The Business Plot
In 1933 a decorated Marine general testified that wealthy financiers had asked him to lead half a million veterans on Washington and install himself beside a compliant President Roosevelt. A House committee found his account credible. Nothing further happened to anyone.
Why this verdict
A congressional committee found in 1935 that evidence of a planned fascist coup was credible; no one was prosecuted and the alleged plotters were never named in the public report, so the conspiracy is confirmed as investigated and substantiated, not as adjudicated.
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01The claim
That a group of Wall Street figures opposed to the New Deal and to leaving the gold standard planned to install an authoritarian government in the United States using a veterans' organisation as the instrument, and approached Major General Smedley Butler to lead it.
02Where it came from
Butler was the most decorated Marine alive, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and — crucially — enormously popular with veterans after championing the Bonus Army. He was also, by 1933, a public critic of American business interests abroad, later writing the pamphlet War Is a Racket. According to his testimony, bond salesman Gerald MacGuire approached him repeatedly through 1933 and 1934, financed by more senior figures, proposing that Butler lead a veterans' march and assume a role modelled on the ministers then emerging in European fascist states.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
The House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by John McCormack, took Butler's testimony in closed session in November 1934. Its report the following February stated that the committee 'received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country' and that Butler's testimony on the alleged plot was verified in its essentials by other witnesses.
The committee also confirmed MacGuire's European travel and his contacts with veterans' organisations, and found that money had moved. What it did not do was call the wealthy men Butler named — among them figures connected to prominent banking and industrial families — or release the portions of testimony naming them, which were excised from the published record. MacGuire denied everything and died of pneumonia at 37 in March 1935. No prosecution followed.
Historians are divided on scale rather than existence. The consensus position is that something real occurred — a well-funded approach with fascist intent — and that it was probably closer to overheated conversation among rich men than to an operational plan with a date on it. Both halves of that assessment belong in any honest account.
04What it cost
The plot's most durable effect was its near-total disappearance from public memory for four decades, which is itself part of the evidentiary story: contemporary newspapers, including the New York Times, treated Butler's testimony as an absurdity, and the committee's confirmation received little coverage. It has since become a fixed reference point in American arguments about how close the country has come to authoritarian rule.