Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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!

Smedley D. Butler deserves a heroes place in the annals of history and yet 95% of the populace will give you a quizzical look when asked about him or the 'business plot'.
I eagerly anticipated having a book that was supposed to codify all the facts pertaining to this plot that I could recommend to friends and family.
Alas Mr Archer own opinions and conclusions drawn, dwarfed those of Mr. Butler(RIP). The high points of this book lie in the middle where we learn of his war exploits that shaped his later anti-interventionist stance and towards the end where select pieces from the hearings and Butlers testimony are pieced in sequential order followed by an all too brief somewhat condescending write up of his anti-war activities at the end of his life.

I will briefly detail some of the flaws below
The story is told directly from Butlers POV which one normally wouldn't find problematic except that the author was very sparse on details pertaining to the plot(the leaders and companies) who only received brief mentions while a good chunk of the book focuses on the plotters emissary(as opposed to the hearings and that fact that Butler was proven right yet not a single charge was brought forth!) Gerald Macguire trying to convince butler to head the coup.

The author also liberally threw around terms like conservative/fascist in a related fashion and grouping leftists(communist included) as the good guys in this story. Note Butler never says this as wall street and the bankers hold sway over both political parties but apparently Archer imposed his paradigmic view on the events that transpired. A fully fleshed view would take into account this was a fascist coup for sure but it included members of both parties of the so called opposing view points.

The gold standard received a fair amount of lambasting based on the fact that it was the cover used by the plotters to appeal to anti-FDR sentiment and a cover to cloak their real interests. The issue of gold is treated as a fascist and bourgeois position of great fallacy even though Smedley Butler never criticized the economics of a gold standard(rather he remarked at what did it have to do w/ a veterans bonus bill?) Whether you support it or not the fact that was this should have taken second fiddle to the issue of the plot and its instigators.

It may have been that this information was not available at the time the author wrote the book but I found it interesting that Prescott Bush and one of Hitlers financiers Fritz Thyssen amongst other prominent men connected to the plot were nowhere mentioned.
John Buchanan does a great job of documenting this.

A last point of personal annoyance was that Mr Butlers amazing anti-intervention writings and speeches were dismissed by the author as stubborn minded, he even criticized Butler on his stance of keeping the USA out of WW2 claiming he was bitter which stopped him from seeing the danger of America staying neutral which is absurd and has been rebutted with in books such as 'human smoke' & 'Churchill, hitler, and the unnecessary war' which show through the historical record that butler was right about US involvement in foreign lands and wars as folly.
The author incorrectly labels Butler a pacifist and isolationist as opposed to an anti-interventionist which butler clearly was(read his book 'war is a racket' to hear it straight from the man) and in the derogatory manner one hears the Neo-Cons try to smear ron paul with.

Smedley Butler deserves his story told better, to make up for this books rough edges I would recommend you research Butler and the Business Plot yourself, you can obtain documents on the web about the hearings, top 50 plotters involved at relative little costs.
A great companion to this book is Wall Street and FDR by Antony C. Sutton which fills in the gaps where Jules Archer dismissed claims that FDR would cave in as a puppet and how his administration was filled with members of the elite plotters and FDR himself became a tool of this new order.

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.

A commonly asked question among historians is "how do democracies turn into dictatorships?" Two historical events are commonly used as models to answer this question; the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire, and the rise of the Nazis in Weimar Germany. A third event could also be thrown in; one that is almost forgotten to history, even though it is well-documented. This third event is the cabal of financial interests that came together in the early 1930's to take out FDR. This event is documented in this book; first released in the 1970s, and re-published last year. The chief protagonist is General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated marines in US history. As a popular war hero, in his retirement he is approached by several representatives of financial interests asking him to lead an army of jobless veterans onto D.C. to essentially intimidate FDR into giving up power. These financial interests include Morgan, Rockefeller, Al Smith, and other powerful figures of that time; and their goal is to stop FDR out of fear of higher taxes.

Smedley Butler, being the true patriot, leads them on and finally exposes them to the press and Congress. The press, being controlled predominantly by big business, downplays Butler's story and the ensuing Congressional hearings. But the conspiracy is stopped, and the rest is history. As a secondary theme, the book explores Butler's growing disdain for war, and realization that US intervention in other countries is almost always done for the profit of US corporations. Interestingly, after reading the book, one comes to see that the original House Committee on Un-American Activities focused its attention on war profiteers, and was eventually taken over by pro-business interests as a weapon against labor unions and liberal intellectuals.

Many of the events and ideas discussed in this book are especially appropriate today with the Iraq war. I highly recommend this book.

After many years of searching for this too-long out-of-print gem, it is finally back. (I bought three copies just to make sure it gets disseminated to those in my own immediate circle.)
The story of Smedley Butler's colorful career as a Marine probably wouldn't have been interesting to me, but it provides a necessary backdrop to the larger story here, and Jules Archer sketches it out with just enough attention to detail so one doesn't get the feeling that major events are being glossed over.
I should say, at times the book feels like it has a "stories for young adults" quality, but don't let that distract (or detract) from the fact that men of influence, wealth and power sought to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, the PRESIDENT of the United States, in 1932.
You've never heard of such a thing? Well, citizen, THAT'S how powerful the conspirators were! And when the light of inquiry was shone on their traitorous plot, they scurried for cover like cockroaches heading back under a refrigerator, loudly claiming it was all nonsense. A.J. Leibling's dictum about freedom of the press (for those who own them) has rarely been so resoundingly underscored.
So kudos to the publishers of this volume, for resurrecting it for another generation. In the words of researcher Dave Emory, "if you don't study history, the world's a mystery."

Well-researched, authoritative account of Wall Street's attempt to force a coup in 1933 to prevent New Deal policies from taking place. Every American should know this history, and understand the true politics of Wall Street and the "miracle" of the market.

Who knows what the world would have been like if this conspiracy had succeeded. We might have never declared war against the Axis (Japan/Germany/Italy) powers in World War II. As Joseph Schumpeter writes in the book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: The political world consists of a series of short-run events that can change the course of history...The idea that good always triumphs over evil is one of those happy falsehoods. All patriots need to be vigilant!

Read it Online FREE - Get a reprinted copy with up-to-date commentaty in paperback or hardcover:
http://plottoseizethewhitehouse.net4truthusa.com

Ten days after this book was published in early 1973, the United States Government (CIA?) pulled this book off National bookshelves and seized every copy in print that they could find.

Since the information contained within its pages is something that this corrupt, immoral, criminal, and treasonous government does not want you the people to see, our webmaster has taken the time to OCR-scan each of the pages in this book, reformat the text to fit the 6 x 9 - inch format it is published in, and reproduced it here to make it available to you the people, who have a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to read it.

We have also simultaneously published the (verbatim reprint) of this book in other formats - including PDF and .PRC format, so that it may be read on Palm Pilots, PCs, and distributed widely enough to make it IMPOSSIBLE for it to ever be censored again.

The book is no longer in print, the copyright has expired under the OLD copyright law, and the author is deceased. Nevertheless, what is contained within its pages is as relevant today as it was the day the book was published; as important today - if not more so - for the American people to know than it was when the events therein described happened. The book is factual; the events actually took place; and if an attempt at a White House Putsch did not then succeed, raises the question about the success or failure of subsequent attempts - Was the JFK Assassination an attempt to (again) seize control of the White House? Did it also fail, or were we just led to believe it was something else - or that by not revealing the possibility - that it never happened at all? Far be it from me to draw your conclusions FOR you; what I am doing here is merely presenting the evidence.... evidence so damning and disturbing, that the powers-that-be in the government have done everything in their power to keep you from learning of it.

This book exposes one attempt - in detail - and illustrates to the reader, something that perhaps is out of the realm of things one thinks about when pondering our Constitutional Republic, but the possibility that a silent Coup d'état in our own government happened, exists nonetheless. There is an overwhelming collection of evidence to suggest that what we should fear most is not being revealed to us by the mainstream media, and indeed, that the mainstream media is merely an extension of the forthcoming Techno-Nazi dictatorship that is still, as of this writing, in its infancy and "cutting its teeth" so-to-speak, on the false flag operation "terrorist" attacks of 9-11 - and the SAD part is.... the American People - not knowing their history - are letting them get away with it.... all over again!

See my book: Land of Childhood's Fears - Faith, Friendship, and The Vietnam War

Fascinating account about a decorated general who turned against war and the big-business industries that profit from it - including their attempt to take over the White House from FDR in a fascist putsch. General Smedley Butler, born a Quaker, was a highly-medaled Marine general who served in many of the United States' interventions in legally elected Latin American governments to support corporate interests. Butler finally tired of big business' hand in killing American soldiers and their reticence to reward those soldiers for risking their lives for corporate dollars.

The most shocking - and relevant for today -- part of Butler's story is that he was approached by representatives of leading corporations to be the figurehead in a move that would make President Franklin Roosevelt a figurehead, and Butler the puppet secretary of corporate interests. Butler exposed the plot - only in its poorly managed infancy - to Congress, to the scorn of newspapers and the denial of those involved (including J.P. Morgan). But the Commission accepted his findings, and scholars agree that there was indeed some sort of plot (although probably not as advanced as Butler thought).

The most sobering thing, of course, is that the danger of a fascist takeover of the United States by corporate interests is alive and well today - funded by the supposedly populist Tea Party. Read Butler's story to learn the lessons of history - and don't let it happen today (even if you think they're on your side).