# Wealthy financiers plotted a fascist coup against Roosevelt in 1933

**No verdict.** 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.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: New Deal era · First circulated: 1934 · Believed by: Little polling exists; awareness rose sharply after 2020s retrospectives
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/business-plot

## Summary
In 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler told Congress, under oath, that a group of wealthy men had approached him to lead half a million veterans on Washington and force Franklin Roosevelt into a figurehead role. A House committee said it had verified much of his story. No one went to prison, and historians have argued for ninety years about how real the danger actually was.

## The claim
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.

## Origin and timeline
- 1933: Bond 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.
- 1933–34: Butler 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.
- 1934-07: Butler reports the approaches to the U.S. House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Reps. John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein.
- 1934-11: Butler and MacGuire testify before the committee in executive session; MacGuire denies the central allegations under oath.
- 1934-11: Major newspapers, including the New York Times, report the story with open skepticism, calling parts of it a 'gigantic hoax.'
- 1935-02: The 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 evidence, claim by claim
- 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.

## Why people believe it
- The witness was about as credible as a whistleblower could be: a wildly popular, twice-Medal-of-Honor Marine general with no obvious motive to invent a story that made him look either gullible or heroic depending on who believed him.
- The committee's own report used unusually strong language (that the plans 'might have been placed in execution') which reads, out of context, like official confirmation of an active coup rather than a cautious statement about a discussed-but-unrealized scheme.
- It fits a durable and not-unreasonable prior: that concentrated wealth resists democratic economic reform, and 1933–34 really was a moment when European elites were backing authoritarian veteran movements against elected governments, so the idea was not fantastical for its time.
- The story went nearly unmentioned in general histories and textbooks for decades, which for some readers itself looks like suppression rather than the more mundane explanation: that it was hard to corroborate and embarrassing to everyone involved, including Congress.

## Open questions
- How organized and serious the scheme actually was is still the central dispute. Butler described an escalating, concrete proposal (a war chest, a target of roughly 500,000 veterans, a specific new cabinet post) while MacGuire, the one named organizer who testified, called the coup plan itself an exaggeration, and contemporaries from the New York Times to Mayor La Guardia dismissed the whole affair as talk that never became an operational plan. The committee's own final report split the difference: it called the scheme 'discussed' and 'planned' and something that 'might have been placed in execution,' while declining to verify the one detail (that anyone had actually proposed Butler take command) that would make it an operational conspiracy rather than exploratory talk among a small circle of men. Nothing in the ninety years since has settled which description fits.
- Who, if anyone, beyond Gerald MacGuire actually committed money or intent to the scheme has never been independently established. Butler named figures connected to the du Pont family, J.P. Morgan & Co., and the Liberty League as prospective backers, and MacGuire's own letters and travel corroborate parts of his account, but every individual named denied involvement, several under oath, and the committee's preliminary report explicitly declined to credit names raised only as hearsay. A single bond salesman's account of who was really paying was never independently confirmed by the people he said were paying.
- Why no prosecution ever followed a congressional committee's own finding that a fascist scheme had been 'discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution' has never been fully explained. Whether the Justice Department saw a genuine lack of prosecutable evidence, reluctance to indict wealthy and well-connected men on one contested account, or something else went unrecorded: the committee referred its findings nowhere, and no later administration reopened the question.
- How much the committee's public report actually left out is itself unresolved. Journalist John L. Spivak published testimony in 1935 that he said had been redacted from the official record as hearsay, expanding the list of implicated financiers, but historians who have reviewed his account, including Hans Schmidt, found it embellished in places even as they credited its core point: that some suppressed testimony deserved more scrutiny than it got. Whether the redacted material held genuine additional evidence or unverifiable rumor the committee was right to exclude cannot be settled from the surviving record alone.

## Sources
- 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): https://www.archives.gov/legislative/research/getting-started/huac-records
- 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): https://archive.org/details/1934-investigationof-nazi-propaganda-activities-1
- Records of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), finding aid, National Archives and Records Administration: https://www.archives.gov/legislative/research/getting-started/huac-records
- 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)
- 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)
- Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, Hans Schmidt, University Press of Kentucky (1987)
- The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right, Sally Denton, Bloomsbury USA (2012)
- When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR, NPR (2012): https://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/145472726/when-the-bankers-plotted-to-overthrow-fdr
- Business Plot, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

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