For those of you who don't know, this is the so-called "Business Plot" to overthrow FDR, that Smedley Butler says, that "Wall Street" asked him to lead.
Practically the only evidence of the plot comes from Butler himself, though there is some corroboration for his story. Butler also wondered if some of the plotters might not have been confidence men of some sort. One reason why he was set to wonder about this later, was because they asked him to lead the plot. Why would they ask Butler? Butler was a known left-winger by the time of 1934 and why would Gerald Maguire (the point man for the coup d'etat, a Wall Streeter, with connections to Du Pont and J.P. Morgan bank executives) approach him, Butler, in the first place? Butler's later idea I think was the following: Maguire was a con man and he had convinced a small group of wealthy industrialists and financeers centered around Du Pont and J.P. Morgan interests that he had the ability to control the American Legion, to capture the White House and depose FDR.
> >
> > Thomas Lamont also supervised gigantic "loans" by J.P. Morgan to
> > Mussolini during the twenties.
Oh this is just silly, not because it isn't true but because it is taken out of context.
Yes,J.P. Morgan loaned to Mussolini. But it was business not personal, Sonny.
And it was the grand business of the United States Government, also. It should be general knowledge (though perhaps its not) that to the U.S. State Department, and in U.S. business circles, Mussolini was a little darling when he first came to power. He was the whip-hand who could control those irrational Italians, as somebody said at the time.
He saved Italy from communism. Mussolini was held in high regard here in business circles and in the State Department until, like Saddam Hussein he got out of line and stopped obeying orders.
So the problem wasn't that the single bank J.P. Morgan gave massive loans to Mussolini for construction projects that helped to destroy huge portions of historical Rome, for example. (See _Mussolini's Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City_ by Borden Painter.) But that most of U.S. business, set U.S. foreign policy to support Mussolini.