-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Plot to Seize the White House
Jules Archer(C)1973
Hawthorne Books, Inc.
New York, NY
--[9]--
13
Press coverage of what was obviously a startling story of utmost importance to
the security of the nation was largely one of distortion, suppression, and
omission.
"In the case of the Liberty League-Legion-Wall Street conspiracy to overthrow
the United States Government," George Seldes declared in his book 1000
Americans, "there was one of the most reprehensible conspiracies of silence in
the long (and disgraceful) history of American journalism."
In his book Facts and Fascism he wrote, "Most papers suppressed the whole
story or threw it down by ridiculing it. Nor did the press later publish the
McCormack-Dickstein report which stated that every charge Butler made and
French corroborated had been proven true."
The most sensitive revelations, as far as the press was concerned, were those
touching upon connections with J. P. Morgan and Company and the powerful
interests represented by the American Liberty League. Heywood Broun, the
highly esteemed columnist for the New York World Telegram, once observed that
the face of The New York Times was "black with the Morgan shoepolish." Speaker
McCormack told me, "The Times is the most slanting newspaper in the world. I
would not expect anything else from them. They brainwash the American people.
It's an empire."
In fairness to The New York Times of today, however, I should quote their
severest critic, George Seldes, who wrote me in October, 1971, "1 find the
press [today] more liberal, too, especially The New York Times. (And I have
not grown mellow in my views, I think.)"
If the prestigious Times had distorted the Wall Street conspiracy story in
1934-1935, class-angling the news was obviously more pronounced in the heavily
anti-Roosevelt, pro-big-business press of that day, much of which derived huge
advertising revenues from corporations involved in the American Liberty
League.
Van Zandt wrote Butler on December 26, "The next time I see you I will explain
to you just how I became involved in the Nazi story. After I read your article
in the paper, the Commander of North Dakota and a few others asked me to give
them the lowdown which I did resulting that one of the boys carried the story
to the newspaper; therefore, causing such article to appear in print, and, of
course, misquoting me all around."
Butler replied on January 2, 1935, "I thought your statements on the Fascist
story were darn good and served to stir up the lines. However, I can guess how
it came about, but it did no harm."
14
The storm of controversy over his exposure of the plot led radio station WCAU
of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to urge Butler to make broadcasts for them two
to four nights a week. He agreed, and beginning on January 4 took to the
airwaves with hardhitting attacks on Fascist plotters. What he had to say was
impressive enough to make small headlines in the back pages of newspapers
sufficiently often to generate enthusiastic support from the nation's
veterans.
On January 7 the Miami, Oklahoma, post of V.F.W. passed a resolution: "Major
General Smedley D. Butler should be commended for his high type of patriotism
in exposing the alleged plot to establish a dictatorship in the United States,
and . . . Franklin D. Roosevelt, President, and citizens of the United States,
should express their appreciation of this exposure."
A movement began within the V.F.W. to have each post reaffirm its loyalty to
the President and the Constitution. "This, in my opinion, would serve notice
upon all plotters against our government," wrote Henry S. Drezner, V.F.W.
official of a Brooklyn post, "that the Veterans will not stand idly by while
an attempt should be made to destroy our form of government."
On January 31 a New Jersey veteran wrote Butler, "General, at this time I can
say you have 95 percent of the New Jersey veterans in back of you in anything
you do."
Two weeks later Dickstein declared that he intended to seek a new
congressional appropriation to press a thorough investigation into Butler's
charges.
"General Butler's charges were too serious to be dropped without further
investigation," Dickstein insisted. "He is a man of unquestioned sincerity and
integrity. Furthermore, in my opinion, his statements were not denied or
refuted. I think the matter should be gone into thoroughly and completely and
I intend asking Congress for funds to make such an investigation. The country
should know the full truth about these reputed overtures to General Butler. If
there are individuals or interests who have ideas and plans such as he
testified to, they should be dragged out into the open."
On February 15 McCormack submitted to the House of Representatives the
committee's findings in the investigation:
In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence
showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist
organization in this country.
No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection
between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country.
There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and
might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed
it expedient.
This committee received evidence from Maj. Gen Smedley D. Butler (retired),
twice decorated by the Congress of the United States. He testified before the
committee as to conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter
is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the
leadership of General Butler (p. 8-114 D.C. 6 11).
MacGuire denied these allegations under oath, but *YOUR COMMITTE WAS ABLE TO
VERIFY ALL PERTINENT STATEMENTS BY GENERAL BUTLER,* [*Italics are the
author's.] with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation
of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of
MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while
MacGuire was abroad studying the various forms of veterans organizations of
Fascist character (p. 111 D.C. 611).
There was also corroboration of this point in French's testimony. The
committee then cited an excerpt from the letter MacGuire had written to Clark
and Christmas from France praising the Croix de Feu as a model veterans
organization.
This committee asserts that any efforts based on lines as suggested in the
foregoing and leading off to the extreme right, are just as had as efforts
which would lead to the extreme left.
Armed forces for the purpose of establisbing a dictatorship by means of
Fascism or a dictatorship through the instrumentality of the proleteriat, or a
dictatorship predicated on racial and religious hatreds, have no place in this
country.
This total vindication of Butler did not burst like a bombshell across the
front pages of America. Instead, as Seldes noted, "Most newspapers again
suppressed or buried or belittled the official verdict."
The New York Times made no mention of the plot in its headlines on the
committee's report, emphasizing instead the committee's proposal that all
foreign propagandists--Fascist, Nazi, and Communist--be compelled to register
with the State Department. In the fifth and sixth paragraphs of the story the
Times briefly reported:
It also alleged that definite proof Had been found that the much publicized
Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major Gen. Smedley
D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually
contemplated. The committee recalled testimony by General Butler, saying he
had testified that Gerald C. MacGuire had tried to persuade him to accept the
leadership of a Fascist army.
And that was all.
15
John L. Spivak had been tipped off earlier by a fellow Washington
correspondent that some of Butler's testimony had been deleted in the
committee's November 26, 1934 report to the House of Representatives, and not
for national security reasons. Spivak determined to get a look at the complete
uncensored record of the testimony given at the executive session.
He had asked for permission to see it, in order to follow up leads on Nazi
activities in the United States, but he had been turned down on grounds that
no one outside the committee and its employees could see transcripts of
testimony taken in executive session.
Other newsmen, however, joined him in pressing for a copy of the Butler
testimony. It was then that the defunct McCormackDickstein Committee, possibly
to quiet persistent rumors about why it was being hushed up, decided to
publish a 125-page document containing the testimony of Butler, McGuire, and
others, on February 15, 1935. It was marked "Extracts," and the last page
explained why:
In making public the foregoing evidence, which was taken in executive session
in New York City from November 20 to 24, inclusive, the committee has ordered
stricken therefrom certain immaterial and incompetent evidence, or evidence
which was not pertinent to the inquiry, and which would not have been received
during a public hearing.
Spivak's newshawk instincts did not let him fully accept this explanation,
because he knew that the committee had published hearsay evidence. Like a
terrier worrying a rag doll, he persisted in trying to find out what evidence
had been cut. Other questions nagged at him. Why had the committee at first
announced it would subpoena all those named by Butler, only to declare later
that it had no evidence on which to question them? Was the clue to this abrupt
change of mind to be found in the censored testimony?
A veteran Washington correspondent told Spivak that he had heard the deletions
had been made at the request of a member of the President's Cabinet. The
implication was that release of certain names could embarrass the Democratic
party, because two had been unsuccessful Democratic candidates for the
Presidency --John W. Davis, the Morgan lawyer, and Al Smith, governor of New
York before Roosevelt.
Davis had been named in the committee's press release, but not Al Smith, the
erstwhile "happy warrior" from the slums of New York who had become codirector
with Irenee du Pont in the American Liberty League, and a bitter critic of
Roosevelt's liberalism and New Deal reform.
Spivak tried everything to check out the story but found himself up against a
brick wall at every turn.
He had been tipped off earlier that the House of Representatives intended to
let the McCormack-Dickstein Committee expire on January 3, 1935, rather than
renew it as the committee had asked in order to continue its investigations.
And die the committee did.
About a week later, seeking to do a story on its accomplishments in exposing
Nazi and anti-Semitic activities in the United States, Spivak won permission
from Dickstein to examine the committee's official exhibits and make
photostatic copies of those that had been made public. Dickstein wrote a
letter to this effect to the committee's secretary, Frank P. Randolph, and
added, "If necessary consult John [McCormack] about it."
Randolph, flooded with work involved in closing the committee's files and
records, gave Spivak stacks of documents, exhibits, and transcripts of
testimony that were being sent to the Government Printing Office. To Spivak's
amazement, he found among these records a full transcript of the executive
session hearings in the Butler affair.
Excited by this accidental stroke of luck, he compared it with the official
extract of the hearings and found a number of startling omissions made from
the testimony of both Butler and French, some of which could not be justified
on grounds of hearsay evidence. Spivak copied down the censored material.
In 1971 I asked former Speaker McCormack if he could recall, after thirty-four
years, the reasons for these omissions from the official record of the
testimony at the hearings.
"I don't recall striking anything from the record," he told me, "but if I did,
it was because I tried to be as careful as I could about hearsay evidence in
open hearings. Executive hearings were different. We'd let people say anything
there because we'd get lots of valuable tips to follow up that way. But in
open hearings I insisted that all the evidence had to be pertinent, relevant,
and germane-evidence that would stand up in a courtroom to the nth degree. I
don't think all investigative committees follow this method, but they should.
I wanted to be very careful about safeguarding the character of anyone who
might be named, without hard evidence, by a witness in testimony at an open
hearing, so if somebody gave hearsay evidence, I would say, 'Strike it out."'
Omissions from the official record of some revelations from the testimony of
Butler and French gave the American press, with a few minor exceptions, a
legitimate excuse to keep silent about them. It was significant that none of
the biggest newspaper chains or wire services saw fit to assign crack
reporters to dig into what was obviously one of the biggest news stories of
the decade.
John L. Spivak could not help wondering why MacGuire, the key to the plot, had
not been compelled to testify on where and how he had obtained his advance
inside information about Al Smith's plans, Hugh Johnson's firing, and the
appearance of the American Liberty League; or why he had not been asked to
reveal the sources of his information about the Morgan and Du Pont interests'
involvement in the plot.
Worst of all, no one involved in the plot had been prosecuted. Spivak went to
the Department of justice and pointed out that MacGuire had denied essential
parts of Butler's testimony, which the committee itself reported it had proved
by documents, bank records, and letters. Did the department intend to file a
criminal prosecution against MacGuire for perjury or involvement in the plot?
"I was told," Spivak reported, "it had no plans to prosecute."
Roger Baldwin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union, issued an angry
statement on the curious apathy of the Justice Department in punishing any of
the miscreants:
The Congressional Committee investigating un-American activities has just
reported that the Fascist plot to seize the government . . . was proved; yet
not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language
of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime. Imagine the action if
such a plot were discovered among Communists!
Which is, of course, only to emphasize the nature of our government as
representative of the interests of the controllers of property. Violence, even
to the seizure of government, is excusable on the part of those whose lofty
motive is to preserve the profit system....
Powerful influences had obviously been brought to bear to cut -short the
hearings, stop subpoenas from being issued to all the important figures
involved, and end the life of the committee.
The Philadelphia Record, which broke the story by French, had these
observations in an editorial:
General Butler deserves the highest praise for recognizing the significance of
the offers made to him, and the menace they represent. "I'm a democrat, not a
Fascist," General Butler says, "and I was sick and tired of being linked by
rumor to this Fascist movement and that one. I believe in the right to vote,
the right to speak freely and the right to write whatever one believes. . . .
I am certainly not going to lead a movement to destroy the very principles in
which I believe." General Butler performed a great public service and showed
himself a true American by taking his information to the McCormack committee.
The Record condemned phony "popular" movements like the National Economy
League, a front for big business, and added:
Some of the same interests behind the League, according to General Butler, are
behind this effort to use him and his soldier following in defense of special
privilege in America. The same people who succeeded in slashing aid to
veterans would like to use those same veterans as their pawns in a war on
democracy.
The folk who want Fascism in this country are the same folk who made profit
while others bled and who would rather see the veteran starve than unbalance
the budget, i.e., add -to the burden of taxes on great wealth. They did it in
Italy. They did it in Germany. They did it in Austria. They will try to do it
in America.... General Butler has nipped one such movement in the bud.
John L. Spivak had shrewd observations about the reasons the conspirators had
failed dismally in their treason:
The takeover plot failed because though those involved had astonishing talents
for making breathtaking millions of dollars, they lacked an elementary
understanding of people and the moral forces that activate them. In a money-
standard civilization such as ours, the universal regard for anyone who is
rich tends to persuade some millionaires that they are knowledgeable in fields
other than the making of money. The conspirators went about the plot as if
they were hiring an office manager; all they needed was to send a messenger to
the man they had selected.
And with incredible ineptitude, they had selected the wrong man.
16
Was it possible that MacGuire had exaggerated to both Butler and French about
the powerful and influential figures involved in the plot, in order to impress
Butler into accepting the leadership of the Fascist putsch that MacGuire was
in charge of planning?
It is conceivable that some of those named by MacGuire as under consideration
for the role of dictator or subordinate positions of leadership had no
knowledge of this fact, although Van Zandt reported that he, for one, had been
approached. It is unlikely that Douglas MacArthur, as Chief of Staff and a
stiffnecked hero with patriotic credentials as unchallengeable as Butler's,
would have had any unsavory dealings with the plotters, however patrician his
outlook.
As for involvement of the American Legion, MacGuire had obviously been
influential enough in the organization to have been made chairman of the
"distinguished guest committee" of its convention, on the staff of National
Commander Louis Johnson, former Secretary of Defense and head of, a large law
firm in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
There is solid evidence that MacGuire had been able to use the Legion to do
mutimillionaire Robert S. Clark's bidding and get the Legion to pass a
resolution demanding a return to the gold standard.
MacGuire was certainly financed by Clark, Christmas, Walter E. Frew, of the
Corn Exchange Bank, and others through the Committee for a Sound Dollar and
Sound Currency, Inc., of which MacGuire was an official. And the McCormack-
Dickstein Committee verified that he had been sent abroad to study Fascist
organizations in Europe as models for creating one in America and had reported
favorably to Clark and Christmas about the Croix de Feu.
MacGuire had outlined to Butler and French the conspirators' plans for a
putsch, indicating it would easily succeed in just a few days because a "big
fellow" organization-later identified by Butler and French as the American
Liberty League-was behind it with money and arms.
He might have been boasting falsely about having had his headquarters while in
Paris at the offices of Morgan and Hodges and about the involvement of the
Morgan interests in the plot. The McCormack-Dickstein Committee failed to
pursue this line of investigation, but a remarkable number of "coincidences"
linked the Morgan interests to various facets of the plot.
Colonel Grayson M.-P. Murphy, MacGuire's boss who had supported his denial of
Butler's charges by insisting, "I don't believe there is a word of truth in
it with respect to Mr. MacGuire," was a director of a Morgan bank. Butler
testified that Clark had implicated John W. Davis, attorney for J. P. Morgan
and Company, as author of the speech Clark had given MacGuire to get Butler to
deliver at the Legion convention. Davis was the same man from whom MacGuire
had declared he could easily raise a million dollars for his Fascist army.
MacGuire had also revealed to Butler that the same financial interests who had
been behind the gold-standard propaganda were financing the plot to seize the
White House.
The formation of the American Liberty League had been announced precisely at
the time MacGuire had predicted the emergence of an organization of "big
fellows" who were in the background of the Fascist putsch. Its treasurer had
been none other than Colonel Grayson M.-P. Murphy. One of its financial
backers was Robert S. Clark. Two of the largest contributors had been the J.
P. Morgan Associates and the Du Pont interests. John W. Davis was a member of
the National Executive Committee. Morgan and Du Pont men were directors. And
MacGuire had told French that the putsch could obtain arms and equipment from
the Remington Arms Company, in which the Du Ponts held a controlling interest,
on credit through the Du Ponts.
The presence of ex-Governor Al Smith in the American Liberty League baffled
many Americans who could not understand what the former poor kid from the
Bowery was doing mixed up with America's richest ultraconservatives. Few
realized that following his defection from the Roosevelt camp, Smith entered
private business as chairman of the board of the New York County Trust Company
and joined in erecting the Empire State Building, of which he was corporation
president.
His alliance with Raskob and the Du Ponts in the League brought charges that
he had "forsaken the brown derby for the top hat." When he failed to stop
Roosevelt's renomination in 1936, he stumped for Republican candidate Alf
Landon, losing much of his former popularity in the process and speaking to
dwindling, hostile audiences.
Were all the interlacing connections linking MacGuire, Clark, Colonel Murphy,
and the Morgan and Du Pont interests to the plot only a series of remarkable
coincidences? If so, another unique coincidence led the American Liberty
League to subsidize such affiliated organizations as the openly Fascist and
anti-Semitic Sentinels of the Republic and the Crusaders, who were urged by
their leader, George W. Christians, to consider lynching Roosevelt.
One night when the President was scheduled to arrive in Chattanooga,
Christians threatened to cut off the city's electric power and warned grimly,
"Lots of things can happen in the dark!" This protege of the American Liberty
League was kept under surveillance by the Secret Service.
As Donald R. McCoy observed in his book, Coming of Age: The United States
During the 1920's and 1930's, ". . . it was clear to most people that the
organization [American Liberty League] was playing the same game on the Right
as the radical groups were playing on the Left, to influence the [Roosevelt]
administration and if unsuccessful to oppose it. As James Farley would later
say, the American Liberty League 'ought to be called the American Cellophane
League' because 'first it's a Du Pont product and second, you can see right
through it.'"
Finally, one must consider the outlook of the conspirators against the
background of the times. During the feverish atmosphere of the early New Deal
days, big business was horrified by Roosevelt's drastic surgery on the broken-
down machinery of the capitalist system. The savage hatred of "that cripple in
the White House" represented the most bitter animosity big business had ever
manifested toward any President in American history.
Their hate campaign was echoed by the vast majority of newspapers, like the
Hearst press, which had originally supported the President, then denounced him
as a dictator. Roosevelt had been compelled to turn to "fireside chats" over
the radio in order to communicate with the American people over the heads of
the press lords.
In that emotional climate it was not at all surprising that some elements of
big business should have sought to emulate their counterparts in Germany and
Italy, supporting a Fascist putsch to take over the government and run it
under a dictator on behalf of America's bankers and industrialists.
That it did not happen here could be credited largely to the patriotism and
determination of one courageous AmericanMajor General Smedley Darlington
Butler.
pp. 190-202
--[next--
PART F0UR
Fallout
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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