The Business Plot: The 1930s Fascist Coup Attempt Against FDR 27%
By Michael Natale19%
7/24/2026, 12:30:04 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Confirmation Bias, and Fundamental Attribution Error, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 11.1% saturation with 211 hits. Analysis detected 2,220 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,896 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.4% and a BS Rank of 27% (16,012 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 73.20% of the article peer group.
The 1930s were a period of turmoil throughout the globe.
The Great War had shattered the old order—collapsing four empires, redrawing borders, and leaving crippling war debts, punitive reparations, and economic insecurity in its wake.
For those who had lost faith in the prevailing governmental and economic systems of the time, two new models emerged.
One was Soviet-style Communism, born of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia.
The other was Fascism, which roared onto the global stage after Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.
As governments fell at the start of the 1930s (with Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil all succumbing to revolutions and coups d’état in 1930 alone), factions fought for either Soviet-style Communism or Fascism, sometimes motivated less by the ideology they fought for than the conviction that only that ideology could stave off the terrifying threat of the alternative.
In retrospect, it might seem inevitable that America weathered the storm without the kind of wild ideological swings that toppled governments elsewhere.
American political history can often be written off as a routine return to the “natural order” in the face of turmoil, with the revolutions represented by paradigm-shifting presidencies—the Age of Jackson, the eras of both Roosevelts, or even the more modern Reagan Revolution—all being flattened over time, to the point where polar-opposite presidents can seemingly stand alongside each other with a smile at a Disney World attraction.
Which is to say, it’s hard for modern Americans (who, regardless of partisanship, routinely rate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the highest tier of presidencies) to understand the seeming threat FDR represented to a portion of the country at the time of his election.
For desperate Americans feeling the crushing weight of a collapsing economy during the Great Depression, Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal was the kind of decisive, bold leadership that they demanded, in stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach of his predecessors, who’d led them into this mess.
But for other Americans, particularly the business leaders who feared being labelled as the bourgeoisie by a self-proclaimed proletariat out for blood, Roosevelt’s victory felt like an extension of early 20th-century anarchist attacks, the Red Summer of 1919, and the shocking Wall Street bombing of 1920.
In Germany, in response to fears of the rise of Communism, and looking to protect their investments, the business leaders of the flailing Weimar Republic gathered together to compose and sign the 1932 Industrielleneingabe, a petition to demand that the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, appoint as chancellor a man they felt could represent their interests and provide a steady hand amidst the tumult: Adolf Hitler.
Early the next year, Hitler would arrange a secret meeting with some of Germany's top industrialists at the home of Hermann Göring to collaborate and raise funds for the infamous Enabling Act, which would further neuter the von Hindenburg presidency and put more power in the hands of Hitler and, so the industrialists believed, themselves.
If it worked in Germany, some on Wall Street thought, might it not also work here?
Why not find some military man to stand at the front, put the awesome power of their collective wealth behind him, and use him to undermine a weak president who, in their eyes, was letting the whims of an uninformed public plunge the nation into a communist dystopia?
The cabal behind what would be called the “Business Plot,” or the “Wall Street Putsch,” even had a candidate in mind: Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in U.S. history.
But they failed to realize that Smedley Butler was unwilling to be their compliant tool—and that his integrity may have been the most important thing standing between American democracy and a fascist coup.
Major General Butler was, by no means, a great fan of the federal government by the early 1930s.
He had served honorably in the Marines from the Philippine-American War through World War I, but Butler had begun to feel that not all the conflicts he fought in were particularly honorable.
According to the 2014 biography Maverick Marine: General Smedley D.
Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, Butler would summarize his career thusly:
“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps.
I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.
And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
Butler expressed misgivings when he received his first Medal of Honor for the now oft-forgotten 1914 bombing of Veracruz, Mexico, feeling he did nothing to deserve it (a sentiment shared by many critics of the seemingly indiscriminate outpouring of medals at the time).
“I, even in my most puffed up moments,” he told his mother in a letter, “can not remember a single action, or in fact any collection of actions, of mine that in the slightest degree warranted such a decoration.”
Butler tried to return the honor, but the Navy insisted he keep it and wear it.
Butler developed further misgivings when he fought in the so-called Banana Wars, a series of police actions and occupations throughout Central America aimed at protecting and supporting American business interests abroad.
By the time Butler retired, he began advocating for U.S. military veterans, particularly after President Herbert Hoover cracked down on the Bonus Army, a group of WWI veterans who sought the payout of their bonuses during the Great Depression but were violently dispersed by General Douglas MacArthur.
Nor did Butler’s tune change when President Roosevelt was elected.
In 1933, Butler toured the country to recruit members for the Veterans of Foreign Wars and criticize actions taken by the Roosevelt administration, particularly the Economy Act of 1933.
Butler’s military record, potential influence over hundreds of thousands of disgruntled veterans, and his expressed distaste for the way Roosevelt was running things is why, Butler would later testify, Bill Doyle and Gerald P.
MacGuire would approach him with a proposal.
MacGuire was a bond salesman and a member of the American Legion who represented himself as having ties to a consortium of wealthy businessmen.
These men had a plan to form a faction of veterans, fascistic in ideology, that would seize a role within, and ultimately overthrow, the Roosevelt administration.
Their plan was to have this group, led by Butler and backed financially by the wealthy elite, pressure Roosevelt to create a new cabinet position, citing the President’s poor health as a pretext.
This new “Secretary of General Affairs” would then take over leadership of the government, with Roosevelt serving merely as a figurehead.
The full extent of this plan was revealed to Butler by MacGuire on August 22, 1934.
Butler was repulsed by the plan, but he kept his feelings close to the vest.
Butler reached out to his former personal secretary, Paul Comly French, who was then a reporter for the Philadelphia Record.
French arranged to meet with MacGuire himself on September 13, 1934, and was surprised at how forthcoming, almost boastful, MacGuire was about the supposedly secret plot and his own desire to see a fascist America replace the democratic system that had elected Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
French would publish the details of the plot in an exposé in both his Philadelphia paper and the New York Post.
Butler, for his part, ultimately rebuked MacGuire with the remark, “My 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.”
In the House of Representatives, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities (sometimes dubbed the “McCormack-Dickstein Committee”) began investigating the plot, but a media narrative was already being spun to dismiss Butler’s claims.
On November 22, 1934, just two days after the Committee began its investigation, the New York Times ran a story under the headline “CREDULITY UNLIMITED” which declared, “The whole story sounds like a gigantic hoax.”
When the Committee released their final report in early 1935, however, they did not agree.
“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,” they concluded.
“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 expedient.”
This conclusion raises the obvious question: If the plot was real, who was behind it?
Who were the wealthy Wall Street backers behind MacGuire’s “Wall Street putsch?”
It’s a question Smedley Butler tried to answer in his testimony.
Yet the committee (which was ironically a precursor to the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1950s) had no interest in naming those names.
“Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape.
The big shots weren’t even called to testify,” Butler said.
Butler claimed that the names he listed were censored from his testimony.
Famous industrialists like J.P.
Morgan and Irénée du Pont were rumored to be the plot’s leaders, but nearly a century later, as The Guardian notes, we still find ourselves vexed with the question “Why is so little known about the 1930s coup attempt against FDR?”
One theory suggested by several sources, including a program on BBC Radio 4, is that FDR himself wanted it that way.
The president may have leveraged the threat of bringing these wealthy industrialists up on charges of treason in order to get them to back down from their opposition to the New Deal.
By sparing the conspirators and their businesses from legal ramifications for supporting an insurrection, FDR wagered he could push through the progressive legislation he felt could save the country.
For his part, Smedley Butler spent 1935 touring the country with his book War is a Racket.
“It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious,” Butler begins his book after restating the title.
“It is the only one international in scope.
It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
He died in 1940, more than a year before the United States would enter World War II, defeating fascism abroad, and supercharging American industry through the war effort.
20 years later, Butler’s vitriolic rage against the “racket of war” would find itself reworded and repeated as a warning from the unlikeliest of places: the White House.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower would warn in his farewell address that, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
By sparing the conspirators in 1935, President Roosevelt assured the passage of the New Deal.
But in doing so, as President Eisenhower’s warning suggests, did he also allow the spirit of that industrialist coup d’état to fester in the heart of American democracy, just waiting for an opportune moment to try again?
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.