Part 1 explained why the British, and their Wall Street allies, the Morgans, hated President Franklin D. Roosevelt and how FDR battled to reduce their influence and power. Part 2 continued the story of FDR's fight and laid out Morgan's counterattack, featuring a 1934 plan for a fascist coup against the FDR White House, which the Morgans hoped would be led by the Marine hero, Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler. Part 3 began the story of explosive congressional hearings in which Butler exposed the Morgan plot...
However, the attention of most of the press focused on the first paragraph of the summary statement: ``This committee has had no evidence before it that would in the slightest degree warrant calling before it such men as John W. Davis, General Hugh Johnson, General James G. Harbord, Thomas W. Lamont, Admiral William S. Sims or Hanford MacNider. The committee will not take cognizance of names brought into testimony which constitutes mere hearsay. This committee is not concerned about premature newspaper accounts, when given and published prior to the taking of testimony.''
Whatever was being done by the committee was being worked out directly with the White House, and most likely with Roosevelt himself. That was the reason for the hinting about the calling of big names, and then the apparent pullback from that posture. From the point that Butler had stepped forward and likely even before that, the White House knew that it had caught its enemies in the act of treason. From the point of its public revelation, prior to the committee hearing, by the reporter French, and then in the hearing itself, the attempted fascist coup was a dead letter: It could no longer happen as planned, under any circumstances.
The Morgan interests and their allies were named by Butler, and now their names appeared in the first paragraph of the committee's summary. There had been 16 people named by Butler, ...
The story would have probably stayed buried, had it not been for a discovery made by the journalist John L. Spivak, who wrote for the Communist-linked magazine New Masses. He had been tipped by a source in Washington that the committee's report had been ``sanitized,'' that sections of General Butler's testimony had been deleted, especially the parts where he named some of the Wall Street conspirators, other than Clark, Murphy, and MacGuire, and including the references to Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and John W. Davis, the Morgan lawyer, as well General Butler's statements about the American Liberty League.
Spivak went to check out the story, and to see McCormack and Dickstein. With their approval he was told that he should look through some committee records. At this point, according to the journalist, he was ``inadvertently'' handed the unexpurgated transcript of the Butler hearings by a file clerk of the committee. He furiously copied down sections of the texts showing the deletions and then took what he found to Butler.
The general exploded, as only Smedley Butler could explode. He took to the radio in a campaign denouncing the committee for bowing to the power of Wall Street and for censoring his remarks. Meanwhile, Spivak published an exposé of the ``coverup'' in New Masses, charging a wide-ranging conspiracy to bury the true origins of the plot and political deals to protect those who would commit treason. Dickstein defended the committee's action, stating that what had been deleted had only been ``hearsay,'' but in so doing repeated the substance of General Butler's charges against the Morgan operatives and Al Smith.
It is hardly likely that a clerk would have handed the ``secret'' text of the committee proceedings to a person known to be a leftist rabble-rouser: Dickstein had deliberately ``leaked'' them, to keep the information before the public.
The furor about the ``censorship'' kept the news of the ``Wall Street plot'' circulating through veteran, labor union, and leftist circles, which in the 1930s, comprised a good portion of the electorate. It kept circulating in these layers as a minor backdrop to the 1936 election campaign, without the benefit of major media coverage.
Spivak and author George Seldes charged elements in the administration with preventing a further investigation and sabotaging indictments of the named conspirators. Butler had originally brought the information about the plot to the Secret Service, which is under the control of the Treasury Department.
In early 1934, an ailing William Woodin had been replaced by covert British operative Henry Morgenthau, whose function in this period was to prevent Roosevelt from moving for a more comprehensive banking reorganization. Morgenthau killed any investigation of Butler's information, but some agents apparently informed the McCormack-Dickstein committee of the charges of the plot.
FBI Director, Edgar Hoover was also informed, and refused to investigate...
With the publication of the committee report, Roosevelt had been given an opportunity to achieve a strategic victory against the British-dominated cabal that was the historic enemy of the American republic. But, Roosevelt sought no strategic victory, only a tactical advantage against his adversaries. There would be no cleaning house over the fascist plot, and he backed off from the threat of a major reform of the banking system outside the bounds acceptable to London. He sought not to defeat the power that the British-controlled Morgan represented as an enemy, but merely to tame it towards his end. His was a factional battle within the patrician camp, not some battle with evil, as it more properly had to be understood...
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