The Plot To Seize The White House by Jules Archer Read Free Book Online Page A

more information about the new superorganization,  MacGuire told Butler that it would be described publicly as a society "to maintain the Constitution." Butler observed dryly that the Constitution did not seem to be in any grave danger, then he bluntly asked what MacGuire's stake was in the enterprise. MacGuire shrugged that he was a businessman, and besides, he, his wife, and his children had enjoyed a long, expensive stay in Europe, courtesy of his backers.
    Taking his leave, MacGuire said that he was going to Miami to agitate again for the gold standard, as well as to get the new paramilitary organization rolling. He promised to contact Butler again after the Legion convention.
    After he had gone, the bemused general was almost tempted to dismiss the whole plot as the product of a disordered imagination-his or MacGuire's. But a grim sense of foreboding told him that he was in the eye of a gathering storm.
    There were too many things that MacGuire had told him that rang true, and could not possibly have been invented. Even as Butler brooded over the affair and wondered what to do about it, another of MacGuire's uncannily accurate predictions materialized two weeks after their talk.
    In September, 1934, the press announced the formation of a new organization, the American Liberty League, by discontented captains of industry and finance. They announced their objectives as "to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise."
    Denouncing the New Deal, they attacked Roosevelt for "fomenting class hatred" by using such terms as "unscrupulous money changers,"  "economic royalists," and "the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties."
    Butler's eyes widened when he read that the treasurer of the American Liberty League was none other than MacGuire's own boss, Grayson M.-P.
    Murphy, and one of its financiers was Robert S. Clark. Heading and directing the organization were Du Pont and J. P. Morgan and Company men. Morgan attorney John W. Davis was a member of the National Executive Committee-the same Davis that Clark had identified as author of the gold-standard speech MacGuire had tried to get Butler to make to the American Legion convention in Chicago.
    Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E. F. Hutton Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society, was-a generous patron, along with other members of the Pew family, of extremist rightwing causes. Other directors of the league included A1 Smith and John J. Raskob.
    Two organizations affiliated with the league were openly Fascist and antilabor. One was the Sentinels of the Republic, financed chiefly by the Pitcairn family and J. Howard Pew. Its members labeled the New Deal "Jewish Communism" and insisted "the old line of Americans of $1,200 a year want a Hitler."
    The other was the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, which the conservative Baltimore Sun described as "a hybrid organization financed by northern money, but playing on the Ku Klux Klan prejudices of the south." Its sponsor, John H. Kirby, collaborated in anti-Semitic drives against the New Deal with the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the first Silver Shirt squad of American storm troopers.
    "The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League," the New York Post subsequently charged, "are in turn spawning Fascism."
    Butler was stunned by this fulfillment of MacGuire's prediction. As he later testified, just at the time MacGuire had said it would, the American Liberty League had appeared and was all that MacGuire had said it would be. And it was obviously no  coincidence that Grayson M.-P. Murphy, Robert S. Clark, and the