So chances are you've never heard the name Smetli Butler before, but if you have, it's

probably in the context of one of the wildest conspiracies ever hatched against an American

president.

The plan was never executed thanks to Butler, and the political and media class kind of

collectively decided not to talk much about it, so it is almost entirely faded from memory.

The simple version though is that leading reactionary politicians and business leaders plotted

seriously to overthrow FDR by marching on Washington with thousands of disgruntled veterans

led by an unimpeachably principled Marine Corps general.

The problem came when the general Smetli Butler exposed the plot and turned them all in.

That may have been the capstone to Butler's life, but what he did before that was also

of enormous consequence for the development of our politics, our foreign policy, our presidency,

everything.

Basically, we are who we are for better or for worse thanks to what Smetli Butler did

over the course of his fascinating and blood-soaked career.

He was involved one way or another in American interventions in Cuba, the Philippines, China,

Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, and Haiti.

He emerged from that journey the nation's most celebrated pacifist, the man who first

exposed the creation of the military industrial complex.

He would know, he said, because he built it, or at least he was the man at its center

who made sure that it did its work.

If you think of American imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th century as a virus,

today we're living with its endless variants and mutations, which continue to infect governments

...