History
Matthew Ehret
March 20, 2020
© Photo: Wikimedia

The upcoming American elections are just around the corner and everyone is wondering if the new president will be named Trump, Biden, Sanders or none of the above.

I can hear the incredulous reader exclaim: Wait, what does “none of the above” mean?? It’s certainly going to be one of those three isn’t it??

It is often too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees and in the opinion-packed world of endless talking head commentaries, every leaf and branch is scrutinized by professional opinionators so closely that many forget that the entire forest is on fire. As I’ve written extensively here and here and here, the reality is that the western financial system is careening towards a crash much worse than anything the world saw in 1929, and the deep state trying to manage this wreck from above would love nothing more than to impose a fascist dictatorship onto a frightened population.

Trump, Sanders and Tulsi: Not Good Fascists

The only reason why so much effort has been expended on attempting to paint Trump, Sanders and Tulsi as “Russian agents” has been the simple fact that neither one of the three individuals would make very willing puppets who would play along with a fascist dictatorship in America under those foreseeable crisis conditions. For all their problems and differences, right wing neocons and left wing Malthusian technocrats despise Trump, Sanders and Tulsi for the crime that they are actual patriotic human beings who genuinely care about their nation. Unlike technocrats or neocons, actual human beings occupying political office may be inclined to spoil a good crisis in order to pass reforms that actually protect the people and revoke the power structures of the shadow government.

So I ask again: What if the oncoming crisis results in a 2020 choice of “none of the above”? What if there is no 2020 choice “offered” democratically to the American public at all? It isn’t like this sort of thing has never happened in American history.

In order to best understand this danger and also gain insight into how it might be circumvented, I suggest revisiting the 1932-1934 efforts by the international deep state to impose a fascist dictatorship upon Americans and even overthrow the elected government of Franklin Roosevelt with a JP Morgan-funded military coup d’état.

The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932

1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.

This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.

In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.

The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt

Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.

In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.

Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.

Who was General Butler?

Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).

By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:

“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”

In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.

The Wall Street Putsch is Launched

These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.

Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power (1).

Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.

Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.

Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly: “Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”

Butler Blows the Whistle

When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.

At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon  substantiated everything over the course of  a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.

Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.

When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded: “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”

Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.

The Aftermath of the Exposure

This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.

Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.

The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. This organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.

Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever.

So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot, it is wiser to ask the question: Where are the General Butlers today?

Why Assume There Will Be a 2020 election? General Butler and the ‘Wall Street Putsch’ Revisited

The upcoming American elections are just around the corner and everyone is wondering if the new president will be named Trump, Biden, Sanders or none of the above.

I can hear the incredulous reader exclaim: Wait, what does “none of the above” mean?? It’s certainly going to be one of those three isn’t it??

It is often too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees and in the opinion-packed world of endless talking head commentaries, every leaf and branch is scrutinized by professional opinionators so closely that many forget that the entire forest is on fire. As I’ve written extensively here and here and here, the reality is that the western financial system is careening towards a crash much worse than anything the world saw in 1929, and the deep state trying to manage this wreck from above would love nothing more than to impose a fascist dictatorship onto a frightened population.

Trump, Sanders and Tulsi: Not Good Fascists

The only reason why so much effort has been expended on attempting to paint Trump, Sanders and Tulsi as “Russian agents” has been the simple fact that neither one of the three individuals would make very willing puppets who would play along with a fascist dictatorship in America under those foreseeable crisis conditions. For all their problems and differences, right wing neocons and left wing Malthusian technocrats despise Trump, Sanders and Tulsi for the crime that they are actual patriotic human beings who genuinely care about their nation. Unlike technocrats or neocons, actual human beings occupying political office may be inclined to spoil a good crisis in order to pass reforms that actually protect the people and revoke the power structures of the shadow government.

So I ask again: What if the oncoming crisis results in a 2020 choice of “none of the above”? What if there is no 2020 choice “offered” democratically to the American public at all? It isn’t like this sort of thing has never happened in American history.

In order to best understand this danger and also gain insight into how it might be circumvented, I suggest revisiting the 1932-1934 efforts by the international deep state to impose a fascist dictatorship upon Americans and even overthrow the elected government of Franklin Roosevelt with a JP Morgan-funded military coup d’état.

The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932

1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.

This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.

In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.

The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt

Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.

In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.

Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.

Who was General Butler?

Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).

By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:

“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”

In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.

The Wall Street Putsch is Launched

These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.

Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power (1).

Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.

Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.

Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly: “Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”

Butler Blows the Whistle

When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.

At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon  substantiated everything over the course of  a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.

Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.

When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded: “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”

Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.

The Aftermath of the Exposure

This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.

Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.

The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. This organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.

Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever.

So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot, it is wiser to ask the question: Where are the General Butlers today?

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

(1) The Legion was a very different beast from the benign organization of old veterans it is known as today, as it was originally founded with Wall Street capital in 1919 and was run early on as a fascist machine. Legion Commander Alvin Owsley made this explicit in 1921 when he said: “If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”

The upcoming American elections are just around the corner and everyone is wondering if the new president will be named Trump, Biden, Sanders or none of the above.

I can hear the incredulous reader exclaim: Wait, what does “none of the above” mean?? It’s certainly going to be one of those three isn’t it??

It is often too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees and in the opinion-packed world of endless talking head commentaries, every leaf and branch is scrutinized by professional opinionators so closely that many forget that the entire forest is on fire. As I’ve written extensively here and here and here, the reality is that the western financial system is careening towards a crash much worse than anything the world saw in 1929, and the deep state trying to manage this wreck from above would love nothing more than to impose a fascist dictatorship onto a frightened population.

Trump, Sanders and Tulsi: Not Good Fascists

The only reason why so much effort has been expended on attempting to paint Trump, Sanders and Tulsi as “Russian agents” has been the simple fact that neither one of the three individuals would make very willing puppets who would play along with a fascist dictatorship in America under those foreseeable crisis conditions. For all their problems and differences, right wing neocons and left wing Malthusian technocrats despise Trump, Sanders and Tulsi for the crime that they are actual patriotic human beings who genuinely care about their nation. Unlike technocrats or neocons, actual human beings occupying political office may be inclined to spoil a good crisis in order to pass reforms that actually protect the people and revoke the power structures of the shadow government.

So I ask again: What if the oncoming crisis results in a 2020 choice of “none of the above”? What if there is no 2020 choice “offered” democratically to the American public at all? It isn’t like this sort of thing has never happened in American history.

In order to best understand this danger and also gain insight into how it might be circumvented, I suggest revisiting the 1932-1934 efforts by the international deep state to impose a fascist dictatorship upon Americans and even overthrow the elected government of Franklin Roosevelt with a JP Morgan-funded military coup d’état.

The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932

1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.

This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.

In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.

The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt

Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.

In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.

Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.

Who was General Butler?

Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).

By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:

“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”

In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.

The Wall Street Putsch is Launched

These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.

Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power (1).

Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.

Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.

Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly: “Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”

Butler Blows the Whistle

When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.

At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon  substantiated everything over the course of  a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.

Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.

When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded: “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”

Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.

The Aftermath of the Exposure

This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.

Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.

The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. This organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.

Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever.

So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot, it is wiser to ask the question: Where are the General Butlers today?

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

(1) The Legion was a very different beast from the benign organization of old veterans it is known as today, as it was originally founded with Wall Street capital in 1919 and was run early on as a fascist machine. Legion Commander Alvin Owsley made this explicit in 1921 when he said: “If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

See also

November 12, 2024
August 4, 2020

See also

November 12, 2024
August 4, 2020

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

(1) The Legion was a very different beast from the benign organization of old veterans it is known as today, as it was originally founded with Wall Street capital in 1919 and was run early on as a fascist machine. Legion Commander Alvin Owsley made this explicit in 1921 when he said: “If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.