The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: bonus bill, bond salesman, fascist army, United States, General Butler, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fascinating biographical study of Smedley Butler. Well work reading." -- Los Angeles Times

"Butler was one of the really great generals in American history." -- General Douglas MacArthur

"General Butler was one of the most glamorous and gallant men who ever wore the uniform of the United States Marines." -- New York Times

"The long forgotten story of what would have been America's serious armed insurrection since the Revolution." -- Boston Sunday Herald

"We owe a debt of historical perspective to Jules Archer for his careful reconstruction." -- Kirkus Reviews

Review

"General Butler's story was . . . alarmingly true." —Time magazine
 
"James E. Van Zandt, a Republican congressman, corroborated Butler's
story." —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (March 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1602390363
• ISBN-13: 978-1602390362
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #31,676 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important books you will ever read!, March 3, 2007

By	anarchteacher (United States) - See all my reviews

Excellent attractive and inexpensively priced paperback edition of the Jules Archer classic. It is terrific to have this wonderful book back in print again!

The book tells the shocking true story of how United States Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was the savior of our Republic from a fascist plot by Wall Street plutocratic militarists in the early 1930s.

Author Jules Archer is featured in The History Channel documentary, The Plot To Overthrow FDR, a concise summary of this exceptional book. This program is available for viewing at Google Video.

For more on Butler and the attempted 1930's fascist coup d'etat against FDR, see my Amazon.com Listmania! book and video list, Smedley Darlington Butler.

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great reading for conspiracy and history buffs., March 1, 2007

By	Bob Fitzsimmons (New York City) - See all my reviews

Some stories are so shocking they seem to be fiction. The amazing part of this true-life history is that the events really happened and that the story has been covered up for sixty years. Great reading for conspiracy and history buffs. Radicals really did try to overthrow FDR!

101 of 127 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of American history, March 1, 2007

By	Eric Zuesse "commentator" (USA) - See all my reviews

This book by Jules Archer documents the abortive scheme by America's leading aristocratic families in the early 1930's for a coup d'etat to replace FDR by a fascist dictator patterned after Hitler and Mussolini. I have checked out and verified all its main sources, such as the House hearings, from the committee headed by John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein (popularly called "the McCormack-Dickstein Committee"), titled INVESTIGATION OF NAZI PROPAGANDA ACTIVITIES, the House Un-American Activities Committee at a time when that Committee was anti-fascist and not only anti-communist. Archer supplements their report with contemporary news articles and books by great investigative journalists such as George Seldes and John Spivak, who independently interviewed participants in the scheme. Archer's work brings all this together into a breezily written book which I believe will stand as one of the, if not as the, supreme muckraking masterpiece(s), because it exposes in raw details the greatest threat to American freedom and democracy: the conservative aristocracy. Archer names names, of both front men and their financial backers, such as the DuPonts, Pittcairns, Morgans, Pews, Mellons, Rockefellers, Huttons, and the backing which they also provided to Robert Welch who was subsequently to found the John Birch Society.

This story has a hero, Smedley Darlington Butler, a retired general who was one of the men this cabal was interviewing to consider for the post of American Duce or Fuhrer. He didn't take them seriously at first, but collected enough documentation on their plans so that he was able to go to Congress with what he had found and so to precipitate the McCormack-Dickstein hearings. Very noteworthy was the consistent demeaning of Butler and of the hearings by The New York Times, as for example (p. 170): "Reading the Times's account of the secret hearings, Butler was struck by a unique arrangement of the facts in the story. Instead of beginning with a full account of his charges, there was only a brief paragraph restating the facts in the headline. This was followed by a whole string of denials, or ridicule of the charges, by prominent people implicated. Extensive space was given to their attempts to brand Butler a liar or lunatic." Similarly, Time Inc. was promoting fascism, such as (p. 21) in Fortune magazine, describing fascism as "achieving in a few years or decades such a conquest of the spirit of man as Christianity achieved only in ten centuries."

The program of George W. Bush has turned out to be remarkably similar to that of the John Birch Society and the Council for National Policy, all eerily similar to what those plotters in the early 1930's were planning but did not bring off. Perhaps today's Republican Party is the successful version of the one that almost overthrew FDR. Perhaps if Smedly Butler had not "ratted" on them, the U.S. would have allied with Hitler, instead of with Churchill. Perhaps Bush is simply the aristocracy's delayed success. But certainly, were it not for the control by the aristocrats, this book by Jules Archer would have been published by a major publisher in its original in 1973, instead of by Hawthorne Books (which is the version that I have and from which I've been citing), and it wouldn't now be obscure.

Jules Archer's masterpiece was too good to be accepted by a major publisher; but, if it had been published by one of the majors, it would have become a best-seller and would now be universally recognized as the classic work that it is.