The Business Plot: The Time American Tycoons Tried to Overthrow FDR (1933-1934)

STRIFE! History's Conflicts Podcast: The year is 1933, and the Great Depression has brought the United States to its knees. In this atmosphere of profound desperation, a cabal of wealthy industrialists and Wall Street tycoons, fearing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, conceives an unthinkable solution: a coup d'état. Their plan is to overthrow the president and install a fascist dictatorship with a beloved war hero, Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, as its figurehead. Butler, however, stunningly agrees to play along only to expose the conspiracy, testifying before Congress about the plot. The public revelation should have caused a seismic political earthquake, yet the affair was swiftly dismissed as a fantasy and faded from history. This near-forgotten event, known as the Business Plot, reveals a moment when American democracy hung in the balance. It forces us to confront the fragility of republican institutions when threatened by concentrated wealth and ideological extremism. The story is a gripping tale of one man's moral courage and a chilling lesson in how power protects itself from scandal.