US 1933: An American response to a ‘domestic threat’
by
MARK LIEBERMAN*

In response to his election, a military-industrial anti-democratic coup is hatched to “save the nation,” using a network of shady well-funded paramilitary groups and to replace the newly elected president -- by force... The plot’s perpetrators and its intricate plan revealed by a courageous military officer... A pusillanimous press first ignores and then belittles the plot... A courageous soldier goes public... The plot is investigated -- cursorily -- by a congressional committee... Its findings are suppressed and eviscerated... Finally, through the heroic efforts of a small radical journal, the truth is unveiled...

Thus, in outline, are the details of an attempted coup d’état which, if successful, would have radically altered the history of the 20th century: the “Business Plot,” so-called because of the ideological and financial support it received from the highest level of America’s corporate elite.

As contemporary historian Clayton E. Cramer has noted in an article titled “An American coup d’état?” “Some Americans regard our country as superior to other nations because we don’t change governments by coup d’état ... [but] 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 ... might have plunged America into civil war.”

The ‘domestic threat’ perceived

Although he was clearly the people’s choice when he was elected in a landslide in 1932 by a nation depressed by the Depression and fed up with the empty promises of the previous administration, Roosevelt was just as clearly not the choice of all the people. Specifically for a cabal of billionaires, the new chief executive was a dangerous, anti-business leftist -- possibly Jewish -- and clearly a “domestic threat” to the American plutocratic establishment. The Du Ponts, Harrimans, Morgans, Rockefellers, Mellons and Bushes decided: FDR must go.

The vehicle they founded and funded to carry out their coup was called the American Liberty League, and its propaganda campaign was a litany of attacks on Roosevelt’s proposals: his Agricultural Adjustment Administration, intended to save millions of destitute farmers from foreclosure, was “a trend toward Fascist control of agriculture.” Social Security -- which still supports millions of needy Americans -- was described as “the end of democracy.” The league even went as far as to challenge the landmark Wagner Labor Relations Act in the US Supreme Court. In the first two years of its existence the league spent more than $1 million -- the equivalent of 10 million of today’s dollars -- getting its message out. But propaganda would not be enough to counter the perceived “internal threat”; the next step was to plan and execute the coup.

The plot hatched

According to John Spivak, the reporter who would eventually uncover the cover-up of evidence, “Around the beginning of July 1933, a representative of a group of conspirators opened negotiations with a noted military man to head a 500,000-man army which would march on Washington, seize the government of the United States, put an end to American democracy and replace it with a dictatorship.” The paramilitaries, unemployed World War I veterans, would be armed with weapons supplied free of charge by Remington Arms -- a Du Pont subsidiary. All that was necessary for the plan to be launched was a leader -- and this the league believed they had found in the person of retired Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler.

On paper at least, Gen. Butler would seem to have been the ideal “Man on a White Horse” to rescue America. Joining the corps at the age of 16, Butler was a veteran of every American conflict beginning with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and ending with service in World War I in 1918. Between those years he became the most decorated Marine in history and recipient -- twice! -- of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Equally important was the fact that Butler was revered by his men as a fair and humane leader. It was said that they would follow him anywhere. Even, the Liberty League believed, down Pennsylvania Avenue at the head of their junta army. But the coup plotters miscalculated. It only took one meeting with the plot makers for the hard-headed general to see that there was indeed a grave “domestic threat” facing the republic. But it wasn’t the president: it was the treasonous plotters who were attempting to subvert the constitution and the will of the people. After several subsequent meetings with the league’s point man, the general blew the whistle.

Instead of agreeing to the league’s proposal that he become commander-in-chief in the coup itself -- and later, when the coup had succeeded, to become “Secretary of General Welfare” in the post-democratic government -- Butler not only refused substantial bribes to do so, he went public with what he had learned, revealing the nefarious details of the plot first to the press and then in congressional committee testimony.

The corporate media react

Given Gen. Butler’s impeccable credentials, the specificity and the gravity of the allegations and the all-star cast of billionaire protagonists, one would assume that the media would have leapt at the story. It didn’t leap. In fact, what we see when we peruse the mainstream reportage of the general’s revelations is nothing less than a disgraceful dereliction of journalistic duty.

On Nov. 21, 1934, for example, The New York Times reported that Gen. Butler had testified that “he was to assemble his 500,000 men in Washington ... with the expectation that such a show of force would enable it to take over the government peacefully in a few days.” But the very next day the same paper carried the headline “A gigantic hoax... a bald and unconvincing narrative” over a snide editorial entitled “Credulity unlimited.” Incidentally, as reported by Clayton E. Cramer, “The New York Times, one of the papers that downplayed the [committee’s] report, had editorialized in favor of the Liberty League’s formation.” Another behemoth of mainstream journalism, Henry Luce’s Time magazine, flatly described Gen. Butler’s testimony as a “Plot without plotters” (Dec. 3, 1934). The Associated Press claimed that the committee “found no evidence to show a connection between this effort and any foreign government” -- a blatant misrepresentation, as we shall see.

The (attempted) cover-up

Gen. Butler’s eminence and his integrity were perhaps the only reasons two US Congressmen -- John McCormack of Massachusetts and Samuel Dickstein of New York -- reluctantly agreed to hold hearings on the coup. The House Committee on Un-American Activities met in secret executive sessions beginning on Nov. 20, 1934, and ending two months later.

Gen. Butler was the first witness and he was received respectfully before giving two hours of detailed testimony. “My interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy,” Butler told the committee. According to the general, his attempted “recruitment” was done by a Wall Street executive named Gerald MacGuire, the designated paymaster for the Liberty League, who outlined the plot and Butler’s possible role in it. MacGuire himself later gave extremely ambiguous testimony to the committee, as did a number of other minor players in the plot.

As for the “big fish” -- the Du Ponts, Rockefellers, Morgans and Bushes -- none were subpoenaed, despite Butler’s testimony as to their involvement in the coup. And despite Congressman Dickstein’s promise on the day the hearings opened that in response to Butler’s accusations, the committee “will call all the men mentioned in the story,” he sang a different tune just days later. “The committee will not take cognizance of names brought into the testimony which constitute mere hearsay,” a committee press release announced.

To its credit, though, the committee’s conclusion as stated in its final report was unequivocal: “In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life, it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. ... 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 expeditious.” Unsurprisingly, Gen. Butler was vindicated.

And there the tale would have ended -- another semi-solved American mystery. Even the doubters were satisfied that something terrible had been averted. The New York Times, which just three months earlier had scoffed, now admitted in its headline, “Plan for march on Capitol held true” (Feb. 16, 1935). Press czar Luce’s Time was now forced to admit that “a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler’s story of a fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true,” (Feb. 25, 1935).

But one reporter for an impoverished-but-respected journal wasn’t content to let the matter rest, and it was from Spivak of The New Masses that Americans were able to read the final -- and perhaps the most disturbing -- chapter in the saga of America’s only coup attempt.

The cover-up uncovered

Published between 1926-1948, The New Masses was a leftist journal whose list of contributors included Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill and Theodore Dreiser, all of whom published articles which could find no place in the mainstream/corporate media. Needless to say, The New Masses was never a profit-spinner -- and equally needless to say, it was harassed on a regular basis by government censors.

Spivak was a featured columnist, specializing in what we now call “investigative journalism” -- a warrior-with-a-typewriter. And where the mainstream/corporate media had first belittled the attempted coup and then tip-toed around it by printing only superficial squibs, Warrior Spivak sprang into action -- and it is to his detailed analysis that we owe our understanding of the enormity of the Business Plot -- and the lengths to which the powers-that-be went to try to cover it up.

When the committee’s final report was published, it was labeled “Extracts” -- which set off an alarm for Spivak, as it would and should for any scrupulous reporter. In fact, he was certain that the only significant portions of the report were those that had been deleted -- and he set out to find them. Besides that, even the published testimony contradicted itself on a crucial point -- the relationship between European fascist groups and the plot.

The committee’s final report stated flatly that “no evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a fascist connection between this effort [i.e., the plot] and any fascist activity of any European country.” But this lie directly contradicted testimony given by the plot’s paymaster McGuire, who had told the committee, “I went abroad [Dec. 1, 1933-Aug. 1934] ... and studied the position that veterans occupy in the fascist setup of government. I discovered they are in the background of Mussolini. ... I then went to Germany to see what Hitler was doing and his whole strength lies in organizations of soldiers. ...Then I went to France and found exactly the organization [the Croix de Feu] we are going to have. It is an organization of super-soldiers.”

Furthermore, another committee witness, the distinguished journalist Paul French, had described an interview he conducted with MacGuire, in which MacGuire had said, “We need a fascist government in this country.” “He [MacGuire] said he had ... made an intensive study ... of Nazi and fascist movements ... and obtained enough information to properly set up one in this country,” French told the committee. This exchange was also missing from the published report.

When he learned that crucial sections of testimony had been deleted, Spivak harried committee chairman Dickstein for an uncensored copy of the transcript, and finally it was furnished. When he read it, Spivak was appalled. Huge chunks of Gen. Butler’s testimony -- hundreds of lines in all, detailing the relationship between corporate America and the proposed coup -- were missing. When he told Butler about these lacunae, the old soldier merely said, “I’ll be God damned!” and gave a national radio speech a few days later -- in which he damned the committee’s dishonesty.

Spivak filled in the blanks, and thanks to his two-part series, “Wall Street’s fascist conspiracy: Testimony that the Dickstein Committee suppressed,” published in January 1935, Americans could finally come closer to the truth about the plot and about democracy’s narrow escape. None of the mainstream/corporate media published the complete transcript.

The final report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities spent six pages discussing the Nazi threat to the US, 11 pages were devoted to the threat posed by communism -- and one page described the coup attempt. Spivak’s grim conclusion? “The suppression of evidence ... reveals the committee’s real character: with an ostensible mission to uncover fascist activities, the committee actually turned out to be a close collaborator with the would-be fascist rulers of the country,” he wrote.

The committee’s mandate was not renewed by Congress, and Spivak speculated as to the reason why: “It even seemed possible that the committee had been killed because unidentified, influential forces feared that public opinion might compel a deeper investigation into the fascist plot.”

A few months after Spivak’s revelations, Nobel Prize winning-author Sinclair Lewis wrote a counterfactual novel with a title which has subsequently entered the language: “It Can’t Happen Here.” But the Business Plot proved that “It” can happen anywhere -- in mature democracies and nascent ones alike. Speaking in 1980, US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black reminded Americans that “experience all over the world has demonstrated, I fear, that the distance between a stable, orderly government and one that has been taken over by force is not so great as we have assumed.” Even more succinct a warning came from Thomas Jefferson while he was composing the US Constitution: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

*Mark Lieberman is a lecturer at İstanbul Technical University.