American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  As a good soldier, Butler followed orders. The Taft Administration asked him to help rig elections in Nicaragua, which he later admitted doing. In what was then called “dollar diplomacy,” Butler also helped American business interests maintain their hold on other Latin American countries. If that’s all they knew about Butler, it’s understandable that the conspirators against FDR might figure he’d play along.

  But he’d given a speech to an American Legion convention, the year before FDR was elected, that clearly showed he’d had a change of heart. When the Legion first formed in the 1920s, most veterans had no clue that big corporations were backing it to use later in breaking strikes. It turned out that one of the Legion’s main founders was Grayson Murphy, who ran one of Wall Street’s big brokerage firms along with being director of a Morgan bank, Guaranty Trust. His name would soon surface as one of the financiers who wanted to remove FDR from power.

  In his speech, Butler decided to give the Legion veterans some insight into how things worked.

  “I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” Butler said. “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

  “In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.”

  In another talk, Butler told veterans that war was “largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know—I’ve been in eleven of these expeditions.” Butler also told the vets not to believe “the propaganda [that] capital circulates” in the controlled press. In 1932, the year after he gave that speech, at the age of fifty, Butler retired to civilian life. He handed out maps to his house to Marines who’d served under him, in case they ever needed anything.

  Butler speculated privately that the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Roosevelt a few weeks before his inauguration might have been orchestrated by a big-business cabal. Now members of that same elite circle decided that Butler, not MacArthur, was the military man best able to lead their coup attempt. One day, they had a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire approach him. Butler quickly smelled a rat, but decided to play along until he could figure out what was really going on. Over the course of some months, Maguire courted him. His employer turned out to be Legion sponsor and financier Grayson Murphy.

  There were some important people, MacGuire told Butler, who wanted to establish a new organization in the U.S. They had money, lots of it, $3 million in working capital and as much as $300 million that could be tapped into. Butler realized the truth of this when some captains of industry came together and announced formation of a new American Liberty League in September 1934. The organization said its goals were “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” Backers included Rockefellers, Mellons, and Pews. Also two unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates, John W. Davis (an attorney for the Morgan banking interests) and Al Smith (a business associate of the DuPonts). At first Butler couldn’t believe even Smith could be involved, until he suddenly published a scathing attack on the New Deal.2 (I guess you could say not a whole lot has changed with our two-party system.)

  Butler had once served with a fellow named Robert S. Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a wealthy banker. He now paid a visit and put forward more of the plan to Butler, who remembered Clark saying: “You know, the President is weak.... He was raised in this class, and he will come back.... But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does.” So Butler was their choice to lead the takeover.

  I view Smedley Butler as someone who’d read the Constitution and followed the law. He didn’t have to be in FDR’s camp to realize that what he was being asked to do was wrong. FDR was the commander-in-chief of the country, and we have a system for how we exchange our leaders. That system is the vote and the election.

  Butler brought a reporter friend in on the conspiracy, so it wouldn’t be just his word against the plotters. Together they worked together on gathering more background. Around Thanksgiving in 1934, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives took Butler’s testimony behind closed doors. The next day, the New York Times ran a two-column headline on the front page: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government by Force.’” Butler was struck by how the paper played it. The gist of his charges was buried deep inside, while most of the article consisted of denials and outright ridicule from some of the prominent people he’d implicated. Time magazine followed up with a front-page piece headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” It caricatured Butler riding a white horse while asking veterans to follow him. “No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler,” the article said snidely. (Are we surprised that FDR started his “Fireside Chats” so he could go straight to the people, and over the heads of media barons like Luce and Hearst?)

  The House committee went ahead and commenced a two-month-long investigation. It verified an $18,000 bribe offer to Butler, and came up with a number of other facts to verify his story. The VFW Commander, James Van Zandt, revealed that he had also been approached by “agents of Wall Street” to lead a Fascist dictatorship. Even Time, which twelve weeks before had made fun of the plot idea, came out with a small-print “footnote” that the committee was “convinced ... that General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.”

  After that, though, the committee’s investigation came to a sudden stop. They never called any of the big financiers for questioning. In fact, when the transcript of the committee’s interview with Butler appeared, all the names he’d named were deleted. Some said that the names were omitted at the request of a member of FDR’s cabinet, who didn’t want to embarrass the two former Democratic presidential candidates that Butler identified. FDR never made any comment on the plot, so we can’t know what he might have said behind closed doors. Maybe he figured, now that this was public knowledge, he didn’t need to pursue it further. Maybe he dismissed the plan as a preposterous idea. For whatever reason, the Justice Department avoided any steps toward fuller investigation. That caused Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to issue an angry statement: “Not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime.” (Does this remind anyone of the current administration not wanting to prosecute the Bush people for their involvement in torture?)

  When Jules Archer interviewed John McCormack in 1971, the former House Speaker claimed he couldn’t remember why his committee had stayed away from implicating the bankers and corporate presidents. McCormack did say: “If the plotters had got rid of Roosevelt, there’s no telling what might have taken place. They wouldn’t have told the people what they were doing, of course. They were going to make it all sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and a plan to make it all sound like a good American program. A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority, as Adolf Hitler did.... The people were in a very confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction. Mass frustration could bring about anything.”

  Even though this happened more than 75 years ago, it’s worth pa
ying attention to where the plot came from—and how its would-be perpetrators haven’t necessarily gone away but only taken on different faces. Let me start to explain that by telling you about a book called Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. It was written by a Georgetown University professor named Carroll Quigley, a well-connected academic who had many friends and associates among the “elite” class. One of his students was Bill Clinton. In Tragedy and Hope, Quigley wrote:

  “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments.... in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”3

  Quigley says it all began with a wealthy Englishman named Cecil Rhodes, who’d worked with financiers like the Rothschilds to gain a monopoly over South Africa’s diamonds and gold. “The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes’ seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.”4

  Funding for “the widely ramified activities of this organization,” later came from groups “associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families.” In looking to expand after the First World War, front organizations were set up—the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and, in New York, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “a front for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table group.”5 The CFR in 1928, according to Quigley’s list, had John W. Davis as its president—the very same fellow who, along with Morgan and others, established the American Liberty League that tried to use General Butler in the plot against FDR. Also among the CFR’s leading lights was attorney Allen Dulles, future director of the CIA and member of the Warren Commission to investigate JFK’s assassination. And “closely allied with this Morgan influence were a small group of Wall Street law firms” that included another future Warren Commission member, John McCloy. Same cast of characters, from FDR to JFK.

  The goal of this cabal of global financiers, writes Quigley, was “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”6

  Then there was this: “The American branch of this ‘English Establishment’ exerted much of its influence through five American newspapers (the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the lamented Boston Evening Transcript).”7

  Quigley’s book is back in print today, but when it first appeared in 1966, it didn’t stay long on bookstore shelves. The professor came to believe it had been “suppressed,” because “it apparently says something which powerful people do not want known.”8

  As I’ve expanded my study of conspiracies, I find that I’m often getting the same information from two separate sources. Let me insert here something about the Bilderbergs. For aTV series I’m doing on conspiracies, we interviewed a fellow named Daniel Estulin, an investigative journalist from Spain who’s been researching the Bilderberg secret society for more than 17 years. It turns out that the wealthiest CEOs of the world have been coming together with the political elite from Europe and America since 1954, when they first met at the Bilderberg Hotel in a little Dutch town called Oosterbeek. The Bilderberg deep pockets reach back centuries, to royalty who still believe they’re the entitled ones and the rest of us are merely cannon fodder. Banker David Rockefeller, at the 1991 Bilderberg meeting, is said to have argued for one world government “of an intellectual elite and world bankers.”9 But I was told that, within this group, David Rockefeller is a waiter. Meaning, at his level, he would bring the other members drinks as mid-level help. The others are much more powerful.

  To get a sense of the continuity among the power brokers: In Tragedy and Hope, Professor Quigley doesn’t mention Prescott or George Herbert Walker Bush—grandfather and father of the first President Bush—but both of them were among the right-wing elite on Wall Street during FDR’s day. In 2007, an American investigative journalist named John Buchanan found documents from the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in the National Archives. These directly linked Prescott Bush to the power brokers (Morgan, DuPont, Remington, and others) who were behind the plan to get rid of FDR. This got some play in the U.K., but not a word in the mainstream American press.10

  But if you check out Kevin Phillips’s book on the Bush family, American Dynasty, you can find some interesting cross-references. Dating back to the First World War, George Herbert Walker (Prescott’s father-in-law) was involved with “a frequently collaborative group of moneymen—Averell Harriman, Percy Rockefeller at National City Bank, and others at Guaranty Trust—who had large international plans.”11 (Remember that one of the anti-FDR coup leaders had ties to Guaranty Trust). In 1919 National City Bank “joined in setting up the new W.A. Harriman and Company, soon to be under George Walker’s presidency” and including Remington’s Samuel Pryor as “part of this cabal.”12 Five years later, Harriman and Walker established the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) in New York “on behalf of the politically active German steel baron Fritz Thyssen”—a major funder of Hitler’s Nazi Party.13 Prescott Bush and a number of his Skull and Bones pals from Yale “came together under one roof through the Brown Brothers Harriman merger in 1931.”14

  Phillips doesn’t bring the Smedley Butler story into his book, but he goes on to say: “Unfortunately, we have no reliable way of knowing exactly why, after 1933, men like Averell Harriman, George Walker, and Prescott Bush, the Dulles brothers, James Forrestal, Henry Ford, and several Rockefellers maintained investment relationships with Hitler’s Germany, in a few cases up to (and even after) Pearl Harbor.”15

  “By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman ... and Dillon Read were two notable active investors in a Germany rapidly rearming under Adolf Hitler.” Prescott Bush “handled much of the German work at Brown Brothers Harriman,” working closely with Wall Street lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles. Prescott was also a director of the UBC bank “that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family.... In 1941, the New York Herald Tribune had featured a front-page story headlined ‘Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank’” that Thyssen was possibly holding for “Nazi bigwigs.” In October 1942, the federal government then “seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation” under the Trading with the Enemy Act.16

  Prescott Bush went on to be a U.S. Senator from Connecticut; the Dulles brothers ran the CIA and the State Department under Eisenhower; Averell Harriman ended up governor of New York. “It is almost as if these various German embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as unfortunate but in essence business as usual,” Kevin Phillips writes.17

  So maybe that’s how the FDR plot was conceived, too—“business as usual,” which the president’s New Deal was obstructing. Smedley Butler did his best to issue the warning. Lecturing around the
country as spokesman for the “forgotten veteran,” the general accused the big industrialists of bloating themselves on the blood of the soldiers in the First World War. He pointed out that DuPont’s profits had soared from only $6 million before the conflict, to $58 million in the course of it. Similar huge jumps were made by companies like Bethlehem Steel and International Nickel. Munitions, as the “war to end all wars” proved, was a mighty profitable enterprise.

  Butler also asked a question, in his book War Is a Racket, that I’ve thought about a lot in terms of today: “How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” His idea was: “Let the officers and directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders ... as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.”18

  Do you think we’d have gone to war in Iraq if Dick Cheney and his Halliburton buddies were subject to Butler’s idea? The “Fighting Quaker, as he was called, died in 1940, so he never lived to see America enter the war against Germany and Japan. Today we owe the man a great debt, as someone courageous enough to blow the whistle on the big-money forces out to undermine our democracy. Too bad there wasn’t another Smedley Butler around when George W. Bush stole two presidential elections. That’s a story we’ll get to, in due course.

  Getting back to the Bilderbergs and the scary notion: is this attempt to control the world real? I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of a dozen guys sitting around a table deciding our future. But I do think that these power brokers, bankers, money men of the world, have the power to try to control the direction we’re going. Can they guarantee it? Never, because you’ve always got the human element, and they don’t seem to want to rouse the ire of the masses. They’re sneakier than that.