May, made into a successful film, which portrayed a Fascist plot by high-placed American conspirators to capture the White House and establish a military dictatorship under the pretext of saving the nation from communism. Few of the millions of Americans who read the novel or saw the film suspected that it had a solid basis in fact.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“I am a Quaker and am preaching tolerance and am not connected nor will I have anything to do with any movement or organization advocating intolerance or the entrance of this country into any foreign war.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Butler’s raging hatred of war led him into the same errors of judgment that ensnared the isolationists of America. Like them, he approved of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to buy “peace in our time” at Munich.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“The Du Ponts supplied more grist for Butler’s antiwar mill in September, when the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee revealed that the munitions industry, led by the Du Ponts, had sabotaged a League of Nations disarmament conference held at Geneva.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Soldiers never leave the country except to protect the moneyed interests.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Directors of the League were identified as also being directors of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, Goodyear Tire, and Mutual Life Insurance Company.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“The American Liberty League banquet marked the opening of their hate campaign of propaganda to defeat the reelection of Roosevelt in 1936.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“The Olympia, Washington, post of the United Spanish War Veterans immediately passed a resolution protesting this libel. Demanding a retraction, they pointed out, “Less than three years ago he stifled an incipient fascist rebellion in the eastern United States, an accomplishment due solely to his own prompt initiative, thereby demonstrating once more his stalwart Americanism.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Butler’s uncompromising stand against war was sometimes confused with the right-wing propaganda of pro-Fascists who wanted no American help given to the victims of Mussolini and Hitler.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Industrialists and financiers were shocked by Butler’s “radical” notion. But if they had checked the Oxford Dictionary, they would have found as one definition of conscription: “taxation or confiscation of property for war purposes to impose equality of sacrifice on non-conscripts.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“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.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Butler spilled over with anger at the hypocrisy that had marked American interference in the internal affairs of other governments, behind a smoke screen of pious expressions of high-sounding purpose. “We supervised elections in Haiti,” he said wryly, “and wherever we supervised them our candidate always won.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“In that emotional climate it was not at all surprising that some elements of big business should have sought to emulate their counterparts in Germany and Italy, supporting a Fascist putsch to take over the government and run it under a dictator on behalf of America’s bankers and industrialists. That it did not happen here could be credited largely to the patriotism and determination of one courageous American—Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“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.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“He might have been boasting falsely about having had his headquarters while in Paris at the offices of Morgan and Hodges and about the involvement of the Morgan interests in the plot.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“It is conceivable that some of those named by MacGuire as under consideration for the role of dictator or subordinate positions of leadership had no knowledge of this fact, although Van Zandt reported that he, for one, had been approached. It is unlikely that Douglas MacArthur, as Chief of Staff and a stiff-necked hero with patriotic credentials as unchallengeable as Butler’s, would have had any unsavory dealings with the plotters, however patrician his outlook.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“This total vindication of Butler did not burst like a bombshell across the front pages of America. Instead, as Seldes noted, “Most newspapers again suppressed or buried or belittled the official verdict.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“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.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Extensive space was given to their attempts to brand Butler a liar or lunatic. Only at the tail of the story, buried inside the paper, did the Times wind up its account with a few brief paragraphs mentioning some of his allegations.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“He had seen it in Europe. It was a plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight, and he said that when they got into power, that is what they would do; that that was the ideal plan.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“He emphasized throughout his conversation with me that the whole thing was tremendously patriotic, that it was saving the Nation from Communists,”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Its contributors included representatives of the Morgan, Du Pont, Rockefeller, Pew, and Mellon interests. Directors of the League included Al Smith and John J. Raskob. The League later formed affiliations with pro-Fascist, antilabor, and anti-Semitic organizations. It astonished Butler that former New York Governor Al Smith, who had lost the 1928 presidential race to Hoover as the Democratic candidate, could be involved in a Fascist plot backed by wealthy men.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

“Butler’s next observation, possibly the most significant in all his testimony, was missing from the published version of his testimony. It was the link between the conspiracy and the powerful interests Butler had good reason to believe were the “big fellows” in the background.”
― Anne Venzon Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.