When Plutocrats Plotted: America’s Brush with a Billionaire’s Coup

As we peel back the curtain to the early 1930s, we’re greeted not by the glitz and glamor of the Jazz Age but by the somber shadows of the Great Depression. This was an era that chewed up the Roaring Twenties and spat out a reality so stark, it made dystopian novels look like optimistic bedtime stories. The stock market had taken a swan dive into the Mariana Trench of economic despair, leaving a trail of bankruptcies, breadlines, and broken dreams in its wake. In this calamitous canvas, Franklin Delano Roosevelt emerged as the nation’s hopeful artist, armed with his palette of New Deal policies, aiming to color the United States with hues of recovery and reform. Yet, not everyone appreciated FDR’s artistic vision. To a select group of industrial moguls, his policies were less like strokes of genius and more akin to graffiti on the pristine walls of their financial empires. <a href="https://medium.com/@Tjkbrown/when-plutocrats-plotted-americas-brush-with-a-billionaire-s-coup-a79cbfdd2051">Learn More</a>