-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Plot to Seize the White House
Jules Archer(C)1973
Hawthorne Books, Inc.
New York, NY
--[3]--
PART TWO
The Indispensable Man
1.
Smedley Darlington Butler was born July 30, 1881, in West Chester,
Pennsylvania, the first of three sons. Both his parents came from old and
distinguished Quaker families. Some of his forebears included pacifists, who
had operated an underground railroad station for runaway slaves, and
grandparents who had joined the Union Army to defend Gettysburg against Robert
E. Lee's army.
On his mother's side he was descended from the Hicksite branch of the Society
of Friends and Congressman Smedley Darlington, the grandfather for whom he was
named. His paternal lineage traced back to Noble Butler, who came to America
shortly after William Penn.
His father, Thomas S. Butler, was a bluntly outspoken judge who spent thirty-
two years in Congress, where he wielded great influence as chairman of the
House Naval Affairs Committee. Once when he had advocated a large Navy, a
close Quaker friend reproached him, "Thee is a fine Friend!"
"Thee," the fine Friend snorted, "is a damn fool!"
The Quaker archaisms thee, thy, and thine were used only within the family and
sometimes to intimate friends. The Quakerism of both Thomas Butler and his son
Smedley was of that order of earlier hot-tempered Quakers who belabored each
other with wagon tongues, while pausing between the hearty blows they
exchanged to invoke divine forgiveness.
Smedley picked up some of his father's uninhibited language as early as age
five, inviting maternal chastisement until his father went to his defense by
roaring, 'I don't want a son who doesn't know how to use an honest damn now
and then!"
Reared in upper-class comfort with a politically prominent father,
grandfather, and uncles, it was taken for granted that he was marked for
prominence. Subtle pressures were exerted by four maiden aunts who adored and
fussed over their first nephew, keeping him in golden curls and dressing him
in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. jeering peers who mistook the clothes for
the boy found his fistwork as fancy as his finery.
Stirred by tales of both his grandfathers in the Union Army, he developed a
passionate love for tin soldiers, toy cannon, and books with pictures of
battles. His mother, Maud Darlington Butler, sought to inculcate peaceful
doctrines in her son by taking him to Hicksite Quaker meeting twice a week and
sending him to the Friends' grade school in West Chester.
However, his early fascination with things martial persisted. When he was
twelve, he joined a West Chester branch of the Boys' Brigade, a preparedness
youth movement that went in for military drills. His father had no objection
and even bought his son the first uniform Smedley ever wore. He felt proud.
At Haverford Preparatory School near Philadelphia, a popular choice of old
Quaker families, he joined both the baseball and the football teams. Although
he was younger and lighter than his teammates, his fighting spirit, qualities
of leadership, candor, and fair dealing made him highly popular and won him
the captaincy of both teams.
He was only a little over sixteen and a half on February 15, 1898, when the
U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor at 9:40 P.m. Americans began
chanting, "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain," around public bonfires,
and volunteer companies marched happily off to war singing, "We'll Hang
General Weyler to a Sour Apple Tree."
Young Butler found himself swept up by the excitement. Struggling with math
and English seemed a hopelessly insipid pursuit, with the newspapers full of
blazing accounts of the terrible brutality of Spanish masters of the little
Caribbean island they had enslaved. Smedley yearned to join the noble crusade
to liberate Cuba in the company of the fine fellows he saw marching off from
West Chester daily.
Fearful of revealing his aspirations to his parents, he attempted a fait
accompli by seeking to enlist with the 6th Pennsylvania Volunteers in his
hometown. Rejected as under age, he braced himself to corner his father in the
sunlit library of their house on Miner Street one morning.
"Father," he said, "I want to enlist. Thee could get me into the Navy, as an
apprentice, if necessary."
Thomas Butler tugged at his thick handlebar moustache with stubby fingers,
regarding his slender son skeptically. "I have known of thy desire to go to
war. But thee is too young."
Smedley's jaw jutted. "If thee won't help me, I'll run away and join the
general army!"
"If thee does, it will avail thee nothing," his father said quietly. "I will
see that they discharge thee."
One night the crestfallen youth overheard his father tell his mother privately
that Congress had authorized an increase of the Marine Corps by two thousand
men and twenty-four second lieutenants for the duration of the war. "The
Marine Corps is a finely trained body of men," his father said. "Too bad
Smedley is so young. He seems determined to go."
A new idea took root. Smedley had seen a Marine in West Chester--a young god
in a magnificent uniform of dark blue coat decorated with many shiny buttons,
and light blue trousers with scarlet stripes running down the seams. Wouldn't
a fellow cut a fine figure in that! That night he fell asleep with visions of
himself as a faultlessly tailored Marine charging up a Cuban hill, his Mamluk
hilt sword pointed forward, inspiring the men behind him in a victorious
charge.
At breakfast, heart pounding, he gave his mother an ultimatum. "I'm going to
be a Marine. If thee doesn't come with me and give me thy permission, I'll
hire a man to say he is my father. And I'll run away and enlist in some
faraway regiment where I'm not known!"
His mother reluctantly agreed to accompany him by train to Marine Corps
headquarters in Washington, without telling his father. In the competitive
examination for Marine lieutenants he ranked second among two hundred
applicants. joyfully he heard the gates of childhood close behind him; ahead
beckoned the exciting world of manhood and adventure. But he swallowed hard
when he had to face his father and admit that he had won acceptance in the
Marine Corps by adding two years to his age.
"Well," his father sighed. "if thee is determined to go, thee shall go. But
don't add another year to thy age, my son. Thy mother and I weren't married
until 1879!"
He could scarcely contain his pride when his lean, wiry frame was encased in a
crisp new uniform. Only average in height with sloping shoulders, one higher
than the other, the new second lieutenant nevertheless managed to look
properly fierce because of a long, large nose and a pair of blazing,
protruding eyes that gave him the bold look of a young adventurer. Huge-
handed, he had a husky voice that quickly developed into a leatherneck growl,
and a lively sense of humor that appealed to his fellow Marines.
His first glimpse of war came the day he arrived at Santiago, Cuba, on July 1,
1898, past a Spanish cruiser still burning in the harbor. Rigid with
excitement, he boarded another ship that took him to Guantanamo Bay, where he
joined the Marine Battalion of the North Atlantic Squadron.
Next day Mancil C. Goodrell, the captain of Butler's company, took him on a
two-man reconnaissance of enemy positions. As they moved along a mountain
trail, a shot rang out, and a bullet whizzed past Butler's head. He flung
himself prone and hugged the earth, his heart beating wildly.
"what in hell is the matter?" Goodrell demanded.
"That was a ... bullet."
"Well, what if it was? A little excitement now and then keeps you from going
stale."
Soldiering under Goodrell, who had had no formal military education, Butler
became infused with the spirit of the Corps. He relished the bonds of
comradeship, the fierce loyalties, the cool courage, the pride in being a
Marine that united men who considered themselves a fighting elite.
The officers were all professional soldiers who chewed tobacco, drank raw
whiskey, cursed a blue streak, drilled the tails off their troops in garrison,
and were experts on the Lee straightpull 6-mm. rifle, Gatling gun, and
Hotchkiss revolving cannon. Thoroughly unorthodox, wild in their humor, they
were fierce warriors who set an example for their men in battle by often
fighting on after they were wounded.
In young Butler's eyes they were heroes all.
He was enormously proud of his first two decorations-the Spanish and West
Indian Campaign medals. But he was even prouder simply of being a full-fledged
leatherneck who had shared the bonds of a campaign with the Marines of
Guantanamo. By the time his battalion returned home, he and two other young
Marine officers-John A. Lejuene and Buck Nevillehad become an inseparable
trio. Lejuene and Neville were each destined to rise to the rank of commandant
of the Marine Corps.
"The Spanish-American War was a high point in my life when I went to it at the
age of sixteen," Butler later reminisced wryly, "to defend my home in
Pennsylvania against the Spaniards in Cuba."
2.
Commissioned a first lieutenant on April 8, 1899, Butler left four days later
with a battalion of three hundred Marines bound for the Philippines. Emilio
Aguinaldo bad begun a revolution against American occupation of the islands
following Spain's surrender.
He led his company at the head of a battalion attack on Nocaleta, a fiercely
defended rebel stronghold that the Spaniards had never been able to take.
Stumbling onto concealed trenches and rifle pits, his company met with a
blanket of heavy fire. The men went prone, waiting for his orders.
Desperation overcoming fright, Butler sprang to his feet, waving the company
to charge and open fire. The battle drove the insurgents back from the trench.
He pursued them through waist-high rice paddies until they turned and fled.
He grew increasingly confident of his ability to survive after several more
skirmishes had driven the Aguinaldo forces north to mountain strongholds. His
pride in the Corps kept growing. When a Japanese tattoist turned up in the
Navy yard at Cavite, he had an enormous Marine Corps emblem tattoed across his
chest. Infection from the tattoist's needle brought him down with a raging
fever.
In June, 1900 he was ordered to a new Asian outpost of trouble under Major
Littleton Tazewell Waller, a crusty bantam of a man with a fierce moustache.
The Marines sailed for China to rescue the American legation, which had been
imperiled by the Boxer uprising. The expedition numbered only a hundred
Marines, but by the time they arrived in China, the situation had reached
crisis proportions.
All of North China was now up in arms against the foreign powers who had
carved the country into colonial spheres of influence. The Chinese bitterly
resented the alien flags that flew over the imperialist compounds and the
foreign ships that dominated Chinese ports, flooding the country with Western
goods. Most infuriating of all were entrance signs the foreign legations had
posted at their luxurious clubs: "Forbidden to dogs and Chinese." Eventually
the allied nations had to send over 100,000 troops to protect their nationals.
The eighteen-year-old Butler, who had no understanding of the political causes
of the Boxer Rebellion, saw his role simply as that of a Marine doing his duty
to protect American citizens on foreign soil. Waller received word that the
legation compound at Tientsin, twenty-five miles inland, was in desperate
straits. A small defending force of allied soldiers was trying to hold off
fifty thousand attacking Boxers.
Waller, Butler, and their ninety-eight men were joined by a column of four
hundred Russians also en route to relieve the siege. At a gray mud village
later known as Boxertown, bursts of heavy fire suddenly exploded from trenches
on all sides. The Russians, who received the brunt of it, fell back swiftly
through the lines of the Marines. Waller's men flattened on the plain,
returning the fire.
Three Marines were killed, nine wounded. Ordered to withdraw, Butler counted
noses and found a private named Carter missing. With a lieutenant named
Harding and four privates, he ran a gauntlet of fire to search for him.
Locating Carter in a ditch, Butler found that his leg had been broken. While
the four privates fought off Boxers, Butler and Harding removed their shirts
to bandage Carter's legs together, carrying him off between them. It took them
an excruciating four hours to fight seven miles through the whine of
persistent bullets to catch up with the company. Tripped several times by his
sword, Butler unbuckled it in exasperation and flung it away.
During the weary retreat of the Marines, Butler constantly fought off an urge
to collapse and give himself over to sleep or death, without caring too much
which. Suddenly the crack of a bullet was followed by a dull sound right next
to him. Startled, he looked up to see a stream of blood flowing down the face
of a grizzled sergeant. The veteran Marine made no sound, just scowled, pulled
his hat over the wound, and continued the pace of the march. It was an image
of tough Marine courage that engraved itself on Butler's memory.
Stumbling on through a fierce North China dust storm with a raging toothache,
his heels rubbed raw by marches that began at 2:30 A.M., famished by hunger,
Butler was so miserable that Boxer gunfire seemed the mildest of his torments.
The Marines finally joined forces with a newly arrived column of three
thousand international troops and fought their way through to the Tientsin
compound. Routing a Chinese cohort, they broke the siege as overjoyed women
and children rushed out to hug their rescuers.
The international troops defending the Tientsin compound were soon reinforced
by an allied army of seven thousand men. On July 13, 1900 they attacked the
native walled city of Tientsin to rout the Boxers from their stronghold.
Butler was in the forefront of the assault, which required breaking through an
outer mud wall twenty feet high and crossing fifteen hundred yards of rice
paddies to an inner high stone wall.
Leading his company through a hail of Chinese shells and snipers' bullets, he
climbed over the mud wall only to find himself dropping into a moat. The
Chinese had flooded the paddies between the walls. He and his men splashed
through the morass, slipping and lurching in waist-high muck as they sought to
fire their weapons. When they approached the inner wall gate, thousands of
Chinese on the wall poured down a withering fire, forcing Butler to order a
retreat.
A tall private next to him named Partridge was hit and seriously wounded.
Butler and two Marines carried him above water level through the rain of
bullets splashing around them.
A burning sensation in his right thigh puzzled Butler momentarily until he
realized he had been shot. Ignoring his wound, he continued to help carry
Partridge until they reached some high ground. There he applied first aid to
the private's wounds, then limped off in search of a medic for him.
By the time he found a Marine doctor, blood was pouring copiously out of his
own wound. He protested volubly when the doctor, who outranked him, insisted
on treating him first. By the time he got the doctor back to Partridge, the
private was dead. Grieved and angry, he refused to leave when the doctor
ordered him to the rear with the other wounded.
His first lieutenant, Henry Leonard, and a sergeant insisted on dragging him
off to the other side of the mud wall. Here he was joined by a Marine
lieutenant who had been wounded in the left leg. Tying their disabled legs
together, they hobbled three-legged back to the nearest first-aid station.
When they had been treated and bandaged, they helped dress the wounds of
hundreds of casualties now pouring in.
Recommending Butler for promotion, Major Waller declared, "I have before
mentioned the fine qualities of Mr. Butler in control of men, courage, and
excellent example in his own person of all the qualities most admirable in a
soldier."
On July 23, 1900 a week before he turned nineteen, Butler was made captain
while recuperating in the hospital. The enlisted men who had helped him rescue
Private Carter at Boxertown received Medals of Honor which, until 1914, were
not awarded to officers. But Butler's promotion took cognizance of his
heroism, citing his "distinguished conduct and public service in the presence
of the enemy."
Insisting that his leg was fully healed, he painfully concealed a limp; until
he had nagged the doctors into getting rid of him with a hospital discharge so
that he could lead his men on a march to relieve the siege of Peking. They
were part of a large, colorful international army that included French Zouaves
in red and blue, Italian Bersaglieri with plumed helmets, Royal Welsh
Fusiliers with ribbons down their napes, Bengal cavalry on Arab stallions,
turbaned Sikhs, Germans in pointed helmets, and flamboyantly uniformed troops
of half a dozen other countries.
Butler's leg wound throbbed painfully, and he suffered spells of sickness from
polluted water and food. His stomach was not soothed by sights en route to
Peking: two Japanese soldiers, eyes and tongues cut out, nailed to a door; an
old Chinese mandarin pinned to his bed by a huge sword; village streets strewn
with fly-covered corpses, their skulls smashed in. The Boxers were just as
ruthless with Chinese "traitors" as with luckless foreigners.
In one village a Chinese family, frightened by the allied army's approach,
jumped into a canal and tried to drown themselves. Butler and his men rescued
them and pinioned them firmly while an interpreter explained that the troops
would not harm them. After some animated conversation, the interpreter told
him, "Captain, these people say that since you have saved their lives, you are
responsible for them as guardians and must now take care of them."
"Good-bye!" yelled Butler, racing off with his men.
Reaching the outskirts of Peking, they ran into blistering fire from the top
of the city's stone and mud wall. They joined a combined five-thousand-man
American and British force hastily digging a trench before the city.
One British private left the trench in an attempt to wipe out a Chinese
strongpoint at one gate but was hit between the trench and wall. Butler's
friend, Henry Leonard, sped out to rescue him but was shot and badly wounded.
Clearing the trench at a bound, Butler raced through fire to reach him, but
Leonard proved able to scramble back on his own, so Butler lifted the wounded
Tommy on his back instead and staggered back to the trench with him.
Just as he eased the British soldier over the parapet, a stunning blow hit him
in the chest. Whirling and falling, he lost consciousness briefly.
When be recovered, he heard one Marine say he'd been shot through the heart.
He tried to speak but found he had no breath to vocalize. His shirt was torn
open, and it was discovered that a bullet had struck the second button of his
military blouse, flattening it and driving it into his chest. The button had
gouged a hole in the eagle of the Marine Corps emblem he bad had tattooed on
his chest in the Philippines. The wound was not serious, although for weeks
afterward his bruised chest ached painfully, and he spat blood when he
coughed.
He was later congratulated by General A. R. R. Dorward, commanding general of
the British contingent, who called Butler's rescue of the wounded Tommy the
bravest act be had ever seen on the battlefield and recommended him for the
Victoria Cross. But the American Government in those days did not permit an
American officer to accept foreign decorations of any kind.
By August 14 Peking was in the hands of the allies, and the Boxer Rebellion
was crushed. Butler's company of Marines, the longest in China, had suffered
the greatest casualties in the fighting--twenty-six killed or wounded.
Exhausted, Butler now came down with a bad case of typhoid fever that wasted
his already spare frame down to a skeletonized ninety pounds.
3.
The ailing captain was shipped to a naval hospital at Cavite, from which he
was invalided home to San Francisco. Arriving on December 31, 1900, be was
embraced at the port by his worried father and mother, who had rushed to the
West Coast to meet him. But during his convalescence he had gained thirty
pounds-and was almost fully recovered. He returned home with his parents
resplendent in his dress blues with two new decorations--a Marine Corps Brevet
Medal for "eminent and conspicuous personal bravery" and a China Campaign
Medal.
The town of West Chester gave him a hero's reception attended by the Secretary
of the Navy and the commandant of the Marine Corps. It was a heady tribute for
a boy not yet twenty.
His parents now suggested that since his enlistment period was about up, and
be had done more than his duty in serving his country, he might want to return
to his Quaker heritage in civilian life. As a boy he had sometimes talked of
becoming a civil engineer. Why not go to college and study for it?
He found himself powerless to explain why be felt bound to the blue
brotherhood; to make his parents understand his deep pride in the Corps, the
warm bonds of solidarity that united Marines, the enjoyable excitement of
danger, the honor of being foremost in defense of the nation and its citizens.
Any other way of life seemed pale and drab by comparison.
"I'm reenlisting," he told them.
On October 31, 1902, he was put in command of a company of 101 men and shipped
to the island of Culebra twenty miles east of Puerto Rico. There was trouble
in Panama, and Butler's company was part of two battalions being stationed in
reserve on Culebra while the fleet, under Admiral George Dewey, conducted
maneuvers offshore.
Living on field rations and fighting scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas,
the Marines built docks and other naval constructions. In the midst of their
perspiring labors Squadron Admiral Joe Coghlan sent 125 Navy gunnery experts
ashore to challenge Butler and his men to a race in dragging five-inch coastal
guns up four-hundred-foot hills. Admiral Dewey sent word that a victory shot
was to be fired from the first gun mounted.
Stripped to the waist, Butler worked like a madman alongside his men to prove
the superiority of leathernecks over bluejackets. At sunrise a jubilant Butler
ordered his men to fire a victory shot. The shell sailed over Admiral Deweys
flagship, landing a mile beyond. Instead of congratulating the winners, the
furious hero of Manila Bay sent Butler an icy reprimand for reckless firing."
Their reward was an order to dig a canal. The work was backbreaking, with the
ground solid rock in many places, marshland in others, all tenaciously guarded
by a ferocious mosquito army. And the Navy insisted that they had to work
under the broiling tropic sun in full uniform with leggings.
Unwilling to inflict any' ordeal upon his men that he was not willing to
endure himself, Butler wielded a shovel in the ditch beside them. Soon their
ranks began to be decimated by tropical fever. A Marine major asked the Navy
flagship, which had an ice machine aboard, for ice to bring down their fevers.
His request scornfully refused, he returned to camp to find Butler
unconscious. The major ordered him rowed immediately across the bay to a
temporary Navy hospital.
Indignant at the Navy's treatment, the major wrote to Butler's father in
Washington to tell him what was happening at Culebra. Thomas Butler let out an
angry roar in the House Naval Affairs Committee. Secretary of the Navy William
H. Moody sent swift orders to Admiral Dewey that no more Americans were to be
used as forced labor on the miserable canal. The Navy brass fumed, convinced
that it had been Captain Smedley Butler who had complained to his father. As
soon as he was off the sick list, Admiral Coghlan put him in charge of sixty-
five natives hired to finish the canal. Two weeks later, the canal finished,
he collapsed with a relapse of tropical fever.
While Butler was in the hospital, a belated award of the Philippine Campaign
Medal made him think about his old battalion under Major Waller, who was now
back in the Philippines under Army General Adna Chaffee fighting rebels. He
was stunned when an uproar in the American press compelled Waller's court-
martial for killing ten Filipino native carriers who had balked at orders
during a march. Waller had been acquitted, however, on grounds that he had
merely been obeying "kill and bum" orders relayed from General Chaffee.
Butler was distressed by the news. Having served under both Waller and
Chaffee, he admired them as courageous officers whose code called for
protecting, first, American civilians wherever they might be; then the men
under them; then their comrades-in-arms. From his own experience in the
Philippines and China, Butler guessed that Waller had suspected the carriers
of being rebels. It was impossible to tell apart insurrectionists and
noncombatant natives.
The twenty-one-year-old Marine captain was not yet troubled by doubts as to
what the Marines were ordered to do in the service of their country, or why.
He shared the easy condescension of most Marines of that swashbuckling era
toward people of underdeveloped countries as naive natives who had to be
patronized, directed, and protected by Americans.
The Marines were an elite gendarmerie entrusted with the duty of maintaining
international law and order on behalf of civilization. A Marine's only concern
was carrying out his orders as expertly as possible, without questions. It was
only later, as be gradually came to know native peoples better and learned to
admire their age-old customs and traditions, that Smedley Butler felt impelled
to question his role as an instrument of American foreign policy.
4.
When a revolution broke out in Honduras early in 1903, Butler's battalion was
dispatched there aboard an old banana freighter, the Panther, as part of a
squadron under Admiral Coghlan.
On the second day out the ship's commander summoned all hands to the
quarterdeck to complain that someone had been using profane language near his
cabin. "I know the guilty party cannot be one of these fine men," he declared,
indicating the sailors, "therefore it must have been one of these men enlisted
from the slums of our big cities." Pointing to the Marines, he restricted
their use of the deck. Butler restrained an impulse to apply the tip of his
boot to the seat of the commander's naval rectitude.
"Then and there," he recalled later, "I made up my mind that I would always
protect Marines from the hounding to which they were subjected by some of the
naval officers."
At the end of his duty in Culebra, his father had reproached him for not
having kept him better informed as to what was going on in America's naval
outposts. Now Butler did not hesitate to write his father field reports in the
Plain Language, sometimes asking him to use his influence on the House Naval
Affairs Committee on behalf of the Marine Corps. Thomas Butler did not always
consent, but did serve informally as the Marines' court of last resort against
Navy hostility.
In Honduras Smedley was vague as to what the trouble was all about, noting,
"It all seemed like a Gilbert and Sullivan war." He led a force ashore at
Trujillo between government and rebel forces who were firing at each other to
rescue the American consular agent.
After seeing some duty in Panama, for which he won an Expeditionary Medal, he
returned to the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1905. A pretty Georgia-born girl
named Ethel Conway Peters, some of whose family had been prominent in the
affairs of Philadelphia since Colonial times, helped him make good use of his
leave time. They were married on June 30 at Bay Head, New Jersey, in a
military wedding. Commented the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Cupid and Mars in a
wedding by the sea at high noon today."
Their honeymoon was a world trip made possible by orders assigning him to the
Philippines as captain of Company E, Second Regiment. Arriving with his bride
by way of Europe, India, and Singapore, he was stationed at a small naval base
on Subic Bay, sixty miles north of Manila. Here, in November, 1906 his
daughter Ethel was born. Butler's popularity led to her adoption by the
regiment. Giving a dinner for the enlisted men, he carried her to the table on
a pillow as guest of honor. Not surprisingly, she grew up a "Marine brat" and
years later married a Marine lieutenant, John Wehle.
With a detachment of fifty men Butler spent several months dragging six-inch
guns up mountaintops to defend Subic Bay against possible attack by Japan, an
attack that did not materialize for another thirty-six years. He and his men
lived ruggedly on hardtack, hash, and coffee. A Navy supply tug, which never
brought them supplies or rations, continued to ignore them even when they
signaled that they had run out of hash.
Butler decided to sail to the Navy supply base across the bay. With two
volunteers he set out in a native outrigger. A typhoon blew up suddenly behind
them, ripping away their sail and snapping their paddles. For five hours they
fought to keep from drowning until the storm finally blew the seafaring trio
ashore at the supply base.
Soaked and chilled, Butler lost no time in arranging to have the supply tug
carry beef and vegetables back to his men. The hungry Marines cheered his
return on the tug. The camp dock bad been swept away by the typhoon, so they
splashed out into the bay to form a chain that passed the food from tug to
shore. Butler was a hero to his men, but not to the Navy brass who heard about
his bypass of official channels.
A Navy board of medical survey decided that his taking the outrigger into a
typhoon, and use of the tug to take supplies back to his men, indicated signs
of an "impending nervous breakdown." He was ordered home.
In October, 1908 despite the dim view of him taken by the Navy brass, be was
promoted to the rank of major. His fitness reports submitted by his commanding
officers could not be ignored; all unanimously rated him "outstanding,"
commending him as a strict disciplinarian impatient of inefficiency, laziness,
or cowardice.
His contempt for red tape and his personal bravery were acknowledged to have
made him one of the most popular and successful officials in the Corps. His
units were distinguished by a high esprit de corps because of his devotion to
his men, his concern for their welfare and pride in their accomplishments and
his democratic insistence upon rolling up his sleeves to work beside them
physically.
Soon after his second child, Smedley, Jr., was born, July 12, 1909 Butler was
put in charge of the 4th Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and sent to Panama.
Although he was stationed on the Isthmus for four years until the Panama Canal
was opened, he was temporarily detached three times to command expeditions
into strife-torn Nicaragua.
Washington had decided to intervene openly in the internal affairs of that
Central American country. Butler's orders each time were "to protect American
lives and property." He soon realized that this general order involved
propping up Nicaraguan governments or factions that were favored in Washington
for business reasons.
The Conservative party was seeking to drive the Liberals out of power. Their
revolt was led by Adolfo Diaz, secretarytreasurer of the La Luz Mining
Company, in which Secretary of State Philander C. Knox was mid to own stock.
The Liberal Government bad smashed Diaz's forces and pinned 350 survivors at
Bluefields, where Butler had been sent with the 4th Battalion. The American
Consul at Bluefields made it clear to Butler that the State Department wanted
Diaz to prevail.
Two Liberal generals prepared to take Bluefields with fifteen thousand well-
armed men. Before the shooting could start, Butler sent them a message. The
Marines were there only as neutrals protecting American residents, he told the
attackers. The government forces could take the town but must leave their guns
outside the city so that no Americans were accidentally shot. Marine guards
would be posted outside the city to collect all weapons from Nicaraguans
entering it.
How could they take the town, the dismayed generals protested, without arms?
And why weren't Diaz's forces inside the town also being disarmed? Butler
thought fast.
"There is no danger of the defenders killing American citizens, because they
will be shooting outward," be replied blandly, "but your soldiers would be
firing toward us."
The ploy compelled the government forces to retract, giving the Conservative
forces time to regroup and mount a counterattack that soon overthrew the
Liberals. Juan Estrada became the new President, with Diaz as Vice-President.
Butler felt somewhat uneasy about the role the Marines had been compelled to
play in this coup, especially since be knew that the American people had no
idea of how Secretary of State Knox was using the armed forces in Central
America, or why. But as a Marine officer he did not feel responsible for
foreign policy. He saw his role simply as implementing that policy by
dutifully carrying out his country's orders as he was sworn to do.
Before the Marines returned to Panama, he was confronted by a host of
Bluefields shopkeepers who presented him with unpaid bills signed by members
of his battalion, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Yankee
Doodle. From the handwriting Butler deciphered the true identity of these
pseudonyms and saw to it that they paid up. The first to defend his men
against injustices, he also insisted that they scrupulously honor their word
to tradesmen in whatever foreign land they were stationed, to protect the
Corps's good name.
One month later the Nicaraguan revolutionary pot boiled over again. General
Luis Mena, the Conservative party's Minister of War, had overthrown Estrada as
President and bad been overthrown in turn by Diaz. Mena went into rebellion
with government troops loyal to him and had returned to attack Managua, the
capital. Butler was rushed to Managua with a force Of 350 men and ordered to
prop up the faltering Diaz government.
Finding Diaz in the field and government forces in the capital in chaos, he
took command of them. The American minister informed him that American banking
interests had taken over the national railroad as security for a loan to the
Diaz government, so that it must now be protected as "American property." But
it ran through territory controlled by three thousand of Mena's troops, who
bad captured a train and held it against a small Marine force sent to retake
it.
Nicaraguan newspapers mocked the Americans' rout. Mena's forces refused to let
any other trains through, cutting off supplies from the port.
On August 25, 1912, Butler was ordered to retake the captured train and open
the railroad line. Angry that a Marine officer had failed in the task and made
the Corps "a laughingstock," he wrote his wife, "The idea prevails very
strongly that Marines are not soldiers, and will not fight. I cannot stand any
slur on our Corps and I will wipe it off or quit."
5.
With a hundred Marine volunteers behind him, Butler located the train and
approached the rebel forces guarding it with two heavy cloth bags in his
hands. His way was barred by machetes and bayonets, and he was warned to
retreat or have his small force annihilated. Through an interpreter he
informed the rebels that the bags in his hands held dynamite, and he intended
to blow them off the map if they did not back off and let his men repossess
the train.
The rebel commander hesitated, then glumly ordered his men to yield. The
Marines manned the train, and as it pulled away, Butler calmly emptied the two
bags out of a rear window in sight of the rebels. They contained sand.
Checking a bridge to make sure it was safe for the train to cross, he was
suddenly confronted by a rebel general with an enormous moustache who whipped
out a huge pistol and shoved it against Butler's stomach. If the train moved
forward one inch, the rebel officer yelled to Marines clustered around the
locomotive, he would pull the trigger.
The slender Marine major suddenly sidestepped, simultaneously tearing the
pistol out of the Nicaraguan's hand. Emptying the cartridges out of the
barrel, he calmly returned the gun to the crestfallen general and drew his own
revolver. The vanquished rebel leader meekly marched back to the train as a
hostage, and the train went through.
Butler discovered that most Nicaraguans were supporting the rebellion against
the Diaz government, which had hired brutal Honduran mercenaries to crush it.
The people themselves had slain many mercenaries, who looted, raped, and
murdered. Unfortunately for American prestige, a few Americans had been
conspicuous among them. Butler's hundred Marines aboard the train were
regarded with general hostility as similarly vicious instruments of the Diaz
regime.
Butler and his men succeeded in opening the line between Managua and the port
at Corinto. On the way back they had to build three new bridges and several
miles of track. Returning to Managua after a fifteen-hundred-foot descent with
the train's brakes gone, Butler collapsed into bed and pulled the covers over
his face. During the whole week-long trip he had had just seventeen hours'
sleep.
By now the cynicism of the American presence in Nicaragua was becoming
depressingly obvious to him. "I expect a whole lot more rot about the property
of citizens of ours . . . which has been stolen by the rebels and which I must
see restored to their owners," he wrote his wife on September 13, 1912. The
following day he complained of orders from Admiral William H. H. Southerland,
who headed the fleet at Corinto, "virtually changing our status from neutral
to partisanship with the government forces."
He was next ordered to open the railroad south to Granada, Mena's rebel
headquarters. Another malaria attack delayed the expedition. Always restless
and unhappy when illness forced him to be idle, Butler held ice in his mouth
and drove down his temperature until the doctor reluctantly let him out of
bed. Weak and haggard with 104' fever, he had to lie on a cot in a boxcar as
his troop train pulled out of Managua. His eyes were so bloodshot and glaring
that his men began calling him Old Gimlet Eye, a nickname that stuck.
Under constant harassment by guerrilla forces, Butler finally sent word ahead
to Granada to warn General Mena that the Americans were prepared to attack him
if he ordered any further assaults on the train. Mena replied that he was
sending a peace delegation. Hoping to impress the emissaries with his military
power, Butler ordered poles put in the muzzles of two small field guns on
flatcars and covered them with tents to give them the appearance of fourteen-
inch guns. He further awed the emissaries by receiving them seated on a wooden
camp chair mounted on stilted legs like a primitive throne.
Glaring down at them, he warned that unless Mena signed an agreement
surrendering the railroad property and moving his troops out of the railroad
area, Marine "regiments" would attack Mena's two-thousand-man force in
Granada.
His bluff worked so well that Mena not only agreed but, to Butler's amazement,
also offered to surrender himself and his army if the Americans would provide
a warship to take him safely to exile in Panama. The jubilant Marine major
notified Admiral Southerland and the admiral at once agreed.
Butler was made temporary governor of the District of Granada until elections
could be held. He promptly released all political prisoners Mena had thrown
into dungeons and returned all the property that had been confiscated from
them. He next issued a proclamation ordering all loot taken from the people by
both rebel and government forces to be restored.
The astonished Granadans hailed him as a liberator.
On September 30, 193.2, Butler was dismayed when the admiral transmitted
cabled orders from Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer to side openly
with the Diaz regime and turn over to it all captured rebels. Apologetically
he disarmed Mena and his troops, confining them in their barracks under guard.
I must say," he wrote his wife, "that I hated my job like the devil . . . but
orders are orders, and of course, had to be carried out." But he protested
bitterly to Admiral Southerland at the betrayal of his promise to Mena.
Southerland finally agreed to stand behind his pledge and explain to Meyer.
Local Granadan politicians, deprived by Butler of their customary loot, loudly
complained to the admiral that he was interfering in local affairs.
Southerland felt compelled to relieve him as governor, sending him to crush
the final remnants of the revolution. Zeledon's force of two thousand rebels
was dug in at a fort on top of the Coyatepe Mountain, a stronghold that bad
never been taken in Nicaragua's stormy history.
On October 4 Butler and Colonel Joe Pendleton charged up the Coyatepe leading
an 850-man Marine force. In a forty-minute battle twenty-seven rebels were
killed in their trenches, nine captured, and the rest put to flight. Two
Marines were killed.
6.
The fall of Coyatepe put the town of Masaya, the last rebel outpost, in Marine
hands. As they occupied it, some four thousand government troops celebrated by
entering the town, looting it, and getting drunk. Incensed, Butler expressed
his bitterness in a letter to his wife, decrying "a victory gained by us for
them at the expense of two good American lives, all because Brown Brothers,
bankers, have some money invested in this country."
Resting in Masaya, the major began longing to see his family. I feel terribly
over missing my son's most interesting period of development, but ... this
separation can't last forever," he wrote Ethel on October 9. "I get so
terribly homesick at times that I just don't see how I can stand it."
The Taft Administration had another unpleasant assignment for him-rigging the
new Nicaraguan elections to make certain that Diaz was returned to power.
Checking on the country's election laws, Butler found that the polls had to be
open a sufficient length of time ("at least that's the way we translated if')
and that voters had to register to be able to vote.
He ordered a canvass of the district to locate four hundred Nicaraguans who
could be depended upon to vote for Diaz. Notice of opening of the polls was
given five minutes beforehand. The four hundred Diaz adherents were assembled
in a line, and two hours later, as soon as they had finished voting, the
-polls were closed. Other citizens had either failed to register or didn't
know balloting was going on.
"Today," Butler wrote Ethel sardonically, "Nicaragua has enjoyed a fine 'free
election,' with only one candidate being allowed to run-President Adolfo Diaz-
who was unanimously elected. In order that this happy event might be pulled
off without hitch and to the entire satisfaction of our State Department, we
patrolled all the towns to prevent disorders and of course there were none."
He consoled himself by reflecting that the constant revolutions in Central
American politics did not represent a struggle for power by the people
themselves, but were most often simply attempts by rascals out of office to
overthrow rascals in office. He bad a high regard for the Nicaraguan people
and genuine compassion for their suffering.
On November 13, 1912, over five thousand Nicaraguans turned out in Granada to
present him with a gold medal for saving them from troop disorders and
looting. They also gave him a scroll signed by Granada's leading citizens,
expressing gratitude for his "brave and opportune intervention" that "put an
end to the desperate and painful situation in which this city was placed-
victim of all the horrors of an organized anarchy."
They told him, "From this terrible situation and from the anguish that the
future held for us, we passed as by magic to a state of complete guarantee for
life, property, and well-being for all, as soon as the American troops entered
the city. The tact and discretion with which you fulfilled your humane
mission, so bristling with difficulties, was such that your name will be
forever engraved in the hearts of the people."
There were fireworks and a fiesta. "The whole thing was very impressive and
made me feel quite silly," he wrote sheepishly to his wife, "but rather proud
for my darlings' sakes."
A people's committee urged him to stay on as police commissioner of the
district. The twenty-nine-year-old major found himself intrigued by the
prospect of introducing honest law enforcement in Granada. "What would thee
think," be wrote Ethel, 11 of my accepting a $15,000 job as Chief of this
Police down here, not to leave the Marine Corps, but to have a three-years'
leave?" But he finally decided against it.
Despite his reservations about the ethics of the Nicaraguan campaign, it had
filled him with exhilaration of adventure. "This is the end of the
expedition," he wrote his wife. "Would like to have some parts of it over
again; the excitement was fine." He indicated an early awareness that he was
destined to play a meaningful role in American history: "Be sure to keep all
my letters as they are a diary of my life, and may be useful sometime in the
future."
With a second bronze star added to his Expeditionary Medal and a new
Nicaraguan Campaign Medal, the indefatigable young campaigner returned to
Panama and his family. His second son, Thomas Richard, was born in October,
1913
With Woodrow Wilson in the White House, war clouds loomed with Mexico when
bandit General Victoriano Huerta overthrew legally elected Mexican President
Francisco Madero. In an angry exchange of notes, Wilson insisted that Huerta
must hold new elections barring himself as a candidate. Wilson's choice was
Huerta's rival for power, General Venustiano Carranza. Banning all arms
shipments to Mexico, the President asked all Americans without urgent business
there to leave the country and sent the fleet to cruise significantly in the
Gulf of Mexico during a period of "watchful waiting."
Defying Wilson, Huerta began importing arms from Europe to crush Carranza. The
President then violated his own embargo and rushed American arms to the
Carranza forces. Full-scale fighting broke out all over Mexico, during which
American industrial property was destroyed and United States businessmen were
compelled to flee attacks against them from both sides.
In January, 1914, the Marines were ordered from Panama to the fleet standing
off Vera Cruz. Ethel Butler took the children home to Pennsylvania, and her
husband reported to the fleet flagship Florida, assigned to the staff of
Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher. Welcoming him aboard, the admiral remarked on
his courage and daring in the Chinese, Philippine, and Nicaraguan campaigns.
He was just the man, the admiral thought, for a dangerous special mission for
the War Department.
How did Butler feel about going into Mexico as a "civilian" spy to make an
expert analysis of Huerta's fighting forces in and around Mexico City, as well
as to gather general intelligence, in case war was declared? He would carry no
official orders of any kind, of course, and if he were caught, the Navy would
have to disavow any knowledge of either him or his mission.
"How soon can I start, Admiral?" he asked.
Beneath a night sky of swollen black clouds, as most of the crew aboard the
Florida watched a Western movie starring Broncho Billy, a civilian-clad Butler
dropped a small traveling bag out of his cabin port into a small boat, then
slipped off the ship after it. His disappearance from the Florida was carried
on the ship's rolls as "desertion."
Ashore in Vera Cruz, he decided to disguise himself as an Englishman. There
were many English in Mexico at the time traveling on business. Attiring
himself in a tweed suit, spats, deerstalker's hat, and a pair of gold-rimmed
glasses with a black ribbon, he undertook a stage English accent. A fraudulent
British passport and forged letters of introduction to important Britons in
Mexico City completed his impersonation.
He left Vera Cruz aboard the private railroad car of the line's
superintendent, a secret Carranza supporter cooperating with the Americans.
The train rolled toward Mexico City along the road American troops would use
if they invaded. The superintendent stopped the train several times en route,
letting Butler inspect electric power plants and reservoirs by introducing him
to leading citizens as "Mr. Johnson," a public utilities expert. Managing to
stray inside some army forts on his own, he was apprehended several times but
released.
"I carried a butterfly net and studied rocks," he grinned in recollection.
"They thought I was a nut and let me pass."
In Mexico City be changed to American garb and posed as a private detective
from the United States seeking a condemned murderer who had escaped and fled
to Mexico. Mexican secret police escorted him to all the garrisons to help his
search for the imaginary criminal. He soon had vital data on the troop
strength and disposition of munitions dumps around Mexico City.
Making military maps of everything be bad seen, Butler buried them in the
false bottom of his bag and took the train back to Vera Cruz. He became aware
that two Mexicans were following him. Apparently be had aroused suspicions,
and the Mexican secret service was keeping an eye on him.
In the early morning when the train reached Vera Cruz, it paused temporarily
to allow a rail switch to be thrown that took it into the station. During this
pause Butler went to the washroom in pajamas, his bag concealed under his
bathrobe. Locking the door behind him, he slipped out of the train window. He
donned his clothes in the freight yard, then sped to the American consulate to
contact Admiral Fletcher.
Two naval officers were sent ashore to the consulate. He turned over all his
maps and data to them, then left separately, dressed once more in his British
guise. Seeking to board a British steamer at the wharf to a port down the
coast, from which he would secretly be picked up and brought back to the
Florida, he was suddenly seized by a squad of police.
They considered it odd for a "British entomologist" to have been visiting the
American embassy. His baggage was opened and searched thoroughly, but nothing
incriminating was found. Threatening "you blighters" with official reprisals
from the British Foreign Office, Butler bluffed them into letting him go. A
few days later he was safely back aboard the Florida, where Admiral Fletcher
warmly congratulated him on the success of his daring mission.
pp.35-61
-----
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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