The plot to seize the White House.
In 1933–34, a group of Wall Street financiers allegedly tried to recruit a half-million veterans and America's most decorated Marine to march on Washington, sideline Franklin Roosevelt, and install a business-friendly strongman. The Marine testified. A congressional committee said the plan was real. The newspaper of record called it a hoax.
This is the origin story of everything this site tracks: money moving against democracy, and the press waving it away. It is also a case study in discipline — because the real record is powerful enough that we don't need the two myths that have attached themselves to it (the Prescott Bush cameo and the Rothschild hand), both of which we set aside.
House committee finds the plot to establish a fascist organization was 'discussed… planned… and might have been placed in execution'
US House Special Committee (McCormack–Dickstein) · Committee report · February 15, 1935
A congressional committee, on the record, credited the core of Butler's account: that attempts to organize a fascist march on Washington were discussed and planned by financial backers.
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Major General Smedley Butler — twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and by the 1930s a fierce critic of what he called war for profit — testified under oath in November 1934 that a bond salesman named Gerald MacGuire had tried to recruit him to lead a veterans' march on Washington, backed by wealthy financiers, to force Franklin Roosevelt aside and install a dictator answerable to business. The House's McCormack–Dickstein Committee investigated and, in February 1935, reported that such attempts “were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution.”
No one was prosecuted. The money men Butler named were never seriously pursued. And the press — the New York Times foremost — ridiculed the whole thing before quietly conceding, once the committee reported, that a fascist march had in fact been contemplated. This page grades the plot, the money, and the burial — and it deliberately sets aside the later embellishments (a Prescott Bush role; a Rothschild hand) that the evidence does not support.
The record, claim by claim
Smedley Butler testified under oath to a plot to depose FDR.
FACTOn November 20, 1934, Butler — one of the most decorated Marines in US history — told the House's McCormack–Dickstein Committee that Gerald MacGuire had pitched him on leading roughly 500,000 veterans to Washington, financed by wealthy backers, to push Roosevelt into a figurehead role and install a business-friendly 'Secretary of General Affairs.' That he gave this sworn testimony is a matter of the congressional record.
A congressional committee said the plan was real — and no one was charged.
FACTThe McCormack–Dickstein Committee's February 15, 1935 report credited the core of Butler's account, adding that it was 'corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark.' MacGuire denied any coup intent and died months later; the committee declined to pursue the prominent men Butler named, calling that testimony 'hearsay.' No prosecutions followed. The gap between 'a committee found it real' and 'no one faced consequences' is itself the story.
“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.”
The money orbit was American blue-blood capital — Morgan and du Pont, not who the myths claim.
FACTGerald MacGuire was a $100-a-week bond salesman at Grayson M-P Murphy & Company — Murphy being a J.P. Morgan-linked banker. MacGuire's European trip was bankrolled by Robert Sterling Clark, a Singer sewing-machine heir. Butler named bigger figures — John W. Davis (Morgan's chief counsel), Thomas W. Lamont (a Morgan partner) — whom the committee waved off without pursuing. The overlapping American Liberty League (founded 1934, roughly 30% du Pont-funded) was the 'respectable' anti-New-Deal front drawn from the same milieu. The documented money is quintessentially American establishment capital.
- New England Historical Society — MacGuire, Grayson Murphy, the Morgan orbit
- McCormack–Dickstein testimony; American Liberty League (du Pont funding)
The press buried it — then quietly admitted it was real.
FACTThe New York Times (November 22, 1934) dismissed Butler's account as a 'gigantic hoax' and a 'bald and unconvincing narrative.' Yet after the committee reported, the same paper ran the headline above (February 16, 1935), acknowledging the committee had found the fascist march 'was actually contemplated.' Ridicule first, correction in the fine print later — the template for how uncomfortable elite stories get managed.
“Plan for March on Capital Is Held Proved.”
How close it came is genuinely contested.
PROBABLY TRUEGraded honestly: that a plan was discussed and planned is FACT (the committee said so); that it was a viable, about-to-launch coup is contested. Skeptical historians (Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it a 'cocktail putsch') argue the distance from talk to action was vast and MacGuire may have been a blowhard or provocateur; others (and the committee) treat it as a real if aborted design by a small core of financiers. We land on PROBABLY TRUE that it was a serious, funded scheme — not mere fantasy — while stating plainly that its odds of success are unknowable and debated.
The same Wall Street world was, in these years, financing fascism abroad.
FACTThis is the bridge forward, and it is graded as documented finance — not as a role in the coup. The law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, home to John Foster and Allen Dulles, was the central conduit for US capital into Weimar and Nazi Germany; Allen Dulles sat as a director of the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, and the firm represented it. The Schröder banking name runs to Baron Kurt von Schröder, a Nazi financier whose Cologne bank hosted the January 4, 1933 meeting that helped clear Hitler's debts on his path to power. We assert the financing and the directorship, which are documented; we do NOT assert the Dulles brothers were participants in the Business Plot, nor the antisemitic-sourced claim that they were 'in the room' at that Hitler meeting.
The two myths we set aside
- The Prescott Bush cameo. A 2007 BBC piece cast Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush) as the plotters' “liaison” to Nazi Germany. That claim is disputed — a scholar has called it a likely clerical research error — and it conflates the Business Plot with a separate, better- documented matter: Bush's directorship of the Union Banking Corporation, tied to the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. That Nazi-finance story is real and belongs elsewhere; dropping Bush into the coup plot is not supported, so we don't.
- The Rothschild hand. There is no evidence connecting the Rothschild family to the Business Plot. The documented financiers were American — Morgan, du Pont, Clark. The “Rothschild” version is a classic antisemitic trope with no factual basis, and we reject it outright. Naming the real money is more damning and doesn't require the lie.
- Reform of memory, not of the record. The plot was buried in real time by ridicule and never litigated. That it survives as history at all is due to a congressional committee that put the core on the record before the moment passed.
Where the machine starts
The Business Plot is the earliest clean instance of this site's entire thesis: concentrated private money moving against elected government, and a compliant press treating the exposure as the embarrassment rather than the plot. It predates — and sets up — the Dulles Blueprint: the same Wall Street law-firm world (Sullivan & Cromwell, the Dulles brothers, the Schröder network) that shrugged at a coup against Roosevelt was, in the same years, wiring American capital into the regimes abroad that made the coup-plotters' ideal look modern. Start here, and the rest of the map reads as sequel.
Questions worth taking seriously
Was the Business Plot real, or a hoax like the Times said?
A congressional committee investigated and reported that the attempts “were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution.” So the plan was real; what's debated is how close it came to launching. The “hoax” framing was the Times' first take, which the paper itself walked back after the committee reported.
Was Prescott Bush involved?
Not on the evidence. The claim comes from a disputed 2007 account and conflates the Business Plot with a separate matter — Bush's Union Banking Corporation directorship tied to German industrialist Fritz Thyssen. We don't place him in the plot.
Were the Rothschilds behind it?
No. The documented financiers were American — the Morgan orbit, the du Ponts, Robert Sterling Clark. There is no evidence of a Rothschild role, and that version is a baseless antisemitic trope we reject. The real money is damning enough.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Wikipedia — Business Plot (Butler testimony, McCormack–Dickstein report, NYT coverage, Prescott Bush dispute)
- Rolling Stone — The Business Plot against FDR
- New England Historical Society — the money orbit (Grayson Murphy, MacGuire, the Morgan pals)
- Asia-Pacific Journal (Peter Dale Scott) — the Dulles brothers, Schröder, and pre-war international banking
- Wikipedia — Kurt Baron von Schröder (Nazi financing; the January 4, 1933 meeting)
- Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (1973) — the classic account of Butler's testimony