McCormack-Dickstein Committee
U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities |
The Business Plot or The Plot Against FDR or The White House Putsch was an alleged conspiracy brought to light by a retired General, involving moneyed interests who intended to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the early years of the Great Depression. The allegations of the plot came to light when Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler notified the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in 1933 and testified to the existence of the plot. The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was the first House Committee On Un-American Activities (HUAC). In his testimony, Butler stated that a group of several men, representing mainly Wall-Street Banking interests had approached him to help lead a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a fascist military coup. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported General Butler’s claims on the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten. ScanPlease note that this report was scanned from a poor copy of a PDF file.[1][2] [3] Therefore there may still be numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes, feel free to edit this page and correct any mistakes from the original PDF. |
Table of Contents[edit]
Public Statment on Preliminary findings of HUAC, November 24, 1934
Public hearings Report of HUAC published December 29, 1934
Testimony of Maj. Gen. S. D. Butler (Retired)
Testimony of Paul Comly French
Testimony of Gerald C. Macguire
Testimony of Gerald C. Macguire—Resumed
Testimony of Gerald C. Macguire—Resumed 2
Testimony of Claude M. Adamson
Testimony of Gerald C. Macguire—Resumed 3
Public hearings Report of HUAC published 29, 1934
1 (Pages 2-7 are missing) 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 PDF File Two 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 PDF File Three
Origin of the files[edit]
U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Public Statement, 73rd Congress, 2nd session, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1934). p. 1-12
U.S. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities, Hearings 73-D.C.-6, Part 1, 73rd Congress, 2nd session, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935). p. 1-163
- House Committee on Un-American Activities report part 1 [pdf file]
- House Committee on Un-American Activities report part 2 [pdf file]
- House Committee on Un-American Activities report part 3 [pdf file]
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee conducted public and executive hearings intermittently between April 26 and December 29, 1934, in Washington, DC; New York; Chicago; Los Angeles; Newark; and Asheville, NC, examining hundreds of witnesses and accumulating more than 4,300 pages of testimony.[4]
Deleted Text[edit]
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee “delet[ed] extensive excerpts relating to Wall Street financiers including Guaranty Trust director Grayson Murphy, J.P. Morgan, the Du Pont interests, Remington Arms, and others allegedly involved in the plot attempt. Even today, in 1975, a full transcript of the hearings cannot be traced.”[1]
“Journalist John L. Spivak, researching Nazism and anti-Semitism for New Masses magazine, got permission from Dickstein to examine HUAC’s public documents and was (it seems unwittingly) given the unexpurgated testimony amid stacks of other papers”,[2] which he printed.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Text in Red is deleted excerpts, click the ^ to see the deleted text.
For the original text and the deleted text side by side, see Suppressed testimony of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee below.
PDF file 1[edit]
The Plot To Seize The White House
By Jules Archer
FORWARD
This is the true story of a remarkable American who, during the early New Deal years, was sought by wealthy plotters in the United States to lead a putsch to overthrow the government and establish an American Fascist dictatorship.
According to retired Representative John W. McCormack, former Speaker of the House, if the late Major General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps had not been a stubborn devotee of democracy, Americans today could conceivably be living under an American Mussolini, Hitler, or Franco.
An ironic aspect of the conspiracy General Butler unmasked is that few Americans have ever heard about it, or even know anything about the general. As children all of us were taught about the treason of Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold, whose betrayals were safely cobwebbed by the distant past. But school texts that deal with the New Deal are uniquely silent about the powerful Americans who plotted to seize the White House with a private army, hold President Franklin D. Roosevelt prisoner, and get rid of him if he refused to serve as their puppet in a dictatorship they planned to impose and control.
There is strong evidence to suggest that the conspirators may have been too important politically, socially, and economically to be brought to justice after their scheme had been exposed before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives. The largely anti-Roosevelt press of the New Deal era scotched the story as expeditiously as possible by outright suppression, distortion, and attempts to ridicule General Butler’s testimony as capricious fantasy.
Smedley Butler’s whole life, however, was proof that he was a man of incorruptible character, integrity, and patriotism, with a deserved reputation for bluntly speaking the whole truth at all times, regardless of the consequences. He was named by Theodore Roosevelt “the outstanding American soldier.” The official Marine Corps record calls him “one of the most colorful officers in the Marine Corps’ long history” and “one of the two Marines who received two Medals of Honor for separate acts of outstanding heroism.” He was decorated no fewer than twenty times.
Former Speaker McCormack told the author, “In peace or war he was one of the outstanding Americans in our history. I can’t emphasize too strongly the very important part he played in exposing the Fascist plot in the early 1930’s backed by and planned by persons possessing tremendous wealth.”
The crucial events of the plot to seize the White House unfolded between July and November, 1933, with hearings before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee begun in New York City on November 20, 1934. On November 26 the committee released a statement detailing the testimony it had heard, and its preliminary findings. On February 15, 1935, the committee submitted to the House of Representatives its final report, verifying completely the testimony of General Butler.
This book may help break some of the seals of silence that have kept Americans from knowing the truth about that conspiracy. As the first effort to tell the whole story of the plot in sequence and full detail, it may serve as a fresh reminder of Wendell Phillips’s warning about the price of liberty.
No American was ever more dedicated to eternal vigilance in preserving our freedom under the Bill of Rights that the remarkable war hero, pacifist, and Republican democrat-Smedley Darlington Butler.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/plottoseizethewhitehouse