How Industrialists Plotted to Overthrow FDR Over The New Deal in 1934

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2019

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

FDR launched the New Deal immediately after his 1933 inauguration, but it was not universally popular. Some hated it bitterly. Critics from the right thought it was part of a long-term plan to push America into Soviet-style socialism. Critics from the left like Louisiana Governor Huey Long thought it didn't go far enough. Long pushed the “Share Our Wealth” plan, demanding that Congress confiscate individual earnings over $1 million, using those funds for health care and college tuition. He called anyone who refused to endorse his plan “damned scoundrels” that were fit for hanging.

Perhaps the strangest episode in opposition to the New Deal came from a group of financiers and industrialists, who in 1934 allegedly plotted a coup d’état to prevent FDR from establishing what they feared would be a socialist state. Though the media regarded it as a tall tale, retired Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler testified before a congressional committee that the conspirators had wanted Butler to deliver an ultimatum to FDR to create a new cabinet officer, a “Secretary of General Affairs,” who would run things while the president recuperated from feigned ill health. If Roosevelt refused, the conspirators had promised General Butler an army of five hundred thousand war veterans who would help drive Roosevelt from office.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:05.4	The unscripted show that celebrates unsung heroes, Mythbust's historical lies, and rediscoveres
0:11.9	the forgotten stories that changed our world.
0:15.5	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:20.8	Hi everyone, welcome to the most recent episode of the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:24.5	Today, what I want to do is take a look at something that is widely understood as a transformational
0:29.0	moment in American history, and then go back and look at how it was received by the
0:33.2	people at the time.
0:34.6	What I'm going to talk about is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
0:38.6	That's understood to be a watershed moment in the relationship between a typical American
0:42.5	citizen and the US government and what the obligations of the government were.
0:47.8	And I'm speaking very broadly here, but before the New Deal, the US government defended
0:52.7	liberty in a negative way.
0:55.2	By negative, I mean that it did not infringe upon people's liberty and it left them alone.
1:01.6	After the New Deal, the government would protect liberty in a positive way, meaning
1:05.8	that it would positively get involved with people's life, and opponents would say it encroach
1:10.2	on people's lives and liberty.
1:11.7	Well, we understand that it happened.
1:13.7	We understand it was transformational.
1:15.1	But what gets lost in this discussion is the type of opposition that existed at the
1:19.5	time.
1:20.5	I think this is a topic that merits its own episode because the opposition to the New
	...

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