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 up Pennsylvania Avenue for the purpose of intimidating Franklin Delano Roosevelt into either resigning outright or handing off all his executive powers to a all-powerful, unelected cabinet secretary who the plotters who were backing MacGuire were going to name. Roosevelt taking the dollar off the gold standard at an American Legion conference in Chicago, but it broadens from there. 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. A representative of a prominent Wall Street brokerage house named Gerald C. I mean, for people who don’t know about, for example, this attempted coup of 1934, can you talk more about exactly how it unfolded? The parallels to these days are quite interesting, but let’s start with the original story that took place, what, like 90 years ago. Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Jonathan. We’re joined now by the award-winning author Jonathan Katz, author of the new book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, also the author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. … It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many,” Butler said. … It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. imperialism, famously writing, “War is a racket. But Smedley Butler later spoke out against U.S. invasions and occupations across the globe, including in Cuba, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico and the Philippines. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech and press.ĪMY GOODMAN: At the time, Marine Major General Smedley Butler was one of the most celebrated Marine officers in the country, having played key roles in U.S. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. I want to retain the right to vote, the right to speak freely and the right to write. My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. As it then seemed to me to be getting serious, I felt it was my duty to tell all I knew of such activities to this committee. He told me they had unearthed evidence linking my name with several such veteran organizations. I talked with an investigator for this committee who came to me with a subpoena on Sunday, November 18. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men which would be able to take over the functions of government. ![]() ![]() The plan, as outlined to me, was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, or as a club at least, to intimidate the government and break down our democratic institutions. ![]() SMEDLEY BUTLER: I appeared before the congressional committee, the highest representation of the American people, under subpoena to tell what I knew of activities which I believed might lead to an attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship. This is a clip of General Smedley Butler speaking in 1934. But Butler refused and revealed what he knew to members of Congress. The men asked the celebrated Marine Corps officer Smedley Butler to lead a military coup. and the former president of DuPont, Irénée du Pont. The coup plotters included the head of General Motors, Alfred P. 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. Capitol and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, we turn to look at a largely forgotten effort to topple the U.S. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.Īs the January 6th House committee and federal prosecutors continue investigation into last year’s deadly insurrection at the U.S. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,, The War and Peace Report.
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