After leading the conspiracy’s members along for a time in an effort to learn more about their intentions, in November 1934 Butler began testifying about the plot to the House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (also known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee).
General Smedley Butler ( USMC Archives)īutler apparently shared the fictional Burt’s sentiments about the profoundly un-American nature of such plans, however. Perhaps those speeches and his increasingly anti-authoritarian views led the Business Plot leaders to assume that Butler would be on their side in opposing and helping overthrow the government.
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government, delivering a series of impassioned speeches to veterans’ groups and other audiences that became the basis for his subsequent book War Is a Racket (1935).
But by the 1930s he had become disillusioned with both war and the U.S. history, having commanded the 13 th Regiment in World War I as well as serving in countless other military actions in the Philippines, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Haiti. At the time of his death Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. A main reason it did not was because of the man whom the plotters approached to serve as that unelected dictator: General Smedley D. So contrary to Burt’s quote, such a plan was conceived and could indeed have happened here in America. These men and their allies began planning for a possible coup, supported by the military and based on the rationalization that Roosevelt’s physical infirmities made him unable to perform presidential duties. currency (which threatened their own wealth). A group of prominent American businessmen, featuring such noteworthy figures as Robert Sterling Clark and Prescott Bush, had become dissatisfied with newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt’s responses to the Great Depression, including both government programs to counter unemployment (which these figures saw as creeping socialism) and the end of the gold standard for U.S.
Given the entirely justified recent attention to the history of American coups, past and present, it’s quite striking that the 1933 Business Plot isn’t yet better known ( Gangsters of Capitalism, a 2022 book by Jonathan Katz, who also wrote the Rolling Stone article “ The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools,” is the place to begin learning a lot more). Those histories reveal that Burt’s quote is both profoundly wrong and inspiringly right about the battle for American identity and ideals. But that sinister plan is based on very real 1933 histories: the so-called Business Plot. Amsterdam pulls together, fictionalizes, and at times troublingly misrepresents a number of threads from the 1930s and early 20 th century American history.
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