The Business Plot as Emergent Elite Collaboration

C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite, has to contend with what he describes as “willful co-ordination” (Mills [1956] 2000:20). In considering the role of the elites and of power, a study thereof will run into historical moments which seem to give weight to an un-academic, conspiratorial perspective of history—the Business Plot, for some, is one such moment. In 1933, a number of “financiers” (Archer 1973:31) had worked to convince retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler to lead a veteran army on Washington, unseating then-President Roosevelt and installing Butler as the nation’s new “Secretary of General Affairs” (Katz 2022). Butler did not intend to aid the plot, but told its representatives of his collaboration while pumping them for information. He would go in to testify in front of Congress as to the nature of the conspiracy. On first blush, to both contemporaneous and modern observers, the Business Plot might appear to be the exact kind of conspiracy that gives weight to visions of puppetmasters, hooded figures behind the scenes, and Wall Street fatcats putting plans in motion that were prevented by a true American patriot. But Mills, through his analysis of “willful co-ordination,” gives us a more lucid perspective on the Business Plot. His work allows us to look at the unity of psychologies and interests produced by the structure of the economic, governmental, and military orders, and to see those as causes of conspiracies like the Business Plot.
 

 

The image above shows Butler addressing the Bonus Army in 1932. In the midst of the Great Depression, some 20,000 veterans and families converged in Washington to demand they be paid a bonus they had been promised. Butler had joined them, his long and illustrious military career commanding respect and authority, and in the speech pictured, he was urging the veterans to stay encamped in protest (Katz 2022). While the House of Representatives would pass a bill to pay out the bonuses, the Senate rejected it. A few days later, General Douglas MacArthur led Army Cavalry in dispersing the protestors (Archer 1972:5). Both Butler and MacArthur, given their careers and position, can be qualified as military elite inasmuch as they “those who decide” national events—certainly not at the top of the military’s “gradation of power” (though MacArthur came very close), but under Mills’ definition, elite nonetheless ([1956] 2000:18). It is Butler’s influence over the Bonus Army in this image that led the plotters to select him as their strongman, and MacArthur’s charge against the Army that led them to avoid him (despite their preference for his politics).
 

 

The plotters referenced above made themselves known to Butler in 1933 through a man named Gerald C. MacGuire, and while he became the source for Butler of information regarding the plot—Butler decided early on to “get to the bottom of” things (Archer 1972:9)—MacGuire was not the only figure involved. Recalling Mills, we notice among the plotters referenced by MacGuire, met by Butler, and uncovered by later investigation an array of elites from the differing orders of America. On the military side of things, the plot was indeed lighter—this is why they had looked to involve Butler, MacArthur, or Hanford MacNider, a former commander of the American Legion (28). But besides those prospective Secretaries of General Affairs, figures who commanded influence among and indeed made decisions for America’s military community abounded in the conspiracy. Bill Doyle, commander of the Massachusetts American Legion, had made first contact with Butler alongside MacGuire (5). Similarly, when McGuire pressured and bribed Butler to call for the veteran’s bonuses to be paid out in gold, Butler learned that the checks he was offered came from Colonel Grayson Murphy and Second Lieutenant Robert Clark—who reportedly had been known as “the millionaire lieutenant” (11-12). Murphy also gives the historian insight into the economic elite working towards the Plot. After his military service, he operated a New York City brokerage firm. Other decision-makers in the financial world who funded and organized the plot included J. P. Morgan Jr. and the Du Pont family (28-29). Indeed, when the formation of the crypto-fascist veteran’s organization that Butler was to lead was announced in September 1934, the backers of the American Liberty League who had put their names in the public eye included Morgan, Du Pont, Rockefeller Associates, William S. Knudsen (senior director at General Motors who had been appointed Lieutenant General by the Roosevelt administration), and a vast number of other names (31). The public side of the League also reveals the governmental/political elite invested in the plot—many figures involved had made their names railing against the New Deal, often in explicitly fascist terms. Other governmental elites included former NY Governor Al Smith and former Democratic Party chair John J. Raskob, whose hands had been shown to Butler before the League went public (29). Through the work of authors like Jules Archer, the Business Plot appears at first as a long list of conspirators and interests. But it is through a Millsian lens that the causes of this collaboration can be best understood.
 

 

As mentioned briefly above, Mills offers in The Power Elite a non-conspiratorial means to understand power and the actions of the people who wield it. First is psychology, the inculcation by social lifestyles and institutional roles of a certain worldview. Owing to the enlargement of the domains of the military, the government, and the economy, the formal positions, and thus skill- and mind-sets held by the various elites are “interchangeable” (Mills [1956] 2000:10). They live and speak in the same social stratum, accepting and teaching and marrying each other (11)—this produces for Mills a “psychological and social unity.” Second, the “ever-increasing interlocking” of the various domains of American society produces a “structural coincidence of interest,” whereby what is useful and profitable for the CEO equals what is useful and lethal for the Joint Chief equals what is useful and electable for the senator. Mills, of course, is not blind to the existence of conspiracy, of “explicit co-ordination between elites” (8; 19)—such is his third key to understanding their power. His intervention against the conspiratorial perspective on history is instead to redirect our understanding of why that collaboration occurs. Rather than being the basis for elite unity, he writes, “the institutional mechanics of our time have opened up avenues to men pursuing their several interests” (20). Elites collaborate because they have a preexisting unity of psychologies and interests. Moreover, elites are not “those who rule America,” archly directing and redirecting the course of history unbeknownst to all but the most tinfoiled of observers. The Millsian theory of history instead sees both ‘consequential’ and ‘inconsequential’ decisions as affecting fate irrespective of the intentions of the decider, and the tightening of the circle of the elite serves only to limit the number of people who make those decisions.

 

With Mills in hand, then, we can return to the machinations of the Business Plot. We see in the tight-knit nature of its conspirators an echo of his first key to understanding power—Butler and MacArthur, and MacNider, Murphy, and Clark held the possibility of collaboration not because they necessarily had fought alongside each other directly, but because the higher-up positions of military officers require and produce similar psychologies, just as the roles of financiers and party chairmen ask similar mindsets of whichever seneschal serves at the time. We also notice a clear unity of interest, both across the board in financier’s preference for the fascist America of the Plot and in microcosm among the named backers of the American Liberty League. J. P. Morgan, Du Pont, and General Motors exist in largely different industries, but the interests of their domain are the same, and moreover those interests, via a historically Millsian interlocking of domains, come to be the same as those of former Senators and former military men. The American Liberty League did not spring up to promote the co-operation of its backers both before and below the rostrum. Instead, as Mills recognizes, the explicit collaboration of the League and the Plot emerges from existing alignment of military, governmental, and economic interest and psychology. Mills also gives us the fate of the Plot: “The course of great events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles. [...] The power of the elite does not necessarily mean that history is not also shaped by a series of small decisions” (21). Against the machinations of financiers, of lieutenants, and of former senators, Butler’s decision directed history.
 

 

 

Works Cited

Archer, Jules. 1973. The Plot to Seize the White House. New York: Hawthorn Books.

Katz, Jonathan M. 2022. “The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools.” Rolling Stone. Retrieved April 18, 2025 (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/coup-jan6-fdr-new-deal-business-plot-1276709/).

"Major General Smedley Butler addresses nearly 16,000 veteran bonus marchers." July 20, 1932. From rollingstone.com. Retrieved April 18, 2025. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/coup-jan6-fdr-new-deal-business-plot-1276709/

Mills, C. Wright. 2000. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.