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Little Caesars: How Wall Street & Big Business Conspired to Overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and Install a Fascist Dictator — and the Patriot Who Stopped Them

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Nov 13, 2023
Category: History

Rachel Maddow has a new book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, and a podcast that dissects historical efforts to bring Fascism to America. Along the way, she synopsizes the Smedley Butler episode in that campaign. Atrios has a hair-raising story about Donald Trump’s plans for an authoritarian government if he’s elected President in 2024. Clearly, Fascism and Smedley Butler are very much in the news.

In my decades as a journalist, I came to believe there’s no non-fiction story I couldn’t tell in 4,000 words. This piece runs 5,000. Apologies, but I needed that extra thousand words to tell you everything you need to know about an American general who declined to participate in a conspiracy that would see Franklin Delano Roosevelt “fired” as President, this hero installed in his place, and Fascism on the sunny, business-friendly Mussolini model replacing democracy, presumably forever.

On any street in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, the Packard limousine would turn heads. Its grill was reminiscent of a Rolls Royce, its fenders had better curves than Mae West. It looked unaffordable, and it was. In 1933, when almost a third of American workers had no work and a thousand families a day were losing their homes, this gentlemen’s club on wheels was selling for $4,750, about four times the average annual income of an American family.

Conspiracies are generally plotted in stealth and shadow. But on July 1, 1933, as Bill Doyle and Gerald MacGuire traveled from Manhattan in this rented, chauffeured limo for their first meeting with Smedley Butler, they had no reason to skulk — they were representing some of the most powerful men in American business. Today, they’d feel Butler out. When they hooked him, they’d suggest that he lead a coup to topple the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Doyle and MacGuire understood that no incoming President had ever been more popular than FDR. In the week after his inauguration, an unprecedented 460,000 Americans wrote to him. In the hundred days that followed, the new President rewarded their trust with fifteen major pieces of legislation and a handful of new agencies. So great was his mandate and so dazzling were his legislative victories that William Randolph Hearst, who was no fan, commented, “I guess at your next election we will make it unanimous.”

Still, some of America’s most respectable business leaders had entrusted Doyle and McGuire to set in motion the overthrow of FDR.

 

In 1933, every American adult knew that line from FDR’s first inaugural address: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

For some of the richest men in America — heirs to DuPont and Singer Sewing Machine, leaders of General Motors and the Morgan Bank — his real message came later: “A financial element has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson… There must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.”

This wasn’t mere rhetoric. Just weeks after his inauguration, Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard. For suffering Americans with nothing to lose, FDR’s willingness to find an innovative way to pump more money into the economy was reason to cheer. For the rich, it was a fire bell in the night. The dollar would be devalued — their millions might become thousands, might become nothing. They could end up like the Germans in the Weimar years, trading wheelbarrows of cash for loaves of bread.

By pledging relief to farmers, workers and the unemployed — and regulation for banks, the financial markets, and corporations — Roosevelt was upending everything the Old Guard knew as America. His New Deal was one crime after another. “That man” planned to soak the solvent, seize property, and crush free enterprise. FDR wasn’t just “a traitor to his class” — he was a traitor, period.

The leaders of the conspiracy to overthrow Roosevelt only carried guns on the plantations of South Carolina and the marshes of Maryland; their idea of violence was a bloodless boardroom coup. But they knew how to get rid of FDR: Treat the President the same way you’d treat any insubordinate employee — fire him.

A bit of treachery inside the White House, a show of force outside its gates, and Roosevelt would get the message. He’d either accept a ceremonial role, or, better, step down. The conspirators believed that John Nance Garner, Roosevelt’s Vice President, had no interest in the job. Neither did Secretary of State Cordell Hull, next in line. So in the confusion that would surely follow Roosevelt’s ruin, there was plenty of opportunity for “a man on a white horse.”

But overthrowing Roosevelt was only the beginning — with FDR gone, the conspirators could bring Fascism to America. Not the goose-stepping Fascism of Adolf Hitler, but the sunny business/government alliance of Mussolini’s Italy. All they needed was the right man to be America’s Mussolini.

That man, they believed, was Smedley Butler. A Pennsylvania Quaker who had enlisted in the Marines at 16, Butler retired 33 years later as the highest-ranking General in the Corps. He was one of only two Marines to win the Medal of Honor twice — in Vera Cruz for leading a force of Marines into battle, armed with nothing but a stick, and then in Haiti for crawling through a tunnel with a handful of Marines into a courtyard of rebels, surprising and killing more than two hundred of them.

Butler was a patriot with an Old Testament black-and-white morality. At various points in his military career, he’d fixed an election in Nicaragua, made China safe for Standard Oil, fast-tracked infrastructure projects in Haiti and Cuba, always smoothing the way for American business. Ate the same time, he’d spoken up for his men; he had a reputation as a hothead. That’s why he hadn’t been chosen Commandant of the Corps; that’s why, late in his illustrious career, he had been briefly and incredibly slated to be court-martialed.

When he retired from the Marines in 1931, Butler was 50, but he was still thin — just 140 pounds — and fit, with a beak of a nose and a thatch of graying hair cropped in a Marine trim. And he was still wired for action; he crisscrossed the country, giving blunt speeches about Big Business. In his military service, he said, he’d been “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” And he meant that literally: “Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

After you’ve condemned America as an imperialist empire, what’s next? For Butler, it was to turn against war itself. In his speeches, he bluntly indicted bankers who saluted only the flag of profit and financed allies and enemies alike. “War is a racket, it always has been,” he’d say. “It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives… It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

In 1932, when 17,000 veterans came to Washington to demand accelerated payment of their war bonuses, Butler camped out with them in their tent city, across the river from the Capitol. At a rally, he cheered them on: “You hear folks call you fellows tramps, but they didn’t call you that in ’17 and ’18. I never saw such fine soldiers. I never saw such discipline.” His voice was forceful and tinged with gravel, George C. Scott as George Patton.

All for naught. Congress gave the veterans nothing. President Hoover tired of a tent city within sight of the Capitol. With tone-deaf timing — this was just three months before the Presidential election — he ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to burn the tents and disperse the protesters. In the assault, two veterans were shot and killed — and MacArthur was no longer a candidate to be front man for a coup.

Bill Doyle and Gerald MacGuire’s mission was just to plant the seed. These World War I veterans would chat amiably with another vet about the old days, and then they’d push the conversation toward veterans’ issues and ask Butler to give a speech at the national convention of the American Legion.

Just one speech. Nothing more.

 

Early afternoon. The Packard cruised through Newtown Square. Wood fences, stone houses, the occasional horse farm. Norman Rockwell Americana. A thousand people lived here so quietly that even its single citizen of national importance was just another resident.

Smedley Butler’s house was modest. As was Butler.

Butler had never met Doyle or MacGuire, and he barely knew the American Legion official who had called from Washington early that morning to say they were coming to see him. Why did he agree? Doyle and MacGuire were Marines, and as he’d told his men when he left the Corps, “I mean to give every one of you a map showing you exactly where I live. I want you to come around and see me, especially if you ever get into trouble, and I will help you if I can.”

Although Doyle was commander of the Massachusetts American Legion and MacGuire had been commander of the Connecticut chapter of the Legion, neither looked military. Doyle was not memorable — he was the kind of man who is perpetually having to introduce himself to people he’s already met. MacGuire was rotund and jowly, with a metal plate in his head from a war wound.

Doyle was the architect of this first part of the plan, but MacGuire did most of the talking. His one subject: the need to replace the officers of the American Legion. He didn’t have to pitch hard — Butler was the most distinguished military man who cared about the rank-and-file. The Legion didn’t. Guided by what was known as “The Royal Family,” it mostly served the interest of Big Business; when workers went on strike, corporations hired the Legion to beat up the strikers. (Legionnaires did this so openly, so proudly, that it was not until 1936 that the Legion’s national commander gave the order prohibiting the wearing of military uniforms when members were on strike-breaking missions.)

Butler took in his visitors’ expensive suits and their Packard limousine. He couldn’t match these men to their stated cause. Something wasn’t right, so he thanked Doyle and MacGuire for their time and said he was sorry they had come down from New York for nothing. He hadn’t been invited to the American Legion convention, he said, and no — really, thanks, but seriously: no — there was no reason for them to go to the trouble of getting him an invitation. He wasn’t going.

 

A few days later, Doyle and MacGuire returned.

This time, they had a better offer: Butler would attend the American Legion convention in Chicago, but only as a spectator. When he appeared in the gallery, his cadre of hired veterans would clap and cheer. Then he’d come down and give a speech.

“A speech about what?” Butler asked.

They just happened to have one with them, written by John W. Davis, a New York lawyer with strong connections to a Morgan-controlled bank. (Davis had served as U.S. Solicitor General and Ambassador to Great Britain; in 1921, he was the founding president of the Council on Foreign Relations; in 1924, he was the Democratic nominee for President.) They’d leave it with him, and if he approved, they hoped he’d reach out to his friends.

“These friends of mine…” Butler said, referring to the veterans who revered him. “Even if they wanted to go, they couldn’t afford to. It would cost them a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars to go out there and stay for five days and come back.”

“Well, we’ll pay that,” MacGuire said.

“How do you get the money to do that?”

“Oh, we have friends. We’ll get the money.”

“I don’t believe you.”

 

The next time MacGuire visited Butler — Doyle never came again — he produced a bankbook. It showed a balance of $42,000.

Again, there was the subject of the speech — the restoration of the gold standard. Only business and Wall Street cared about that, Butler said. Why would veterans? Because, MacGuire said, the men behind this effort to change the leadership of the Legion wanted to be sure the vets got real money. After all they’d done for America, the soldiers deserved better than rubber checks.

“People with money to give away don’t care about a bonus for soldiers,” Butler said. “Who’s behind this?”

“Colonel Murphy. Grayson M.-P. Murphy. I work in his office.”

MacGuire outlined Murphy’s great career for a few minutes, but Murphy’s New York life didn’t impress Butler. He only cared that the American Legion regarded the vets as nothing more than hired thugs for the rich.

“Murphy’s on our side,” MacGuire insisted. “He wants to see the soldiers cared for. He has nothing to do with using soldiers to break strikes — he’s a very fine fellow.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Butler replied — but he once again sent MacGuire away without any firm answer.

 

The next time MacGuire and Butler met was in a Newark hotel room. Butler mocked him: “You people are bluffing. You don’t have any money.”

In response, MacGuire took out his wallet and tossed eighteen crisp thousand-dollar bills on the bed.

“This is for you, for expenses,” MacGuire said. “You’ll need some money to pay your friends.”

Butler saw a set-up: “Every one of the numbers on these bills has been written down. If I try to cash one, you would have me by the neck.”

“Oh, we can change them into smaller denominations,” MacGuire said quickly, sensing that he’d finally found the way to hook Butler.

“You put that money away before somebody walks in here,” Butler ordered. “I don’t want to be tied up with it at all. I told you distinctly I am not going to take these men to Chicago.”

“What about you?” asked an increasingly agitated MacGuire. “Are you going to the convention?”

Butler said he hadn’t decided. But he had clearly decided to gather as much information as he could about whatever group MacGuire represented, for he now issued a challenge.

“You’re a wounded man — you’ve got a silver plate in your head,” he told MacGuire. “You’re being used by somebody, and I want to know the fellows who are using you. I’m not going to talk to you anymore. You’re only an agent. I want some of the principals.”

MacGuire took the bait. “I’ll send one of them over to see you — R.S. Clark. He’s a banker. He used to be in the Army.”

“Would it be possible,” Butler asked, “that he was a second lieutenant in the Ninth Infantry in China during the Boxer campaign?”

“That is the fellow.”

 

On his next visit, MacGuire produced Sterling Clark, who had indeed served under Butler in China.

The old days didn’t matter much to Butler. Once again, he pointed out that a speech calling for a return to the gold standard would do nothing to help the veterans — only big business would benefit.

With that, Clark revealed his greatest fear: that Roosevelt’s economic policies would turn him into a pauper. “I’ve got $30 million,” he said. “I don’t want to lose it. I’m willing to spend half of the 30 million” — he didn’t have to say: on the campaign to overthrow FDR — “to save the other half. If you get out and make that speech in Chicago, I’m sure they will adopt that resolution and that will be one step toward the return to gold.”

Butler, in turn, leveled with Clark. He said he’d do nothing to exploit veterans. If he was to lead them, his veterans’ brigade would defend the government — not subvert it. He wouldn’t speak at the American Legion convention. Especially about gold.

At the convention, others did. A resolution to return to the gold standard was adopted. On the way home, MacGuire visited Butler, simply to boast. And he reappeared a few weeks later, offering the general $1,000 to speak — again, about the gold standard — at a dinner in Butler’s honor.

 

No successful businessman places all his hopes on one plan, and neither did the Business Plotters. In 1934, at the same time they were courting Smedley Butler, they were setting up the American Liberty League. Grayson Murphy was the treasurer. Sterling Clark was a founding member — and the largest donor. Irénée du Pont, Howard Pew and John Raskob were active.

In its 31-room Manhattan headquarters, the League had 50 employees; in Washington, its office was larger than the office of the Republican National Committee. The League spawned chapters at 26 colleges. It had a speaker’s bureau and radio shows; it pumped out 50 million pieces of literature a year. As a propaganda arm for the conservative cause, it was extremely successful: newspapers ran 200,000 articles by or about the League, with The New York Times putting it on the front page 35 times in two years.

The League’s mission was to “unite several millions of people from all walks of life who are now without organized influence in legislative matters… [and] to protect the Constitution.” Its real mission hid below that lofty aim: to show how Communists and Socialists had infiltrated FDR’s Administration.

And then there was the League’s darker purpose: to funnel money from rich, respectable business executives — the du Ponts alone gave the League $282,000 — to hate groups. Like the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, which circulated pictures of “Mrs. Roosevelt going to a Negro meeting” in order to stir up Klan activity in the South; it received $14,600. Like the Crusaders, an openly Fascist group whose leader joked about lynching Roosevelt; it got $21,075.

From CEOs of international businesses to men who gathered in the darkness in sheets and hoods — the Liberty League covered quite a range of conspiratorial talent.

 

MacGuire improved the offer. Butler would become head of “a great big super-organization to maintain our democracy” — that is, after he helped the Business Plotters remove the tyrant in the White House.

Why, Butler asked, wouldn’t the public see through this plan?

“We’ve got all the newspapers,” MacGuire bragged. “We’ll start a campaign that the President’s health is failing. Everybody can tell by looking at him — the dumb American people will fall for it in a second.”

Clark was as far up the chain as Butler got. He never met anyone from DuPont, General Motors, the Morgan Bank, U.S. Steel or any other major corporations that MacGuire had hinted were involved in the plot.

It wouldn’t have made a difference — the Business Plotters had miscalculated. They might be all powerful, but Smedley Butler couldn’t be bought. That he had fixed elections abroad was irrelevant. An American election was different. A Presidential election in the United States was the one time that democracy was honored; it was the country’s glory, the envy of the world.

Choose money and power over honor? This Marine would sooner leave the body of one of his men behind on a foreign battlefield. His code was absolute: country first, country last. He would never overthrow a President.

“I’m a businessman,” MacGuire told Butler. “I have a wife and family to keep, and the men I represent take good care of them. And if you would take my advice, you would be a businessman too.”

“My interest, my one hobby,” Butler told MacGuire, “is maintaining a democracy.”

 

In the fall of 1934, Butler arranged for MacGuire to meet with Paul French. By then, MacGuire should have known that Butler would never join the conspiracy. But so great was his eagerness to enlist Butler and so limited was his imagination that he never suspected that French might represent danger — French wasn’t acting as Butler’s agent, he was a reporter for the Philadelphia Record.

In his meeting with French, MacGuire not only confirmed Butler’s account of the conspiracy, he went further. “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists,” MacGuire said. And that government, he said, might be quickly installed. Morgan bankers could deliver $1 million overnight; weapons for the veterans’ militias would come from the DuPont-controlled Remington Arms Company.

In MacGuire’s scenario for revolution, Wall Street would raise interest rates and create a “new crash.” Leftist agitators would whip up the millions of unemployed. And in the chaos, Butler would ride into Washington.

French’s story made the front page in Philadelphia, and a Congressional committee began to investigate.

Butler was the star witness for the Congressional committee headed by John W. McCormack — three-time House Majority Leader and Speaker of the House from 1962 to 1971 —– and Samuel Dickstein, a New York Congressman. (A few years later, Congressman Dickstein would sell information he gathered about Fascist elements in the United States to the Soviet Union; despite this, he ended his days as a Justice on the New York State Supreme Court.)

The first testimony began on November 21, 1934. The next morning, The New York Times put the plot on the front page — but with a headline that spun the story against the whistleblower: “General Butler Bares `Fascist Plot’ to Seize Government by Force.” Only at the bottom of the article did the Times acknowledge the Congressional committee’s findings — which it attributed to “sources in Philadelphia.”

The main witnesses were Butler, Gerald MacGuire, and Philadelphia journalist Paul French.

Butler and French told the same chilling story. MacGuire contradicted them on almost every point. Asked, for example, what he and French had talked about, he testified:

ANSWER. The position of the bond market, the stock market; what I thought was a good buy right now; what he could buy if he had seven or eight hundred dollars; the position of the country; the prospects for recovery, and various topics that any two men would discuss if they came together.

QUESTION. Nothing else?

ANSWER. Nothing else, excepting this, Mr. Chairman: As I said yesterday, I believe, when Mr. French came to me, he said General Butler is, or has, been approached by two or three organizations — and I think he mentioned one of them as some vigilante committee of this country  — and he said, “What do you think of it?” and I think I said to him, “Why, I don’t think the General ought to get mixed up with any of those affairs in this country…I think he ought to keep away from any of these organizations.”

Lies, all lies.

MacGuire was the only witness criticized by the Committee — not for lying about what he’d told French and Butler, but for telling inconsistent stories about the large sums of cash he carried at American Legion conventions.

Murphy and Clark and other alleged conspirators weren’t forced to testify. Perhaps it was just as well. Rich and powerful men tend not to write mission statements for illegal acts or conspire with low-level operatives — the absence of a paper trail frees them to give any testimony they want.

Nevertheless, the hearings not only uncovered considerable evidence linking MacGuire to men with much bigger salaries and more exalted titles, they revealed the broad outlines of the conspiracy itself.

Among the evidence: MacGuire’s postcards to Butler from Europe and MacGuire’s reports to Clark about a French veterans’ group sympathetic to a Fascist ruler. James Van Zandt, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, came forward to say that two months after Butler had warned him about the plot, he was approached by “agents of Wall Street” to lead “a Fascist dictatorship in the United States under the guise of a ‘veterans organization.’” The timing of the founding of the American Liberty League. The movement of large sums of money in and out of Clark and MacGuire’s accounts. And more.

Beyond documents and agreed-upon facts, there is considerable evidence that Wall Street threatened Roosevelt in 1933-1934. For example:  Early in 1934, George L. Harrison, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and Owen D. Young, founder of Radio Corporation of America and co-founder of the National Broadcasting System, met with Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary. According to Morgenthau, they told him, “You will do what we want you to do or we will not support your government bond markets.”

Assessing the evidence, John McCormack concluded that this conspiracy was “a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of rich men who wanted Fascism.”

Reaction to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee’s hearings was immediate — and withering.

Time magazine cast Butler as a joker, calling its piece “Plot Without Plotters.”

The men whose names had become public were more bluntly dismissive.

Overthrow the President? What an idea!

“Perfect moonshine! Too utterly ridiculous to comment upon,” said Thomas Lamont.

“A fantasy! I can’t imagine how anyone could produce it or any sane person believe it. It is absolutely false as far as it relates to me and my firm, and I don’t believe there is a word of truth in it with regards to Mr. MacGuire,” snapped Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy.

“It’s a joke! A publicity stunt! I know nothing about it. The matter is made up out of whole cloth. I deny it completely,” insisted Gerald MacGuire.

“The best laugh story of the year,” said Douglas MacArthur.

When the committee’s report was made public, the press could no longer spin the findings against Butler.

In small type, Time had to agree with the committee’s conclusion: The plot was “alarmingly true.”

The New York Times — which had run an editorial dismissing Butler’s claims as “a gigantic hoax” and “a bald and unconvincing narrative” — now cited Butler’s “definite proof.”

And FDR? Dickstein sent Roosevelt a copy of the report. Roosevelt’s response was laconic in the extreme: “I am very interested in having it. I take it that the committee will proceed further.” Was this a coded communication to discourage more inquiry? If so, McCormack and Dickstein got the message — there was no follow-up.

In March of 1935, a month after the Congressional committee released its findings, Gerald MacGuire died of pneumonia. He was just 37 years old.

The other conspirators went on with their lives — and their mission.

 

At an unprecedented joint session of Congress on January 3, 1936, Roosevelt introduced a “Neutrality Act” that would establish an embargo on weapons and commodities that might be used for war. Then he teed off on the Liberty League.

“They steal the livery of great national ideals to serve discredited special interests,” he thundered. “This minority in business and industry …engage in vast propaganda to spread fear and discord among the people. They would gang up against the people’s liberties. They seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.”

“Our resplendent economic aristocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong.”

“They realize that in 34 months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic aristocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.”

“They hide their dissent in a cowardly cloak of generality… Give them their way and they will take the course of every aristocracy of the past — power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”

Six days later, the Treasury Department charged Pierre Du Pont and John Raskob for tax evasion.

 

In the Presidential election of 1936, the League’s program became the Republican platform — just as FDR hoped. He was re-elected in the biggest landslide in American history, winning all but two states. The Democrats had the largest majority in the House of Representatives that any party had enjoyed since 1855, the largest in the Senate since 1869. Alf Landon, the Republican Presidential candidate who had been saddled with the support of the Liberty League, assessed these results and said the obvious — the League’s endorsement was the “kiss of death.”

With his enemies neutered, Roosevelt could afford to be lighthearted and dismissive about the League: “I regarded all these rich grumblers as absurd, bumbling malcontents and never attached the slightest credence to anything they said or did.” After 1936, that proved to be a common reaction. Membership and money dwindled.

The League limped on until 1940, but the men who had dabbled in insurrection had learned their lesson. They returned to doing what they did best — business. For a number of them, that meant providing resources and goods to — and cashing checks from — Nazi Germany.

 

After Smedley Butler’s reputation was shredded by the media coverage of the Congressional committee, he gave more speeches for smaller fees. He published his book, “War Is a Racket.” He broke with Roosevelt and, in 1936, voted for the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas. He sat in his yard for hours, staring into the distance. In 1940, he died of cancer. He was 59.

As Butler lay in his hospital bed, his wife had his ‘40 Oldsmobile — so new he’d never driven it — parked so he could see it from his window.

Smedley Butler left an estate of $2,000. For the men who would have made him all-powerful, that wasn’t even a rounding error.

THE PLOTTERS

GRAYSON MALLET-PREVOST MURPHY

 Murphy was a West Point graduate who served in the Philippines, headed the American Red Cross in Europe after World War I, and underwrote the formation of the American Legion for $125,000. On Wall Street, he started as a bond trader and went on to head his own company. He was close to the Morgan bank, helped raise money for Mussolini and received an “Order of the Crown of Italy” award for his efforts. A genial man who loved shooting grouse in Scotland, he was a board member of Anaconda Copper Mining Company, Guaranty Trust Company, New York Trust Company, Bethlehem Steel, Goodyear Tire and more.

 ROBERT STERLING CLARK

 A Yale graduate and one of the heirs to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, he had served under Butler in China. Then known as “the millionaire lieutenant,” he had become an aesthete (he added vanilla to his mayonnaise) and an art collector (he bought a masterpiece almost every day). In 1929, when his income was $3 million a year, he became convinced that he was paying 80% in taxes, and he began financing conservative causes. When Butler blew the whistle on the Business Plot, Clark was in Europe. He was called to testify before the Congressional Committee, but he declined to return. Sterling Clark is now remembered mostly as the creator of the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute at Williams College.

HOWARD PEW

A close friend of Robert Welch, a founder of the John Birch Society. Son of the co-founder of Sun Oil, he became its President. He opposed government’s role in the private lives of Americans — even in education: “If you believe in freedom for the individual, you must be opposed to any encroachment of government on the rights of the individual.”

THOMAS W. LAMONT, JR.

He began his career as a journalist, and, as a financier, helped to launch the Saturday Review of Literature. As acting head of J.P. Morgan in 1929, he tried to stabilize the economy with massive purchases of equities. The effort earned him the cover of Time magazine. In 1926, he called himself as “a missionary” for Italian Fascism and arranged a $100 million loan for Mussolini. Now he’s remembered as the donor of a library building at Harvard.

JOHN RASKOB

The former Chairman of the Democratic Party and vice-president for finance of both DuPont and General Motors. At GM, he created General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), which extended credit to GM customers. He favored a five-day workweek, arguing that Saturdays off would help Americans become consumers and buy the cars that Detroit was mass-producing. Two months before the Crash of 1929, when the average American was making $17 to $22 a week, he published “Everybody Ought to be Rich” in the Ladies Home Journal, suggesting that all Americans could become wealthy by investing $15 per month in the stock market. By then he had sold his GM stock and was preparing to start construction on the Empire State Building.

RENEE du PONT

President of DuPont from 1919 to 1925, he began the transformation of the company from the world’s largest manufacturer of explosives and gunpowder to a safe as milk (“Better living through chemistry”) consumer-products giant. Of all the corporate haters of FDR, he was the most extreme: “The Roosevelt Administration practices the socialistic maxim ‘work like hell so that the parasites may get the benefit of your labor.'” At the 1934 Senate Munitions Investigating Committee, which revealed how his company earned excessive profits during World War I, he testified that “the only way to wage a successful war is to have an absolute monarchy.”

GERALD MacGUIRE

The conspirators’ primary representative was a 37-year-old former commander of the Connecticut chapter of the American Legion who worked for Grayson M.-P. Murphy as a $100-a-week bond salesman. Early in 1934, when MacGuire’s meetings with Butler seemed to be going nowhere, Murphy sent him to Europe to learn about Fascist groups and report back about their methods, policies and successes. Later that year, as one of the key witnesses at the Congressional committee that was investigating the Business Plot, MacGuire repeatedly perjured himself.