So I just walked up to this terminal in a cafe and found a Google search window still open. Whoever had been here was looking for matches to "fascist presidents." Among the results was this resource: "How a fascist coup almost ousted FDR."

There's nothing conclusive on the page to back this up, but there is this story about the man who made the allegation, Smedley Darlington Butler.

"In the spring and summer of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, 20,000 impoverished World War I veterans descended upon Washington, D.C., begging the government to honor the cash bonuses that had been promised them. The so-called 'Bonus Army' erected Hooverville' across the Potomac River, where they slept under lean-tos made of newspaper, tin, bits of cardboard, or whatever they could scrounge.

"Then-retired general Butler, whose Quaker roots gave him a strong sense of social justice, addressed the 'troops,' expressing his support for their cause. Others in the military, however, were not as sympathetic. Under the command of President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas Macarthur, assisted by then-Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, used tanks and tear gas to flatten the Hooverville and rout the Bonus Army. Three died, including an eleven-week-old-baby; thousands more were injured by the gas.

"The treatment that Butler saw meted out to the homeless veterans of World War I by the U.S. government was no different than that he had seen dealt out to countless others of the poor and powerless. In 1935, he remarked on his illustrious military career: 'I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.' He had, in short, been the muscle for the American government's mafia-style foreign policy.

"Of course, Haitians and Mexicans don't vote in the United States, and the Bonus Army incident did little to endear President Hoover to the masses. He was booted out in the 1932 election, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced him. The new President immediately began making reforms, including a whole-scale restructuring of the nation's economic infrastructure and vast concessions to labor -- changes that hardly endeared him to Big Business. In 1934, Smedley Butler told a Congressional committee that several Wall Street brokers, represented by one Gerald C. MacGuire, had approached him, seeking his leadership for another group of veterans to march on Washington -- this time, an armed force that would make it clear to Roosevelt that it was either Wall Street's way or the highway. America had seen its own attempt at a Fascist coup."