S4 Ep44: That Time Democracy Almost Collapsed: The Forgotten History of Smedley Butler and the Plot to Overthrow FDR
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How far would you go to stand up for what's right? Would you risk your career, your reputation, your life?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I'm not a big pro-military kind of person. I know there are myriad reasons people join, but if the reasoning is the nebulous idea of patriotism, we're probably not going to be on the same page. To be clear, that doesn't mean I don't support the troops. I just prefer not to support the system the troops are... trooping for, if you know what I mean.

But I am really into redemption arcs. If someone joined the military thinking they would be upholding freedom, but then learned their role was actually to uphold an economic system that favored the rich, and then they did whatever they could to undo the damage they'd caused, well, I might just offer to buy that person a drink. ♪

Smedley Darlington Butler. Now there's a name for the history books. Except I didn't learn about him in school, and I'm gonna bet you didn't either. Because I'd have remembered a name like that. He was a real hero. A Marine Major General and a two-time Medal of Honor winner. And in the 1930s, he probably thwarted a White House coup that

that could have undermined democracy and replaced it with a fascist military for the good of the millionaires. I know what you're thinking. Daisy's trying to draw some wicked political point to score a small victory on the people now in charge. I am not. I am just going to explain how something really shocking happened in the early 1930s. Something that nobody told me about and something for which nobody got punished. Something that had treason and banana republic written all over it.

something that nearly undermined Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal before most of the public programs that saved us ever got underway. It is something that is debated to this day among historians, but I guess not trusted to the rest of us because nobody sees fit to put it in history books. So the rest of us can either A, hate on those robber barons, or B, esteem them for being ahead of their time, or C, decide history is a lot more interesting than our high school curriculum makes it.

Smedley, I think we're on a first name basis because I think I would have liked Smed and he would have called me Days and we would have laughed. But I digress there. Sorry. Smed started out a common soldier, which might be an oxymoron, but I don't know.

Still, Smed was by all accounts a regular Joe who fought his way through some serious heat and mosquitoes and tropical rain foresty humidity in the Philippines and in a lot of Latin America at the dawn of the new American century before he took a good hard look at what he'd done and decided maybe he wasn't the good guy he thought he was.

This was long before he went to Congress and told them that America's biggest-named millionaires were so unhappy with FDR that they were going to try to oust his ass. By force. And how did Smedley know this? Because he was the guy they'd chosen to lead the coup. And they wanted Smed to get soldiers to do the couping. Smedley was not on board. Smedley. Good guy. Extraordinaire.

So what's the big historical debate about, you ask? Some of those who've read the record say they aren't so sure that Smed wasn't exaggerating a little. Or maybe he just overestimated the danger we were all in, if we were in danger at all. The other side of the debate thinks we dodged a bullet from which this country could not have recovered. In any case, here's what happened back then when the ground beneath our feet shook, but history didn't notice.

At the time of Smed's death, he was the most decorated Marine in U.S. military history, which is saying something, especially if you know that he was born a Quaker, a religion that has opposed war since its inception in 1660. They're known for their protests against it, their conscientious objection to serving, and to extending relief in countries rebuilding after war.

Admittedly, the butler branch of Quakers that Smed came from veered a bit from that doctrine. As both his grandfathers had served in the Union Army, and as a boy, Smed thought there was nothing better to do than line up his toy soldiers and have them batter one another senseless. His poor mother Maude, bless her heart, did all she could to tamp down his vigor by taking him to Quaker meetings at least twice a week and sending him to a Quaker school.

Smed's dad wasn't upset, though, when 12-year-old Smed joined a boys' club that was some kind of pre-military training ground where young men learned discipline, adherence to authority, how to march, and how to handle armaments. Plus, they got to wear spiffy uniforms with shiny buttons and stuff.

He was 16 when, in 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, killing 266 of its 354 crew members and prompting the U.S. to blockade the harbor and declare war on Spain, all to free Cuba, which was something Smed found noble and, even at his young age, too thrilling for words. He wanted to strap on a gun and help those nice folks down south.

His parents relented and off he went to be a full-fledged Marine, a boy who passed the lieutenant's exam with flying colors and was on the ground at Guantanamo before he was 17. ♪

His new best friend there was another young officer named John A. Lejeune. You might recognize that name as being the same as the Marine Corps base camp in North Carolina, an amphibious assault training facility named for him after he'd served as the commandant of the Marine Corps throughout the 1920s. Smed was networking on a pretty impressive scale before he could legally drink.

From Cuba, he was sent to the Philippines, where the locals were rebelling against the now-occupying Americans. Smed found out that he was not only brave, but crafty and dogged, leading numerous skirmishes that marked him as quality leadership stock and metal-worthy in the bargain.

From there, he was sent to China to fight for the U.S. in the Boxer Rebellion, which I don't remember from history class either, but Google tells me was an anti-foreign, anti-imperialist, anti-Christian uprising that ultimately took 100,000 lives.

And that's all I'm going to tell you, because it gets really complicated and we don't have time for me to take on why the boxers or the Chinese martial arts dudes who rebelled believed they were impervious to Western guns and grenades. Spoiler alert, they weren't, and the rest of Chinese history got rearranged. Just know that Smed again made himself immensely useful to the American cause, such as it was.

He was even such a nice guy that once, on his way to Peking, he saved a Chinese family who had jumped into a canal to kill themselves when they saw his battalion approach. He explained that nobody was going to kill them. They decided he'd saved them and he was now their guardian for life. He declined their invitation and kept moving.

That little rebellion was put down and he went home with typhoid fever, only to recoup enough to be sent to lead troops to Panama, then Nicaragua, then Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and back to Panama. He dug ditches, captured and recaptured trains, fought in mud again amidst all those mosquitoes, and generally put himself in front when his troops attacked and showed his loyalty repeatedly to whatever it was this country asked of him.

He then shuttled off to Granada, where he was temporarily made governor until elections could be held. His first act was to release all military prisoners and make sure all the property and cash taken from the beleaguered citizenry was returned to them. For that, he was hailed as a liberator.

Truth was, in each of those Latin countries, Smed did as he was told, and beautifully. He was sick a lot of the time with tropical fever, but that didn't stop our fearless young buck from hoisting the American flag and saluting the Marines he loved so much. Then President Howard Taft ordered an election in Nicaragua that even Smed knew was rigged.

His job was to make sure it happened without disruption. He did the job, only to be sent to Mexico to covertly spy on that country's military operations while Woodrow Wilson was president. Then Smed was sent back into Mexico armed with their military intelligence he'd previously smuggled out to fight them on the ground in Veracruz.

That went so well, Smed earned a Medal of Honor, which he refused to accept because, he said, quote, end quote. My guy, the scream that you would hear me emit if I saw a cockroach would quickly dispel you of this notion. You were more courageous than most. Anyway...

Smed was recognized as the trooper he apparently was. He was now sent to Haiti and did again what he did, march into battle, wrangle the locals into submission, and wave the stars and stripes. ♪

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Text STRANGE to 64000. That's STRANGE to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. By 1916, he was made a lieutenant colonel and two years later got sent to a real war, the one then being waged in Europe, the Great War, or as it was called after 1945, the First World War.

The men he led loved him. One remarked to a government visitor, quote, I'd cross hell on a slat if Butler gave the order, end quote.

But Smed was getting a little ticked off that the men he led were dying for something he wasn't exactly clear on. According to Jules Archer, author of The Plot to Seize the White House, the valiant Smed was frequently on the verge of being court-martialed for his belligerence toward commanding officers. Archer writes that Smed would later remark, "...gradually it began to dawn on me to wonder what on earth these American boys were doing getting wounded and killed and buried in France."

I mean, that's why the Quakers are non-violent. Maybe you should have listened to them. That got him to rethinking what he'd done in years past. And he was slowly growing pissed. Later, when he wrote War is a Racket in 1935, he had crystallized his thinking at the time. Quote, "'War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.'

Oh, Smed, you had me at racket. By then he'd seen what he'd done and what it cost him and those he'd urged forward to their imminent destruction.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's 1920 now, and veterans had returned home to find the services offered them woefully lacking. A few took to writing their old commander to ask for his intercession with hospitals and the government as to their care. He weighed in on individual cases, and he started to get attention.

Veterans groups found their way to his door. He only joined the American Legion because old pal John Lejeune, freshly put in charge of the Marine Corps, asked him to.

He personally thought it was too political an organization and too influenced by big business types who saw the veterans as something they could exploit. Smed was getting to be quite the radical now. Politics kept rearing its ugly head. In 1923, Smed was asked to become the top cop in Philadelphia, his home state, by the governor. Seems the city was being torn apart by Prohibition's ugliness.

It was home to more than 8,000 places where you could buy illicit booze. With crime lords and cahoots with police, it was a town full of speakeasies, sex workers, gunplay, gambling, and robberies. Smed said no at first, then agreed. First week on the job, he shut down almost 1,000 spots where Philadelphians went to drink and gamble. He was employing tactics others would later call a militarization of the police.

But Smed simultaneously made the businessmen in town mad by succeeding a little too well, and he left that job mad again that nothing was as he thought it was. I don't know exactly what the details there were, but it sounds like the fat cats of the town were like, yeah, we want you to bust people buying booze, but not, like, you know, us. We should still be allowed to do whatever we want.

When he was sent to China again, this time to rein in Chinese warlords, it dawned on Smed that he wondered if it was right for the U.S. to interfere in internal Chinese domestic issues, like he, we, had in Latin America. But the Chinese loved him for his efforts, even awarded him the Yangtze Medal. The Navy followed with its own accolades for his peacemaking achievements. And then the stock market crashed in October 1929.

Two months later, there was talk of the Senate investigating the use of Marines to intervene in Latin American internal affairs. And Smed, my new homeboy, started talking. ♪

In December 1929, good Americans in the know were making noise, demanding Congress investigate how U.S. Marines had been deployed to intervene in the internal workings of Latin American countries. Smed was ecstatic. He must have figured that gave him license to speak out on the matter himself, which, of course, he did, telling a Pittsburgh crowd that the State Department had rigged the Nicaraguan elections. And he knew because he was there.

President Hoover's people lost their collective shit. Memos were furiously sent between cabinet secretaries, and the Navy secretary ended up getting the short straw, the one chosen to reprimand Smed and tell him, you know, to shut the hell up. Smed basically told the Navy's top man to have a nice day. Smed Butler was now considered by the folks in Washington as a big loudmouth whose loose talk about rigged elections in Nicaragua were spurious.

In line to be the next commandant of the Marine Corps, Smed found his chances being blocked by the powerful who didn't like his honesty. He decided to hell with that and settled into a new life. As Archer wrote, quote, to devote himself to advancing the defense of the United States as he believed it ought to be defended, end quote.

As such, he warned about the dictators on the rise in Europe. To a private audience in Philadelphia, he spoke about Benito Mussolini retelling a story he'd been told by a friend about the Italian general in charge of that country.

He explained that the friend had been in an armored car with Mussolini and they were driving very fast. That the car ran over a child. The friend had screamed in protest as the car continued down the road. And that Mussolini said the child represented only one life and the affairs of state could not be stopped for something so insignificant. Smed's remarks went public.

President Hoover and his entire cabinet, including the Secretary of State, were not happy. Repeating the loose talk of other world leaders was conduct unbecoming an officer, they said. Those in charge quickly apologized to Mussolini and arrested Smed and got ready to court-martial him. Veterans were very unhappy that one of the most fearless of their leaders was being gored.

The Washington Daily News editorialized, quote, End quote. It got ugly and public before a settlement of sorts was reached, and Smed wrote a little sorry-what-I-said-embarrassed-you note to Mussolini, and the court-martial was canceled.

Smed would only stipulate that he was sorry he'd caused embarrassment to his government. He was restored to his previous post and remained officially in good standing. Journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt IV admitted he'd been the source of Smed's story. He added to the true story by saying that Mussolini had remarked to him after the fatal incident, "'Never look back, Mr. Vanderbilt. Always look ahead.'"

I don't know if this was an addendum to the quote Smed had attributed to Mussolini about one life not being important enough to impede matters of the state, or if it was a correction to it. Either way, it's still a pretty fucking shitty thing to say after you've mowed down a little kid. I'm just going to go ahead and say it for the record. Mussolini was a jerk. By 1931, Smed was finally done with the military, but knew he needed some source of income.

He was due a Great War bonus because of the passage in 1924 of the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, a piece of legislation that gave each qualified veteran of that war a certain payment plus compounded interest. But the money wasn't to be paid until 1945. God only knows what the holdup was. Veterans out of work and desperate to feed their families in the midst of the Depression wanted that money now.

Feeling that the government had failed veterans, and frankly him, he took to making speeches demanding half of the receipts and a small per diem payment.

Among the first speeches he gave was a fiery bit of anti-war rhetoric at an American Legion convention in Connecticut in August 1931, before he was even officially retired from the military. He said, quote, I 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, end quote. Talk dirty to me, Smedd.

He went on saying he helped purify Nicaragua for the Brown Brothers, a Wall Street investment firm. He'd made Mexico safe for American oil interests. He'd cleared the way in the Dominican Republic for Big Sugar. He made Cuba welcoming to National City Bank.

He said he could give Al Capone some tips. Capone had only run three cities. The U.S. Marines, he raged, had run three continents. Hell, he'd spent his best years making the world safer for the moneyed, helping to put into power dictators like the Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua's Antonio Somoza.

He then retired from the Marines at age 50. At his goodbye event, he gave out maps to his house so that any Marine who ever needed him for anything could call on him at any time. ♪

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Veterans loved him now more than ever, as he went on to publicly promise in 1932 that he'd stash his medals and uniform in a vault, never to see the light of day, until America's warriors in wars past saw their bonus. In mid-July 1932, 17,000 destitute veterans and their families set up camp, literally, in D.C., to demand their promised bonus.

They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. The media called them the Bonus Army. As the days passed that hot July, the crowd grew to be 43,000 strong. Smedley Butler was asked to speak to them by the VFW. He did so, reminding them to stand strong, but not resort to violence, as that would make the nation far less inclined to stand with them on the issue.

On July 28th, President Hoover had had enough. He sent U.S. Army troops led by General Douglas MacArthur to physically remove them. They left and crossed the Anacostia River. This is where Hoover ordered MacArthur to end the assault. ♪

MacArthur was not always great at taking orders. He was supposed to stop when he got to the river, but he pursued those fleeing using tear gas, tanks, bayonets and fire, burning the encampment shelter to cinder. At least one vet was killed, though some accounts put that tally at two. 55 were injured and 135 were arrested before it was over.

And just in case you've lost the plot here, the government was attacking their own soldiers who were demanding to be paid for their service to their country. Got it? Okay. The media reaction was mixed. Some hailed Hoover's actions, others found it repugnant and unprecedented.

Smed, a lifelong Republican, began campaigning for FDR, or more precisely against Herbert Hoover, saying, quote, Nobody has any business occupying the White House who doesn't love his own people. End quote. FDR, of course, won.

A little more than two weeks before Roosevelt was to be inaugurated for the first time, Giuseppe Zingara, a teeny tiny five foot tall Italian immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen, stood on a bench about 25 feet from the president-elect during a brief stop in Miami. He fired five shots in FDR's direction.

Zangara was unsuccessful because a woman named Lillian Cross, who was standing on the bench beside him, managed to grab and twist his shooting arm so that he misfired. The shots killed the mayor of Chicago and injured four bystanders. It was determined that Zangara was likely mentally ill. Smed believed he was just a pawn in the plot thought up by big business to stop Roosevelt and whatever it was that he was about to do to start regulating them.

Smedley Butler was a man with an impressive past, a wide range of admirers, and a track record that was solidly pro-veteran. He was not at all surprised when, in July 1933, an American Legion official he'd met called him to say that two guys were coming over to chat. Cool.

William Doyle and Gerald McGuire arrived to ask Smed if he'd show up at the Legion's Chicago convention to lead the ouster of the current leadership who weren't listening to what veterans wanted. They looked a tad slick for Smed. They had come in a chauffeur-driven Packard and wore silk suits. McGuire had identified himself as a bond salesman. Doyle was a commander of the Massachusetts branch of the American Legion, even had a purple heart to show Smed.

Smed declined their offer. They then said he could come as a delegate to voice his opposition from the floor, not as a special speaker. He could, you know, be a delegate. From Hawaii. Huh? Hawaii? He was not from Hawaii.

Smed declined that weird idea, only to have the twosome appear a month later with a new plan. They told Smed he could come to the convention on a special train with a few hundred Legionnaires on board to insist he be given the floor. Smed, wondering what the fuck these guys were doing, asked what he was supposed to say to the Legionnaires. They left him with a script and told him to round up a few of his own Legionnaire buddies to come along.

None of Smed's buddies could afford the trip. No problem, the businessmen said. They'd pay all their expenses. Smed asked if this was on the level. The two men showed him a bank book with about $86,000 in recent deposits, or about $2 million in today money. Smed thought fast.

I'll play along, he figured, see where this goes. Because he knew of only a handful of Americans who had that kind of money. And they were the ones who had sent him to fight not for freedom, but for capitalism as it served them. Had these guys not been paying attention to Smed's latest take on war? They left him to think about their offer. They also left the speech they wanted him to deliver. It was a rousing call to go back to the gold standard. ♪

Now, strangers, I had to do some digging here to figure out why this upset Smed's apple cart. And you know me, I'm no history professor, so I'll try to make this really simple. The gold standard linked the value of our currency to gold. In 1933, FDR suspended that so he could respond to the crisis at hand. That is, the struggling economy post-Great Depression.

He thought people were hoarding gold and that this would slow down the recovery efforts. So he suspended the gold standard. Bankers didn't like this because they'd extended credit on the gold standard but could be paid back in cash that they decided was worth far less. So Smed figured out that the plan was to use veterans to pressure FDR into changing it back. Smed, ever the info gatherer, said, "'I'm not doing this until I know who's backing this plan.'"

McGuire, pushed to the limit by Smed, finally named one of the guys who had sent him. That would be Grayson M.P. Murphy, New York brokerage firm head and friend to J.P. Morgan, and a guy on the board of Bethlehem Steel, Anaconda Cooper, and Goodyear Tire. He'd also been decorated by Mussolini for some shit. The first great unspooling of what was going on dawned on Smed as he researched deeper and deeper into post-World War I Legion work.

This guy, Grayson Murphy, had been one of 20 American officials who, according to Jules Archer's definitive book on the plot, quote, had met in Paris in February 1919, reportedly on order from the commanders of the American Expeditionary Forces to counter revolutionary unrest in Europe, forming a veterans organization with the alleged purpose of looking after veterans' welfare, end quote.

They had instead interpreted that to mean that veterans could be used to combat anything they thought smelled of socialism. This meant that legionnaires were regularly used to break strikes that working men and women had endorsed to create better pay, better working conditions, and better benefits. The easy-peasy argument went like this. Tell the legionnaires that the strikers were communists. In turn, they'd bring baseball bats to convince the working man on strike to give up.

It worked. Repeatedly. Archer quotes the American Civil Liberties Union, quote, of the forces most actively attacking civil rights, the American Legion led the field. End quote.

Meanwhile, back at Smed's house, throughout the late summer and early fall of 1933, McGuire pushed the general to give the speech to the Legionnaires. An angry Smed told him it was a big business speech that had nothing to do with the vets. No, McGuire insisted, it was an insistence that veterans not be paid their bonus in less than gold standard cash. Smed wanted to talk to one of the bigger fish.

And then Robert Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune and noted art collector, showed up when McGuire could not attend another get-together. An impatient Clark decided to put his cards on the table. He was, himself, worth $30 million. He said he was worried about FDR and he was willing to spend half his fortune to save the other half.

Smed, after recovering from the shock, said he would not allow America's veterans to undermine democracy. Their job was to defend it, he railed. Clark called McGuire to report what Smed had said. Smed figured he'd heard the last of those jerks. Smed went on the offensive, calling out those who had profited by war, naming, among others, Bethlehem Steel for making 10 times its usual profit during the war years. ♪

His speeches angered the American Legion brass, but delighted its members who agreed with him. He was also busy hammering Congress about the bonus the vets were due. His argument? If you can give $20 million to save banks, you can give $20 million to save those who fought so you could have a bank.

Then, in 1934, Gerald Maguire got back in touch with Smedley Butler. He boldly told Smed that he liked what was happening in France. There, an organization called the Croix de Feu had rioted and forced the head of the French government to resign in favor of someone more, let's just say, conservative. He then asked Smed, according to Archer, quote, to agree to lead a fascist coup to capture the White House. ♪

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Dive into delicious with all your fish fry favorites at Culver's. From Wisconsin with love, welcome to delicious. The plan, as laid out by McGuire, was that half a million veterans, led by their beloved General Butler, would march on Washington. America's richest men and the corporations they ran were in full agreement on this, he said. Think the DuPonts and the Morgans.

According to Jonathan Katz, author of Gangsters of Capitalism, Smedley Butler, The Marines and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire, Smed's little band of brothers would, quote,

who would take on the executive powers of government. If Roosevelt went along, he would be allowed to remain as a figurehead, like the King of Italy. Otherwise, he would be forced to resign, placing the new supersecretary in the White House. End quote.

Smed decided it was time to call a halt to this shit. Because, as Katz put it, quote, Remember the rigged elections in Nicaragua? Smedley sure did.

On November 20th, 1934, this headline ran in the New York Post. Quote, General Butler accuses New York brokers of plotting dictatorship in U.S. $3 million bid for fascist army bared. Says he was asked to lead 500,000 for capital putsch, U.S. probing charge, end quote. Yes, sir, Smed had gone to the feds.

In front of a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities, Smed unpacked all that he'd been hearing for the past few years from McGuire, Clark, et al. Now don't be confused. This is not the same House Un-American Activities bunch that tried to make everyone who leaned left into a communist in the 1950s. This was an earlier pre-mutation that was less, uh, ridiculous.

Meeting in New York, Smed gave Senator John McCormick of Massachusetts and Senator Samuel Dickstein of New York the big picture about the coup. He also said that he'd been told in July that a powerful cabal would be announced in August as, quote, a society to maintain the Constitution, end quote.

And sure enough, he said the New York Times had heralded the creation of the nonpartisan Liberty League on August 23rd, 1934. Its purpose was, the story said, to combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the Constitution. Or, as Smed and others believed, the Liberty League was formed to oppose the New Deal and preserve the fortunes of the fortunate by staging a coup.

The fortunate, in this case, were the Liberty League's members, executives of Phillips Petroleum, Sun Oil, General Foods, our friend Grayson Murphy, former Democratic candidates Al Smith and John Davis, and advertising behemoths McCann Erickson.

Both Smed and a journalistic buddy named Paul Comley French, who had written the original New York Post article, had done all they could to flesh out the details. They would leave the rest of the fleshing out to the almighty subpoena power of the U.S. government. The November 20, 1934 outing of what became known as the business plot elicited denials all around. Grayson Murphy called it fantasy.

Testimony was taken. Smed and French went first, followed by Maguire, who gave a lot of I-cannot-recall responses to the two senators' questions. Robert Clark, who was conveniently in France, sent his lawyer to answer for something he professed to have no knowledge of. General MacArthur, who had been a second choice to lead the coup, said he had a bad cold and couldn't meet with the committee or anyone else for that matter.

The country either loved or loathed Butler now, depending on your bank account. The two versions of what happened, in sharp contrast to one another, meant that someone was lying. If Smed was lying, what a tragic denouement for such a patriotic and brave man's career. If it was Maguire who was lying, America had been saved by one man who thought democracy was worth the trouble. But that was about as far as it went.

How come no one else was called to testify, to drill down on this thing and find out who was the big fat liar? Good fucking question. On November 26, 1934, McCormick and Dickstein issued a statement that more or less said they could not compel testimony from those who had been implicated by hearsay, but that they had verified all of what Smed had said. The New York Times publicly took the side of the powerful. Time magazine, too.

The Roosevelt administration made it clear to the public it wanted this thing figured out. And then everybody dropped it like a hot potato. As Katz noted, quote, End quote. It named No Names.

Did FDR need those big names and their big money to keep America afloat and decide, fuck it, it's over, let it go? Did Smed misinterpret what he'd been told? Did McGuire know he was fronting an attempted coup? Hard to say.

Okay, but were there fans of fascism out there in big business? I can answer that one. You bet your ass there were. J.P. Morgan was Mussolini's banker. Texaco's torqued reber gave Hitler American oil. We already sussed out Henry Ford's less-than-Sterling character, but that February 15, 1935 report didn't go there.

But it did go here. It said no European country was implicated, but, quote, there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient, end quote. It was determined before the record's release that some of the testimony had been deleted from the official version. Smed called them out on that.

He told a radio audience in Philadelphia that, quote, like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape, end quote. Smed kept up his push to get that bonus money to those who had served in the Great War. In June 1936, Congress passed the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act, which authorized immediate payment of the bonuses.

The Bonus Army incident, while unsuccessful, went far in furthering the GI Bill of Rights passed in 1944. That bill provided job training, low-cost home loans, and grants to those who served in World War II. Smed would later be vindicated in reference to his claims of going to war in Latin America in order to bolster American capitalism when hearings on the matter were held in 1971.

When former Senator McCormick was asked by Archer in 1971 why the U.S. Attorney General did not pursue the whole matter of the coup, he replied, quote, What would the public gain from delving deeper into a plot which was already exposed and whose principles could be kept under surveillance? Roosevelt had enough headaches in those troubled days without having to make a face-to-face confrontation with men of great wealth and power, end quote.

So the worst of America was forced to yield to the best of America as FDR established programs to aid the unemployed and installed oversights on banks and financial institutions and on communication and labor. Over the course of his presidency, he established the Social Security system, promoted conservation, bolstered farm subsidies, and expanded America's national parks and stopped motherfucking Hitler.

Thanks, Smed. We sure could use someone like you now. Next time on Strange and Unexplained. You've heard of Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Abominable Snowman. But unless you're from Australia, you've likely never heard of the beast of many names, the Yowie.

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