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FILE 049 · VOL VIII · Your Great-Grandparents Were the Test
Wall Street Asked a Marine General to Overthrow the President
A coup only fails if somebody says no. Ask how many times nobody did.
Based on: The Business Plot of 1934
Intake record
| Recovered from | Estate of a former bond salesman's secretary, New York City |
|---|---|
| Contents | Stenographer's notebook (1933 to 1934), a check stub, a letter to a congressional committee (unsent) |
| Finder | Niece |
| Status | The committee referenced published its report in February 1935. Its unedited testimony was not fully released for decades. |
Recovered file
In 1933, the United States was in the worst economic crisis in its history. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed. Banks were failing by the thousand. A new President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had taken office promising a New Deal, and had begun, among other things, to take the country off the gold standard. Some of the wealthiest men in America believed he was leading the nation toward socialism and ruin. [1]
In November 1934, a retired Marine Corps major general named Smedley Butler testified before a special committee of the House of Representatives. Butler was one of the most decorated soldiers in American history, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and enormously popular with veterans. He testified that he had been approached by a bond salesman named Gerald MacGuire, acting on behalf of wealthy financial interests, with a proposal. Butler would lead a private army of half a million veterans in a march on Washington. Roosevelt would be pressured to accept a new cabinet post, a secretary of general affairs, to run the government, while the President became a figurehead. If he refused, he would be removed. [2]
Butler said he refused. He said he had told MacGuire that if he got even a few hundred thousand veterans together to march on Washington, he would use them to defend the government, not to overthrow it. [2]
In February 1935, the committee reported that it had been able to verify the pertinent statements made by General Butler, and that attempts to establish a fascist organization in the United States had been discussed, had been planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient. No one was prosecuted. Several powerful men named in the testimony were never called to testify. The newspapers largely treated the affair as a joke. [3]
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
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