The most decorated Marine in US history retired, declared his wars had served corporations, and revealed a plot by businessmen to make him overthrow FDR.
Smedley Butler enlisted in the Marine Corps at 16 by lying about his age, served for 34 years across four continents, and earned two Medals of Honor — more than any Marine in history at the time of his death. He fought in the Philippines, China, Central America, the Caribbean, and France. His men called him 'Old Gimlet Eye.' His superiors called him one of the finest officers they'd ever seen.
Butler's career included interventions across Central America and the Caribbean that today read as blunt instruments of American corporate interests. He helped install favorable governments in Nicaragua and Haiti. He secured oil concessions in Mexico. He was, in his own later words, muscle for hire — only the client was the United States government, and the ultimate beneficiaries were American banks and businesses.
After retiring in 1931, Butler underwent a transformation. He became one of the most prominent voices against American militarism and foreign intervention, traveling the country giving speeches to veterans and labor groups. His 1935 pamphlet 'War Is a Racket' argued that wars are fought for profit — that the real beneficiaries of military conflict are the bankers, arms manufacturers, and corporations that get contracts and concessions while ordinary soldiers do the dying.
In 1934, Butler testified before Congress about an alleged plot by a group of wealthy businessmen to recruit him to lead a paramilitary coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The plan, as Butler described it, was to use his popularity with veterans to march 500,000 men on Washington and install a fascist government. The men allegedly involved included figures connected to major American corporations. The congressional investigation confirmed Butler's account was credible, then quietly buried it.
Butler's whistleblowing made him a hero to veterans and labor organizers and a pariah to the establishment. He was never prosecuted, promoted, or really reckoned with. The McCormack-Dickstein Committee found his testimony credible but named no names publicly, and no one was ever charged. The attempted coup — if it was real — simply disappeared from the official American narrative.
Smedley Butler died in 1940, largely outside the mainstream of American patriotic memory. He remains a genuinely difficult figure: a man who spent decades doing the thing he would later condemn, who then found the clarity — or the outrage — to say plainly what few in uniform would. 'I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism,' he wrote. Very few soldiers, before or since, have ever said anything like it.
The man who allegedly made the approach was Gerald MacGuire, a Wall Street bond salesman fronting for wealthier backers. Butler said the plan was to raise a 500,000-man veterans' army and install him as a 'secretary of general welfare' who would run the country while Roosevelt stayed on as a figurehead. MacGuire denied everything under oath and died of pneumonia in 1935, months after testifying, at 37.
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee's final report concluded that the plot had been discussed and planned and 'might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.' The names Butler attached to it included figures tied to DuPont and J.P. Morgan's bank, none of whom were called to testify publicly. The New York Times first dismissed the story as a 'gigantic hoax,' then quietly softened its coverage once the report came out.
Historians have never settled how real the threat was. Some read it as a genuine fascist conspiracy that collapsed the moment Butler refused to play along; others think it was rich men's loose talk that Butler, already famous as an anti-war populist, took further than the evidence warranted. What is not in dispute is that he reported it to Congress rather than pursuing it.