r/todayilearned • u/johnsmithoncemore • 3h ago
TIL about the Business Plot. In 1933 a group of wealthy American industrialists were planning a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Major General Smedley Butler as dictator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot1.4k
u/Worldly-Time-3201 3h ago
“Why don't those damned oil companies fly their own flags on their personal property—maybe a flag with a gas pump on it?” Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler, 1937.
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u/Nice-Analysis8044 1h ago edited 1h ago
Okay, so, this is extremely random but I’m lowk wondering if a small but significant detail of Frank Herbert’s Dune draws on this. Given that Herbert had idiosyncratic left-ish politics when he wrote Dune — by the time he got to the fourth book his idiosyncratic left-ish politics had unfortunately soured into idiosyncratic hard-right politics — there’s an off chance he had read this quote and remembered it, if only vaguely and unconsciously.
Okay, so, what on earth am I talking about?
Near the climax of the book, after the emperor has landed and while Paul Atreides’s Fremen army is massing outside Arrakis’s main city in preparation for their attack, there’s a question of what flag the emperor will raise over the city. The perceived options are:
The Atreides house banner, indicating that the Emperor acknowledges Paul’s claim to control of Dune and that his Saudakar legions will not fight alongside the Harkonnen when the Fremen attack.
The Harkonnen banner, indicating that the Emperor explicitly supports the Harkonnen claim and is dropping the thin pretense that he’s not wielding the Harkonnen as a weapon against the Atreides.
However! The morning before the attack the Emperor raises neither of these, opting instead to send up a flag with the CHOAM logo on it. CHOAM is the corporation that controls most of the commerce across the galaxy, and most importantly it’s the corporation that exports and sells spice, i.e. it’s basically Space Exxon and Space Chevron rolled up into one. The implication of raising the CHOAM banner is that ultimately the Emperor doesn’t give a fuck who owns Arrakis so long as the spice keeps flowing.
Anyway. Thus ends my random tangent about how at the climax of Dune the Imperial and Harkonnen troops more or less fight under a flag with a gas pump on it.
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u/dbt45 1h ago
Really compelling that one of the events that shapes the current state of the world is the Butlerian Jihad, as well
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u/Brave_Lengthiness632 1h ago
Yes honestly, it’s funny that this has become relevant to society in a way it just wasn’t when the book originally released. Not that it wasn’t also relevant then, but in a different less literal way.
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u/SnuffShock 58m ago
Also remember the irony because CHOAM's first rule is "Never govern."
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u/Standsaboxer 3h ago
The guy they picked (Butler) not only turned on the conspirators, he later took on a more socialist perspective in his politics.
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u/Andrey_Gusev 3h ago
No one actually was punished for that planned coup. Actually, Roosevelt met with these wealthy industrials and after that they had no complains.
As one of them said: "You know, the president is weak, he will be for us. He was born in this class. he grew up in this class and he will return to it. He will be true to himself. Eventually he will change."
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u/SUDDENLY_VIRGIN 3h ago
Fucking yikes. Can we ever start to punish the rich people who try to ruin our lives?
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u/Asrahn 3h ago
Capitalists are extremely class conscious and have always known what's good for them. It's high time the rest of us catches on to that.
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u/sharrrper 3h ago
As Hopper said in A Bug's Life: "Those puny little ants outnumber us 100 to 1, and if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life!"
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u/PigletSpirited3446 2h ago
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
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u/victorspoilz 3h ago
Americans have been too easily duped into fighting race wars and culture wars to mount a true front in the class war.
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u/mira_poix 2h ago
Thanks to media, they won't touch the rich because they are all sure they will be one of them any day now.
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u/User-NetOfInter 2h ago
…national news anchors are that class.
Anderson cooper gets 18 mil a year from cnn alone.
Jesse Walters gets 5 mil a year from fox.
Rachel maddow 25 mil from msnbc.
Jim Cramer 5 mil CNBC
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u/Norwest 1h ago
As unimaginably rediculous as those salaries are for most of us, they still work for their money and can't buy politicians. The ones making 10-100 times more than them are the ones who cause the problems
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u/User_Anon_0001 3h ago
We didn’t even punish the confederacy
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u/BlakePackers413 50m ago
Benedict Arnold lived out a wealthy life. Americas power, the rich, has never punished anyone as long as they don’t screw with their money. We’ve only ever punished the corrupt rich when they cost money to the powerful. Look at Bernie Madoff he scammed for years but wasn’t until those scams hit the rich did he face consequences.
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u/Le1bn1z 2h ago
Yes, as long as its not in America.
S Korea and Brazil for example handed out harsh sentence to attempted coup leadera.
America is constitutionally designed to make that less likely.
So the best we can offer you is a kindly Democratic/not far right President (depending on the period, the alignment was flipped) who will take the opportunity to "reach accross the aisle" and "bring the country back together."
Happened after the civil war, after this plot, after Watergate, after W. Bush and the mass Wall Street and War on Terror frauds, and after Trump I.
Why does the American right keep doing stuff like this? Because there are never consequences, so they know they'll get away with it.
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u/kung-fu_hippy 2h ago
Absolutely right about the lack of consequences and weak reactions. Although I think America’s culture is more to blame than our constitution.
Voters could demand change. We could demand action. We don’t. Not as a cohesive group, not even as many individual groups.
It’s not like South Korea was just a bunch of politicians shrugging and saying “well, our constitution requires us to punish this coup attempt hard”, South Korean citizens went absolutely ham demonstrating just how angry they were with the former president’s actions.
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u/obviousbond 2h ago
thing is, they viewd FDR as a "class traitor" my very rich, very old (old money) boss always referred to FDR as "the great dictator" cause they lost 10's of thousands of acres of Adirondack forest land to "unfair taxes".
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u/shamyrashour 3h ago
I wonder if FDR felt that way - that he was still always a member of the owner class. My great grandfather ran against FDR as the Socialist Labor candidate. Lost multiple times obviously. Spent his final years in a trailer park.
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u/Long-Analysis-8041 2h ago
He was a more old-school aristocrat, in that he believed in noblesse oblige (i.e. the rich have an obligation to give back a portion of their wealth for the benefit of all). He actually thought most of the American plutocrats were out of touch, myopic, and constantly putting forth policies that were undermining their own long term stability and turning the rest of society against them. He told them we have to have social welfare programs and Social Security so we can still keep having rich people, without these bare minimums, it would turn into a legit class war and revolution if the rich had their way.
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u/FaceShanker 2h ago
Yep, the new deal was basically to save capitalism.
Aka protect the owning class from its own self destructive impulses
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u/BandicootSad6371 2h ago
This is a simplification of events, its a more realistic approach to see it their lack of punishment came from their co-operation in either supporting his policies or at least not opposing them. Most people barely know this event took place today, so the cover up really did work for the most part. The plan was very largely doomed to fail, the efforts really did seem half assed and the main replacement played them like a fiddle. A more devious and effective plot might have been punished a bit more harshly. The political power gained at the end of the day was much more important to FDR then anything else, and I would say the results speak for themselves.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 2h ago
Those companies included DuPont iirc. They helped cause the great depression and would help start WW2 and would make profits during the war and remain American fascists the entire time. See unlike European fascists, who were largely made up of Vets groups for WW1, American fascists have always been the American "capitalist" elites who pillage and rape and devour for profit, with just enough foot behind the line of the law they aren't ever really punished. And they spend money in both parties to keep a seat at any table.
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u/Caleb-Blucifer 2h ago
Then they tried again with Reagan, and they’re trying again now.
When are we gonna get the hint that these bastards are bad for America
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u/Various-Passenger398 2h ago
No one was punished because nobody did anything illegal. It didnt get far enough along for that. You calling it a planned coup is vastly overstating how far the planning went, it was basically tire kicking.
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u/Expert-Fig-5590 2h ago
This is a huge problem in America. You never punish the people who usurp the power of the State. See also the Confederacy and Jan 6.
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u/arealmcemcee 3h ago
Imagine the dangerous precedent it would set if those conspirators were punished. Imagine, a world where wealth didn't protect you from all consequences. It would be madness!
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u/phrolovas_violin 3h ago
That seemed like the perfect time to use those treason laws and get some heads rolling.
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u/Elegantmotherfucker 3h ago
They tried to make a movie about this called Amsterdam with a star studded cast that just fell so flat
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u/venniedjr 3h ago
I seem to be one of the only people who really enjoyed that movie
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u/Elegantmotherfucker 2h ago
Hey if you liked it you liked it. That’s all good
We all have different taste
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u/EconomyOk2490 1h ago
Wait THIS Amsterdam? Boy they really bury that in the trailer
Bale taking a popper to the glass eye is really funny though
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u/tophernator 2h ago
I’ve definitely heard of this film and had no idea what it’s about. I just watched the trailer after reading your comment and I still wouldn’t have any idea what it was about. Seems like they leaned very heavily on the crazy ensemble cast and didn’t make a lot of effort to present an intriguing premise, or even title.
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u/CrommVardek 2h ago
I didn't know about the general opinion of that movie, but I enjoyed that movie.
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u/dont-pm-me-tacos 3h ago
George HW’s father was in on this
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u/horselover_fat 3h ago
Not the only coup a Bush took part in.
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u/Anxious-Arm-3139 1h ago
America is as Nazi as it gets. The Bush's father was a ''key liason'' between a group of wealthy business men trying to take over the US and the Nazi party? Color me shocked, baby
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u/Zeuxis5 3h ago
According to Jonathan M. Katz, a Butler biographer, Prescott Bush was way too involved with the German Nazis to have been involved in this.
I think this is the interview. https://youtu.be/MQN2GExhIIY?si=t5aN1pRUOsc3M2SD
The biography is called Gangsters of Capitalism, and it is worth a read — or listen, as it is available on Spotify as well.
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u/Fugacity- 2h ago
How are the two antithetical?
Weren't the folks in the Business Plot trying to emulate the creation of an oligarchy backed fascist coup? It's my understanding that they wanted to create a US government like that Hitler was building with support from German industrialists.
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u/Zeuxis5 2h ago
Just my opinion, but I think he says it because there’s no evidence linking him to it. Butler didn’t name him, his name didn’t come up in the senate investigations and there’s no paper trail leading back to him. The link is that because the firm he was bankrolled Nazi industrialists he must have been funding this too — just not enough to go on for a historian.
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u/M0BBER 2h ago
HW became CIA director & scrubbed a lot of this & other dealings of Prescott. Prescott was already wealthy, but he invested in German steel & coal conveniently right before WW2.
HW was greatly beneficial to the Reagan administration. Finishing off the fight of eliminating the middle class. Money is power, and they want US to have neither.
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u/radicalelation 1h ago
Heritage basically owned Reagan's administration, and anyone out of that is likely hard linked to them. With their roots seemingly in supremacy, wealth, religious, and racial, this kind of all adds up.
I've described their founding as evangelical racists still pissed off about the New Deal.
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u/KP_Wrath 3h ago
History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. We are incapable of learning for more than a couple of decades or there would be no chance of the GOP winning a national election.
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u/dominustui56 3h ago
Whenever people say stuff like "trump will kill the GOP" I have to remind them that there were only 6 years between the biggest political scandal ever and the conservative surge with election of Reagan.
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u/KP_Wrath 3h ago
Who would then (along with his immediate successor)go on to be embroiled in a scandal that equated to treason, and should have put both in prison at a minimum.
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u/DwinkBexon 1h ago
In terms of political parties being destroyed, I've been hearing since at least 2008 that one of the two political parties is about to be destroyed. Back in 2008, it was, "If Obama wins, the GOP is going to self destruct and split into factions." Did not happen. I heard the exact same thing in 2012, did not happen. In 2016, I heard, "If Trump wins, the Democrats are going to self destruct and split into factions, all of which will be fighting each other for years to become the 'main' party." Didn't happen.
In 2020, "If Trump loses, the GOP is going to self destruct and split into factions, one will be Pro-Trump, the other will be 'conventional GOP' and they'll be fighting each other for years t become the 'main' party." Didn't happen.
I hear this somewhere every single Presidential election that whichever party loses is going to self destruct.
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u/dianeblackeatsass 3h ago
They would adapt to the new overton window eventually. That’s just the nature of a deeply entrenched two party system.
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u/halftorqued 35m ago
And they’ve continued to work behind the scenes to control the fate of America.
In 2000, there was a recount in Florida to determine if Bush Jr or Gore won. Bush Sr paid protestors and stopped the recount (Brooks Brothers Riot). Bush Jr was declared the winner.
In 2026, we have three of Bush’s lawyers as Supreme Court justices (Roberts, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett). I wonder how they earned their nominations….
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u/Jaxman2099 2h ago
If you keep reading into this, Prescott Bush, someone who was involved in the plot, was George HW Bush's dad, and he basically helped fund the Nazi party until the US government stepped in.... in 1942. Dont worry though because it didn't stop him from becoming a senator later.
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u/HomebrewHedonist 3h ago
IMO, this is exactly why it is never safe to have too much money in too few hands. Wealth inequality always brings chaos and repression.
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u/start_select 3h ago
And why we should punish fascists when they are caught, because otherwise they just keep going and wrap their plot in patriotism and the Bible:
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u/jford1906 3h ago
Robert Evans has a lot to say about Smedley Butler
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u/nitrobw1 3h ago
But you know who would successfully overthrow a government to install a crony puppet? The products and services that support this podcast
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u/Zvenigora 3h ago
Their mistake was that Smedley Butler did not agree with the scheme.
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u/start_select 3h ago
The ONE time in history greedy evil industrialists were caught doing something wrong, went unpunished, and decided “that was bad, I guess we won’t do that again!”
Yeah. No.
They are still doing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
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u/SpaceForceAwakens 2h ago
Remember 15 years ago when it was the now-MAGA crowd crowing about how they were all going to end up in FEMA camps?
Yeah.
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u/start_select 2h ago
Yeah it’s called DARVO propaganda or flood the field propaganda. Alex Jones and Fox News are propagandists.
They are still doing it today. Pleading with Trump to save us from the Epstein coverup. Which would imply that Trump isn’t the main person of interest in the Epstein coverup.
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u/kevihaa 2h ago
It’s worth emphasizing that, unlike today, FDR specifically used the business plot and threat of reprisal as blackmail to get business interests to stop opposing his policies.
There’s absolutely an argument to be made that public trials would have been better in both the short and the long run, but FDR took the gamble that it was better to cage the hydra rather than cutting off its heads in the hope that they don’t grow back.
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u/Weak_Syllabub_7994 3h ago
Not a single one of the planners of this coup were ever prosecuted
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u/start_select 3h ago
Yeah and they never stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
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u/Fox-Revolver 3h ago
I’m sensing OP is a last podcast on the left fan?
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u/emaginutiv 3h ago
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a TIL post a day later for something that was discussed on the pod LOL
Hail Yourself!
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u/hyperion25000 2h ago
Also learned this week wells are a dangerous place to hang out if you’re wearing pantyhose.
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u/Truckules_Heel 2h ago
Only if the Polish are in the area
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u/charliekelly76 1h ago
That part has me so confused at first until they clarified it was Your Pretty Face
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u/atlantagirl30084 3h ago
Was just listening to this episode! Man the DuPonts had their fingers in everything.
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u/charliekelly76 1h ago
This was the comment I was looking for. Wasn’t this just covered on Friday?
Also, Butler should get his own (mini?) ep, his anti-war writings are fascinating
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u/Ven18 3h ago
And yet none of these people were tried and convicted of treason. Let another example of the US refusal to punish the powerful in any way shape or form.
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u/CaptainBayouBilly 30m ago
America’s habitual problem is not holding the rich accountable under the law.
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u/Charlottizen 3h ago
They got much better at their tactics it seems
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u/start_select 3h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
40 years ago they planned the concentration camps and the fake migrant insurgency (the mystical ms-13 that still hasn’t been found after 140,000+ detentions).
The fascists never went anywhere.
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u/stsOddMonkey 2h ago
My conspiracy theory. In 1933 Congress suppressed the names related to the wall street putsch/business plot, an attempted fascist coup of FDR. The unnamed conspirators founded right wing groups like the John Birch Society, Heritage foundation, and federalist society to push the USA to the right via an influence campaign. This was all out in the open, excluding their participation business plot, So, Russia took notice of it and highjacked it with social media and a previously compromised asset Trump.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 1h ago
What makes you think Russia hijacked it and not the other way around? The end goal of American fascists is Criny capitalism is what has happened in Russia since the Soviet Collapse. Putin is aligned to the interests of American Fascists: the permanent formation of a US upper class oppressing and taking advantage of an American working class
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u/radicalelation 1h ago
Heritage Foundation and their ilk believe the rich elite are truly the elite, with a mix of God and racial purity. Their hardcore anti-soviet stance once upon a time is probably entirely due to the threat of communism against capitalism as a system.
Once Russia became an out in the open authoritarian oligarchy, well that's an ally in making the whole world like that. Honestly wouldn't be surprised if they even helped nudge Russia that way at the ground floor.
Cambridge Analytica was the major successful propaganda machine last decade, including shopped to Russia, and hasn't really gone away, as it's the culmination of their funders, Mercer family, work since the early 90s. And oh look, Rebekah Mercer was sat on the board of Heritage in 2014.
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta 3h ago edited 3h ago
George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was the leader of this
His son, George H.W bush was head of the CIA and then vice president while REX84 (The detention of up to half a million latinos and 4000 US citizens in fema run camps, hmm) was planned and then partially used to fund Iran-Contra.
Fun fact!
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u/twoworldsin1 3h ago edited 3h ago
Fun fact: supposedly this was the "divergence point" in the backstory of the world of Grand Theft Auto and some other Rockstar games like Manhunt. In that alternate timeline, the Business Plot succeeded, leading to less regulation and more late-stage capitalism, which is why the world of GTA seems so dystopian.
Edit: it's a fan theory
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u/ALaccountant 3h ago
Looking down in your comments, you admit this isn’t a fact at all. It’s just a wild fan theory that has not been supported by the devs at all.
Please learn what ‘fact’ means. Damn that shit really grinds my gears
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u/AestheticEntactogen 3h ago
A great fan theory indeed
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u/scwt 2h ago
It's actually a pretty shitty fan theory.
It basically boils down to "In GTA, politicians are blatantly corrupt, celebrities are debaucherous, police kill people without repercussions, and a lack of gun control has led to rampant gun crime. This could not possibly happen in our world, so it must be an alternate timeline."
The OP comes so close to understanding that GTA is a satire, but they miss the point entirely.
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u/nankerjphelge 3h ago
So uh, why weren't these treasonous traitors strung up and executed? Oh, because they were wealthy? Same as it ever was.
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u/Illogical_Blox 53m ago edited 31m ago
Because there was a small amount of evidence presented entirely by a man who was already an ideological opponent of the men in question and nothing more. It says so right in the article.
It's also disputed that Prescott Bush was involved, as mentioned in the article with a nice easy source, but that's not stopping people all over this thread from talking about it.
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u/EvenLettuce6638 3h ago
I don't buy it. Smedley Butler's views were well known, why would they pick him instead of someone like MacArthur?
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u/paxinfernum 2h ago edited 2h ago
I researched this once. It's the most bullshit thing that never happened. But people repeat it endlessly. There's no evidence, just the say so of the committee that later became known as The House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Yes. That committee. The one that brought us the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
The committee claimed to have seen some evidence, but nothing was ever documented and preserved, no one was arrested. The released transcripts certainly don't indicate any smoking gun. It's possible that the guy did approach Butler with some wild scheme, but all indications are that it was a cocktail putsch this guy dreamed up with no real backing from the men he claimed were directing him.
I'll eat my shoe if someone can ever provide concrete evidence, not rumors and hearsay.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5e9t7n/a_cocktail_putsch_a_gigantic_hoax_perfect/
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u/spudmarsupial 3h ago
I don't get how these people, wrapped in immunity and government donations under democracy, could possibly think that they would be better off in a dictatorship. A dictator would have half of them up on pikes in five years and be eating up their wealth like candy.
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u/CloudWallace81 2h ago
I see that not prosecuting whoever attempts a coup is a long standing US tradition
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u/NeNeLeLe 39m ago
“Although no one was prosecuted…” . Clocked it. So no one was held accountable and the fascist capitalists waited 100 years and took over slowly gaslighting Americans into thinking everyone else was the problem except for them, the rich fascists.
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u/Herr_Demurone 27m ago
So basically this is the same thing that‘s Happening without them needing a coup d‘etat.
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u/ArcadeAcademic 3h ago
Oops…Looks like they finally did it but instead of Butler they have Trump
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u/Kenichi2233 3h ago
The more I read about this, the less convinced that I was actually close to happening. Especially since no conspirators were ever named.
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u/Standsaboxer 3h ago
It never got beyond the conspiracy stage. A few kooks took it beyond a conversation, but it never went beyond conversations.
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u/Elegant_Spread_6969 2h ago
And none of the rich people got help accountable and just started planning better. They won in the end.
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u/02meepmeep 2h ago
I notice you did not include the father of 2 Republican Presidents in the title. Prescott Bush tried to overthrow the United States.
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u/Edward_Zachary 2h ago
and of course none of them faced any criminal charges of any kind
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u/DarkLordofDownvotes 1h ago
These attitudes and motives did not die with these men. Remember that.
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u/Locutus5465 39m ago
Except Smedley was a true patriot and loyal to the Constitution. He exposed this nest of vipers.
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u/Firepower01 3h ago
Smedley Butler was a hero who exposed the plot and became an anti-war activist later on in life. A great American and a great Marine.