1934 Plot by American Industrialists to Seize the White House Foiled by Marine General

Thanks for the Article. I have read about General Butler and this whole sordid affair in another book. It turns out the Prescott Bush was also involved in trying to persuade the general to commit coup.

Don't forget to mention that he was against the FED.

Of course there are two sides to every story--here is the other side.

Those who doubt Butler's testimony claim that it simply lacked evidence.

* Historian Robert F. Burk: "At their core, the accusations probably consisted of a mixture of actual attempts at influence peddling by a small core of financiers with ties to veterans organizations and the self-serving accusations of Butler against the enemies of his pacifist and populist causes."[16]
* Historian Hans Schmidt: "Even if Butler was telling the truth, as there seems little reason to doubt, there remains the unfathomable problem of MacGuire's motives and veracity. He may have been working both ends against the middle, as Butler at one point suspected. In any case, MacGuire emerged from the HUAC hearings as an inconsequential trickster whose base dealings could not possibly be taken alone as verifying such a momentous undertaking. If he was acting as an intermediary in a genuine probe, or as agent provocateur sent to fool Butler, his employers were at least clever enough to keep their distance and see to it that he self-destructed on the witness stand...MacGuire repeatedly perjured himself...Butler may have blown the whistle on an incipient conspiracy..."[17]
* Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: "Most people agreed with Mayor La Guardia of New York in dismissing it as a "cocktail putsch"[18]... As for the House committee, headed by John McCormack of Massachusetts, it declared itself "able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler" except for MacGuire's direct proposal to him, and it considered this more or less confirmed by MacGuire's European reports. No doubt MacGuire did have some wild scheme in mind, though the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable and it can hardly be supposed that the republic was in much danger."[19]
* Historian James E. Sargent reviewing "The Plot to Seize the White House" by Jules Archer: "Thus, Butler (and Archer) assumed that the existence of a financially backed plot meant that fascism was imminent and that the planners represented a wide spread and coherent group, having both the intent and the capacity to execute their ideas. So when his testimony was criticized and even ridiculed in the media and ignored in Washington, Butler saw (and Archer sees) conspiracy everywhere. Instead, it is plausible to conclude that the honest and straightforward, but intellectually and politically unsophisticated, Butler perceived in simplistic terms what were in fact complex trends and events. Thus he leaped to the simplistic conclusion that the President and the Republic were in mortal danger. In essence, Archer swallowed his hero whole."[20]

Thank you for this great article, raising many interesting questions.

I would like to put the impacts of this incident in further perspective. Two months before FDR was sworn in, he was very likely the target of an assassination attempt in Florida. The gunman a chicago hitman had his arm hit at the last minute resulting in the Mayor of Chicago being killed rather than FDR.

The incident was quickly hushed up and the killer put to death within a few months.

The timing of this attack was at the time when corporate america was terrified of FDR's plan to remove the country from the gold standard. In fact, the first day of holding office consisted of declaring a banking holiday and stopping all NY banks from moving the country's gold over to Europe.

FDR then brought in a NY DA, giving him extraordinary investigative power (trading with the enemies act) to look directly at JP Morgan's private files. In one of the most covered early moments of FDR's administration the public was given a show trial of the Morgan and other top corporate bankers in what was the Pecaro hearings, exposed Morgan as an agent of the Bank of England.

Those hearings led to the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act which broke up the syndicate between brokerages and banks, probably the 2nd most important law of the New Deal. It was overturned by republicans and Clinton in 1998. Those proxied syndicates allowed people like Morgan and Rockefeller to take control of companies by holding just a few percent of a company's stock and leverage into alliances that led to things like AT&T, or U.S. Steel.

Because of these events, FDR was called a traitor to his class, rather than the reformer that he was.

Attempts to destroy FDR were real. conservatives were not to see office for 16 years, even though the entire U.S. media campaigned viciously against him in all four of his elections. The only reason he won in the first place was because of the liberal, soon to be come facist supporter, William Randoph Heast used his media empire, the largest in the country, to support FDR during the 1932 election campaign. The number one issue in that election season was public vs private power, with the huge collapse of the Insull empire (later known as Commonwealth Edison), one of the largest corporate collapses right up until until Enron. Morgan was fingered as playing a key roll in the collapse of Insull's empire.

The impacts on the private bankers was huge. The largest banker-broker in the U.S. had been exposed as working for royal treasury. His huge EBASCO plan to create an AT&T of the electric power industry had been stopped. Some of the largest FTC hearings in U.S. history disclosed the huge private syndicate being built nationwide, using vicious redbaiting tactics against proponents of public power were exposed.

FDR used these dramatic scandals to promote and start the TVA, CVP, PBB and the rural electric coops across the country for farmers, of which 90% had no electricity.

Time Magazine, a Morgan financed magazine might not be an unbiased source about the Butler issue.

But more to the point. Morgan and his General Electric, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Citibank empire had been exposed for what it was a way for European bankers to play games with the U.S. financial institutes.

The real issues that were being fought over back in 1933, as result of the 1929 stock crash and the midwest Insull Crash in 1932 were the issues that drove the public battles.

Just like what is happening today, we are not going to see or hear about the scandals that actually made people angry to act the way they did in our corporate media. The fact that Morgan's NBC-General Electric, right from the start has been playing game with the public is never an issue should be one of the biggest stories in U.S. political economic history.

There are no issues left accept how the media has hidden its own role in destroying any kind of legitimate political opposition to corporate america's takeover of our political system.

And it all stems back to FDR's first few years in office.

Anybody ever see any of FDR's stump speeches? They look just like what you would see from Edwards, Gravel or Kucinich today.

Actually, I'm in vacation mode on a book around the subject.

The primary subject is how the corporations and conservatives have buried one of the most important issues of the 20th century. The public vs private control of utilities.

Most of us never really think about the fact that our water, roads, fire departments, police or educational systems all are publicly held. Well, there was a huge fight around electricity and phones as well, and we lost those two issues. The electric public vs private war culminates under FDR where the public shifts its support to public, with his huge public works projects.

After the death of FDR and ending of the war, the idiot Truman had know interest in the public vs private debate. The cold war rhetoric was used, as it had across the country to make it look the public control of electricity was a communist conspiracy. The largest of the public works projects the CVP (California Valley Project) has been almost completely privatized, with annual attempts to sell of the TVA and BPP. They even wanted to shut down the entire energy infrastructure of the DOE for decades. today, we are seeing the push to privatize every single public resource and then deregulate it. Probably the least known and the biggest thefts taking place is around the 1872 mining act and the selloff of our minerals.

The push to deregulate the electric industry which led to the 2001 robbery of California by Ken and George W. iwas all about a push to put back together a Morgan AT&T of electric companies, here and around the world, with Enron leading the way. Enron wasn't running a scam on the Caymans. They were actively setting up a push to take over power companies worldwide and were on their way to surpassing General Electric in size when somebody blew the whistle on them.

It is my belief that the goal of bankrupting California's utility companies was all about taking them over, but Enron and the Texas gang didn't quite know who they were trying to knock off.

This is all speculation, but I think the key was when Govenor Davis hired the world's largest energy brokerage firm in the world as the state's consultant in February 2001. That company is called Credit Suisse, and happen to be the 2nd largest bank in Switzerland. They have been a very long term investor in Cal's largest private electric company, Pacific Gas & Electric.

I think it was Credit Suisse that had the deep pockets to pull the rug out from under Enron and did so because they have long been a huge player in the state and were not wanting the Texans to get the upper hand in one of the largest electric markets in the world.

With this, I think I would also say that this country needs to wake up to the impacts of the three largest balance of trade issues that are killing this country. Our oil addiction, is of course the largest dollar drain on the economy, with the next largest being the growing trade deficity with China and Walmart.

But the one least known but is having the most nefarious impacts on the country is the deficit the country has with Texas Energy companies and especially with natural gas. One of the first major political actions Reagan did was to deregulate the Texas Gulf gas industry which has since become a brutal economic baby twin of the Middle East.

Texas money machine has been buying up California corporations, starting with the huge takeover of Pacific Bell phone company that has since led to the complete reintegration of AT&T. Then there was the selloff of Southern Pacific Railroad, the sale of Bank of America, the merger of Chevron and Texico, followed by the Dynergy-Enron invasion, which failed. The last major tactical push was to remove the University of California from management of the two largest nuclear weapons labs and replace it with Texas management. That also failed.

Financial interests have seldom put in any kind of real discussion about how much money goes to Texas or for that matter New York City from the rest of the country.

With this weeks news that some of the country's biggest banks are now engaged in massive sellouts to foreign investors, it shoud be about time that we start calling for reports showing who owns what in this country and what the impacts are.

A century ago, Royalist Europe basicly bought up most of the U.S. rail, banking and steel sectors and then used that leverage to extract wealth from this country at the expense of our workers. Today, we are watching that exact scam being pulled by the U.S. and the Brits in China, Mexico and Turkey.

Atticus, I am closing on your beginning articles at Newsvine and I am amazed and dumbfounded that we have been joined by one so articulate and knowledgeable. I hope you continue to pursue this topic and any other as it relates to the sad state of affairs within the News Business. So glad I found you.

Tracking comment.

Interesting discussion!! I hope to get back to finish reading it.

I can relate to Eric's anger. I feel quite a bit of indignation myself at times. At the same time, I remember well the lessons I learned from Star Wars as a youth about how our anger draws us towards "the Dark Side".