Wall Street executives plotted a military coup against President Roosevelt in 1933

The Business Plot: When Wall Street Tried to Overthrow American Democracy

In the summer of 1933, as Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies threatened the fortunes of America's wealthiest industrialists, a group of Wall Street power brokers hatched a plan that sounds like fiction — but was confirmed by a congressional investigation.

The Plot

The conspirators — linked to JP Morgan, DuPont, Remington Arms, and other major corporations — approached Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in American history, with a proposal: lead a private army of 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist government modeled after Mussolini's Italy.

The Whistleblower

What the plotters didn't anticipate was that Butler was no puppet. Instead of joining the conspiracy, he reported everything to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (a precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee). In explosive testimony in November 1934, Butler named names and laid out the entire scheme.

The Cover-Up

Despite Butler's testimony and corroborating evidence, no one was ever prosecuted. The mainstream press largely dismissed the affair. Time magazine called it a "plot without plotters." The committee's final report confirmed that a plot had indeed existed but named no conspirators, and Congress took no action.

The Receipts

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee's own final report acknowledged: "There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution." Declassified records and Butler's sworn testimony remain in the congressional record. Historians have since confirmed the plot's authenticity, with Jules Archer's 1973 book and subsequent archival research providing extensive documentation.

The Business Plot remains one of the most dramatic examples of a proven conspiracy that was buried by the very institutions meant to investigate it. The people who called it crazy were proven wrong — by Congress itself.