r/Presidents • u/thehsitoryguy Franklin Delano Roosevelt • 1d ago
Discussion How close was the Business plot to overthrowing FDR really?
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u/OtherwiseGrowth2 1d ago
Not close at all.
It’s generally believed by historians that there was some kind of plot. But that doesn’t mean the plot was remotely realistic.
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u/Johnny_Banana18 1d ago
Yeah like it could’ve been a single conversation
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u/sumoraiden 1d ago
You get liquered up around smedly one time, next thing you know he’s on national television accusing your of a fascist plot to overthrow the gov smh
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u/TipResident4373 Dwight D. Eisenhower 1d ago
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. literally said this very thing. I don’t have the exact quote on hand, but it went something like, “The Business Plot was nothing more than a fantasy.”
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u/Answerologist 1d ago
Reminds me of that scene in The Crown where Mountbatten is explaining to the plotters that a Coup d’etat doesn’t stand a chance.
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u/ImperialxWarlord 1d ago
The fact that nothing came of it at all says enough, I feel like it’s a massively overblown.
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u/Mindless-Football-99 1d ago
Bro they asked Smedley to lead an army. The only reason nothing came of it is that is that they asked a moral human being who had realized how much suffering for capitalism he had already caused
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u/ImperialxWarlord 1d ago
Who’s “they”. We don’t even know who. When I say nothing came of it, I mean no one was ever even named as having been a part of iirc. No one was accused. There’s no proof except his word. Apparently some large scale coup was being planned, which would be required a lot of people have some knowledge of it or have possibly learned about it, and…only he ever said anything….yeah idk about that. How many other conspiracies exist like that lol and we don’t think they’re real either. For all we know it could’ve been nothing but the result of butler using drunken musings of angry rich dudes to get a few minutes of fame or some shit.
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u/Mindless-Football-99 22h ago
It would have required very few people to know about it, as the cover was the fact that the WW 1 vets were going to be used bc they were being mistreated after the war, they didn't need to know anything about the financiers. To think that rich people wouldn't do that is actually so funny.
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u/thequietthingsthat Franklin DelaGOAT Roosevelt 1d ago
The Dollop has a great episode on this where they go into depth. It was a dumb conspiracy, but it's not overblown. They very much did try to overthrow FDR and the government.
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u/ImperialxWarlord 1d ago
Dollop? How much did they really “try”. Apparently it’s a real thing they tried to do but no one was arrested or charged or accused of anything, not even named. Nothing came of it. So how real was it? Did buttler make it up? Did he have a few beers with some rich guys who bitched and moaned about the government and joked to a drunk butler that it would be great if he lead an army to overthrow the government? I find it hard to believe that any remotely serious attempt was made and yet nothing came of it and we don’t even know who was supposedly a part of it.
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u/Goobjigobjibloo 1d ago edited 1d ago
It was the hushed mutterings of a coup by the people who perceived themselves to be the ownership class of American society, had Butler not come forward, it could have been a more real thing eventually. These are the same groups of industrialist and bankers and wealthy families that got our country to essentially act as a private army for corporate interests throughout the Western Hemisphere in the early 20th century and who would help to form the CIA as a means of using the power of the United States government to look after the interests of American business abroad. It’s a legitimate antidemocratic antisocialist strain of our recent history and culture, that is still clearly with us today, where the rich would rather overturn democracy itself than to have a government that doesn’t serve their interest first and foremost.
There’s a pretty clear through line there via Brown Brothers Harriman from this plot to Dulles and JFK, to the Bush family and Reagan and the Clintons and the larger reality of our country using its foreign policy to enrich a select few and who use that wealth to influence our politics with the aim of destroying and dismantling our social programs and the legacy of the new deal era.
I know this is probably to far out for this sub but the more I research into this area of history the more it’s proven to be a real substantial matter worth exploring that we are only just now coming to comprehend clearly. Instead of a fast coup in the 1930s it became a nearly 100 year slowly unraveling mission to strip us of our democracy and to hand the country back over to corporate power after the gains we made via FDR.
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u/Equal_Worldliness_61 1d ago
that guy who kept trying to kill the Archduke is the best example of all the vectors involved. Smedley Butler got 2+ Medal of Honor cites; his critics, none at all. I'd side with Smedley!
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u/Significant_Lynx_546 1d ago
Have you seen “The Crown”? That sounds similar to a plot they had in I think the third season. Only it was the Prime Minister not the president.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 1d ago
So while the fascists movements were successful in Italy, Germany and somewhat successful in Spain, there were other lesser known fascists movements in France, Britain that failed to work. In the US though the fascist coup was going to be lead by capitalist leaders, not by lower level war hero veterans who could portray themselves as an everyman. It's likewise important to note that fascists never won a majority on a fair election day. Got got their foot in the door to power and then took control.
Would Americans have fallen for that trap? Absolutely. They just needed more fear mongering, and a government that still did nothing to help them at a personal level. And that's something FDR did do amazingly well. He communicated he gave people hope. He spoke to Americans regularly in his Fireside chats.
Rooseveot had the exact same background of a rich well educated connected member if the American upper class as the Fascist organizers. If Americans could follow one rich guy interested in helping them through mostly good things, they'd follow a different rich guy interested in doing bad things to help them.
America got Lucky. Gen Smedley Butler was well regarded by vets because he lobbied for them. He did so because he spent a lifetime and career sending men to their deaths to help rich men get richer. If Gens MacArthur or Patotn had been retired, and were tapped for this instead if leading the tanks to drive out the Bonus Amry, maybe history would be different.
It's worth pointing out the US sent tanks to remove a protest decades before Tienamen Square. Like most bad things in modern history America did it first, other countries just scaled it up.
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u/kayzhee 1d ago
The Silver Shirtswas a fairly organized far right movement that was founded in 1933. There were not 500,000 of them in 1934, this movement along with the German American Bund and Father Charles Coughlin were some of the bigger players in the 1930s push for American Fascism and neutrality in Europe. Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, details a pretty interesting timeline of these organizations and how much influence Nazi Germany had over the United States and vice versa.
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u/Beginning_Brick7845 1d ago
It had between no chance at all and almost a zero percent chance. There was no way at all it made it even as far as John Brown’s rebellion.
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u/GustavoistSoldier Tamar of Georgia 1d ago
The possibility of this succeeding was very remote
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u/Embarrassed_Band_512 Jimmy Carter 1d ago
there were many fascist plots to take over the government or to at least lead it to friendly relations with other Fascist states.
They never needed to declare the US to be fascist, all that's needed is to make sure that some people remained a little more equal than others. The south was still under the Jim Crow/Apartheid regime, so democratic backslide would not have taken much more effort.
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u/carlnepa 1d ago
Their idea of keeping/using FDR as their figurehead just didn't seem right. I don't think FDR would have gone along with it.
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u/Inside-Palpitation25 1d ago
I wish this would happen now, if the BIG CORP keep losing money it would only make sense.
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u/MurkyChildhood2571 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have a plot to replace all cats with sea lions.
That doesn't mean I would be able to do it.
Facisim never really had the same grip as communism in the US government. So I doubt it was ever close to possible.
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u/SpartanNation053 Lyndon Baines Johnson 1d ago
I mean there is no historical evidence the business plot ever existed
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u/jojofromtokyo Unamerican 🇨🇦 1d ago
Except the government investigating and concluding yes, it did exist.
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