Wealthy financiers plotted a fascist coup against Roosevelt in 1933
Verdict: Disputed. A retired Marine general testified under oath that financiers approached him about a veterans' coup, and a congressional committee said it verified his account — but no one was prosecuted, every named man denied it, and historians still argue over whether it was a real plan or a scheme that never got past talk.
Believed by: Little polling exists; awareness rose sharply after 2020s retrospectives
What the theory claims
That in 1933–34, a group of wealthy businessmen and financiers, opposed to Franklin Roosevelt's departure from the gold standard and his New Deal policies, conspired to recruit a private army of several hundred thousand veterans, install retired Major General Smedley Butler as its leader, and use the threat of a march on Washington to force Roosevelt to cede power to a new, unelected 'Secretary of General Affairs' — in effect, a soft fascist coup modeled on Europe's veteran leagues.
The evidence in brief
Claim: A decorated, retired general testified under oath that financiers tried to recruit him for a coup.
Evidence: True, and undisputed. Smedley Butler — twice awarded the Medal of Honor, the most publicly trusted military figure of his era — gave detailed sworn testimony naming dates, meetings, and dollar figures. His credibility as a witness, separate from whether the plot was real, was rarely challenged even by skeptics.
Claim: A congressional committee confirmed the plot was real.
Evidence: Partly true, with an important limit. The committee's final report said it had verified 'all the pertinent statements made by General Butler,' and that the scheme was 'discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution' — but it explicitly could not corroborate the single most dramatic claim, that anyone had proposed Butler himself lead the organization, and it named no one as prosecutable.
Claim: The men Butler named were prosecuted or forced to answer for it.
Evidence: False. Every individual Butler identified — including Gerald MacGuire, Robert Sterling Clark, and Grayson Murphy — denied involvement, and no one was indicted, subpoenaed to the same degree as Butler, or held legally accountable. The Justice Department did not pursue charges.
Claim: This was a fringe rumor with no documentary backing.
Evidence: Overstated. The committee's investigators found bank records and correspondence — including a letter from MacGuire describing the French veterans' league Croix de Feu as a model — that corroborated parts of Butler's account of contacts and travel, even though they could not prove the coup itself was ever a firm operational plan.
Timeline
- 1933Bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire and American Legion official William Doyle begin approaching Smedley Butler, then the country's most famous retired general, about veterans' politics.
- 1933–34Butler testifies MacGuire's proposals escalate: funding a Butler speaking tour, then a plan for him to lead 500,000 veterans to Washington and press Roosevelt to create a new cabinet post.
- 1934-07Butler reports the approaches to the U.S. House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Reps. John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein.
- 1934-11Butler and MacGuire testify before the committee in executive session; MacGuire denies the central allegations under oath.
- 1934-11Major newspapers, including the New York Times, report the story with open skepticism, calling parts of it a 'gigantic hoax.'
- 1935-02The committee issues its final report, concluding the plans were 'discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution' — but no one is indicted.
The full story
The general and the bond salesman
By 1933, Smedley Butler was one of the most recognizable men in America who had never held elected office. He had retired the previous year as a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps after thirty-three years of service, two Medals of Honor, and a growing second career as a barnstorming public speaker — increasingly a populist and anti-war one, scornful of the bankers and industrialists he had come to believe used the military to protect their overseas investments. Veterans, especially the destitute former soldiers of the Bonus Army that had been forcibly dispersed from Washington in 1932, loved him.
That popularity made him a natural target for recruitment — or so Butler later testified. In the summer of 1933, he told Congress, he was approached by Gerald C. MacGuire, a bond salesman for the Wall Street firm Grayson M-P. Murphy & Co., together with American Legion official William Doyle. The initial ask was mundane: would Butler run for national commander of the American Legion, with expenses covered by unnamed backers? Butler said he declined, suspicious of who was really paying and why an obscure bond salesman had that kind of money to spend.
What Butler swore under oath
Take the believers' case on its own terms, because it rests on something concrete: sworn congressional testimony from a witness whose honesty was barely questioned even by people who doubted his conclusions. Testifying in executive session before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities — chaired by Reps. John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein, and known afterward as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee — Butler laid out an escalating series of contacts through late 1933 and 1934.
According to Butler, MacGuire's proposals grew steadily bolder: first funding for a Butler speaking tour attacking the gold standard's abandonment; then, in 1934, a fully formed plan. MacGuire allegedly told him a war-chest of millions was available to organize roughly 500,000 veterans for a march on Washington, ostensibly to demand cash payment of a promised service bonus but really to pressure Roosevelt into creating a new cabinet-level post — a “Secretary of General Affairs” — who would assume the president's operational powers while Roosevelt became a ceremonial head of state, citing his health as pretext. Butler said MacGuire pointed to Europe for precedent, describing the Croix de Feu, a French nationalist veterans' league, in a letter after a research trip abroad; a March 1934 letter along these lines became part of the committee's evidence.
Butler testified that MacGuire named, as prospective backers, some of the era's best-known men of wealth — figures connected to the DuPont family, J.P. Morgan & Co. interests, and the Liberty League, a group formed that same year to oppose the New Deal's economic policies. Butler said he strung MacGuire along to learn more, then reported the entire affair to the committee and, separately, to a Philadelphia journalist, before it ever became public. When the committee released its final report on February 15, 1935, it did not dismiss him. It stated plainly that “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,” and separately that it “was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.” For a body that could easily have buried an inconvenient story about the nation's financial elite, that is a striking thing to have put in writing.
What the committee could not verify
Read the committee's report past its most quotable line, and the picture gets considerably murkier. Immediately after saying it had verified Butler's pertinent statements, the same report added a crucial exception: it could not corroborate “the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization” — that is, the specific claim that anyone had formally proposed Butler himself take command of the veterans' army. That is close to the load-bearing allegation of the entire story, and the committee said, in its own words, it could not confirm it.
No one was indicted. The Justice Department never brought charges. Every individual Butler named as a participant or backer — MacGuire, financier Robert Sterling Clark, executive Grayson Murphy, and others linked to DuPont and Morgan interests — denied the allegations, several under oath. MacGuire, the one alleged recruiter who did testify, admitted to a European trip studying veterans' organizations and to contact with Butler, but called the coup plan itself an exaggeration or misunderstanding; committee members found his answers evasive rather than confirming. The committee itself, in its earlier preliminary report, cautioned it would “not take cognizance of names brought into testimony which constitute mere hearsay” — a warning that some of the most famous names attached to the story in popular retellings (a list that has grown further in decades of retelling online) were never substantiated by the committee at all.
Contemporary press coverage was, at first, openly derisive: the New York Times described the story in November 1934 as a “gigantic hoax,” and Time magazine mocked it under the headline “Plot Without Plotters,” treating Butler's account as tall talk that no serious person had actually acted on. New York's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, closer to the events than most historians who later studied them, is widely quoted as dismissing it as a “cocktail putsch” — all talk over drinks, no operational plan. Historians who have since combed the record, including Robert F. Burk, describe it as most plausibly a mix of genuine, if amateurish, influence-peddling by a small circle of financiers, filtered through Butler's own populist suspicion of Wall Street — not a coordinated, imminent coup with a real chain of command.
Why the story has such staying power
The Business Plot occupies an unusual place among conspiracy theories: unlike most entries in this encyclopedia, its central claim was tested in a legislative hearing while the alleged plotters were still alive, and the resulting record is genuinely ambiguous rather than clearly resolved either way. That ambiguity is exactly what keeps it alive. A committee said, in an official government document, that a coup “might have been placed in execution” — a sentence that is easy to quote as vindication and easy to read, in full context, as a hedge.
It also survived by being genuinely inconvenient to everyone with a stake in the story. Prosecutors had little appetite for pursuing wealthy, well-connected men on the word of a single bond salesman's contested account. The financiers named had every reason to let the story die quietly rather than sue and draw more attention. And mainstream historians, wary of both crediting an unprovable coup and dismissing sworn testimony from a decorated general, tended to give it a paragraph rather than a chapter — which left the fullest, most dramatic tellings largely to popular writers like Jules Archer, whose 1973 The Plot to Seize the White House treated Butler's account as essentially proven and became the story's main vehicle into public memory, later amplified further by internet retellings that add names and details the committee itself never confirmed.
Finally, the story sits on real historical ground that makes it feel more plausible than an ordinary conspiracy claim: 1933 truly was a year when elite discomfort with an interventionist, off-gold-standard government was intense, and fascist veterans' leagues really were reshaping European politics at that exact moment. Believing the Business Plot does not require inventing a hidden global system — only believing that some rich Americans briefly admired what was happening in Europe and made a clumsy, deniable pass at importing it. That is a far smaller leap than most conspiracy claims ask of their audience, which is precisely why historians still argue over where the true story sits between “nothing” and “a real, live threat.”
Where the evidence lands
The available record supports a genuinely disputed verdict, not a debunked or confirmed one. It is established fact, not allegation, that Smedley Butler gave detailed sworn testimony describing recruitment attempts, that a congressional committee investigated it, and that the committee's final report affirmatively stated the scheme was discussed and planned and could have been executed. It is equally established fact that the committee could not verify the plan's most specific element, that every named individual denied involvement, and that no prosecution followed from either the Justice Department or any other authority.
What separates historians is not the documentary record — which is fixed and publicly available — but how much weight to put on a single, largely uncorroborated informant (MacGuire) relaying an alleged plan to a single witness (Butler) whose account the committee itself only partially confirmed. Read generously, it is evidence that American elites came closer to organized authoritarian action than textbooks generally acknowledge. Read skeptically, it is a case study in how an isolated, informal, and possibly self-aggrandizing series of conversations can calcify — through one sympathetic committee report and one popular book — into a story remembered as far more concrete than the surviving evidence actually supports. Both readings can be held by a careful person; that is what “disputed” means here.
Sources
- 1.Investigation of Un-American Activities: Final Report of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (McCormack-Dickstein Committee), House Report No. 153, 74th Congress, 1st Session — U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities (1935)
- 2.Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Hearings Before the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (including Gen. Smedley D. Butler and Gerald C. MacGuire testimony) — U.S. House of Representatives, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session (1934)
- 3.Records of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), finding aid — National Archives and Records Administration
- 4.War Is a Racket (1935) — Smedley Butler's own account of his views on militarism and business interests in the period surrounding his testimony — Smedley D. Butler (1935)
- 5.The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R. — Jules Archer (Skyhorse Publishing / Hawthorn Books) (1973)
- 6.Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History — Hans Schmidt, University Press of Kentucky (1987)