Gerald C. MacGuire (1897-1935)

By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!

Jerry MacGuire, a bond salesman for Grayson M.-P. Murphy’s top Wall Street brokerage company, was a WWI veteran, and the former commander of the American Legion’s Connecticut branch. He was also on the staff of Louis Johnson, the Legion’s National Commander and a former Secretary of Defense.

MacGuire was the front man that corporate backers sent as emissary to meet General Butler and to recruit and manipulate him. MacGuire presented himself as chairman of the Legion’s “distinguished guest committee” and asked Butler to speak at their upcoming Chicago convention.

MacGuire was also an official on the Committee for a Sound Dollar and Sound Currency. Its goal was to return the U.S. to the gold standard. Until recently, gold had the basis for the value of U.S. currency. Wall Street bankers and financiers revered this standard as an inviolable principle and were infuriated when FDR changed their sacred financial system.

The McCormack-Dickstein committee learned that MacGuire was cashier for the Sound Dollar committee and for the creation of a mass veteran’s organization that only the hugely popular Butler could rally.

The committee also verified that MacGuire’s backers sent him to Europe for seven months to study the use of veterans’ organizations in empowering and sustaining fascist political movements and governments. His research mission was supposed to provide a potential model that they could use to ensure the success of a similar fascist yake over in America.

When the fascist plan began to unravel, thanks to General Butler’s efforts to expose it, MacGuire became the plotters’ expendable fall-guy. MacGuire’s paymasters did not cover for him when the Senate committee began probing into his suspicious expense accounts. MacGuire might have eventually spilled the beans, revealing more details about his financial backers and their plot. However, in March 1935, one month after the Committee’s final report, MacGuire died of natural causes, at the ripe old age of 37.

References:

Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, 1973.

John Spivak, New Masses, Jan. 27, 1935.

The Plot to Overthrow FDR, History TV, 1999.

Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

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