As the January 6th House committee and federal prosecutors continue investigation into last year’s deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, we turn to look at a largely forgotten effort to topple the U.S. government in the past.
It was 1934. Some of the nation’s most powerful bankers and business leaders plotted to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in order to block the New Deal and establish a fascist dictatorship. The coup plotters included the head of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, as well as J.P. Morgan Jr. and the former president of DuPont, Irénée du Pont. The men asked the celebrated Marine Corps officer Smedley Butler to lead a military coup. But Butler refused and revealed what he knew to
So, it actually starts in 1933. A representative of a prominent Wall Street brokerage house named Gerald C. MacGuire starts trying to recruit Smedley Butler to — it actually starts out as like kind of an internal plot to get him to speak against Franklin D. Roosevelt taking the dollar off the gold standard at an American Legion conference in Chicago, but it broadens from there. And by 1934, MacGuire is sending Butler postcards from the French Riviera, where he’s just arrived from fascist Italy, from Berlin, and then he comes to Butler’s hometown of Philadelphia and asks him to lead a column of half a million World War I veterans
— source democracynow.org | Jan 26, 2022