U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley
Butler

I have decided to include the following article on this site in
case the original link goes AWOL.

An American Coup
d'État?
by Clayton E.
Cramer
History Today, November 1995

Some Americans regard our country as superior to
other nations because we don't change governments by coup d'état - and we
never have. Perhaps because of our long tradition of power changing hands
by election, we regard our nation as immune to the use of force for
political purposes. True, assassins have killed four of our Presidents,
but these deaths did not lead to turmoil and chaos; the government
followed well-established procedures for transferring control to the men
previously elected Vice President. Unlike other nations where
assassination often leads to civil war, the United States has avoided
this.

How different is America from nations where political power comes quite
directly "from the barrel of a gun"? A curious footnote to American
history suggests that, except for the personal integrity of a remarkable
American general, a coup d'état intended to remove President Franklin D.
Roosevelt from office in 1934 might have plunged America into civil war.

The General

This remarkable man was Smedley Darlington Butler, retired U.S. Marine
Corps Major General. Butler is the sort of person for whom the word
"colorful" is woefully inadequate. Butler won America's highest military
award for bravery (the Congressional Medal of Honor) twice. His style of
warfare was unusual not only for his personal courage, but for the energy
he put into avoiding bloodshed when it was possible to achieve his aims in
other ways. Not surprisingly, this engendered a remarkable loyalty among
the men who served under him - and that loyalty was why certain men asked
Butler to lead a military attack on Washington, D.C., with the goal of
capturing President Roosevelt.

Butler was more than a remarkable soldier. He served as police
commissioner of Philadelphia during 1924-25 (on loan from the Marines), in
an attempt to enforce Prohibition. While the effort was a failure, his
insistence on enforcing the law against wealthy partygoers as well as poor
immigrants established his reputation as a man of high integrity. He was
not universally loved, but he was widely respected.

Butler is best remembered today for his oft-quoted statement in the
socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935:

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent
place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped
in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit
of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in
1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar
interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit
companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil
went its way unmolested.... Looking back on it, I felt I might have
given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his
racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three
continents.
In War Is A Racket, Butler argued for a
powerful navy, but one prohibited from traveling more than 200 miles from
the U.S. coastline. Military aircraft could travel no more than 500 miles
from the U.S. coast, and the army would be prohibited from leaving the
United States. Butler also proposed that all workers in defense
industries, from the lowest laborer to the highest executive, be limited
to "$30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get." He also
proposed that a declaration of war should be passed by a plebiscite in
which only those subject to conscription would be eligible to vote.

From 1935 through 1937, Butler was a spokesman for the League Against
War and Fascism, a Communist-dominated organization of the time. He also
participated in the Third U.S. Congress Against War and Fascism, sharing
the platform with well-known leftists of the era, including Langston
Hughes, Heywood Broun, and Roger Baldwin. When the Spanish Civil War
(1936-39) threatened the collapse of the Soviet-supported Spanish
government, the League's pacifism evaporated, and they supported
intervention. Butler, however, remained true to his belief in
non-interventionism: "What the hell is it our business what's going on in
Spain?" But before Butler became involved in these causes, he had already
exposed a fascist plot against his own government.

The Plot

Butler had friends in the press and Congress, so he could not be
ignored when he came forward in late 1934 with a tale of conspiracy
against President Roosevelt, in which he had been asked to take a leading
role. At first glance, Butler seems an unlikely candidate for such a
position. While Butler was a Republican, in 1932 he campaigned for
Roosevelt, calling himself a "Republican-for-Ex-President Hoover." (Butler
had a poor relationship with Hoover going back to their time together
during the Boxer Rebellion.)

But there were good reasons why someone seeking to overthrow the U.S.
government would have wanted Butler involved. Butler was a powerful symbol
to many American soldiers and veterans - an enlisted man's general, one
that spoke out for their interests while on active duty, and after
retirement. Butler would have attracted men to his cause that would not
otherwise have participated in a march on Washington.

Butler would have been a good choice also because of his military
skills. His personal courage and tactical skill would have made him a
powerful commander of an irregular army. Finally, his ties of friendship
to many officers still on active duty might have undermined military
opposition to his force, as friends and colleagues sought to avoid a
direct confrontation with him.

Another reason that the plotters might have approached such an unlikely
candidate was that Butler was not regarded as a great intellect. After
World War I, the Marine Corps had began to emphasize a new
college-educated professionalism. Butler, one of the less educated
"bushwhacer" generals, might have seemed easy to manipulate.

Butler testified that bond trader Gerald MacGuire had approached him in
the summer of 1933. MacGuire claimed to represent wealthy Wall Street
broker Grayson Murphy, Singer sewing machine heir Robert Sterling Clark,
and other unnamed men of wealth. They asked Butler to speak publicly on
behalf of the gold standard, recently abandoned by President Roosevelt.
MacGuire's rationale for why Butler should ally himself with the gold
standard cause was that the veterans of World War
I were due a bonus in 1945. As MacGuire told Butler, "We want to see
the soldiers' bonus paid in gold. We do not want the soldier to have
rubber money or paper money."

It appears that the plotters underestimated Butler's intelligence and
character. When this explanation failed to persuade Butler, MacGuire and
Clark offered him money, abandoning any pretense of civic-mindness.
Butler's sense of honor prevented him from speaking in favor of any policy
for mercenary reasons.

MacGuire eventually told Butler their real goal. MacGuire asked Butler
to lead an army of 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington, D.C. The
stated mission was to protect Roosevelt from other plotters, and install a
"secretary of general welfare" to "take all the worries and details off of
his shoulders." But Butler saw through their supposed concern for
Roosevelt. He testified before Congress that he told MacGuire:

[M]y interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy.
If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of
Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you,
and we will have a real war right at home.

Yes; and then you will put somebody in there you can run; is that the
idea? The President will go around and christen babies and dedicate
bridges, and kiss children. Mr. Roosevelt will never agree to that
himself.

Butler eventually deduced that the real goal was
a coup d'état to take Roosevelt captive, and force reinstatement of the
gold standard, the loss of which many wealthy Americans feared would lead
to rapid inflation. The plotters would keep Roosevelt as a figurehead
until he could be "encouraged" to retire.

That MacGuire had significant financial backing behind him seems clear,
considering the substantial bank savings books he showed to Butler. What
remains unclear is whether the names MacGuire dropped (other than Robert
Sterling Clark) were really involved, or whether MacGuire was a con man.

MacGuire's claims and financial resources alone did not convince Butler
that such a conspiracy actually existed. The fulfillment of a series of
startling predictions by MacGuire did finally persuade Butler that there
was more than just hot air involved. MacGuire knew in advance of
significant personnel changes in the White House. He correctly predicted
the formation of the American Liberty League (the major conservative
opposition to Roosevelt), and the principal players in it. Especially
disturbing was that many of the supposed backers of the plot were also
members of the League. MacGuire's claim that the League ("villagers in the
opera" of the scheme, in MacGuire's words) was part of the plot could not
be easily dismissed.

The American Liberty League was a successor to the highly successful
Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, the lobbying organization
responsible for the repeal of the "Noble Experiment." From its formation
in 1918 until 1926, the AAPA made little progress, at least partly because
it had little money. But in 1926, money poured into the AAPA from some of
America's wealthiest men, including Pierre, Irenee, and Lammot du Pont,
John J. Raskob, and Charles H. Sabin. The AAPA spent its new found wealth
on distribution of literature, and on the formation of a bewildering
number of associated organizations. These associated organizations gave
the impression of a grassroots movement, rather than a collection of
millionaires feeding press releases to friendly newspapers. The AAPA also
rapidly took control of the Democratic Party, with one of their
supporters, Al Smith, receiving the 1928 Democratic Presidential
nomination. While AAPA had powerful friends within the Republican Party,
they never achieved control of it.

The AAPA's motivations were a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. The
stated concern was that Prohibition had done serious damage to the
principle of federalism - that the federal government's authority did not
include the police powers used to enforce Prohibition. But it appears that
this was not the only motivation, or even the reason most important to the
men who funded the AAPA. Like many other Americans, these business leaders
"found themselves unable to gratify what seemed a natural, more or less
innocent, desire without breaking a law" (i.e., the consumption of
alcoholic beverages). To suddenly find themselves among the criminal
classes was not pleasant to a group who had always thought of themselves
as law-abiding and respectable members of American society. There is also
strong evidence that the backers of the AAPA saw Repeal as a method of
reducing income and corporate taxes, by taxing alcoholic beverages
instead.

The AAPA went out of business at the end of 1933, with the end of
Prohibition. But within a year, from the same offices, with most of the
same backers, many of the same employees, and much of the same style, it
reappeared as the American Liberty League. Throughout the next six years,
it led the fight against the New Deal, arguing that much of Roosevelt's
program was contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution. In an
age when Hitler and Mussolini had commandeered extraordinary economic
powers, the fears that the American Liberty League expressed about
Roosevelt's vaguely similar gathering of economic power could not be
summarily dismissed.

The League, in spite of its impressive resources, was rapidly made to
appear "ridiculous or dangerous" or both by the Roosevelt Administration.
Most importantly, the leadership of the League was largely rich men. The
Depression-era gap between rich and poor had become too wide, too obvious,
and too painful for the League to be credible to the majority of
Americans. Butler's testimony before Congress claimed that some of the
people associated with the League were the very ones that had approached
him - including Grayson Murphy, the League's treasurer.

In the depths of the Great Depression, in that nadir of despair before
Roosevelt gave his stirring first inaugural address in 1933, America was
awash in political groups identifying in greater or lesser degrees with
communism or fascism. Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-NY), concerned about the
threat of such groups, persuaded the House of Representatives to create
the Special Committee to Investigate Nazi Propaganda Activities in the
United States. This committee investigated Butler's charges in late 1934.

MacGuire, not surprisingly, denied that such a plot existed. Instead,
he claimed his activities had been political lobbying to preserve the gold
standard, but he quickly destroyed his credibility as a witness by giving
contradictory testimony. While the final report agreed with Butler that
there was evidence of a coup d'état plot against Roosevelt, no further
action was taken on it. The Committee's authority to subpoena witnesses
expired at the end of 1934, and the Justice Department started no criminal
investigation.

Part of the reason for the lack of prosecution of the alleged plotters
may have been the untimely death of the only man who could have testified
against the rest: Gerald MacGuire. He died at age 37 from complications of
pneumonia, less than a month after the Committee released its report.
MacGuire's physician claimed that his death was partly the result of the
stress of the charges made by Butler, but there is no reason to assume
that MacGuire's death was in any way suspicious.

The Committee's report excluded many of the most embarrassing names
given by MacGuire, and repeated by Butler. MacGuire had claimed that 1928
Democratic President candidate Al Smith, General Hugh Johnson (head of
Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration), General Douglas MacArthur,
and a number of other generals and admirals were privy to the plot. Since
Butler had no evidence of their involvement, other than MacGuire's claims,
it was certainly reasonable for the Committee to exclude these details
from the final report as "certain immaterial and incompetent evidence."
But in conjunction with MacGuire's apparent advance knowledge of the
details of internal White House staff activities, it certainly suggests
that if a coup was planned, it had significant support within the
Roosevelt Administration.

The News Media Downplays The Plot

The news media gave an inappropriately small amount of attention to the
report. Time magazine ridiculed Butler's claims. The week following
Butler's testimony, Time described it as a "Plot Without Plotters,"
simply because the alleged plotters claimed innocence. But Time
admitted that Veterans of Foreign Wars commander James Van Zandt
confirmed that he, too, had been approached to lead such a march on
Washington.

The leftist magazine New Masses carried an article by John
Spivak that included wild claims of "Jewish financiers working with
fascist groups." Spivak's article spun an elaborate web involving the
American Jewish Congress, the Warburg family, "which originally financed
Hitler," the Hearst newspaper chain, the Morgan banking firm, the du
Ponts, a truly impressive list of prominent American Jewish businessmen,
and Nazi spies! Spivak's article raised some disturbing and legitimate
questions about why much of Butler's testimony was left out of the final
committee report. But these important concerns were seriously undermined
by Spivak's paranoid ravings. The left-of-center magazines Nation
and New Republic were unconcerned about it, since in their view
"fascism originated in pseudoradical mass movements," and therefore could
not come from a wealthy cabal.

Newspaper descriptions of the final report are also astonishing for how
lightly most treated it. A New York Times article about subversion
and foreign agitators started on the front page, but gave only two
paragraphs to the coup plot inside the paper. "It also alleged that
definite proof has been found that the much publicized Fascist march on
Washington... was actually contemplated." It was not a major story.

The San Francisco Chronicle took the story more seriously. The
only headline with a larger type size that day concerned the recent fatal
crash of the airship Macon. The Chronicle carried an Associated
Press story headlined, "Justice Aids Probe Butler Fascist Story." The
first five paragraphs were devoted to Butler's allegations. The
Chronicle quoted the Committee report that it "was able to verify
all the pertinent statements by General Butler, with the exception of the
direct statement suggesting creation of the organization."

A third newspaper sampled showed an even more astonishing lack of
interest than the New York Times: the Sacramento Bee used a
substantially different Associated Press wire story that emphasized
propaganda efforts by foreign agents. Another AP wire story, at the bottom
of page five, described Butler's allegations, taking the Committee's
report at face value. This wire story includes the comforting knowledge
that the committee found "no evidence to show a connection between this
effort" and any foreign government.

An apparently serious effort to overthrow the government, perhaps with
the support of some of America's wealthiest men, largely substantiated by
a Congressional committee, was mostly ignored. Why? Roosevelt's Secretary
of the Interior, Harold Ickes, wrote a book in 1939 about the
concentration of American journalism. He claimed that, "In 1934, 82 per
cent of all dailies had a complete monopoly in their communities."
Newspaper chains, in Ickes' view, "control a dangerously large share of
the national daily circulation and in many cities have no competition."

Ickes' book was largely devoted to proving that the major newspapers of
the United States were intentionally distorting the news, and in some
cases, directly lying. Ickes argued that newspaper editors did so in the
interests of both their advertisers and in defense of the capitalist
class. Ickes mentioned the Liberty League as one of the "propaganda
outfits" who were allied with the major newspapers. Indeed,the New York
Times, one of the papers that had downplayed the Committee's report,
had editorialized in favor of the Liberty League's formation.

Did newspapers and magazines onsciously play down the plot, because it
represented an embarrassment to people of influence? Or did editors simply
give it low visibility because they regarded it as an absurd story?

We must consider another disturbing possibility. Butler was associated
with the loose alliance of progressive and populist forces that were
dragging Roosevelt towards the left. It is easy to forget that for much of
Roosevelt's first term as President from 1932-36, he was the rope in a tug
of war between conservative and progressive forces in America. The
popularity of men such as Senator Huey Long (D-Louisiana) and the
nationally known radio priest Father Coughlin - and the need to
short-circuit their rising political power - appears to have caused
Roosevelt's increasingly leftward movement in 1935-36.

Is it possible that Butler concocted this story as a way of creating
animosity towards conservatives by Roosevelt? If Butler had lied to the
Committee, and no such conspiracy was ever planned, why did MacGuire
apparently perjure himself before the Committee? Or, alternatively, could
leftward leaning members of the Roosevelt Administration have manipulated
Butler into believing that such a plot actually existed as a way of
creating animosity towards conservatives, thus dragging Roosevelt to the
left? Either theory could explain why MacGuire, Murphy, Clark, or the
other supposed plotters were never prosecuted.

Yet another possibility (though less likely) is that there was no
prosecution because Roosevelt's own advisors had taken part in the plot,
as MacGuire claimed. A criminal prosecution would have washed the
Roosevelt Administration's dirty laundry in public.

Why Is The Plot So Poorly Known?

Butler's account of the MacGuire plot was a very serious accusation. If
MacGuire had told Butler the truth, a large number of wealthy men had made
serious plans to overthrow representative government in the United States
- though their concern that Roosevelt was creating a government in the
style of Mussolini or Hitler, might provide some legitimate reason for
their actions. Why doesn't this plot appear in history books? That
conservatives might discount the plot is not unexpected; that liberals
have tended to ignore the plot is a little more surprising.

It is hard to imagine how different American politics was in the 1930s.
The collapse of the world economy had shaken the faith of many Americans
in individualism and free market capitalism. Many traditionalists, here
and in Europe, toyed with the ideas of Fascism and National Socialism;
many liberals dallied with Socialism and Communism. Prominent populists
such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin sided with progressives in support
of isolationism, redistribution of wealth, and a federal government that
would play a more active role in the American economy.

In hindsight, the moral and economic deficiencies of these various
collectivized systems are now clear. In 1934, however, people of good will
persuaded themselves that Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were doing good,
and ignored the great evils that were already underway. To turn over the
rock exposing MacGuire's plot raises unpleasant questions about the
political sensibilities of both right and left in 1930s America.

How Secure Are The Institutions of Legal Government In America?

How secure, indeed? It would be tempting to write off this entire
matter as a group of con men separating wealthy conservatives from their
money by pretending to hatch a plot against the Roosevelt Administration.
But there are too many disturbing pieces of evidence in this tale that
suggest that the Zeitgeist of the 1930s was not limited to Europe.

If MacGuire's claims to Butler were true, some U.S. military commanders
were prepared to stand aside while 500,000 veterans marched on Washington
and took Roosevelt captive. (Between the World Wars, the United States
Army was so small that 500,000 veterans might have given them a serious
fight - even if every officer remained loyal to Roosevelt.)

But unlike many European countries, American government was highly
decentralized in 1934, and this would have worked against any serious
military action against the legitimate government. Every state governor
had control of state militia units, armed with out of date, but still
serviceable military weapons.

In addition to the regularly organized state militias, the population
of the United States, then as now, was heavily armed with the sort of
weapons well suited to military operations. Whatever the advantages of the
plotters' army of 500,000 veterans, they would have been far outnumbered
by the unorganized militia of the United States - then as now, consisting
of every U.S. citizen between 18 and 45, and legally obligated by state
laws to fight at the order of the governor in the event of insurrection,
invasion, or war.

But in a nation that was suffering from the ravages of the Great
Depression, another model exists for what might have happened: the Spanish
Civil War. The divisions over religion in America were not as dramatic as
those that ripped apart Spanish society. But many Americans were beginning
to lose their faith in American institutions - as evidenced by the growth
of American Nazi and Communist movements during the 1930s. It is
frightening to think of what might have happened if a general as capable
as Butler had become the man on a white horse.

In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, delivered at New
York University in 1960 concerning the protections of the U.S. Bill of
Rights:

I cannot agree with those who think of the Bill of Rights as
an 18th century straitjacket, unsuited for this age. The evils it guards
against are not only old, they are with us now, they exist today.

Experience all over the world has demonstrated, I fear, that the
distance between stable, orderly government and one that has been taken
over by force is not so great as we have assumed.

Indeed,
the plot that Butler exposed - if what MacGuire claimed was true - is a
sobering reminder to Americans. We were not immune to the sentiments that
gave rise to totalitarian governments throughout the world in the 1930s.
We make a serious mistake when we assume, "It can't happen here!"

Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer
with a Northern California manufacturer of telecommunications equipment.
His first book, By The Dim And Flaring Lamps: The Civil War Diary of
Samuel McIlvaine, was published by Library Research Associates
(Monroe, NY) in 1990. Mr. Cramer's second book, For The Defense of
Themselves And The State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation
of the Right To Keep And Bear Arms was published by Praeger Publishers
(Westport, Conn.) in 1994. Mr. Cramer recently completed his B.A. in
History at Sonoma State University.

Bibliography
Archer, Jules, The Plot To Seize The White House,
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Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
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Butler, Smedley D., War Is A Racket, (New York: Round Table
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Cahn, Edmond, The Great Rights, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1963).

Ickes, Harold L., America's House of Lords: An Inquiry into the
Freedom of the Press, (Rahway, N.J.: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939).

New York Times, February 16, 1935; March 26, 1935.

Schmidt, Hans, Maverick Marine, (Lexington, Ky.: University
Press of Kentucky, 1987).

Sevareid, Eric, Not So Wild A Dream, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1946).

Spivak, John L., "Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy", New Masses,
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microfilm)..

Sacramento Bee, February 15, 1935.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1935.

Time, 24:23 [December 3, 1934].

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of Certain Other Propaganda Activities, Hearings 73-D.C.-6, Part 1,
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