![]() The members of the Business Plot believed Butler would lead this irregular force in a coup. Butler, who testified under oath about his knowledge of a plan to form an organization of 500,000 veterans who could take over the functions of government, as you can see Butler himself say in the 1935 newsreel footage above. The plot was famously exposed by Major General Smedley D. Bush), bond salesman Gerald MacGuire, and Bill Doyle commander of the Massachusetts American Legion. The conspirators included investment banker and future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush (father of George H.W. In what became known as the “Business Plot” (or the “Wall Street Putsch”)-a group of bankers and business leaders allegedly created a conspiracy to overthrow the president and install a dictator friendly to their interests. Wall Street agreed, except for all that stuff about the Constitution and the welfare of the ordinary American. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. This is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. West Virginia Republican Senator Henry Hatfield wrote to a colleague, in a series of evergreen expressions, characterizing FDR’s historic First Hundred Days as “despotism”: Still, Roosevelt’s election went too far for his opponents (and not far enough for progressives to his left). But in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, “the economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system,” writes NPR, in a description of the Great Depression that reads as drily understated. Despite the failure of laissez-faire financial capitalism after the crash of 1929, financiers, economists, and politicians refused to admit their principles might have been very badly flawed.
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