-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Plot to Seize the White House
Jules Archer(C)1973
Hawthorne Books, Inc.
New York, NY
-----
18
Defying Adams, Butler continued to express his convictions freely and publicly
about current problems on which he felt qualified to speak out. He was
delighted in May, 1-930, when Congress, over President Hoover's veto, passed a
Spanish-American War pension bill for veterans. With the unemployment rate
climbing steadily to almost five million that year, he urged passage of a
bonus bill for all veterans. The government had a solemn obligation to
citizens who bad risked their lives to protect it, Butler insisted, to see to
it that they, their wives, and their children were not allowed to languish in
hunger, poverty, and despair.
Two deaths that year saddened him. His brother Horace was killed in a car
accident in Texas, and his old friend Buck Neville died suddenly after briefly
replacing Lejeune as commandant.
Now Butler was the senior-ranking major general in the Marine Corps, the
logical choice as next commandant. An official inspection report bad also
praised Quantico as the finest post in the United States. But on the same day
that it appeared, Marine Corps headquarters sent Butler a curt letter
suggesting that he make fewer speeches, because his Quantico post was in poor
shape as a result of his frequent absences.
In July, 1930, Secretary Adams paid a visit to Quantico, undoubtedly to lay
the groundwork for an official excuse to reject Butler's fitness to be
appointed commandant. Butler was equally determined to demonstrate that the
rebuke be had received about the "poor shape" of his post was totally
unwarranted. Escorting Adams everywhere over the barracks and parade grounds,
he proved that Quantico was a model of efficiency. The dress-uniform review of
his crack regiments was flawless, and the Marine air squadron performed
brilliant maneuvers.
The secretary acidly observed that Quantico was the most expensive place in
the nation for training men. Controlling his temper, Butler pointed out the
sports stadium built at almost no cost to the taxpayers.
"That's one of your damned follies!" Adams muttered. He was clearly attempting
to provoke the volatile Butler into flaring up, and Butler knew it. Clenching
his jaw, the general remained outwardly calm but could not resist telling a
sharply barbed joke about "an old buzzard" who couldn't be pleased by
anything.
Several weeks later a Navy selection board met to choose a new commandant. One
staff admiral declared that he'd be damned before he'd see Butler made
commandant; in no time at all the damned fellow would be trying to run the
whole Navy. Others agreed. Adams happily discarded Butler's name and proposed
instead Brigadier General Ben H. Fuller who, despite being junior in rank, was
approved by the board.
The news was the last straw for Butler, who now determined to retire within a
year to devote himself to advocating the defense of the United States as he
believed it ought to be defended. Resolutely opposed to military intervention
overseas on behalf of Wall Street interests, he planned to arouse the American
people into preventing any more. At the same time he had doubts about the
wisdom of entering world disarmament agreements, as leading pacifists
proposed. Could the United States afford to disarm and trust the word of
military dictators like Italy's Mussolini, with Hitler's swiftly growing Nazi
party in Germany already laying the groundwork for a new war by renouncing the
Versailles Treaty?
In a speech before the influential Contemporary Club of Philadelphia on
January 19, 1931, he declared, "I agree with Dr. Hull of Swarthmore; if we
could all lay down our arms, there couldn't be any war. But there are mad-dog
nations who won't get the word, who will refuse to sign the agreement, or, if
they sign it, refuse to abide by it."
Seeking to impress his listeners with the kind of men dictators were, he
added, "A friend of mine said he had a ride in a new automobile with
Mussolini, a car with an armored nose that could knock over fences and slip
under barbed wire. He said that they drove through the country and towns at
seventy miles per hour. They ran over a child and my friend screamed.
Mussolini said he shouldn't do that, that it was only one life and the affairs
of the state could not be stopped by one life."
His listeners gasped audibly. Arms akimbo, his head thrust forward angrily,
Butler demanded in a scornful voice, "How can you talk disarmament with a man
like that?"
He had been told that the audience was a private one and that he could speak
in confidence, but he soon learned that there was no such thing as
confidential speech for a man so often in the public eye. Among his listeners,
unknown to him, was an Italian diplomat from Washington who bad been invited
to attend.
The outraged diplomat at once reported Butler's remarks to Italian Ambassador
de Martino. The embassy sent a frantic cable to Rome, then filed an official
protest with the State Department. The morning papers broke the story, and it
made sensational headlines. A high-ranking American officer, wearing the
Marine uniform on active duty, had publicly insulted the head of a friendly
power.
Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson felt compelled to deliver a formal apology
to Mussolini: "The sincere regrets of this government are extended to Mr.
Mussolini and to the Italian people for the discourteous and unwarranted
utterances by a commissioned officer of this government on active duty."
The Washington military-diplomatic bureaucracy now decided that this time
Butler had gone too far. Formal charges against him were hastily drawn and
presented to President Hoover, who promptly signed them. On the morning of
January 29 Marine Commandant Ben Fuller phoned Butler at Quantico.
"General Butler, you are hereby placed under arrest to await trial by general
court-martial. You will turn over your command to your next senior, General
Berkeley, and you will be restricted to the limits of your post. The Secretary
of the Navy wishes you to know that this action is taken by the direct
personal order of the-President of the United States."
The charges were "conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline" and
"conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." These accusations were known
in the armed forces as Mother Hubbard charges because they "covered
everything." Most Marine officers were convinced that the powers-that-be had
decided to "throw the book" at Old Gimlet Eye and drum him out of the Corps
dishonorably, in revenge for his well-known fighting man's scorn of
Washington's desk warriors.
Butler notified Brigadier General Randolph C. Berkeley, his junior officer at
Quantico and a good friend, that he was under arrest-the first general officer
to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. Butler's two-star command flag
was lowered on the Quantico flagstaff, and he offered his sword to Berkeley,
who indignantly refused to accept it.
Berkeley was outraged that Smedley Butler, who wore eighteen decorations and
was one of only four military men in American history who had ever been
awarded two Medals of Honor, should be put under arrest by a telephone call.
He was even more indignant that Butler had been confined to the post,
hindering his ability to arrange for his own defense at the court-martial.
Defying the wrath of Adams, Berkeley himself went to Washington to get
Butler's old comrade-in-arms Henry Leonard, who had lost an arm fighting
beside him in the Boxer Rebellion and who now had a law practice in the
Capital, to act as Butler's counsel. Leonard rushed off to Quantico
immediately.
A prisoner on his own post, Butler was wryly amused by an invitation to be
guest of honor at a sportsmen's dinner. His aide-de-camp, L. C. Whitaker,
replied dryly for him: "As General Butler is under arrest, he will be unable
to attend."
19
News of his arrest brought an outpouring of sympathy and support for him not
only among his far-flung and influential staunch friends but also among
millions of Americans who despised Mussolini and everything the dictator stood
for. Admiring Butler for speaking out against fascism, they were appalled that
he was being court-martialed for being a patriot who believed in democracy,
the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and distrusted dictators who denied
such civil liberties to their own people.
Butler also had the support of millions of veterans who knew him as a
magnificent fighting man and hero, as well as a general who was on the side of
the enlisted man against the brass; and of hundreds of thousands of admirers
who still remembered the courageous fight he bad waged against the crooked
politicians and racketeers of Philadelphia.
Many Americans, moreover, were fed up with the Hoover Administration for
sitting on its bands with the Depression rapidly worsening, and esteemed a
public leader who at least had the courage of his convictions and spoke them
bluntly. ItalianAmerican anti-Fascists also rallied to Butler's support by
bitter protests against Stimson's apology to Mussolini.
The administration grew alarmed as a rolling tidal wave of angry criticism of
Butler's arrest swept across the country.
"Unless we are mistaken," declared a Washington Daily News editorial, "the
American people are likely to consider these Cabinet officials guilty of a
strange timidity toward Mussolini on one band and of an unwarranted harshness
toward a splendid American soldier on the other."
Public opinion on the side of Butler made itself felt so quickly and
emphatically that the administration found it necessary to ameliorate the
conditions of his arrest. His restriction to the post was lifted, allowing him
to travel where he needed to in order to arrange for his defense.
He wired New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had presented him with
one of his Medals of Honor as Undersecretary of the Navy, "Am in great
trouble. Can you assist me in securing services of John W. Davis as counsel?"
Davis, a leading Wall Street corporation lawyer, bad been the unsuccessful
Democratic candidate for President in 1924. Roosevelt persuaded Davis to agree
to argue Butler's case at the trial.
A visit to Butler's aunt, lawyer Isabel Darlington, also enlisted Roland S.
Morris, a former ambassador to Japan, as Henry Leonard's counsel in preparing
the case.
Thousands of sympathetic messages poured into Quantico. Butler was deeply
touched by two letters especially: Both Governor Roosevelt and former
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels volunteered to testify in his behalf at
the court-martial. That news stunned Adams and Hoover.
The trial date was set for February 16. Butler was impatient to have it
sooner, anxious to get all the facts before the public, but Leonard and Morris
argued that the torrent of favorable publicity was helping his case. They
proved correct. Protests against the court-martial were pouring into the White
House by the sackful. The trial threatened to become a cause celebre, with
implications for the whole system of military justice, especially after a
Marine colonel denounced American court-martials as basically unjust.
The impending trial was also throwing a spanner into Secretary of State
Stimson's plans for forging an international naval arms limitation agreement.
Crucial to that agreement were preliminary negotiations between Italy and
France, which feared Italian and German fascism. Resisting Stimson's pressure
to sign an arms limitation agreement with Mussolini, the French cited as
justification popular American support of Butler's view that Mussolini could
not be trusted and widespread protest over his arrest for saying so.
Mussolini himself, alarmed by the bad press he was getting in the United
States, with a few notorious exceptions, sent word to Stimson that he
considered the whole incident an "unfortunate error" and believed it would be
best for all concerned if the whole plan to court-martial Butler could be
quietly dropped.
Stimson, who now realized that he had a tiger by the tail, passed the word to
the crestfallen Adams. The Secretary of the Navy now had to beat a hasty
retreat with as much dignity as he could muster out of his humiliating
predicament. He sent Leonard a letter announcing his decision to "settle" the
matter by calling off the court-martial and simply detaching Butler from his
command with a reprimand, placing him on the inactive list with the limbo
status of "awaiting orders."
In polite language Leonard told Adams to go to hell. A few hours later, after
checking with his principals, the Secretary of the Navy then offered to let
the whole thing drop by just detaching Butler from the command and issuing a
reprimand. Again Leonard turned him down flatly. Adams frantically tried a
third proposal. The administration would settle, he now pleaded, for an
official letter of apology. There would be no court-martial and no removal of
Butler from Quantico.
Roaring a third refusal, Leonard demanded that Adams stop dawdling and proceed
to trial. By now the administration, in a state of near panic, meekly asked
Leonard just what terms for settling the matter would be acceptable to General
Butler.
Leonard, jubilant at this abject surrender, conferred with Morris and Butler.
Angry at his persecutors, Butler wanted to insist upon the court-martial, but
as he confided to a relative on February 12, "Mother and Bunny [his wife] were
both breaking under the strain," and he decided that it wasn't worth their
anguish to fight the establishment to a finish. "I feel we could have licked
them badly," he added, "but now I have a club over their heads, as they were
warned that we would tell if they tried any more persecutions."
Since he had already won a clear moral victory, he decided he could afford to
let the government save a little face. He agreed to write a letter reiterating
his explanation that the Mussolini speech bad been made at a private club
meeting and expressing regret that anything he bad said "caused embarrassment
to the Government." He would accept an official gentle "reprimand," which was,
however, not to be written by Adams but by Leonard himself for Adams to sign.
In return for these concessions the government would announce that it was
dropping its courtmartial and was immediately restoring the general to his
command with full rank and privileges, without prejudice, of any kind.
The administration hastily accepted Butler's terms, and the suitable papers
were drawn. On February 9 the court-martial was canceled, and a mild reprimand
credited Butler's explanation that his speech had been intended to be
"confined to the limits of four walls," as well as acknowledging his "long
record of brilliant service." One newspaper headlined the story:
"YOU'RE A VERY BAD BOY - SAYS ADAMS TO BUTLER.
The general's admirers grinned in delight, He was released from arrest and
restored to duty, his command flag once more fluttering over Quantico. It was
a signal and remarkable victory for a lone Marine officer to win over the
President of the United States and the Secretaries of State and the Navy.
"I was glad to see Smedley Butler get out of his case as he did," Will Rogers
wrote in his column on March 15, 1931. "You know that fellow just belongs in a
war all the time. He don't belong in Peace time. He is what I would call a
natural born warrior. He will fight anybody, any time. But he just can't
distinguish Peace from war. He carries every medal we ever gave out. He has
two Congressional Medals of Honor, the only man that ever got a double
header.* [* Rogers's mistake was a common error. In addition to Smedley
Butler, three other-Americans have each won two Congressional Medals of
Honor.] You give him another war and he will get him another one . . . I do
admire him."
The press was reluctant to let the story die. The wire services carried
journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt's revelation that he had been the one who had
told Butler the true story about Mussolini. He corrected a few details. After
running down the child, Vanderbilt said, Mussolini had observed the journalist
looking back in horror and had patted his knee reassuringly, saying, "Never
look back, Mr. Vanderbilt-always look ahead in life." Italian officials now
sought to deny that Vanderbilt had ever ridden in a car with Mussolini.
Butler was appalled, but not too surprised, to read that Ralph T. O'Neill,
national commander of the American Legion, had presented to Italian Ambassador
de Martino a resolution in praise of Mussolini, passed by the National
Executive Committee. There were powerful and influential wealthy elements in
the Legion leadership who admired Mussolini's shackling of Italian labor
unions under the guise of fighting Reds.
Now that he bad defeated the attempt of his enemies to court-martial him,
Butler revealed to his friends that he intended to go ahead with his original
plan to retire at the end of the year. On March 1 be informed the press,
barking, "Get this clear--I are not resigning!"
20
Butler now found himself in greater demand than ever as a public speaker. The
Alber Lecture Bureau of Cleveland pleaded with him to take a leave of absence
and satisfy the groups all over the country clamoring to hear him. He was
offered half of all admission fees charged, with a minimum guarantee Of $250,
Plus $25 a day expenses and railroad fare.
At the same time Philadelphia's Mayor Mackey asked him if he would assist in
raising funds for the city's Committee for Unemployment Relief. Applying for a
two months' leave of absence to make a speaking tour, be turned over half his
fees of about six thousand dollars to the unemployed and also to the Salvation
Army, which he respected as being genuinely responsive to the needs of both
the poor and the doughboys in trenches.
He explained the impulse for his decision by a letter he had received while he
was under arrest during the Mussolini affair, "General," a veteran had written
him, "the stamp on this letter cost me the two of my last four cents, but I
wanted you to know that I am for you."
"I almost cried," Butler admitted. "I feel that if that poor fellow could give
me half of what he had, I can give him half of, what I've got." He was also
strongly influenced in his sympathy for the luckless by his aunt, Isabel
Darlington, who headed the Chester County Poor Board and fought county
authorities vigorously to increase welfare funds.
Publishers begged him for a book. "I am making far more money out of making
speeches than I ever could out of writing a book," he replied practically, "so
unless Bobbs-Merrill are going to outbid the public ... I would be cutting off
my nose to spite my face by writing instead of talking." But he finally
consented to dictate his war memoirs to adventure writer Lowell Thomas, who
published them as a book, under the title Old Gimlet Eye.
Aware that his imminent retirement meant a sharp drop in income and an
increase in expenses, with little or nothing saved, he sought to organize his
time as profitably as possible. He accepted radio offers to relate his
experiences in the Marines.
If Butler did not consciously seek publicity, there was little doubt that the
headlines sought him out. His rapport with the press was explained by one
newsman's observation that he was "colorful copy and a helluva guy." He often
said himself, "There are three types of people who understand me-Marines,
policemen, and newspapermen." His chief interest in stories about him in the
press was less vanity than a determination to disseminate views he held
strongly.
With the first ominous rumblings of war beginning to be heard in both Europe
and Asia, he was determined to steel the American people against letting
themselves be dragged into any more foreign wars. He would tell them the whole
truth about the use that had been made of the Marines by the government in the
name of protecting democracy and "American interests" abroad.
On August 21, 1931, invited to address an American Legion convention in
Connecticut, he made the first no-holds-barred antiwar speech of his career.
It stunned all who heard it or read it in the few papers that dared report it
in part:
I spent 33 years . . . being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for
Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. . . .
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown
Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place
for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape
of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street....
In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way
unmolested.... I had . . . a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals,
promotions.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do
was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three
continents. . . .
We don't want any more wars, but a man is a damn fool to think there won't be
any more of them. I am a peaceloving Quaker, but when war breaks out every
damn man in my family goes. If we're ready, nobody will tackle us. Give us a
club and we will face them all....
There is no use talking about abolishing war; that's damn foolishness. Take
the guns away from men and they will fight just the same. . . . In the
Spanish-American War we didn't have any bullets to shoot, and if we had not
had a war with a nation that was already licked and looking for an excuse to
quit, we would have had hell licked out of us. . . .
No pacifists or Communists are going to govern this country. If they try it
there will be seven million men like you rise up and strangle them. Pacifists?
Hell, I'm a pacifist, but I always have a club behind my back!
Earlier that same day, before Hoover had had a chance to read the speech,
reporters asked the President if he would seek to delay the general's
retirement.
"I assume that if General Butler wishes to retire, the authorities will
approve," Hoover answered cautiously. "The general is a very distinguished and
gallant officer and I have no doubt that if the country has need, it always
can secure his services." Next day, when Butler's attack on big business was
reported, attempts to get any statement from the White House met with icy
silence.
And on that day, providing a punctuation mark to Butler's doubts that the
Kellogg-Briand Pact protected any nation from aggression, Japan invaded
Manchuria and reduced the pact to a worthless scrap of paper.
On October 1, 1931, friends of Smedley Butler from all stations in life, and
from all periods of his career, gathered at Quantico as his two-star command
flag was hauled down once more, this time with full honors. At the age of
fifty, after spending all of his life but the first fifteen years in a Marine
uniform, under fire over 120 times, he retired from the Corps and was once
more a civilian.
In his farewell speech to his beloved leathernecks his voice was more than
customarily hoarse, and tears misted his fierce glare. "It has been a
privilege to scrap for you just as you have scrapped for me," he told them.
"When I leave I mean to give every one of you a map showing you exactly where
I live. I want you to come around and see me, especially if you ever get into
trouble, and I will help you if I can. I can give you a square meal and a
place to sleep even if I cannot guarantee you a political job."
He meant every word, gave out the maps, and kept his promise for as long as he
lived.
21
Demands flooded in now for Butler's services as a lecturer. He had embarrassed
governments, large and small, including his own, by his relentless candor, but
his courage and honesty had won the admiration of millions of Americans. His
speeches became more vitriolic than ever, scorching the hides of the powerful
and the highly placed.
He met eager requests for articles by magazines and newspaper syndicates with
the help of his friend E. Z. Dimitman, who was now night city editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer. Dimitman would flesh out his views on war and peace,
which Butler then edited and revised to his own satisfaction.
There never seemed to be enough money. Although he received some lecture fees
up to $500, the average fee came to $250 and in many cases turned out to be
far less. Most of what he managed to earn went into putting Tom Dick through
Swarthmore and Smedley, Jr., through California Tech and M.I.T., and paying
off the house he and Ethel had bought in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.
It was an old square farmhouse that had been gutted by fire except for its
walls. Butler had rebuilt it with glass-enclosed porches and a huge, high
hallway in which he erected his two treasured Chinese Blessings Umbrellas,
opened like canopies at each end of the hall. He had thought to remodel the
house for $35,000, but it had turned out to cost far more, and be was forced
to sell most of the land to pay off the mortgage.
As a civilian Butler was close-fisted with money, gently but firmly resisting
the endless letters he received begging for handouts, because be had no money
to spare. His thrifty wife kept an old, ragged, shabby fur coat in the closet,
over thirty years after he had brought it home for her from the Boxer
Rebellion. She never wore it, but could not bring herself to throw it away. He
himself upset many military organizations by canceling his membership and
journal subscriptions without offering any explanation. He was too proud to
admit the real reason; he simply had to prune expenses.
Out of uniform, he took pride in his appearance and dressed well but
conservatively. Unable to break the traditions of thirtythree years of dress
parade, he polished his shoes daily and buffed the buttons on his white,
custom-made summer suits. His thought patterns, too, continued to dwell
primarily on military concerns.
One of his objectives was to stir up a demand that the Marine Corps be removed
from under the thumb of politically appointed desk admirals of the Navy and
set up as a separate branch of the armed forces under their own leaders. He
gave his reasons in an article called "To Hell with the Admirals! Why I
Retired at Fifty," which appeared in Liberty Magazine on December 5, 1931:
The clique of desk-admirals who seem to hold sway in the Navy Department in
Washington demand an Annapolis man as head of the Marine Corps. They desire to
have the Corps an insignificant part of the naval service, a unit directly
under their collective thumb. It dismays and appalls them to learn of the
heroic deeds of Marines on foreign duty. They feel it detracts from the
prestige of the navy. . . .
This group of admirals did everything possible to keep me from being named
commandant. . . . And now those officers of the Marine Corps who have been
particularly loyal and friendly to me ... are being transferred all about the
country and abroad . . . . As I go I am tempted to say to that shipless
clique: "To hell with the admirals!"
Outraged, Admiral Pratt issued a statement denouncing his broadside. The
tablet that bad been erected in his honor in the Navy Building was removed.
Later located and rescued by a Butler Memorial Commission, it was installed in
Philadelphia's City Hall after his death.
Another article Butler wrote for Liberty stirred the wrath of the Honduras
Government by exposing the collaboration of Honduran and other Central
American dictators with American banking and commercial interests. The
controlled Honduran press accused him of misrepresenting the situation and
showered him with epithets. From Tegucigalpa a New York Times correspondent
wired, "It is realized that he is now retired, and not subject to the
restraint which can be imposed on an officer in active service."
More and more of Butler's attention was directed to the steadily worsening
Depression and what it was doing to the country. He was outraged when hunger
marchers who had gone to Washington on December 7 were denied admission to the
White House to petition for jobs.
During 1932 stocks fell go percent, farm products 60 percent, industrial
production 50 percent. By the end of the year fifteen million Americans were
in the ranks of the unemployed. Homeowners and farmers were being dispossessed
for nonpayment of taxes and debts. Outraged neighbors in many communities were
setting up roadblocks with guns to bar outside bidders at foreclosure auctions
so that the property could be bought for a song and returned to its owners.
Alarmed bankers saw this development as a Communist threat.
Butler's antagonism toward big business intensified. On February 14, 1932, the
United Press quoted him as saying, "I've about come to the conclusion that
some American corporations abroad are, in a measure, responsible for trouble
with the natives simply because of the way they treat them. . . . I've seen
hundreds of boys from the cities and farms of the United States die in Central
American countries just to protect the investments of our large corporations."
How could Washington criticize Japan for its takeover in Manchuria, he
demanded, when we ourselves had been just as imperialistic?
In the spring Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot urged Butler to throw his
hat into the political ring and oppose James J. Davis, former Secretary of
Labor under Hoover, for the Republican nomination for senator. His admirers
were already demanding that Butler run for governor.
"I am not going to run for the Senate or governorship," he growled to
newspaper friends, "and then have the politicians laugh at me." But Pinchot's
entreaties were too strong and persistent, and Butler reluctantly agreed.
Stumping the state, he appealed to Republican voters with a platform promising
jobs for the unemployed and home property loans for debtors. Campaigning for a
bonus bill, be placed all his decorations and uniforms in a vault, publicly
vowing never to wear them again until soldiers got their bonus. Although he
was personally popular, two issues he campaigned for in 1932--Prohibition and
the soldiers' bonus-were not.
Despite receiving half a million votes, he was defeated. Paul Comly French of
the Philadelphia Record revealed that Governor Pinchot had set Butler up for
defeat to eliminate him as a political threat, making a secret deal to support
Davis. The Pincbot political machine bad been used against Butler in key
election districts.
Reporter Jesse Laventhol, later city editor of the Philadelphia Record, who
had been Butler's press secretary during the campiagn, told the author,
"Butler's sponsors failed him .... trading off votes for Davis in return for
electing certain state senators to give 'the governor control of that body."
So Smedley Butler never went to Congress like his father.
22
In the early summer of 1932 over twenty thousand veterans and their families
joined in a Bonus Army march to Washington, camping on the edge of the Capital
to demand payment of a two-billion-dollar cash bonus to all veterans. The
House, under pressure, quickly passed the Patman Bonus Bill on June 17, but
the Republican Senate rejected it, 62 to 18.
Butler was indignant at the failure of Congress to honor America's pledge to
its fighting men and was thoroughly disgusted with Hoover's failure to do
anything about the plight of the nation except issue optimistic reports that
prosperity was "just around the corner."
On June 30, while the Democratic convention was in session, he announced that
he might, for the first time in his life, vote Democratic "if the right man is
nominated for President." It was no secret that he saw the right man as New
York's governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had already broadcast an
impressive speech on the need of the American Government to discover its
"forgotten man."
When Roosevelt won the nomination, pledging a New Deal along with the repeal
of Prohibition, Butler wired him, "We salute your nomination as one of the
greatest blessings granted any nation in an hour of desperate need." He
offered to help F.D.R.'s campaign any way be could, and Roosevelt asked him to
get in touch with Democratic campaign manager James A. Farley, or Roosevelt's
chief secretary, Louis Howe. Butler soon began stumping for F.D.R. In a speech
before the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen in New York on July 7 he
warned that the government had to be rescued from "the clutches of the greedy
and dishonest":
Today, with all our wealth, a deathly gloom hangs over us. Today we appear to
be divided. There has developed, through the past few years, a new Tory class,
a group that believes that the nation, its resources and its man-power, was
provided by the Almighty for its own special use and profit.... On the other
side is the great mass of the American people who still believe in the
Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States.
This Tory group, through its wealth, its power and its influence, has obtained
a firm grip on our government, to the detriment of our people and the well-
being of our nation. We will prove to the world that we meant what we said a
century and a half ago-that this government was instituted not only to secure
to our people the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but
the right to eat and to all our willing millions the right to work.
A lecture bureau urged him to undertake a national speaking tour of 100,000
miles through the United States. He agreed, not only to earn the money
involved but also because he saw the trip as a way to get to know his fellow
Americans better. He knew more about the Cacos of Haiti than the residents of
Michigan Boulevard, more about the thinking of Nicaraguans and Chinese than of
Manhattanites and Californians. As "a stranger to my native land and to my
fellow citizens," he felt a strong compulsion to "see America last" and learn
about them, too. So he began visiting over one hundred cities in forty-eight
states, "keeping my eyes and ears open all the time."
Years of delivering training talks to his troops and pep talks before and
during battle bad made him an articulate extemporaneous speaker. Without a
note to refer to he held audiences spellbound, and each time he delivered a
talk it was different. A fast thinker on his feet, he spoke in the colorful
idiom of everyday language, which he used with the impact of a shower of
arrows.
He was only partially successful in his attempts to civilianize his colorful
barracks argot. One Milwaukee newspaper, describing a speech he made at a
First Methodist Episcopal church in September, 1932, ran a story headlined:
BUTLER TALKS IN CHURCH, USES NICE LANGUAGE.
"Only one 'hell' and two 'damns' spiced his remarks throughout the evening."
What he heard and saw on his tour convinced him that Americans were hungry for
a change in the administration, especially for a turn away from foreign
affairs to home problems. But he found no indication that Main Street America
either wanted revolutionary change or thought it likely, despite alarm over a
Red menace in the conservative press.
I held personal conversations with more than two thousand persons in all walks
of life," he said on October 2, 1932, after his tour, "and they gave me a new
and true insight into the people of America. I learned that the average
American is convinced that no change in the form of our government is
necessary or advisable."
The attempt by conservatives to smear "anyone who utters a progressive
thought" as a Red, he pointed out, was helping a "handful of agitators in
their vain efforts to foment disorder and discontent with our form of
government." He branded Republican warnings that a Democratic victory would
turn America socialist an absurd myth.
When a new political group called the Roosevelt Republican Organization was
formed in Philadelphia, Butler was asked to take a leading role in it. Louis
Howe assured him that Roosevelt would be most grateful for any help he could
give the governor in that capacity.
A week before Election Day Butler made a slashing attack on Hoover in a speech
to an enthusiastic rally of Queens, New York, veterans, describing himself as
"a member of the Hoover-for-Ex-President League because Hoover used gas and
bayonets on unarmed human beings."
"Nobody has any business occupying the White House who doesn't love his own
people," be declared, adding, I was raised Republican, but I was born
American. I have no ring through my nose, and I vote for whom I please."
He insisted that the bonus must be paid: "The bonus is an amount of money that
the American people owe the soldier, but anybody demanding it is charged with
lack of patriotism. During the war nobody charged the officers of the
Bethlehem Steel Corporation or any of the other corporations who received
enormous bonuses with 'raiding the Treasury."'
American big business, be accused, had been responsible for United States
entry into World War I and was now "getting ready to start another one in the
East."
On November 8 Butler's choice for President won, and the House of
Representatives went Democratic by a margin of three to one. A chorus of
newspaper fury and frustration reflected the dismay of banking and industrial
interests over Roosevelt's election.
Less than three weeks before the President-elect's inauguration, an
unsuccessful attempt was made to assassinate him at Miami. Could the
assassin's bullet possibly have been negotiated for, Butler speculated, by a
big-business cabal that hated Roosevelt and dreaded a New Deal?
23
Many veterans' posts now started a movement to have Butler appointed
administrator of the U.S. Veterans Bureau in January, 1933, and sent
resolutions to Roosevelt to this effect.
Soon after the N.R.A. began, General Hugh Johnson asked Butler to work with
him in administering the program. Butler thanked him but refused, explaining,
I don't want to be tied up with anything I don't know about."
Meanwhile he watched with fascination the swift unfolding of developments in
the New Deal from the time Roosevelt declared at his inauguration on March 4,
1933, "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is
fear itself."
Next day the new President proclaimed a national bank holiday and embargoed
the exportation of gold. The famous "Hundred Days Congress," in a special
session called by the President, swiftly enacted into law the principal
policies of the New Deal. As the American people stirred with new hope that at
last the government was beginning to fight the nightmare Depression, Butler
noted with satisfaction that the bankers and industrialists of the nation were
horrified.
Meanwhile between July and December he had been pursued and wooed by Jerry
MacGuire, the bond salesman for Grayson M.-P. Murphy and Company, who had
sought to enlist him in the schemes of the financial group he represented. It
was with some relief that he was temporarily freed from these persistent
attentions on December 1, when MacGuire went abroad on an unexplained mission
for his backers.
Early in December, 1933, Butler began touring the country for the V.F.W. and
made headlines by speaking out with characteristic bluntness to attack the
leadership of the American Legion. He told a large gathering of veterans in
New Orleans that the V.F.W. commander "would not sell out his men as the
officers in charge of the American Legion have."
Sharing the platform with Senator Huey Long, he urged Long to concentrate on
fighting for the veterans' bonus and forget less important matters. "What the
hell do you know about the gold standard?" he challenged Long. "Don't pay any
attention to what the newspapers say. Stand by your friends and to hell with
the rest of them!"
Taking Long's political demagoguery at face value, he believed him to be
sincere in his advocacy of a redistribution of national wealth and praised him
as a man "with nerve enough to maintain a fight against Wall Street." He urged
the veterans to "make Wall Street pay, to take Wall Street by the throat and
shake it up." If they wanted to get the bonus that had been promised them,
they would have "to organize . . . to get together . . . to do as the veterans
of other wars have done."
It was a fighting speech in the classic populist vein, and it sparked national
controversy. The Cincinnati Times Star, a newspaper controlled by American
Legion officials, angrily accused Butler of advocating a "soldier
dictatorship."
Interviewed afterward in Atlanta about his attack on the Legion, he stuck by
his guns and added fuel to the fire by stating grimly, "I've never known one
leader of the American Legion who has never sold them out!"
As for the Star's accusation that he wanted a military dictatorship, he
replied with a speech denouncing crackpot rightist Movements that advocated
such a course for America. His suspicions about Clark and Maguire were
obviously very much on his mind when be made it.
"To many it may seem strange for a military man to denounce dictatorship", he
declared. "Generally it is the military men who are advocates of this stern
measure.... But we do not need a dictator and we would not have one anyway,
because our temperament and traditions forbid it."
He made it clear that he was stumping the country only on behalf of the
ordinary "forgotten soldier," just as F.D.R. had crusaded for the "forgotten
man."
He told reporters, "I went on the retired list after thirty-three years of
making wars, to rock and rock. So many former soldiers came to me with their
pathetic stories that I bounced out of retirement. All we soldiers are asking
is that the nation give us the same break that is being given the
manufacturers, the bankers, the industrialists. . . . Jimmie [Van Zandt] and I
are going around the country trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker
class."
If American Legion officialdom was furious at Butler's charges, the rank and
file were not. Typical of the barrage of fan mail cheering him on was a letter
from a Los Angeles Legionnaire: "Every word you say is true, and 1, as an ex-
soldier and one of the rank and file, respectfully request that you assume the
active leadership of the ex-servicemen. These five million men and their
families need you for a leader and will stick through thick and thin. The
leadership of the American Legion voice actually the opposite of the true
wishes of the membership.... Sir, the ex-serviceman of the United States is at
your command."
But Butler's first bombshell was mild compared to his next broadside against
the establishment, made in his Atlanta speech to the V.F.W. the next day. The
New York Times featured it tinder the headline:
GEN. BUTLER LAYS WAR TO BANKERS.
War was "largely a matter of money," he told the veterans who had gathered to
hear him. "Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay
the President sends Marines to get it. I know--I've been in eleven of these
expeditions." The world was not yet through with war, he warned, but we can
help get rid of it when we conscript capital along with men.
He pointed out that soldiers who went through the horrors of war were not the
same when they came back, adding vehemently, "We ought to make those
responsible pay through the nose." That was why the V.F.W. was calling for
immediate payment of the soldiers' bonus, in addition to compensation asked
for disabled veterans and pensions for veterans' widows and orphans.
Ex-servicemen were made the butt of an Economy Act passed by Congress, Butler
charged, because "the principle of taking care of soldiers is nothing at all
but an old-age pension to which the nation eventually will come, and the
bankers don't want it." He added caustically, "If Charles Dawes got ninety
million dollars for a sick bank, soldiers ought to get it for sick comrades."
Pointing out that veterans could muster twenty million votes among themselves
and their families, he urged them to use this pressure at the polls to force
decent care of the disabled.
If the "Democrats take care of you," he advised, "keep them in. If not-put 'em
out!" He warned veterans not to believe "the propaganda capital circulates" in
the press, which he condemned as largely capitalist-controlled. "The paper
that takes the part of the soldier," he charged, "loses advertising."
His concern for disabled veterans was not mere rhetoric. He met many of them
in the eighteen veterans' hospitals he visited during his tour of the country.
His walks through the wards to talk with them filled him with an angry grief.
In his days of combat he had seen many men killed and wounded. But the
crushing impact of seeing fifty thousand young men gathered together in
"living graveyards," forgotten by their country and the people for whom they
had sacrificed arms, legs, faces, and minds, moved him to rage against the old
men in power who had doomed them to lives of empty despair.
"Seventeen years ago they were the pick of the nation," he wrote grimly. ". .
. In the government hospital at Marion, Ohio, 1,800 wrecks are in pens. Five
hundred are in a barrack, under nurses, with wires all around the buildings
and enclosing the porches. All have been mentally destroyed. They don't even
look like human beings." He added in cold rage, "A careful study of their
expressions is highly recommended as an aid to the understanding of the art of
war."
On February 19, 1934 all the disabled veterans in the Veterans Administration
hospital at Albuquerque signed a petition to Butler, urging him to testify in
Congress to demand passage of the Bonus Bill and restoration of adequate
compensation to disabled veterans. He replied, "I am doing everything humanly
possible to help the veterans," and urged them to swamp Congress with letters
and postcards.
George K. Brobeck, legislative representative for the V.F.W., wrote Butler:
Every member of our National Staff is deeply appreciative of your fine
cooperation in our battle for the disabled men. I can think of no greater
service that America's military leaders might dedicate themselves to than the
one you have carried on so unceasingly, and I wish to repeat what Admiral R.
E. Coontz said to me the other day You always know where Butler is and whether
you like it or not, be is always on the level."
24
Army posts he visited often hailed the ex-Marine with a military band, partly
a tribute to his fame as commandant of the Army camp at Pontanezen, but even
more for his championship of the Bonus Army and veterans' hospitals. Wherever
he spoke to veterans' meetings and rallies, enthusiastic ex-soldiers
invariably outnumbered ex-Marines in his audience.
In his speeches for the V.F.W. he continued to plead their cause, along with
assailing war-makers and demanding payment of the veterans' bonus. In March he
was urged to attend the Indiana convention of the V.F.W. at Marion, which had
the largest veterans' hospital in the United States.
John R. James, its chairman, asked him to come and "say something to these
poor boys here to cheer them up in their lonesome surroundings. We need you
here at this time more than any other person in the country. The Veterans all
love you and look to you to guide them and tell them what to do. . . . I am
unable to mention your name in a meeting without getting a round of applause."
He was gratified to read on April 12, 1934, that the Senate had voted an
inquiry into the manufacture of and traffic in arms. Senator Gerald P. Nye, of
North Dakota, as chairman of the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee.
began holding public hearings stressing the heavy profits made by American
financiers and armament-makers during World War I.
The Nye Committee produced shock waves by exposing the pressures exerted by
the armament industry on the government to take America into that war. Oswald
Garrison Villard, editorpublisher of The Nation, wrote, "I never dreamed that
I should live to see the time when public opinion in the United States would
be practically united in recognizing that we were lied to and deceived into
going to war . . . and when Congress would actually put a stop to those
processes by which Wilson, House, Lansing and J. P. Morgan and Company brought
us into the war." The Nye investigation, continuing until 1936, strengthened
isolationist sentiment in the United States and inspired a series of
neutrality acts during 1935-1937.
Following the hearings closely, Butler was tremendously impressed and
influenced by their disclosures. They also confirmed his suspicions that big
business-Standard Oil, United Fruit, the sugar trust, the big banks-had been
behind most of the military interventions be had been ordered to lead. In a
broadcast over Philadelphia radio station WCAU he described his experiences in
"the raping of little nations to collect money for big industries" that had
large foreign investments.
Authentication for this view came thirty-eight years later when Milan B.
Skacel, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Latin America in the United
States, acknowledged on October 3.6, 1971, "Most of us freely admit that some
of the past business practices of U.S. firms in Latin America were
unconscionable."
Testifying before the Nye Committee, Eugene G. Grace, president of Bethlehem
Steel, admitted that his corporation had received almost three million dollars
in bonuses during World War I. He nervously expressed concern that such a
revelation might "leave a bad taste" in the mouths of veterans who had served
their country for a dollar a day, but nevertheless labeled their bonus
movement an "unfortunate" enterprise.
"Bethlehem Steel made ten times as much money during the war as before,"
Butler roared over WCAU, "and this band of pirates calls the soldiers Treasury
raiders!"
He urged reporter friends to get transcripts of the Nye hearings and read
them, insisting, "You fellows ought to know this stuff." One wanted to know
what had prompted him, even before the Nye disclosures, to "pull the whiskers
off" the face of commercialism behind the pomp and patriotic glory of war.
"As a youngster, I loved the excitement of battle," he replied. "It's lots of
fun, you know, and it's nice to strut around in front of your wife-or somebody
else's wife-and display your medals, and your uniform. But there's another
side to it, and that's why I have decided to devote the rest of my life to
'pulling off the whiskers."'
During his V.F.W. lecture tour he met an old war comrade, G. D. Morgan, who
was now adjutant of the V.F.W. post in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and confided
in him about the scheming of MacGuire, Doyle, and Clark. On May 14, 1934,
Morgan wrote him, "My Dear Smed: I wish you would send me the Statistics as
near, as possible that you have on those two Ex-Service men and the, Banker.
We are getting in the middle of a hot Congressional Campaign and one Senator
has been very adverse to our cause, so we want to shoot the works."
That month the Farmer-Labor party of Colorado urged Butler to become the
party's candidate for President in 1936, stating, "We know of no other man in
the U.S. that is as well informed on the situation with the nerve to carry
out, make possible these reforms, and that has the confidence of the masses.
The people need you badly."
25
In August, when Jerry MacGuire returned from Europe, the bond salesman had
insisted 'upon another meeting with Butler on a matter "of the utmost
importance." And at their discussion in the empty restaurant of Philadelphia's
Bellevue Hotel, MacGuire had sought to get him to agree to lead a Fascist coup
to capture the White House.
While smoking out the plot as far as he could and then getting reporter Paul
Comly French to investigate it for corroborative evidence in preparation to
exposing it, Butler continued his crusade against war and on behalf of justice
for the veterans. Once more he found himself running into censorship trouble.
Radio station WAVE, carrying his speech on October 3 to the V.F.W. national
convention, cut him off the air for "objectionable language" used before "a
mixed audience." The convention unanimously adopted a resolution condemning
WAVE for "unceremoniously curtailing the address of General Butler, an honored
and beloved member of this organization."
Louis G. Burd, Adjutant of the Butte, Montana, post, wrote him:
... This assertion is just some more of the same old hooey to mislead the
public. In our opinion you were cut off simply because you are one man before
the public who has the courage to . . . give the public the true facts that
they hunger to hear, and in a language of which there is no
misunderstanding.... Be assured, General, that this effort to prevent the
searchlight from being turned onto the malefactors of great wealth and
veterans' enemies will prove futile [to stop] your untiring fight for justice
for the veterans and the common people.
On Armistice Day Butler was vigorously applauded for a speech to a New York
Jewish congregation appealing to all religious groups to "stop the war
racket." He created a sensation in the press by flatly declaring that he would
never again carry a rifle on foreign soil. He proposed two constitutional
amendments. The first would make it impossible for war to be declared except
by the exclusive vote of those physically able to fight. The second would
prevent United States warships from going beyond a two-bundred-mile limit, and
airplanes from going more than five hundred miles from the American coastline.
On the same night from Richmond, Virginia, American Legion Commander Frank N.
Belgrano, Jr., a banker, indirectly replied in an angry speech attacking
"radical tendencies":
"Some, it would seem, have forgotten that our -country requires of us high and
willing duty today as it did when we went forth to fight an enemy in the open.
We are facing a new and more dangerous foe today. It has seeped quietly into
our country and whispered into the ears of our workers and our people
everywhere that our ideals of government are out of date. We of the Legion are
mobilized to meet that enemy and we are calling upon loyal Americans
everywhere to join us in ridding our country of this menace."
To Butler that sounded suspiciously like the reams of propaganda the American
Liberty League was now sending out, along with lecturers, to denounce the
"socialism" of the Roosevelt Administration and call for a return to the
doctrines of a laissez-faire economy.
The League's campaign failed to make any impact in the congressional elections
of 1934, however, and F.D.R. won an enormous. Democratic majority in both
houses of Congress.
Meanwhile gossip was spreading around Washington that the American Legion was
going to provide the nucleus of a Fascist army that would seize the Capital.
John L. Spivak, a crack reporter whose specialty was exposing American
Fascists and of whom Lincoln Steffens once said, "He is the best of us," heard
about it from an eminent Washington correspondent with excellent sources of
information and decided to investigate it.
The rumors also reached the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of
Representatives. This was the first House Un-American Activities Committee, at
that time equally oriented against Fascist and Communist activities. Under
Representative John W. McCormack, later Speaker of the House, it spent
considerable time and energy unmasking Fascist agents in America. Not until
1939, when a new version of HUAC was reconstituted under the chairmanship of
Martin Dies, did this committee become infamous for its relentless persecution
directed almost exclusively against liberals and leftists of every persuasion,
while ignoring subversion on the right.
One of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee's investigators contacted Butler to
ask if there was any truth in the rumors that he could shed light on. Now that
he had Paul Comly French's testimony to corroborate his own, Butler decided
that there was little more to be gained by playing MacGuire along; between
French and himself, the plotters' secret plans bad been ferreted out to a
significant extent.
Come hell or high water, press ridicule or denunciations terming him a madman,
he was now determined to testify before the committee and spread the plot for
a Fascist takeover of the United States all over the front pages. He would
destroy it before it bad a chance to crush democracy in the country he loved
and had served all his life.
But would he be believed, even with the support of French's testimony? What if
be wasn't? Worse, what if he had waited too long to unravel the whole sordid
story, and it was already too late to stop the conspirators?
pp. 109-136
-----
Next -
Part III
The Conspiracy Explodes
-----
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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