THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE
BY JULES ARCHER

 

Special Note: For many years, this landmark book from 1973 was out of print and only available from collectors for several hundred dollars a copy. Thankfully, a new edition came out in early 2007, which is available here. Spread the word to your friends and colleagues, and invite them to read our two-page summary of the war cover-up at this link.

 

Americans can no longer be shocked by the discovery that information directly affecting their personal freedom is withheld from news media to protect persons with governmental influence. But it still comes as a shocking revelation that in 1933 there was an actual attempt to make a fascist puppet of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, more than forty years later, the public still remains ignorant of the story behind "THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE."

The fact that the plot was a failure and our present government is still a democracy, is directly attributable to Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most remarkable generals in American history. A veteran of 35 years in the Marine Corps and twice a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Butler finally decided that "war is a racket!" His reputation for patriotism, integrity, and dedication to democracy, coupled with his proclivity to speak the truth as he saw it irrespective of official policy, made him a seemingly perfect front for the men who hated Roosevelt. They were people with a determination, if it were impossible to replace the president, to manipulate him through the person of an American Mussolini. Their short-sightedness prevented their realizing that Butler was obviously the wrong choice for the job.

Jules Archer quotes testimony from the McCormack-Dickstein House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings (including testimony that was subsequently censored from public record) that details how Butler was approached by representatives of the arch-conservative American Liberty League; how they tried to persuade him to lead an army of veterans in demonstration against Roosevelt's silver standard; how Butler quickly concluded that the silver standard controversy was being used as a subterfuge to lead American veterans against Washington for truly sinister purposes; and how this hero, patriot, and Republican democrat, upon uncovering the full dimensions of the conspiracy, determined to go to Washington and blow it wide open.

John L. Spivak, a reporter assigned to cover the committee hearings, calls the story "one of the most fantastic plots in American history....What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories. It would be regrettable if historians neglected this episode and future generations of Americans never learned of it."

Born in New York City, Jules Archer is a graduate of City College of New York. During World War II he served four years in the Pacific with the Army Air Corps and was also a freelance correspondent by order of General MacArthur. He is the author of many books on political events and personalities, including Mao Tse-tung, The Dictators, Hawks, Doves and the Eagle, The Extremists, and Chou En-lai.

Hawthorn Books, Inc. Publishers 260 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10016

 

Printed in U.S.A.

 

 

THE PLOT TO SEIZE

THE

WHITE HOUSE

 

Jules Archer

 

 

 

HAWTHORN BOOKS, INC.

PUBLISHERS / New York

 

 

 

THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE

 

 

 

To reporters George Seldes and John L. Spivak

for their courageous dedication to the

truth, wherever it led

CONTENTS

 

 

FOREWORD  ix

 

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS       xi

 

 

I

The Plot  1

 

II

The Indispensable Man  35

 

III

The Conspiracy Explodes  137

 

IV

Fallout   203

 

 

INDEX   245

 

 

FORWARD

 

This is the true story of a remarkable American who, during the early New Deal years, was sought by wealthy plotters in the United States to lead a putsch to overthrow the government and establish an American Fascist dictatorship.

          According to retired Representative John W. McCormack, former Speaker of the House, if the late Major General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marine Corps had not been a stubborn devotee of democracy, Americans today could conceivably be living under an American Mussolini, Hitler, or Franco.

          An ironic aspect of the conspiracy General Butler unmasked is that few Americans have ever heard about it, or even know anything about the general.  As children all of us were taught about the treason of Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold, whose betrayals were safely cobwebbed by the distant past.  But school texts that deal with the New Deal are uniquely silent about the powerful Americans who plotted to seize the White House with a private army, hold President Franklin D. Roosevelt prisoner, and get rid of him if he refused to serve as their puppet in a dictatorship they planned to impose and control.

          There is strong evidence to suggest that the conspirators may have been too important politically, socially, and economically to be brought to justice after their scheme had been exposed before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives.  The largely anti-Roosevelt press of the New Deal era scotched the story as expeditiously as possible by outright suppression, distortion, and attempts to ridicule General Butler’s testimony as capricious fantasy.

 

ix

x        Forward

 

          Smedley Butler’s whole life, however, was proof that he was a man of incorruptible character, integrity, and patriotism, with a deserved reputation for bluntly speaking the whole truth at all times, regardless of the consequences.  He was named by Theodore Roosevelt “the outstanding American soldier.”  The official Marine Corps record calls him “one of the most colorful officers in the Marine Corps’ long history” and “one of the two Marines who received two Medals of Honor for separate acts of outstanding heroism.”  He was decorated no fewer than twenty times.

          Former Speaker McCormack told the author, “In peace or war he was one of the outstanding Americans in our history.  I can’t emphasize too strongly the very important part he played in exposing the Fascist plot in the early 1930’s backed by and planned by persons possessing tremendous wealth.”

          The crucial events of the plot to seize the White House unfolded between July and November, 1933, with hearings before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee begun in New York City on November 20, 1934.  On November 26 the committee released a statement detailing the testimony it had heard, and its preliminary findings.  On February 15, 1935, the committee submitted to the House of Representatives its final report, verifying completely the testimony of General Butler.

          This book may help break some of the seals of silence that have kept Americans from knowing the truth about that conspiracy.  As the first effort to tell the whole story of the plot in sequence and full detail, it may serve as a fresh reminder of Wendell Phillips’s warning about the price of liberty.

          No American was ever more dedicated to eternal vigilance in preserving our freedom under the Bill of Rights that the remarkable war hero, pacifist, and Republican democrat-Smedley Darlington Butler.

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

I am deeply indebted first and foremost to the immediate family of the late Major General Smedley D. Butler-daughter Mrs. Ethel Peters Wehle and sons Smedley Butler, Jr. and Thomas Richard Butler-for their generous cooperation; for use of the general’s private and military papers, scrapbooks, memorabilia, recordings, and photos; and for vivid personal recollections of their father.

          Sincere gratitude is also expressed to the following persons and institutions for their contributions to my research:

          Former Speaker of the House of Representatives John W. McCormack, who headed the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and who answered all my questions about the hearings he held during which General Butler testified about the conspiracy.

          General David M. Shoup, retired commandant of the United States Marine Corps, who served under General Butler in China and who shared some of his reminiscences with me.

          George Seldes, whose newsletter In Fact and books 1000 Americans and Facts and Fascism gave me my first inklings of the conspiracy many years ago and who generously helped me with my research efforts.

          John L. Spivak, former foreign correspondent for International News Service, who rendered invaluable cooperation by answering all my questions and generously permitting me to quote from his own fascinating reminiscences,  A Man in His Time, in which he relates how he was able to thwart efforts to suppress important names involved in the conspiracy.

 

xi

xii      Acknowledgements

 

          Senator Job Javits and Representative Hamilton Fish, Jr., who assisted me in obtaining copies of the testimony at the conspiracy hearings of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee.

          E. Z. Dimitman, former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and close friend of General Butler’s, who shared his reminiscences of the general.

          Jerry Doyle, Philadelphia Daily News staff artist, who helped me locate old friends of the general’s.

          Jesse Laventhol, Philadelphia newsman, confidant, and press secretary for the general’s Senate campaign, now retired, who explained some of the behind-the-scenes political factors.

          Tom O’Neil, former city editor of the Philadelphia Record at the time of the conspiracy, who helped put some of the pieces of the puzzle together.

          William J. Stewart, Acting Director, National Archives and Records Service, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, who guided me through the Roosevelt papers in locating material pertaining to General Butler and helped me identify sources.

          Mary Schutz and Charlotte Wright, of the Mid-Hudson Library System, Poughkeepsie, New York, who obtained for me rare and hard-to-get research on the conspiracy from universities and public libraries all over the East Coast; James Brock, Ethel Tornapore, and Jane McGarvey, of Adriance Library in Poughkeepsie; the Starr Institute Library, Rhinebeck, New York; Neda M. Westlake, Curator, Rare Book Collection, Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; and Mary Lou Alm, of the Pine Plains, New York, Library.

          Colonel F. C. Caldwell, U.S. Marine Corps (retired), director of Marine Corps History, Historical Division, who gave me valuable research leads and provided me with helpful articles and public records from Marine Corps sources.

          Warrant Officer D. R. Aggers, U.S. Marine Corps, Head, Administrative Section, Director of Information, for providing certain Marine Corps photos of General Butler.

          Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., which permitted me to study a 1962 master’s thesis in library science by Eunice M. Lyon, The Unpublished Papers of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps: a

Acknowledgements          xiii

 

Calendar, based on files turned over by the Butler family to the Marine Corps.

          Robert B. Pitkin, editor, American Legion Magazine, who gave me statistical information about past Legion commanders.

          Donald R. McCoy, historian, University of Kansas, for granting permission to quote from his book, Coming of Age: The United States During the 1920’s and 1930’s.

          Assistant Professor Dane Archer, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who originally researched the conspiracy for me eight years ago in old newspaper files at Yale University’s Sterling Library.

          My wife, Eleanor E. Archer, who aided me in interviews with Speaker McCormack, General Shoup, and General Butler’s family as well as serving as adviser, critic, indexer, and proofreader.

          Time magazine, for permission to quote from its article, “Plot Without Plotters,” December 3, 1934.

          Susan Berkowitz and Joan Nagy, whose brilliant editorial help aided me in sifting and organizing the elements in this book to let what remained stand out like gold dust in a prospecting pan.

 

JULES ARCHER

 

Pine Plains, New York

 

 

 

 

PART ONE

 

The Plot

1

 

 

Perspiring on the raw-wood platform in the broiling heat of a July day in Washington, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, retired, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and opened his collar.  His violent deep-set eyes surveyed ten thousand faces upturned among the lean-tos, shanties, and tents on Anacostia Flats.

          Bums, riffraff, drifters, and troublemakers-those were some of the descriptions being applied to the Bonus Army.  Many of the ragged veterans who had marched on the Capital had been sleeping in doorways and under bridges, part of the vast army of twelve million unemployed.  Some were the same men who had fought under Smedley Butler in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines campaign, the Boxer Rebellion, the Caribbean interventions, the Chinese intervention of 1927-1928, and World War I.

          Butler had come to Washington in 1932 at the urging of James Van Zandt, head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to lend moral support to veterans at a crucial moment.  Congress had just voted down the Patman Bonus Bill to pay veterans the two-billion-dollar bonus promised them in bonus certificates payable in 1945.  Bonus Army Commander Walter W. Waters, a former army sergeant, and other leaders feared that their discouraged followers would now give up and return home.

          When Waters introduced Smedley Butler to the huge crowd of veterans gathered along the Anacostia River to hear him, he was greeted with an enthusiastic roar of acclaim that echoed through Washington like thunder.  They all knew Old Gimlet Eye, one of the most colorful generals who had ever led troops

 

 

3

4                   The Plot to Seize the White House

 

into battle.  He was even more famous and popular among rank-and-file leathernecks, doughboys, and bluejackets for the fierce battles he had fought against the American military hierarchy on behalf of the enlisted men.  He was also admired, respected, and trusted because of his one-man fight to compel Americans to remember their tragic war casualties hidden away in isolated veterans’ hospitals.

     Smedley Butler was a wiry bantam of  a man, shoulders hunched forward as though braced against the pull of a heavy knapsack, his hawk nose prominent in the leathery face of an adventurer.  Silhouetted against a flaming sunset, he made a blazing speech of encouragement in the blunt language that had kept him in hot water with the nation’s highest-ranking admirals and generals, not to mention Secretaries of State and Navy.

     “If you don’t hang together, you aren’t worth a damn!” he cried in the famous hoarse rasp that sent a thrill through every veteran who had heard it before.  He reminded them that losing battles didn’t mean losing a war.  “I ran for the Senate on a bonus ticket,” he said, “and got the hell beat out of me.”  But he didn’t intend to stop fighting for the bonus, and neither should they, he demanded, no matter how stiff the opposition or the names they were called.

     “They may be calling you tramps now,” he roared, “but in 1917 they didn’t call you bums! … You are the best-behaved group of men in this country today.  I consider it an honor to be asked to speak to you. … Some folks say I am here after something.  That’s a lie.  I don’t want anything.”  All he wanted, he told the cheering veterans, was to see that the country they had served dealt with them justly.  He concluded his exhortation by urging, “When you get home, go to the polls in November and lick the hell out of those who are against you.  You know who they are. … No go to it!”

     Afterward he was mobbed by veterans eager to speak to him.  Until 2:30 A.M. he sat sprawled on the ground in front of his tent, listening sympathetically to tales of lost jobs, families in distress, and troublesome old wounds.  He slept three hours, then woke up to resume talks with the veterans.

     Sharing a Bonus Army breakfast of potatoes, hard bread, and

The Plot           5

 

coffee, he learned that the food was running out, and veterans were muttering about rioting against Congress if it did.  Before he left for his home in Newtown Square, a small town outside of Philadelphia, he warned the Bonus Marchers, “You’re all right so long as you keep your sense of humor.  If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind, you will lose the sympathy of a hundred twenty million people in the nation.”

     It was the government, however, that unleashed the violence.  Under orders from President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur led troops in driving the Bonus Army out of Washington at bayonet point and burning down their shacktowns.

     By August 1 rumors spreading from the last stronghold of the veterans, an encampment at Johnstown, Virginia, indicated that the infuriated Bonus Marchers were determined to organize a new nonpartisan political organization of veterans and wanted General Butler to lead it.  Reporters pressed him to comment.

     “I have heard nothing about it at all, although I was in Washington about two weeks ago to address the veterans,” he replied with a shrug.  “I have neither seen nor heard from Mr. Waters or any of the other leaders of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.”

     Meanwhile he phoned the governors of a number of states and won their agreement to provide relief for those of their veterans who wanted to return home.  He phones Waters in Washington to urge that the remnants of the Bonus Army break camp and start back home under this plan, and he issued a blast at the Hoover Administration as heartless for its treatment of the veterans and its failure to help them, their wives, and their children return home without further humiliation.

     That November lifelong Republican Smedley Butler took the stump for Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped turn Herbert Hoover out of the White House.

5                   The Plot to Seize the White House

 

2

 

 

On July 1, 1933, General Butler’s phone rang soon after he had had breakfast.  Calling from Washington, an American Legion official he had met once or twice told Butler that two veterans were on their way from Connecticut to see him about an important matter and urged him to make time for him.

     About five hours later, hearing a car pull up into his secluded driveway at Newtown Square, Butler glanced out the porch window.  His lips pursed speculatively as two fastidiously dressed men got out of a chauffeur-driven Packard limousine.

     At the door the visitors introduced themselves as Bill Doyle, commander of the Massachusetts American Legion, and Gerald C. MacGuire, whom Butler understood to have been a former commander of the Connecticut department.

     Butler led the visitors into his study at the rear of the house, and they took chairs opposite his desk.  MacGuire, who did most of the talking, was a fat, perspiring man with rolls of jowls, a large mouth, fleshy nose, and bright blue eyes.  He began a somewhat rambling conversation during which he revealed that he, too, had been a Marine, with a war wound that had left a silver plate in his head.  Doyle established his combat credentials by mentioning that he also had a Purple Heart.

     Butler’s compassion for wounded veterans made him patient as MacGuire encircled the subject of their visit in spirals that only gradually narrowed until their apex pierced the point.  The point, it seemed, was that MacGuire and Doyle, speaking for a coterie of influential Legionnaires, were intensely dissatisfied with the current leadership of the American Legion.  Considering it indifferent to the needs of rank-and-file veterans, they revealed that they hoped to dislodge the regime at a forthcoming Legion convention to be held in Chicago.  They urged

The Plot           7

 

 

Butler to join them and stampede the convention with a speech designed to oust the “Royal Family” controlling the organization.

     Their dissatisfaction with the leadership of the American Legion did not find Butler unsympathetic.  He had long been privately critical of the organization’s close ties with big business and its neglect of the real interests of the veterans it presumably represented.  These convictions were to be made dramatically public before the year was out, but now he declined his visitors’ proposal on the grounds that he had no wish to get involved in Legion politics and pointed out that, in any event, he had not been invited to take part in the Legion convention.

     MacGuire revealed that he was chairman of the “distinguished guest committee” of the Legion, and was on the staff of National Commander Louis Johnson, a former Secretary of Defense.  At MacGuire’s suggestion Johnson had included Butler’s name as one of the distinguished guests to be invited to the Chicago convention.  Johnson had then taken this list to the White House, MacGuire said, and had shown it for approval to Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s secretary.  Howe had crossed Butler’s name off the list, however, saying that the President was opposed to inviting Butler.  MacGuire did not know the reason, but Bill Doyle assured Butler that they had devised a plan to have him address the convention anyhow.

     Butler remained silent.  He was used to oddball visitors who called with all kinds of weird requests.  Curiosity, and the leisure afforded by retirement, often led him to hear them out in order to fathom their motives.

     He thought about his visitors’ finely tailored suits and the chauffeur-driven Packard an their claim to represent the “plain soldiers” of the Legion.  The story about the rejection of his name on the Legion convention guest list by the White House struck him as more than peculiar, in view of the fact that the President had gratefully accepted his campaign help in a “Republicans for Roosevelt” drive eight months earlier.  Why should F.D.R. suddenly be so displeased with him?

     It crossed his mind that the purpose of the story, true or false, might be intended to pique him against the Roosevelt Administration, for some obscure reason.  Keeping his suspicions

8                   The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

to himself,  he heard out his visitors in the hope of learning why they were so anxious to use him.

     They explained that they had arranged for him to attend the convention as a delegate from Hawaii, which would give him the right to speak.  When he still declined, they asked whether he wasn’t in sympathy with their desire to oust the “Royal Family.”  He was, he said, because the leadership had simply been using the organization to feather their own nests, but he had absolutely no intention of attending the convention without an invitation.

     His disappointed visitors took their leave but asked permission to return in a few weeks.

 

 

3

 

 

A month later Doyle and MacGuire returned.  Without waiting to inquire whether Butler had changed his mind, MacGuire quickly informed him that there had been a change of plans.  The general had been right to object to coming to the convention as just another delegate, MacGuire acknowledged.  It would have been ineffective, and a waste of the general’s immense prestige.

     MacGuire outlined a new plan in which Butler would gather two or three hundred Legionnaires and take them to Chicago on a special train.  They would be scattered throughout the audience at the convention, and when Butler made an appearance in the spectators’ gallery, they would leap to their feet applauding and cheering wildly.  The proceedings would be stampeded with cries for a speech that would not die down until Butler was asked to the platform.

     Incredulous at the audacity with which this scheme was being unfolded to him, Butler asked what kind of speech his visitors expected him to make.  MacGuire produced some folded

The Plot           9

 

 

typewritten pages from an inside jacket pocket.  They would leave a speech with him to read.  MacGuire urged Butler to round up several hundred Legionnaires, meanwhile, to take to Chicago with him.

     Holding on to his fraying temper, Butler pointed out that none of the Legionnaires he knew could afford the trip or stay in Chicago.  MacGuire quickly assured him that all their expenses would be paid.  But Butler, who was constantly being approached with all kinds of wild schemes and proposals, was not prepared to take the plotters seriously until they could prove they had financial backing.  When he challenged MacGuire on this point, the veteran slipped a bankbook out of his pocket.  Without letting the name of the bank or the account be seen, he flipped over the pages and showed Butler two recent deposits-one for $42,000 and a second for $64,000-for “expenses.”

     That settled it.  No wounded soldiers Butler knew possessed $100,000 bank accounts.  His instincts sharpened by two years’ experience, on loan from the Marines, as crime-busting Director of Public Safety for Philadelphia, warned him that there was something decidedly unsavory about the proposition.

     He decided to blend skepticism, wariness, and interest in his responses, to suggest that he might be induced to participate in the scheme if he could be assured that it was foolproof.  He would profess himself interested, but unconvinced as long as he suspected that there was more to be learned about the scheme.  So far they had told him practically nothing except what was barely necessary for the role they wanted him to play.  He determined to get to the bottom of the plot, while trying not to scare them off in the process.

     After they had left, he read over the speech MacGuire had left with him.  It urged the American Legion convention to adopt a resolution calling for the United States to return to the gold standard, so that when veterans were paid the bonus promised to them, the money they received would not be worthless paper.  Butler was baffled.  What did a return to the gold standard have to do with the Legion?  Why were MacGuire and Doyle being paid to force this speech on the convention-and who was paying them?

9       The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

4

 

 

Butler detected an odor of intrigue.  Some kind of outlandish scheme, he was convinced, was afoot.  Knowing little about the gold standard, why Roosevelt had taken the country off it or who stood to gain by its restoration and why, he began thumbing through the financial pages of newspapers and magazines-sections of the press he had never had any occasion to read.

          The first important fact he learned was that the government no longer had to back up every paper dollar with a dollar’s worth of gold.  This meant that the Roosevelt Administration could increase the supply of paper money to keeps its pledge of making jobs for the unemployed, and give loans to farmers and homeowners whose property was threatened by foreclosure.  Banks would then be paid back in cheapened paper dollars for the gold-backed dollars they had lent.

          Conservative financiers were horrified.  They viewed a currency not solidly backed by gold as inflationary, undermining both private and business fortunes and leading to national bankruptcy.  Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist out to destroy private enterprise by sapping the gold backing of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.

          Butler began to understand that some wealthy Americans might be eager to use the American Legion as an instrument to pressure the Roosevelt Administration into restoring the gold standard.  But who was behind MacGuire?

          A short while after MacGuire’s second visit, he returned to see Butler again, this time alone.  MacGuire asked how he was coming along in rounding up veterans to take with him to the convention.  Butler replied evasively that he had been too busy to do anything about it.  He then made it clear that he could no further interest in the plan unless MacGuire was willing to

The Plot      11

 

 

be candid and disclose the sources of the funds that were behind it.

          After some hesitation MacGuire revealed that they had been provided by nine backers, the biggest contributor putting up nine thousand dollars.  Pressed to explain their motives, MacGuire insisted that they were simply concerned about helping veterans get their bonus and a square deal.

          People who could afford such contributions, Butler reflected ironically, were hardly the type who favored a two-billion-dollar bonus for veterans.

          When he prodded MacGuire further, the fat veteran revealed that one of his chief backers was a wealthy Legionnaire he worked for, Colonel Grayson M.-P. Murphy, who operated a brokerage firm at 52 Broadway in New York City.  Butler pointed out the contradiction between MacGuire’s claim that his group was concerned with the problems of the poor rank-and-file veteran and the fact that his backers were all obviously wealthy men.  MacGuire simply shrugged and frankly admitted that as far as he personally was concerned, he was primarily involved in the transaction as a businessman and was being well taken care of for his efforts.  It would be equally profitable for Butler, he hinted, if the general were disposed to cooperate.

          Butler pumped him about Colonel Murphy’s connection with the plan.  Murphy, MacGuire revealed, was one of the founders of the Legion and had actually underwritten it with $125,000 in 1919 to pay for the organizational field work.  He had been motivated by a desire to see the soldiers “cared for.”

          When Butler questioned Murphy’s motive in wanting the gold-standard speech made at the convention, MacGuire explained that he and the other backers simply wanted to be sure that the veterans would be paid their bonus in sound gold-backed currency, not in “rubber money.”

          He showed Butler several checks for large amounts signed by Murphy and two other men-Robert S. Clark and John

12                          The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

 

Mills.  Clark’s name rang a bell with Butler.  He had known a Second Lieutenant Robert S. Clark in China during the Boxer Campaign who had been called “the millionaire lieutenant.”

          The money, MacGuire said, would be used to open an expense account for Butler in Chicago.  He hoped that the general would now get busy rounding up veterans to take to the convention.

          Butler remained noncommittal.  He intended to procrastinate as long as he could, continuing to pump MacGuire until had enough information to make a complete report to the government.  The President, he felt, ought to know what schemes his rich opponents were up to overturn New Deal policies.

          After the visit, Butler brooded over the implication of MacGuire’s revelation that his employer, key founder and sponsor of the American Legion, was involved.  Tall, heavyset, Grayson Mallot-Prevost Murphy* not only operated one of Wall Street’s leading brokerage houses but was also a director of Guaranty Trust, a Morgan bank, and had extensive industrial and financial interests as a director of Anaconda Copper, Goodyear Tire, and Bethlehem Steel.  A West Point graduate, Murphy was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I with the rank of colonel.  Butler’s bushy eyebrows rose when he also learned that the financier had been decorated by Benito Mussolini, who had made him a Command of the Crown of Italy.

          Butler found out that he had been one of twenty American officers who had met in Paris in February, 1919, reportedly on orders from the commanders of the A.E.F., to counter revolutionary unrest in Europe following the end of World War I, by forming a veterans’ organization with the alleged purpose of looking after veterans’ welfare and uniting them to defend America at home as they had abroad.

          Murphy had put up $125,000 to get the American Legion going, and it had been organized in the spring with a caucus of about a thousand officers and men.  The Legion had then solicited funds and support from industrialists.  Swift and Company executives had written other firms, “We are all

 

* The Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy referred to here and throughout the book died on October 19, 1937.

The Plot                13

 

 

Legion, the results it will obtain, and the ultimate effect in helping to offset radicalism.”

          The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920’s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency.  When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were Communists trying to create national chaos so that the Reds could take over.  Legionnaires were given baseball bats to break up strikes and civil rights demonstrations.  The American Civil Liberties Union later reported, “Of the forces most active in attacking civil rights, the American Legion led the field.”

          The rank and file, however, had grown increasingly restless and impatient with the “Royal Family” that ran the Legion, especially after the Depression had left so many jobless.  Veterans forced to sell apples on street corners were angered by a Legion leadership that opposed the bonus and government spending as inflationary.  That was why so many thousands had bypassed the Legion to join the Bonus March on Washington.

          Adding up the facts, Butler was struck by a startling contradiction.  MacGuire had claimed to speak for rank-and-file discontent with the Legion’s bosses and professed to want to oust them, yet he was an agent for a top founder of the Legion who was obviously one of the powers behind the throne.  MacGuire had revealed that the Legion still owed Murphy part of the $125,000 foundation money he had provided and had tacitly acknowledged that Murphy “makes the kings.”

          MacGuire obviously had to be lying in his claim that he-or Murphy-wanted to topple the present leadership.  Why?  Perhaps it was a ruse to channel and control popular discontent in the Legion, hopefully with Butler’s help, for the purposes of the nine wealthy men behind MacGuire.  Butler awaited MacGuire’s next move with deep intersest.

13                          The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

5

 

 

In September Butler was asked to address a convention of the Legion’s 29th Division at Newark, New Jersey.  On the Sunday morning he was in the city, the phone rang in his hotel room.  It was MacGuire, who was in the lobby and asked to see him.

          Invited to Butler’s room, MacGuire reminded the general that the time for the American Legion Convention was rapidly approaching.  Was Butler finally ready to take a contingent of veterans to Chicago and make the gold-standard speech?

          Butler displayed increasing skepticism about the whole plan.  In a gruff voice he challenged MacGuire’s proposal as a bluff without any real money behind it.  His visitor whipped a fat wallet out of his hip pocket, extracted a mass of thousand-dollar bills, and scattered them all over the bed.  The eighteen thousand dollars, he said smugly, would amply cover the expenses of Butler and the veterans he led to Chicago.

          The gesture caught Butler by surprise; losing his temper, he accused MacGuire of trying to give him thousand-dollar bills whose number had been recorded, so that once he cashed them, the plotters would have proof of his complicity.  MacGuire hastily assured him that he could have smaller denominations.

          In his vexation Butler snapped at the bond salesman to take back the money immediately, as he had no intention of getting involved in MacGuire’s scheme.  But then, as he regained control of his anger, he sought to make it appear that he was merely indignant that he was forced to deal with an emissary.  He would negotiate, he told MacGuire firmly, only with principals.

          After some hesitation MacGuire agreed to have him contacted by Robert S. Clark, a banker who had inherited a large fortune from a founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

          One week later Clark phoned Butler at his home.  They arranged a meeting at the railroad station.  Butler instantly

The Plot      15

 

 

Recognized the tall, gangling man, hair now steel-gray, who stepped off the train as the lieutenant he had known thirty-four years earlier.

          Butler drove him home for lunch, during which they exchanged memories of the Boxer Campaign.  Afterward they adjourned to the spacious, glassed-in porch, and Clark got down to the business of his visit.  He was going to the American Legion convention in a private car attached to the Pennsylvania Limited, he told Butler.  He planned to have the train stop at Paoli to pick the general up, and they would continue on to Chicago together.  A suite of rooms had already been reserved for Butler at the Palmer House.

          Clark would see to it, he told the general, that Butler was calling for a resolution demanding restoration of the gold standard.  In discussing the speech, the millionaire was induced to reveal that the author was none other than John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic candidate for President, and now chief attorney for J. P. Morgan and Company.

          Butler pointed out to Clark that the speech did not seem to have anything to do with the soldiers’ bonus, which was presumably the purpose of his trip to Chicago.  Shrugging, Clark blandly repeated MacGuire’s assurance that those supporting the speech simply wanted to be sure that the bonus would be paid in gold-backed currency, not in worthless paper.

          Butler decided to draw blood and observe Clark’s reaction.  Sharp eyes honed on his visitor’s face, he suggested that the speech had all the earmarks of big-business propaganda.  The banker, taken aback, did not reply for a moment.  He seemed to be debating with himself whether to deny the allegation or take Butler into his confidence.  Then he astonished the general by a sudden burst of candor.

          He had a personal fortune of thirty million dollars, he revealed, and he was greatly worried about losing it to a Roosevelt inflation-runaway government spending unbridled by the need to back each paper dollar with gold.  He was willing to spend fully half his fortune if it would save the other half.  He was confident that if Butler made the speech at Chicago, the Legion would go on record as demanding a return to the gold standard.

16                          The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

That would be an important step toward organizing the veterans of American to put pressure on Congress and the President for such a bill.

          Why, Butler asked him curiously, did he think the President would allow himself to be pressured by such tactics?  Clark expressed confidence that Roosevelt would yield because he belonged, after all, to the same social class that was solidly behind the gold standard.  Once he had restored it, his fellow patricians would rally around him and defend his position against criticism.

          Butler was shocked by Clark’s blatant snobbery, but even more by the millionaire’s assumption that the wishes of economic royalists should-and would-prevail over the democratic processes of government.  Once more his anger boiled over. In a voice that cracked with indignation, he exploded that he wanted nothing to do with a scheme to exploit veterans.  Furthermore, he rasped, he intended to see to it that the veterans of the country were not used to undermine democracy but to defend it.

          Clark’s face turned crimson.  Chagrined, he reproached Butler for being stubborn and “different,” hinting that such things as the mortgage on Butler’s house could be taken care of for him, and in a fully legal fashion.

          This crude attempt to bribe him was too much for the dumbfounded general.  Bellowing his indignation, he roared an order at the millionaire to follow him into the living room.  Clark meekly trailed him into a large hall resplendent with flags, banners, decorations, plaques, scrolls, citations, and other symbols of esteem that had been presented to the general during his long career in the Marines.  The hall was flanked at both ends by huge canopies on tall poles-“Blessings Umbrellas” awarded by unanimous vote of the people of Chinese cities only to their greatest benefactors.

          Quivering with rage, Butler pointed out to Clark that most of the awards in the hall had been given to him by poor people all over the world, and he vowed that he would never betray their faith.  Ordering Clark to inspect them until he understood the enormity of his mistake, Butler stormed off to his study, pacing back and forth in an effort to simmer down.

          In a few minutes a chastened Clark joined him and meekly

The Plot      17

 

 

asked permission to make a phone call to MacGuire at the Palmer House in Chicago.  As Butler listened stony-faced, Clark informed MacGuire that for “excellent” reasons the general would not be coming to the convention.  MacGuire was reminded that had money enough to do the job alone and could “send those telegrams.”  At the completion of the call, Clark then apologized so contritely that his host, mollified, forgave him.

          To lighten the strained atmosphere, then conversation now returned to the Boxer days until it was time to drive Clark to the station to catch a six o’clock train from Paoli.

          Butler felt ambivalent about having revealed his true feelings.  On the one hand, it made him feel better to get them off his chest; tact and restraint and subterfuge were alien to his nature.  On the other hand, it seemed hardly likely that after his explosion the plotters could possibly believe they could persuade or buy him.  He would have no further opportunity to ferret out their plans.

          A few days later he carefully studied a newspaper account of the proceedings of the American Legion convention I Chicago.   The story revealed that a huge flood of telegrams had poured into the convention urging delegates to endorse a return to the gold standard.  A resolution to this effect had been proposed and carried.

          Butler felt mingled amusement and disgust.

 

 

6

 

 

To the general’s surprise MacGuire stopped off to see him, this time in a hired limousine, on the way back from the convention.  The man said nothing about the contretemps with Clark, although Butler was certain he must have heard about it, and his manner was as buoyant and friendly as ever.  He boasted to Butler about having put over the gold-standard resolution.

18      The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

The general pointed out wryly that no action had been taken at the convention to endorse the soldiers’ bonus.  MacGuire airily repeated his contention that there was no point in that until the country had sound currency.

          Shortly afterward MacGuire came to Newtown Square again and surprised the general with the news that a dinner had been arranged by Boston veterans in his honor.  He was promised transportation in a private car, and, MacGuire beamed, Butler would be paid a thousand dollars to speak at the dinner-in favor of the gold standard, of course.

          Butler was dumbfounded at MacGuire’s incredible persistence.  Surely the indefatigable bond salesman had realized by this time that he was barking up the wrong tree!  But perhaps, the general speculated, MacGuire felt challenged to “make the sale,” in much the same manner that he undoubtedly sought to overcome the sales resistance of reluctant prospects for his bonds.  And apparently MacGuire was convinced that only Smedley Butler had the prestige and popularity among veterans that his coterie needed to put over the scheme.

          Irked by the new attempt to bribe him, Butler rasped that he had never been paid a thousand dollars for any speech and had no intention of accepting such a sum to let words be put in his mouth.  Chagrined but undiscouraged, MacGuire cheerfully promised to come up with some other more acceptable plan to utilize the general’s talents as a public speaker.

          In October a former Marine running for office in Brooklyn, New York, begged Butler to make some campaign speeches in his behalf.  Butler was hesitant because he was about to leave on a tour of the country for Veterans of Foreign Wars, speaking for the bonus and for membership in the V.F.W. as the best way to get it.  But loyalty to the men who had served under him took him first to Pennsylvania Station.

          To his astonishment he was met by MacGuire.  The bond salesman somehow knew where he was headed and asked to accompany him.  Butler consented, more and more intrigued by the ubiquitous MacGuire who kept turning up everywhere he went like a bad penny.  He found himself even growing perversely fond of MacGuire for his stubborn refusal to take No for

The Plot      19

 

 

an answer.  In the Marines Butler had always had a soft spot for incorrigible rascals who brightened up monotonous routine by their unpredictable shenanigans.

          Besides, he was still curious to learn more about what the plotters in the gold scheme were up to.  MacGuire now revealed a new plan to involve the general through his impending lecture tour for the V.F.W.  Wasn’t he, MacGuire probed, going to use the opportunity to speak out on public issues important to the veterans?  Butler wasn’t sure whether this was simply a shrewd guess or whether MacGuire somehow had eyes and ears all over the country.

          Butler declared that he believed that democracy was in danger from growing antidemocratic forces within the country and that he planned to appeal to the nation’s veterans to unite against this threat.  At the same time he wanted to alert them to the risk of being dragged into another war by the propaganda of organizations camouflaged with patriotic trappings.

          MacGuire looked thoughtful.  Then he asserted that the group he represented really had the identical objectives.  He urged Butler to let him go along on the tour.  He would stay in the background, enlisting veterans in “a great big superorganization to maintain our democracy.”

          Butler lost no time in squelching that idea.  He admitted that he couldn’t keep MacGuire off any train he rode, but made it firmly clear that he would not be associated with the plans of MacGuire and his rich friends in any way.  He softened the reprimand by saying that he did not want to hurt the feelings of a wounded veteran, but MacGuire would have to understand that he could not be used to aid money schemes.

          MacGuire said peevishly that he couldn’t understand why Butler refused to be a businessman like himself.  The general expressed blunt suspicions of MacGuire’s real reasons for wanting to trail in the wake of this V.F.W. tour.  MacGuire protested that he had no intention of doing anything subversive.

          Then he made the general a new offer.  If Butler would merely insert in each of his V.F.W. speeches a short reference to the need for returning to the gold standard, in order to benefit veterans when a bonus bill was passed, MacGuire and his backers

20      The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

would pay him $750 per speech-three times what the V.F.W. was paying him.  Butler replied emphatically that he would refuse to abuse the veterans’ trust in him even if the offer were for $100,000.

Frustrated, MacGuire took his departure abruptly.

 

Soon afterward Butler began his swing around the country for the V.F.W. He was no longer bothered-for the moment­-by the persistent attentions of Jerry MacGuire, who left for Europe on December 1, on a mission for his backers.

MacGuire took his departure against the background of a steadily rising chorus of hatred for "that cripple in the White House" by big-business leaders. It was reflected in the anti­-Roosevelt slant of both news and editorials in the business-­oriented press. In the eyes of America's industrialists and bank­ers, the President, if not an actual secret Communist, was dedicated to destroying the nation's capitalist economy by the New Deal, which they labeled "creeping socialism."

Many believed that unless F.D.R. were stopped, he would soon take America down the same road that the Russians had traveled. They were horrified by his recognition of the Soviet Union on November 16, ¹933, seeing it as a sinister omen. They were equally appalled by his speech six weeks later promising that the United States would send no more armed forces to Latin America to protect private investments.

Some business leaders envied their counterparts in Italy, who had financed Mussolini's rise to power. Il Duce's efficiency in "making the trains run on time" was highly lauded, along with the dictatorial control of labor unions by his corporate state. Thomas Lamont, a J. P. Morgan partner, praised the dictator for his methods of providing low-paying jobs, cutting the public debt, and ending inflation.

"We all count ourselves liberal, I suppose," Lamont told the Foreign Policy Association. "Are we liberal enough to be willing for the Italian people to have the sort of government they apparently want?"

Butler, who had not known that MacGuire: had left for Eu­rope, received a postcard from him from the French Riviera, reporting only that he and his family were having a wonderful

The Plot                             21

 

 

time. Another card came from MacGuire in June, 1934, this time from Berlin. Butler surmised that the bond salesman's long stay in Europe had to be on business, paid for by his boss or all his backers. But what kind of business? More shenanigans in connection with the gold standard?

Continuing his tour for the V.F.W., Butler observed more and more storm signals flying in the United States as he traveled around the country. The nation was rapidly becoming polarized between the forces of Left and Right. Demagogues with apparently inexhaustible funds for propaganda and agitation led "patriotic" crusades against Communists, Jews, and "Jewish bankers," who were alleged to be behind the New Deal.

That June Roosevelt further inflamed big business by a whole new series of New Deal acts that crippled stock speculation, se up watchdog agencies over the telephone, telegraph, and radio industries, stopped farm foreclosures, prevented employers from hindering unionization and compelled them to accept collective bargaining. As an epidemic of turbulent strikes broke out, the orchestration of Roosevelt hatred in the nation's press rose to a fresh crescendo.

To Herbert Hoover the New Deal represented "class hatred . . . preached from the White House," "despotism," and "universal bankruptcy." Butler was intrigued by the July, 1934 issue of Fortune, the Luce magazine read by America's leading industrialists and bankers, which devoted a whole edition t glorifying Italian fascism.

It was produced by Laird S. Goldsborough, foreign editor for Time, who asked Fortune's wealthy readers "whether Fascism is achieving in a few years or decades such a conquest of the spirit of man as Christianity achieved only in ten centuries." He concluded, "The good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to h momentarily fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, Sacrifice."

In that summer of 1934 it was not difficult to detect the acrid smell of incipient fascism in the corporate air. Smedley Butler large hawk nose was soon to detect more than a mere whiff of it.

22               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

7

 

 

Resting at home after his exhausting V.F.W. tour, which had included emotionally draining visits to the casualties hidden away in eighteen veterans' hospitals, Butler received a phone call from a familiar voice. Jerry MacGuire insisted that lie had to see the general immediately because he had "something of the utmost importance" to impart.

Butler and his wife had planned to drive into Philadelphia that afternoon, so, curiosity aroused, he agreed to meet Mac­Guire at the Bellevue Hotel. It was August 22, 1934, three days after a German plebescite had approved vesting sole executive power in Adolf Hitler as führer of Nazi Germany.

Shortly before three o'clock Butler entered the empty hotel lobby, where he found the pudgy bond salesman waiting for him. MacGuire wrung his hand enthusiastically as though they were long-lost comrades from Butler's old 4th Battalion in Pan­ama. Leading the way to the rear of the lobby, MacGuire took him into the hotel's empty restaurant, which was not operating for the summer.

They took a table in a secluded corner of the room, and Mac­Guire began describing how enjoyable his trip to Europe had been. Butler patiently waited for him to get down to business. He wondered, not without sympathy, whether it was the silver plate in MacGuire's head that made him so prolix.

MacGuire finally asked whether the general planned to attend the forthcoming American Legion convention in Miami. Butler replied curtly that he did not. He felt irritated by MacGuire's arrogant assumption that the stale scheme of using the Legion for his gold clique's propaganda was a matter of the "utmost importance" to Butler.

MacGuire then insinuated that it was time to "get the soldiers

The Plot                             23

 

 

together." Butler agreed grimly, but his cryptic tone, he was sure, implied a considerably different purpose for organizing the veterans than MacGuire had in mind.

MacGuire revealed what he had been up to on the Continent (hiring the previous seven months. His backers had sent him abroad to study the role that veterans' organizations had played in working for and bringing about dictatorships. In Italy MacGuire had found that Mussolini's real power stemmed from veterans organized in his Black Shirts; they had made him dic­tator and were the chief protectors of his regime.

Beginning to suspect what MacGuire had in mind, Butler tried to seem matter-of-fact as he asked whether MacGuire thought Mussolini's form of government was a good example for American veterans to work toward. MacGuire didn't think so.

His investigations on the Continent, he revealed, had convinced him that neither Mussolini nor Hitler, nor the kind of paramilitary organizations they had built, could be made attractive to the American veteran. But he had discovered an organiza­tion that could be, he revealed in elation.

He had been in France during a national crisis brought about by nationwide wage slashes. Riots had erupted in Paris early in February, ending in the calling of a general strike that had paralyzed the country. Civil war had been averted only by the formation of a National Union ministry made up of all parties except Socialists, Communists, and Royalists.

A key role in ending the crisis had been played by a right­wing veterans' organization called the Croix de Feu. It was a superorganization, MacGuire explained, an amalgamation of all other French veteran organizations, and was composed of officers and noncoms. The Croix de Feu had 500,000 members, and each was a leader of ten others, so that their voting strength amounted to 5,000,000.

It occurred to Butler that if MacGuire's description was accurate, the Croix de Fen was an elitist outfit minus the democratic voice of the greatest majority of veterans-the buck privates, who were expected only to follow and obey, exactly as they had been ordered to do in wartime.

MacGuire now told Butler that his group planned to build

24               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

an American version of the Croix de Fen. Asked its purpose, the fat man hesitated, then replied that it was intended to "support" the President. Butler asked wryly why Roosevelt should­ need the support of 500,000 "supersoldiers" when he had the whole American people behind him.

Looking petulant and impatient, MacGuire ignored the question, pointing out that the crux of the matter was Roosevelt's dilemma in not having enough money to finance the New Deal and the danger that he might disrupt the American system of finance to get it. MacGuire and his group were firmly determined that the President would not be allowed to do it.

Despite MacGuire's exasperating circumlocution and the twists in his logic, a fresh pattern was becoming clear to Butler. Far from "supporting" Franklin Delano Roosevelt, MacGuire and the interests behind him were obviously planning to compel the President to yield to their demands about American finances.

The American version of the Croix de Fen was intended to be a powerful paramilitary organization to enforce those demands. But when Butler pressed him on its purpose, MacGuire denied emphatically any intention to frighten the President. In fact, he explained, the whole idea was really to support and help Roosevelt, who was obviously overworked, by providing him with an "Assistant President" to take details of the office off his shoulders. It was quite constitutional, MacGuire insisted. The aide would be called a Secretary of General Affairs.

According to MacGuire, the President himself had been grooming an aide for such a role-General Hugh S. Johnson, controversial administrator of the National Recovery Administration (N.R.A.). But, MacGuire confided, Johnson had been too loose-lipped to suit Roosevelt, and as a result was slated to be fired within three or four weeks.

Pressed to explain how he acquired this information, MacGuire assured Butler that his group was close to the White House and had advance information on all such secret matters.

Confused, Butler didn't know quite what to make of these oddly faceted revelations, but he was subsequently reminded of MacGuire's prediction when Johnson resigned in pique from the peace­ administration soon afterward and began attacking Roosevelt

The Plot                             25

 

 

and the New Deal in a syndicated column for the Scripps Howard press.

Butler did not have to feign new interest in MacGuire's proposals; obviously much more was now involved than simply lobbying efforts for restoration of the gold standard. MacGuire, interpreting the general's absorption as an omen of cooperation, grew more candid about the plan of his group.  They would work up public sympathy for the overburdened President, he explained eagerly, by a campaign explaining that Roosevelt's health was failing. The "dumb" public would accept the need to give him "relief" by having a Cabinet official take the chores of patronage and other routine worries of the office off his shoulders. Then the President's status would become like that of the President of France, a ceremonial figurehead, while the Secretary of General Affairs ran the country.

Thus, at one stroke, the country would be rid of Roosevelt's misrule and would be put back on the gold standard. And now, MacGuire concluded triumphantly, how did the general feel about heading the new "superorganization" that would be the power behind bringing about these sweeping changes?

Unable to contain himself any longer, Butler exploded that if MacGuire and his backers tried to mount a Fascist putsch, he would raise another army of 500,000 veterans to oppose them and the nation would be plunged into a new civil war.­

Upset, MacGuire hastily assured the general that he and his group had no such intentions, but only sought to ease the burdens of the Presidency. Butler sarcastically expressed doubt that Roosevelt would appreciate their concern and turn his executive power over to their "Secretary of General Affairs," while limiting himself to ceremonial functions. Besides, Butler pointed out tersely, any attempt to build a huge paramilitary army of half a million men would require enormous funds.

MacGuire revealed that he now had $3 million in working funds and could get $300 million if it were needed. He added that in about a year Butler would be able to assemble 500,000 veterans, with the expectation that such a show of force would enable the movement to gain control of the government fully in just a few days.

26               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

Butler was stunned. Either MacGuire was a madman, psy­chotic, or fantastic liar, or what he was describing was a treason­ous plot to end democracy in the United States.

He demanded to know who was going to put up all the money. MacGuire replied that Clark was good for $¹5 million and that the rest would come from the same people who had financed the "Chicago propaganda" about the gold standard at the Amer­ican Legion convention, and who were now behind the planned march on Washington.

What plans, Butler wanted to know, did they have to take care of the veterans? The "superorganization," MacGuire said, would pay privates ten dollars and captains thirty-five dollars a month for one year, and after that it would no longer be neces­sary. But how did the plotters plan to manage the legal aspects of setting up an Assistant President in the White House? Mac­Guire explained that the President would be induced to resign because of bad health. Vice-President Nance Garner, who didn't want to be President, would refuse the office. By the rule of succession, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was next in line, but he was far too old and could easily be set aside to make way for a Secretary of General Affairs to take Roosevelt's place as President.

MacGuire again urged Butler to head the paramilitary army. The scale of the plot, as it was unfolding to him, took Butler's breath away. It occurred to him now that MacGuire's backers had been contemplating the creation of a Fascist veterans' army at the time MacGuire had first approached him to "get the soldiers together" behind their gold-standard campaign. That explained why MacGuire had wooed him so persistently, despite the general's obvious reluctance and outbursts of temper when patriotic indignation overcame his attempts to play along and learn what the plotters were up to.

No false modesty prevented Butler from recognizing that he was perhaps the best-known, and certainly the most popular and charismatic, military figure in the United States. He also suited the plotters' plans perfectly because he was noted for a brilliant, hard-hitting style of oratory that, they undoubtedly reasoned, could be put to the service of demagoguery in the same spell­

The Plot                             27

 

 

binding way Hitler and Mussolini had magnetized millions into following them. His rasping voice and fiery spirit captured audiences and held them hypnotized.

His reputation for fearless honesty, for speaking his mind bluntly no matter whose corns he trod on, also made him the ideal candidate to sell the plotters' propaganda to the nation's veterans, if he could be persuaded to view their scheme as ultra­patriotic. A combination of these reasons had unquestionably inspired Jerry MacGuire's insistent campaign to win him as the head of the putsch. It explained why MacGuire had refused to lake No for an answer, counting on his persuasive powers as a I bond salesman to break down Butler's sales resistance by camou­flaging the raw nature of the conspiracy, and tempting him into the plot with the biggest bribe ever offered to any American.  The opportunity to become the first dictator of the United States.  In a word, MacGuire was convinced that with Smedley Butler as their Man on the White Horse, the plotters would have their greatest chance of success.

Increasingly uneasy and on guard, Butler now resolved to play along carefully until he had penetrated the full secret blueprint of the conspiracy. Keeping his voice cordial, he expressed interest in MacGuire's scheme, but exhibited enough doubts to induce him to reveal more in the effort to reassure Butler and win him over.

Butler became convinced that if MacGuire was telling the truth, far richer and more powerful men than just Robert S. Clark had to be involved. Clark had told Butler that he had been willing to spend $15 million of his fortune in the plotters' schemes to restore the gold standard. But MacGuire had revealed that the people behind him could, and would if necessary, raise $300 million for the putsch.

Butler determined to find out who they were. He demanded assurances from MacGuire that reputable and important people were really behind the plan to create an American Croix de Feu, pointing out that he could not afford to risk his reputation by getting involved in any second-rate adventure.

Convinced that at last he was on the verge of winning the general's support, MacGuire eagerly sought to impress him with

 

28               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

the caliber of the influential movers and shakers of America who were involved in the plot. He revealed that in Paris he had made his headquarters at the offices of Morgan and Hodges. Butler tried to conceal his astonishment.

There was only one Morgan in the financial world-J. P. Mor­gan and Company. MacGuire left no doubt in his mind that the nation's biggest financiers were, indeed, involved. According to the bond salesman, there had been a meeting in Paris to decide upon the selection of the man to head the superorganization. MacGuire and his group had held out for Butler, but the Morgan interests distrusted the general as "too radical," preferring Douglas MacArthur instead.

MacArthur's term as Chief of Staff expired in November, and the Morgan interests felt that if Roosevelt failed to reap­point him, he would be bitter enough to accept their offer. Butler observed that MacArthur would be likely to have difficulty in lining up veterans behind him, because his dispersion of the Bonus Army had made him highly unpopular.

MacGuire indicated that the Morgan coterie's second choice was Hanford MacNider, an Iowa manufacturer who was a former commander of the American Legion. But MacGuire em­phasized that his own group was still insisting that Butler was the only military leader in the country capable of rallying the veterans behind him. The Morgan interests had acknowledged Butler's immense prestige and popularity, he revealed, but were apprehensive that as head of the paramilitary force Butler might lead it in the "wrong direction."

Butler observed that MacNider would have no more popular appeal than MacArthur because he had gone on record as op­posing the bonus. MacGuire then revealed that MacNider would be cued to change his stand, and would do so. Butler remem­bered this prediction when, three weeks later, MacNider sud­denly reversed his position and came out in support of the bonus.

If Butler could not be persuaded to head the new super­organization, MacGuire said, the offer would definitely be made to MacArthur, whether or not the latter was reappointed Chief of Staff. He confided that there would be an administration fight over MacArthur's reappointment, but he would get it because he

The Plot                             29

 

 

was the son-in-law of Philadelphian Edward T. Stotesbury, a Morgan partner.

It was a bold prediction, since never before in American history had a Chief of Staff been allowed to succeed himself. Butler was all the more startled and impressed with MacGuire's sources of information when his prediction came true several months later.

MacGuire also informed Butler that James Van Zandt, the national commander of the V.F.W., would be one of those asked to serve as a leader of the new superorganization. He would be approached by one of MacGuire's envoys at the forth­coming V.F.W. convention in Louisville, Kentucky.

Butler asked when the new superorganization would surface and begin functioning, and what it would be called. MacGuire said that he didn't know the name of it yet but that the press would announce its formation in two or three weeks and that the roster of its founders would include some of the most im­portant men in America. One of them, MacGuire revealed, would be none other than former New York Governor Al Smith, who had lost the 1928 presidential race to Hoover as the candi­date of the Democratic party.

Butler raised his bushy eyebrows in astonishment. It seemed incredible that the derby-hatted "happy warrior," who had grown up in New York's East Side slums, could be involved in a Fascist plot backed by wealthy men. But he knew that Smith was now a business associate of the powerful Du Pont family, who had cultivated him through Du Pont official John J. Ras­kob, former chairman of the Democratic party. Under their in­fluence Smith had grown more and more politically conservative following his defeat, while still remaining a Democrat.

Could it really be possible that a leading standard-bearer of the Democrats was committed to help overthrow the chief Demo­crat in the White House? In slight shock Butler asked MacGuire why Smith was involved. MacGuire replied that Smith had de­cided to break with the Roosevelt Administration and was preparing a public blast against it which would be published in about a month.

Pressed for more information about the new superorganization,

30               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

MacGuire told Butler that it would be described publicly as a society "to maintain the Constitution." Butler observed dryly that the Constitution did not seem to be in any grave danger, then he bluntly asked what MacGuire's stake was in the enter­prise. MacGuire shrugged that he was a businessman, and be­sides, he, his wife, and his children had enjoyed a long, expensive stay in Europe, courtesy of his backers.

Taking his leave, MacGuire said that he was going to Miami to agitate again for the gold standard, as well as to get the new paramilitary organization rolling. He promised to contact Butler again after the Legion convention.

After he had gone, the bemused general was almost tempted to dismiss the whole plot as the product of a disordered imagi­nation-his or MacGuire's. But a grim sense of foreboding told him that he was in the eye of a gathering storm.

There were too many things that MacGuire had told him that rang true, and could not possibly have been invented. Even as Butler brooded over the affair and wondered what to do about it, another of MacGuire's uncannily accurate predictions ma­terialized two weeks after their talk.

In September, 1934, the press announced the formation of a new organization, the American Liberty League, by discontented captains of industry and finance. They announced their objec­tives as "to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise."

Denouncing the New Deal, they attacked Roosevelt for "fomenting class hatred" by using such terms as "unscrupulous money changers," "economic royalists," and "the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties."

The Plot                             31

 

 

Butler's eyes widened when he read that the treasurer of the American Liberty League was none other than MacGuire's own boss, Grayson M.-P. Murphy, and one of its financiers was Robert S. Clark. Heading and directing the organization were Du Pont and J. P. Morgan and Company men. Morgan attorney John W. Davis was a member of the National Executive Com­mittee-the same Davis that Clark had identified as author of the gold-standard speech MacGuire had tried to get Butler to make to the American Legion convention in Chicago.

Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E. F. Hutton Associates, Wil­liam S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society, was- a generous patron, along with other members of the Pew family, of extremist right-wing causes. Other directors of the league included A1 Smith and John J. Raskob.

Two organizations affiliated with the league were openly Fascist and antilabor. One was the Sentinels of the Republic, financed chiefly by the Pitcairn family and J. Howard Pew. Its members labeled the New Deal "Jewish Communism" and in­sisted "the old line of Americans of $1,200 a year want a Hitler."

The other was the Southern Committee to Uphold the Consti­tution, which the conservative Baltimore Sun described as "a hybrid organization financed by northern money, but playing on the Ku Klux Klan prejudices of the south." Its sponsor, John H. Kirby, collaborated in anti-Semitic drives against the New Deal with the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the first Silver Shirt squad of American storm troopers.

"The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League," the New York Post subsequently charged, "are in turn spawning Fascism."

Butler was stunned by this fulfillment of MacGuire's predic­tion. As he later testified, just at the time MacGuire had said it would, the American Liberty League had appeared and was all that MacGuire had said it would be. And it was obviously no

32               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

coincidence that Grayson M.-P. Murphy, Robert S. Clark, and the Morgan interests were deeply involved.

Even yet another of MacGuire's predictions came true a fortnight later, when A1 Smith published a scathing attack on the New Deal in the New Outlook, breaking publicly with the President over economic policies.

If Butler had had any lingering doubts about the authenticity of MacGuire's claim to have inside knowledge of what American big-business leaders were up to, the appearance of the American Liberty League on schedule, and A1 Smith's break with the White House, convinced him that MacGuire's revelations of a plot to seize the White House were no crackpot's fantasy. MacGuire had called the shots every time.

Butler was now genuinely alarmed. For the first time it dawned upon him that if the American Liberty League was, indeed, the "superorganization" behind the plot that it seemed to be, the country's freedom was in genuine peril. Such money and power as the men behind the League possessed could easily mobilize a thinly disguised Fascist army from the ranks of jobless, embittered veterans and do what Mussolini had done in Italy with the financial support of the Italian plutocracy.

Getting in touch with Van Zandt, Butler told the V.F.W. commander that he had been approached to lead a coup as head of a veterans' army. He warned that the conspirators intended to try to involve Van Zandt, too, at the V.F.W, convention in Louisville. Thanking him for the warning, Van Zandt assured Butler that he would have nothing to do with the plotters.

Butler was tempted to leave for Washington immediately to warn the President or his advisers. He now knew enough to expose the whole plot. But he was pragmatist enough to realize that on his unsupported word, without the slightest shred of evidence, he was likely to be greeted with polite skepticism, if not ridicule. Heads would shake. Poor Smedley Butler. How sad-a fine, brave Marine general like that, losing touch with reality. Too many campaigns, too many tropical fevers. At best they might believe that MacGuire had, indeed, told him all those fantastic things, but then MacGuire, obviously,

The Plot                             33

 

 

had to be some kind of psychotic nut. And Butler would have to be an idiot to have taken him seriously, to have believed that many of the nation's greatest leaders of the business and fi­nancial world would get involved in a conspiracy to depose the President and take over the White House!

MacGuire, of course, would deny everything. So would Robert S. Clark. So would everyone connected with the American Liberty League-if this was, indeed, the superorganization Mac­Guire had revealed was behind the plot.

The enemies Butler had made among the military brass during his colorful career would help the press ridicule his revelation. "Old Gimlet Eye," they would scoff, "is at it again-stirring up a storm, making headlines. Worst publicity hound that ever wore a uniform!"

But Smedley Butler had never in his life backed off from his duty as he saw it. Convinced that the democracy he cherished was in genuine danger, he steeled himself for the ordeal of public mockery and humiliating attacks that he knew would follow his exposure of the conspiracy. He was enough of an expert tactician, however, to know that he couldn't win his battle without supporting troops. He would need corroborative testimony by someone whose word, when combined with his own, would have to be respected and force a full-scale investiga­tion.

Butler confided in Tom O'Neil, city editor of the Philadelphia Record. Observing that the whole affair smacked of outright treason to him, he asked O'Neil to assign his star reporter to dig into the story. O'Neil agreed, and reporter Paul Comly French, whose news features also appeared in the New York Post, was instructed to seek confirmation of the plot. Butler knew and respected French, who had done an intelligent and honest job of covering his fight against crime and corruption in Philadelphia ten years earlier.

French set about determining whether MacGuire and his group were operating some kind of racket to extort money out of the rich by selling them political gold bricks, or whether a cabal of rich men, enraged by the President and his policies, was putting up big money to overthrow F.D.R. with a putsch.

34               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

In view of the powerful people the general had named in con­nection with the plot, French knew that his assignment was a keg of dynamite. Even if he could somehow confirm the existence of the plot and identify the conspirators, he and the general were bound to meet with incredulity when they sought to expose the blueprint for treason and the traitors.

Much would depend upon establishing and documenting the credibility of Smedley Butler, the chief witness. If the general's career showed him to be given to gross exaggeration or chronic lying, or to be an officer of dubious character whose word could not be trusted, then his sworn testimony against those he charged with treason would be held worthless.

If, on the other hand, an examination of his life and career proved that he was a man of incorruptible character, integrity, and patriotism, then his testimony would have to be given the gravest consideration, especially when supported and corrobo­rated by the findings of French's investigation.

Whatever the outcome, the reporter knew that the denoue­ment would be a stormy one. To Butler's enemies he was a highly controversial, unorthodox fighting man whose irrepressible temper and tongue kept him in the headlines. To his friends he was a patriotic war hero with strong convictions about democ­racy and a deserved reputation for bluntly speaking out the truth, regardless of consequences.

What kind of man, actually, was the Marine general who was accusing many of America's leading financiers and indus­trialists of seeking him as the indispensable man for their Fascist plot to seize the White House?

 

 

 

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!"

 

 

 

37

38               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

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

 

The Indispensable Man                                       39

 

 

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

 

40               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

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

The Indispensable Man                                       41

 

 

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 Neville­ had 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 had 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

 

42               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

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

The Indispensable Man                                       43

 

 

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,

 

44               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

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

 

The Indispensable Man                                       45

 

 

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

 

46               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

blow hit him in the chest. Whirling and falling, he lost consciousness briefly.

When he 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 had 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 he 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, he 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

 

The Indispensable Man  47

 

 

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 he 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 he 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 12,5 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 Dewey's flagship, landing a mile beyond. Instead of congratulating the winners,

 

48               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

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 burn" 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 wher­

 

The Indispensable Man  49

 

 

ever 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 he 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

 

50               The Plot to Seize the White House

 

 

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 3o 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

The Indispensable Man  51

 

 

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 had been swept away by the typhoon, so they splashed out into the bay to form a chain that passed the food they splashed 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 hack 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

 

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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, secretary ­treasurer of the La Luz Mining Company, in which Secretary of State Philander C. Knox was said to own stock. The Liberal Government had 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," he 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 he knew

The Indispensable Man              53

 

 

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 had 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 had 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

 

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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, be 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

The Indispensable Man      55

 

 

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

 

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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, 1912, 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 troops, confining them m 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 had 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

The Indispensable Man      57

 

 

battle twenty-seven rebels were killed in their trenches, nine cap­tured, and the rest put to flight. Two Marines were killed.

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."

 

 

 

6

 

 

 

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 g. "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 it") 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

 

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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 had 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 hoops 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," he wrote Ethel, "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

 

The Indispensable Man  59

 

 

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

 

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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 he 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 he had 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 he had aroused suspicions, and the Mexican secret service was keeping an eye on him.

 

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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.

 

 

7

 

 

 

When war with Mexico seemed inevitable, on April 19, 19¹4, Admiral Fletcher put six companies of Marines ashore at Vera Cruz under Butler's old friend, Buck Neville, now a colonel.

At dawn when the six companies began marching through the city Mexican troops fired at them from rooftops and house windows, using machine guns as well as rifles. Marines rushed from house to house smashing in doors and searching for snip­ers.

The Marines Butler led were not his own command, and he

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was not sure of their behavior under fire. To inspire coolness he led them through Vera Cruz with no weapon of his own except a stick. The Marines in two columns kept close to the doorways for cover while he walked calmly down the center of the street for a better view of snipers in houses on both sides.  Ignoring bullets spurting dust at his feet, he used the stick to point out snipers to his sharpshooters.

By nightfall the Marines had won control of the city, but at a cost of 135 Americans killed or wounded, 7 of the casualties Butler's men. Mexican casualties were four or five times as great.

Returning to Panama, Butler relieved tedious garrison duty by expending his inexhaustible energy in making Camp Elliott an exemplary Marine outpost. After a visit to the Panama Canal Zone, Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison wrote him, "I was delighted . . . to observe the esprit de corps exhibited by your command. Their alertness, skill, and proficiency were models for military organizations."

Congress had by now authorized officers as well as enlisted men to receive Congressional Medals of Honor. One was now awarded to Butler for being "eminent and conspicuous in command of his Battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22nd and in the final occupation of the city [Vera Cruz]."

"I've no more courage than the next man," he protested, "but it's always been my job to take my fellows through a mess the quickest way possible, with the loss of the fewest men. You can't do that from a distance. Besides, I was paid to do what I did. I've been scared plenty, but if I'd ever let my men know it, they'd have been scared. And soldiers who are scared aren't worth so much. They'll keep their lives, but the job won't get done."

To the astonishment of the Navy Department, he refused to accept his Medal of Honor, explaining that he did not consider what he had done at Vera Cruz worthy of the nation's highest military award. Admiral Fletcher, questioned by the Navy, replied that Butler was wrong; he had certainly merited the Medal of Honor not only for his courageous leadership in the Vera Cruz battle but also for his heroism as a spy.

The Indispensable Man              63

 

 

The Navy Department thereupon sent the medal back to the reluctant hero with a terse order to keep it and wear it, but for Butler a matter of principle was involved. He was proud of his decorations and would wear none that he did not believe he fully deserved. He returned the medal to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, writing stubbornly, "I must renew my request that the Department reconsider its action in awarding this dec­oration." The matter was shelved by the outbreak of World War I in August, 1914, but Butler was later pressured into accepting the medal.

Wilson was keeping a careful and worried eye on Haiti. During 1914 four presidents of that volatile little republic were over­thrown. The Germans were threatening to intervene to protect their economic interests. Wilson suspected that they wanted to use the volatile little republic as a naval base, which would put them within easy striking distance of the Panama Canal and the Florida coast.

Then in 1915 a new Haitian president, pursued by an angry mob, was forced to seek sanctuary in the French legation. The mob dragged him out and killed him. Now the angry French Government threatened intervention. Squirming in an agony of indecision, the anti-imperialist Wilson finally decided to put Haiti under American control to prevent any of the warring European powers from seizing it.

Besides, he told Secretary of State Robert Lansing, an Ameri­can occupation would give him a chance to bring law, order, democracy, and prosperity to the wretched people of the mis­ruled little country. Wilson's missionary impulse dovetailed neatly with less exalted plans by big-business interests. The National City Bank controlled the National Bank of Haiti and the Haitian railroad system. Dollar diplomacy also involved the sugar barons who saw Haiti's rich plantations as an inviting target for investment and takeover.

Rioting in the capital of Haiti in August, 1915, gave Wilson the excuse he needed to intervene with warships and Marines under Colonel Littleton Waller, Butler's commanding officer.  Haiti was placed under an American commissioner who con­trolled the republic's affairs through the Haitian President. Cabinet

 

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ministers were puppets with only advisory powers. The government was not allowed to incur any "foreign obligations" without American consent, and an American customs official collected all money due Haiti. The Marines "pacified" the population and maintained the President's authority.

When the Haitian National Assembly met in Port-au-Prince, Marines stood in the aisles with bayonets drawn until Philippe Dartiguenave, the Haitian selected by the American minister, was "elected" President by the Assembly. He was the first Haitian President to serve out his full seven-year term, only because of the occupation of the Marines.

Under Dartiguenave American control of the island was assured by a treaty signed on September 16, 1915, which entitled the United States to administer Haitian customs and finance for twenty years, or longer if Washington saw fit. The Haitian constitution was revised to remove a prohibition against alien ownership of land, enabling Americans to purchase the most fertile areas in the country, including valuable sugar cane, cacao, banana, cotton, tobacco, and sisal plantations.

Northern Haiti, however, remained in the grip of rebels known as Cacos, whose chiefs Dartiguenave labeled bandits. Posing as nationalists, they were actually precursors of the brutal Tonton Macoutes of the later Duvalier regime, just as cruel to the peas­ants as the government's soldiers were.

Butler led a reconnaissance force of twenty-six volunteers in pursuit of a Caco force that had killed ten Marines. Like the Cacos in the mountains, he and his men lived for days off the orange groves. For over a hundred miles they followed a trail of peels, estimating how long before the Cacos had passed by the dryness of the peels. A native guide they picked up helped them locate the Cacos' headquarters, a secret fort called Capois, deep in the mountain range.

Studying the mountaintop fort through field glasses, Butler made out thick stone walls, with enough activity to suggest they were defended by at least a regiment. He decided to return to Cape Haitien for reinforcements and capture it. On the way back they were ambushed by a force of Cacos that outnumbered them twenty to one. Fortunately it was a pitch-black night, and

The Indispensable Man              65

 

 

Butler was able to save his men by splitting them up to crawl past the Cacos' lines through high grass.

Just before dawn he reorganized them into three squads of nine men each. Charging from three directions as they yelled wildly and fired from the hip, they created such a fearful din that the Cacos panicked and fled, leaving seventy-five killed. The only Marine casualty was one man wounded.

When he was able to return with reinforcements, spies had alerted the Cacos, and Butler took a deserted Fort Capois without firing a shot. Only one last stronghold remained to be cleared-the mountain fortress at Fort Riviere, which the French, who had built it during their occupation of Haiti, considered im­pregnable. Butler was told it would be difficult to capture, even with a strong artillery battery.

"Give me a hundred picked volunteers," he said, "and I'll have the colors flying over it tomorrow."

 

 

8

 

 

 

 

Butler earnestly assured his volunteers that they could do the job. His pep talks were enormously persuasive because they were sincere-so sincere that after he gave one, he would often feel emotionally spent and limp. He refused to believe that any job was impossible for Marines and frequently hypnotized him­ self into believing it. His fervor made believers out of his men, who never hesitated to follow him against overwhelming odds.

His officers gave him unreasoning loyalty, even though he was a tough taskmaster and never played favorites. One captain, asked to explain his devotion to Butler, said, "Well, damn him, I don't know. I'd give him my shirt, and he would not only not thank me, but he'd probably demand that I give him my other one. I stick because-hell, I don't know why!"

What happened when Butler led his tiny force against Fort

 

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Riviere was subsequently described in a memo by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who visited Haiti in January, 1917, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The Congressional Medal of Honor could not be awarded to an officer unless a high official of the military branch concerned first made a personal investigation and authenticated the citation. When Butler was recommended for the award, Roosevelt went to Haiti to investigate.

He was taken by Butler on an inspection tour of Haiti and the ruins of Fort Riviere, which Butler had demolished with explosives after its capture to deny its reuse to the Cacos. In his memorandum Roosevelt wrote what he had learned from others about Smedley Butler's attack on the four-thousand-foot-high mountain fortress in November, 1915:

 

This was the famous fortification captured by Butler and his 24 Marines in the Caco rebellion of a few months before. The top is a hog's back ridge a quarter of a mile long. Butler and his Marines left a machine gun at one end of the ridge while he and about 18 Marines crawled through the grass into the fort itself. Crawling down into a corner, they found a tunnel into the courtyard, serving as a drain when it rained.

Butler started to crawl through it (about 2 1/4 ' high x 2' wide) and the old sergeant [Ross lams] said, "Sir, I was in the Marines before you and it is my privilege." Butler recognized his right, and the sergeant crawled through first. On coming to the end within the courtyard, he saw the shadows of the legs of 2 Cacos armed with machetes guarding the place. He took off his hat, put it on the end of his ­revolver, and pushed it through. He felt the two Cacos descend on it and          he jumped forward into the daylight.

With a right and left he got both Cacos, stood up and dropped 2 or 3 others while his companions, headed by Smedley Butler, got through the drain hole and stood up. Then ensued a killing, the news of which put down all insurrections, we hope, for all time to come. There were about 300 Cacos within the wall, and Butler and his 18 companions killed [many] . . . others jumping over the wall and falling prisoner to the rest of the force of Marines which circled the mountain.

I was so much impressed by personal inspection of the

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scene of the exploit that I awarded the Medal of Honor to the Marine Sergeant and Smedley Butler. Incidentally, But­ler had received the Medal of Honor at Tientsin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion.* He had been awarded at the capture of Vera Cruz in 1914 but declined to accept it. The third at Fort Riviere he did accept.

 

Butler saw pathos as well as bravery in the episode at Riviere.  "The futile efforts of the natives to oppose trained white soldiers impressed me as tragic," he declared. "As soon as they lost their heads, they picked up useless, aboriginal weapons. If they had realized the advantage of their position, they could have shot us like rats as we crawled out one by one, out of the drain."

But the power of the Cacos was broken, and the revolution was over. Surviving Cacos sought to keep the movement alive, but their ancient horse pistols, Spanish cutlasses, Napoleonic sabers, French carbines, and even flintlocks were futile against the superior weaponry and training of the Marines.

President Dartiguenave awarded Butler the Haitian Medal of Honor, with great praise for his dynamic personality, intense determination, direct and unrelenting attacks against heavy odds, and masterful ability to lead men.

Soon after peace was restored, Butler sent for his wife and children. They had seen little of him since the beginning of his tour in Panama, because of his three expeditions to Nicaragua followed by the Mexican and Haitian campaigns.

They joined him at Port-au-Prince in a large, comfortable house with white verandas and a pleasant, shaded garden, located on the outskirts of the town. Sumptuous by island stand­ards, it nevertheless lacked indoor plumbing, and the family had to share a two-hole privy.

A stern taskmaster in the Corps, Butler was a gentle and undemanding father. It was Ethel Butler who disciplined the children, a matter of necessity because of his frequent absences.  The children loved the exotic flavor of the tropical republic. Smedley, Jr. was sent to an integrated school with Haitian children­

 

 

*Roosevelt's error; officers at the time of the Boxer Rebellion could not win the Medal of Honor.

 

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and a few other white youngsters. Young Ethel went to a convent taught by nuns in French and English.

Never allowed into town, as it was considered unsafe, they were accompanied everywhere by a gendarme. One night while the family was seated on the veranda, a Caco concealed some­where on the hillside took a shot at their father, narrowly miss­ing him.

Washington decided to reorganize the ineffective Haitian mil­itary, which had almost one general for every three privates in its thirteen-hundred-man army. Dartiguenave agreed to its re­placement by a native constabulary of three thousand men to be trained and directed by Butler. Although still only a major, Butler's rank as head of the Haitian Gendarmerie was major general, and his power that of Minister of the Interior.

He was paid $3,000 a year as commandant of the Gendarm­erie, which cost the American Government $800,000 a year. Ostensibly under the direction of the Haitian President, the new force was actually controlled by Washington. All of its officers were Marines.

Haiti's foreign minister demanded that the Gendarmerie be put under Haitian control. Butler refused, pointing out that accord­ing to an agreement signed by Dartiguenave, the commandant alone was made responsible for the force. The foreign minister angrily drew up a new constitution for Haiti that would force the Americans to relinquish their power over both the Gendarm­erie and Haiti itself, and prepared to introduce it in the Haitian National Assembly.

Alarmed, Dartiguenave told Butler that the foreign minister had the support of a majority of the Assembly's legislators, who intended to ram the new constitution through the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Then they planned to vote to impeach Dartiguenave, ostensibly for violating the old constitution, in reality because they considered him an American pawn.

The American minister, A. Bailly-Blanchard, cabled a warning to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who cabled back that since the new constitution was "unfriendly" to the United States, it must not be approved by the Haitian Legislature. Bailly-­Blanchard was ordered to take any steps necessary to prevent

The Indispensable Man              69

 

 

its passage. He summoned Butler, Butler's regimental com­mander, Colonel Cole, and the top naval commander, Admiral Anderson, to a conference, and read them Lansing's cable.

It was decided that Americans would have no legal justifica­tion for interfering in Haiti's internal affairs, but that Butler, as major general of the Haitian Constabulary, did have that right. Commanded to carry out the State Department's orders, Butler went to see Dartiguenave, who urged him to use the Gendarmerie to dissolve the National Assembly.

But Butler had no relish for the role of dictator. If Dartigue­nave and his cabinet wanted the Assembly suspended, he in­sisted, then they had to take full responsibility. He refused to act until they had apprehensively signed a decree ordering dis­solution of the Assembly "to end the spirit of anarchy which animates it."

When Butler led his gendarmes to the National Assembly, he was greeted with loud, prolonged hissing. The gendarmes began cocking their rifles. Many, veterans of previous coups d'etat, were amazed at Butler's order to lower their guns.

He then handed the President's decree to the presiding As­sembly officer to be read aloud to the chamber. Instead the latter launched into a wrathful tirade against the American occupation. His outburst threw the hall into an uproar.

Fearful of being charged, the gendarmes again threw up their weapons, and Butler once more snapped an order to ground arms. The reluctant presiding officer finally read Dartiguenave's decree and bitterly declared the Assembly dissolved. The gloomy legislators then filed into the street, and the gendarmes locked the hall behind them.

 

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9

 

 

 

The Marine Corps promoted Butler to lieutenant colonel in August, 1916. Winning commendation as a capable administra­tor, he kept Haiti stable and at peace for the first time in half a century. He grew fond of Dartiguenave while acknowledging, "I knew lie was an old political crook." Typical of the President's expenditures from the treasury was sixteen hundred dollars "to have the hole in a carpet mended."

Traveling all over Haiti without a gun, despite the Cacos, Butler established a postal service, a country school system, a network of telegraph lines, a civil hospital in Port-au-Prince, and a five-hundred-mile road system; he also restored lighthouses and channel buoys. Although these civic and economic improve­ments unquestionably benefited American investors, Butler's primary purpose was to improve life for the Haitians.

"I was, and have been ever since, very fond of the Haitian people," he wrote later, "and it was my ambition to make Haiti a first-class black man's country."

But no amount of Butler's "good works" could erase from Haitian minds the humiliating awareness that they had been robbed of their independence by a military occupation. Haitians had no shortage of legitimate grievances. The supreme power on the island was not Butler, who was preoccupied with the Gendarmerie, but the commanding officer of the Marines in Haiti, Littleton Waller, who was made a brigadier general in the fall of 1916. As the officer who had once been court-martialed for brutality toward Filipino natives, he did not inspire among his staff officers any vast respect for Haitian sensibilities.

In the interior they talked as casually of shooting "gooks" as sportsmen talked of duck-hunting. Patrolling against the Cacos, some Marine officers looted the homes of native families they

The Indispensable Man              71

 

 

were supposed to protect. Others talked of "cleaning out" the island by killing the entire native population. Prisoners were beaten and tortured to make them tell what they knew about Cacos' whereabouts. Some were allowed to "escape," then were shot as they fled.

Haitians in the interior were forced to carry bon habitant (good citizen) passes. Any native stopped by a Marine and un­able to produce a bon habitant could be either shot or arrested. Understandably, many Haitians became convinced that all Amer­icans were racial bigots who hated black men. And behind the Americans in uniform were the American businessmen, who plundered the wealth of the island with impunity.

Butler, now in his early thirties, did not take Haitian poli­ticians very seriously. He viewed most of them as banana re­public opportunists not too different from the crooked ward bosses who infested the American body politic. The ingenuity and pretensions of the shrewdest, like Dartiguenave, tickled his sense of humor, but he regarded the Haitian people themselves with respect and affection, if blind to the irony implicit in the presumption to offer superior government to a black republic by a nation that had signally failed to solve its own serious race problem.

His eyes opened increasingly, however, to the fact that he was being used by big-business interests to pacify the population in order to protect profitable American investments.

"The Haitian Government, such as it is, either yields perforce to American pressure," reported correspondent Herbert J. Selig­mann in The Nation, "or finds itself in feeble and ineffectual opposition.... The present Government of Haiti, which dangles from wires pulled by American fingers, would not endure for twenty-four hours if United States armed forces were withdrawn; and the President, Dartiguenave, would face death or exile."

Butler protested to Washington about some of the injustices of the occupation. On April g, 1916, he wrote to the State De­partment to point out that the Haitians logically objected to the retention of Marine officers in the Gendarmerie unless they were made subject to trial by Haitian courts. since otherwise

 

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the United States could mount a coup d'etat whenever it chose to order one. His protest fell on deaf ears.

By the spring of 1916 Haitian discontent was growing rapidly. Waller warned Butler to be on guard because Cacos, spreading the rumor that the Americans would soon pull out, were urging the people to rise and destroy them now.

Butler felt deeply discouraged. Despite everything he had tried to do for the people, the dollar sign behind the occupation had made all his efforts useless. In July he wrote to Lejeune, "All of us gendarmes are mighty tired, and I for one am going to ask to be relieved at the first opportunity presenting itself."

In August Waller ordered him into Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic sharing the island with Haiti, to put down a revolt led by Celidiano Pantilion and "stabilize the economy." The Dominican Government had defaulted its obligations to American banks and paid for its sins with an American occupa­tion to protect U.S. investments that lasted eight years.

When he returned from Santo Domingo, mission accomplished, a letter was waiting for him from Lejeune. "Assistant Secretary Roosevelt came back with glowing accounts of the splendid work being done by the Marine Corps in connection with the Gendarmerie," Lejeune wrote enthusiastically. "You certainly de­serve the greatest credit for what you have done in making a soldier out of the ignorant Haitian."

But Butler had begun to brood about the virtue of leading American boys into battle, causing some to lose their lives and others to suffer permanent disablement, to protect American business interests in the Caribbean. He grew quietly cynical about some of the compliments paid to him.

In neighboring Santo Domingo revolutionists joined bandits in shaking down American plantation managers for money. Re­pulsed, they set cane fires and sought to prevent cane from being cut and ground. The American sugar interests there wanted Butler to come to their rescue once again.

"Members of the Sugar Association and myself," their spokes­man, businessman Frank H. Vedder, wrote to Roosevelt, "desire to express to you our appreciation of . . . the improvement in conditions, the hard work being done by the marines in the

The Indispensable Man              73

 

 

field. . . . The dangers from bandit operations are by no means past or remote. Additional troops would be of great assistance in clearing up the situation."

To Butler's relief Roosevelt replied, "I appreciate, of course, that the complete elimination of bandit operations is at the present time exceedingly difficult, but I trust that the Acting Military Governor will be able to give all the protection neces­sary with the forces under his command."

Butler sought to convince the State Department that the Haitians would never cease to be anti-American until Washing­ton allowed them to hold honest elections and choose their own President. Spies tipped off Dartiguenave, who grew chilly toward Butler for putting his job in jeopardy.

But Haiti received little attention now from the State Depart­ment, which was carefully studying developments in World War I. Reading about the war from his remote outpost, Butler regarded it with loathing as "madness . . . a European blood­bath." He fervently hoped that Wilson would have the good sense to keep American boys out of it.

When the President took America into the war, however, Butler instantly appealed to Lejeune for a combat assignment in France, where he felt that he would at least be serving his country instead of Wall Street. Lejeune replied that the State Department was so pleased with his work as an administrator in Haiti that it had refused to transfer him to the European war front. Unappeased, Butler moaned to Lejeune in June, 1917, "The service is becoming more and more detestable every day, and the knowledge that I am not allowed to fight for my country makes it even more unbearable."

He appealed to Roosevelt. "Secretary Roosevelt and I," replied John McIlhenny, head of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, "are of the same opinion that the work which you have in hand should not be interfered with or disturbed because it is the most potent factor in maintaining a peaceful occupation."

An entreaty to his father also failed to work. "Your father," wrote Representative W. L. Hensley, of the House Naval Affairs Committee, "has gone into all these matters with the Secretary of War concerning your ambitions. They feel you are doing a

 

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great work where you are, and for you to be transferred from there would turn things topsy-turvy."

Disconsolate, Butler threw himself into a new orgy of road­building. In forty-five days lie built a new road from Port-au-­Prince to Cape Haitien, across twenty-one miles of the roughest, densest tropical country he had ever seen. After he had driven the first car over it, Secretary of State Lansing cabled congratula­tions. McIlhenny wrote him, "I think your achievement in build­ing a road from Port-au-Prince to Cape Haitien in such a time and at such a cost is a miracle."

"Someone has misled you," he replied impatiently, "concerning my value to this country, and to the aims of the U.S. down here, for I am simply a subordinate to the Chief of the American Occupation . . . and have no independent authority."

By now Butler was strongly suspicious that he was being held in Haiti by the War Department's lack of confidence in his fit­ness for a command in France. When he asked a friend in Wash­ington to snoop and investigate for him, he was assured that his suspicions were unfounded: The government was really having trouble finding a competent man to replace him.

He still didn't believe it. His instincts told him that his old enemies in the Navy Department were working against him. He had trodden on a good many other important toes as well during his two years in Haiti, and he had heard rumors spread by some naval officers that he had won all his medals and promotions because of his father's influence.

He did not hesitate to try to use that influence when Thomas Butler became chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1918. But his renewed pleas to be allowed to serve in the A.E.F. failed to move his father, and he remained bogged down disconsolately in Haiti. He grew increasingly unhappy with the government's management of the island's affairs.

Under wartime censorship Port-au-Prince's newspapers were suppressed, and their editors jailed, for suggesting that since Mr. Wilson was so concerned about the fate of poor little nations overrun by powerful military aggressors that he had gone to war in Europe for them, he might consider rescuing little Haiti from its invaders.

The Indispensable Man              75

 

Some years later when Harding succeeded Wilson in th_e White House, Dartiguenave called upon him to remove all Marines from Haiti and liberate the Haitian people. To dramatize his case, Dartiguenave accused Butler of having dissolv_ed the Haitian National Assembly by force of arms, without authority, conveniently ignoring the fact that he had begged Butler to do it and that he had written him upon his departure, “I regret to see you obliged to cease your services in this country, and I was well pleased with the broad and intelligent cooperation that you have constantly given to the Government."

Dartiguenave's memorial to Harding, published widely in the United States, "stirred up a hell of a commotion," as Butler put it. The Senate appointed an investigating committee with Sen­ator Medill McCormick, of Illinois, as chairman. Butler was summoned as a witness. A lawyer for the American N.A.A.C.P. demanded to know on what authority he had presumed to dis­solve the Haitian National Assembly.

"The President [Dartiguenave] himself dissolved the Congress," Butler replied. "I merely carried his decree of dissolution to the Assembly."

Haitian witnesses jeered at this assertion, but their faces fell when Butler produced the decree signed by Dartiguenave and his cabinet; it had been prudently saved among Butler's memor­abilia. The upset Haitian politicians denounced it as a forgery, but were compelled to acknowledge it as authentic when it was compared with other documents signed by Dartiguenave. His case won, Butler saw no need to embarrass the State Department by also revealing that Secretary of State Robert Lansing had secretly ordered "any steps necessary" to stop the National As­sembly from passing an _anti-American constitution.

Soon afterward Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby asked Butler to return to Haiti as High Commissioner with a "civilian financial adviser" who, Butler knew, would represent American big-business investors and dictate economic policy. He had had enough of letting Wall Street profiteers use the Marines as their private army. He would prefer not to go, he told Denby, and certainly not with any civilian financial adviser. In that case, Denby said coldly, he need not go at all.

 

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In March, 1918, bursting with frustration over his inability to get into the action on France's battlefields, Butler decided to press the matter personally with Lejeune, who was now a gen­eral, during a medical leave to Washington for dentistry.

 

 

 

10

 

 

 

Lejeune finally succeeded in getting him detached from Haitian service, but to Butler's dismay, instead of being sent overseas, he was ordered to take over a swampy new Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, on the Potomac, thirty miles south of Wash­ington. Here he had to train regiments of raw boots for the front and glumly watch them pull out for France without him.

He felt irked with his father for failing to use his influence to get him into combat. Thomas Butler had visited the front and had been greatly disturbed by the high casualties of American troops. Smedley wondered whether his father had refused to help him get overseas out of a dread of losing him in the European carnage.

He persisted in nagging Marine headquarters for an overseas command, but his refusal to be discreet even now antagonized his superior officers. Learning that a move was afoot to raise the rank of the Marine commandant to lieutenant general, he spoke out against it as a rank piece of opportunism. No similar promotions were being suggested, he pointed out acidly, for the leathernecks in the trenches of France.

His friends in the Corps moaned at this bull-in-a-china-shop gaffe, warning him that his indiscreet candor was hurting his career. He remained stubbornly convinced of his right to speak out vigorously against injustice in the Corps.

He finally found a way to get overseas when the 13th Marines came to Quantico for training. Josephus Daniels, Jr., son of the

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Secretary of the Navy, was with the regiment. Meeting his father, Butler persuaded Daniels, Sr., that young Marines like his son needed the protection overseas of veteran Marine com­manders like Smedley Butler. Despite the opposition of the desk admirals in Washington, Butler was finally ordered overseas with the regiment.

Bidding farewell to his family, Butler was happy in the con­viction that he was heading for the front at last. For twenty years, he told his wife, he had been preparing for the big war that he had dreaded, yet had anticipated. At last he would be serving his country in its greatest hour of crisis. In his patriotic zeal his qualms about the commercial intrigues he had learned to suspect behind troop movements were swept away.

Anchoring at Brest on September 24, 1918, he and his men were assigned to a dreary Army debarkation center, Camp Pon­tanezen, consisting of seventeen hundred acres of mud flats oc­cupied by 75,000 American soldiers, of whom 16,000 had the flu. Returning casualties had complained of scandalous conditions at Pontanezen, where they had been forced to await ships home lying in mud, hungry, chilled, and medically neglected.

Day after day he waited impatiently for his orders to move up to the fighting zone. After two weeks he was handed a tele­gram from A.E.F. Commander General John J. Pershing in­forming the thirty-seven-year-old Butler that he had been promoted to the rank of brigadier general, making him the youngest Marine ever to achieve that rank. And he was finally assigned his new command-in charge of Camp Pontanezen.

Butler read the telegram three times, unable to believe it. Then be let out a roar of fury. The bastards! The unutterable bastards! They couldn't do this to him. After twenty years as a fighting Marine, to be denied the opportunity to lead his men into battle and be forced to sit instead in a dirty mud hole a light-year away from the fighting!

To make matters worse, he discovered that one officer after another had been put in charge of the miserable concentration camp and pest trap that was now his responsibility, only to fail dismally in their attempts to clean it up. It was obvious to him that he had been handed a "lemon" of a command, ending his

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dreams of fighting in the Meuse-Argonne. Bitter, he added Pershing to his list of enemies in top echelons.

Pershing, actually, had been motivated only by the desperate need for a good administrator who could do something about the mess at Pontanezen, the linchpin for troops and equipment com­ing into France and for wounded and sick troops going home. Butler's record as an able administrator in Haiti and Quantico had marked him as the man for the job. So he was forced to watch glumly as the ¹3th Marines left for the front, leaving him behind in command of an all-Army outfit in Brest.

Shaking off his despond and self-pity, Butler went to work. Not long afterward writer Mary Roberts Rinehart arrived with orders from Secretary of War Newton Baker to investigate the terrible conditions at Pontanezen. Touring the camp talking to the troops, she was astonished to find morale high. One private told her enthusiastically, "I'd cross hell on a slat if Butler gave the word!" She wrote later:

 

In charge of the camp was that dynamo of energy, courage and sheer ability, General Smedley Butler of the Marines. And Butler was no red tape man. In defiance of regulations he was issuing double rations of food, and serv­ing hot soup all day long to those who needed it. He had issued, also, six blankets to each man, and as the ground under the tents was nothing but mud, he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duck-boards no longer needed for the trenches, carried the first one himself up that four-mile hill to the camp, and thus provided something in the way of protection for the men to sleep on.

To have produced the morale I found under existing con­ditions was nothing short of a miracle of ability, and I said so. Even the flu, taking its daily toll of men in the hospital nearby, was practically non-existent in the camp. . . . I had never seen General Butler before, and I went prepared to send in a blistering report to Washington. . . . But the men were in fine condition, and cheerful.

 

Her report to Baker was so glowing that the Secretary of War promised to send Butler everything he needed.

Soon after the Armistice Butler threw the gears of camp opera­tion

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into reverse. In a single day 26,000 men were processed onto ships, 2,000 newcomers were processed into France, and 10,000 men fresh from the line were processed into camp. Every man back from the front was deloused, bathed, and freshly dressed and equipped within twenty-four hours. The camp was the outstanding marvel of American efficiency on French soil,

During an inspection visit by Pershing, the commander of the A.E.F. noticed that as Butler drove him around the camp, doughboy after doughboy failed to salute them. Irked, he snapped to Butler, "Don't you think they should be taught to salute?"

"Well, General," Butler said with a shrug, "if the Army had them from six months to six years and they haven't learned to salute, you can't expect a Marine to teach them in six days!"

He was always on the side of the powerless against the brass. One day while he was absent his superior, General Helmick, made a surprise inspection of Pontanezen. Finding wastefulness in one mess, Helmick savagely tongue-lashed the lieutenant in charge. When Butler learned about it, he phoned the Army Chief of Staff.

"If the general has any complaint with the camp," he stormed, "tell him to pick on me and not on a young lieutenant who is doing his level best!" When Helmick came to see him, Butler pounded on the desk and told his superior what he thought of him for "jumping on a boy."

After Butler's angry outburst had subsided, Helmick replied, "Now, Smedley, I'll talk. I've let you abuse me, your commander, for two reasons. First, because you've been of such tremendous value to my organization, and second, because I know I didn't do the right thing by that boy. I realize also that you've worked yourself into a state of nervous collapse to make the camp a success. I know you don't mean what you're saying. I never per­mit myself to be aroused by a tired man's utterances, when that tired man is a good man."

"General, by God," Butler said hoarsely, struck with admira­tion, "you are some commander!"

Helmick then went with Butler to the young lieutenant and apologized to him publicly in front of all the cooks and KP's.

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Torn between court-martialing him for his frequent intransi­gence toward higher authority and decorating him for his ac­complishments in an almost impossible job, the Army finally awarded him its Distinguished Service Medal. The Navy felt impelled to follow suit with its own Distinguished Service Medal. The French awarded him their Order of the Black Star. He wore these decorations proudly beside his World War I Victory Medal with French clasp.

But the reward he treasured most was the gratitude of hun­dreds of thousands of doughboys back from the misery of the trenches, grateful for his efforts to ease their hardships as they waited for evacuation home. He did a lot of hard thinking as he watched the wounded and maimed pass through Pontanezen, some with their nervous systems irreparably shattered.

"Gradually it began to dawn on me to wonder," he related later, "what on earth these American boys are doing getting wounded and killed and buried in France." This uneasy reflec­tion began to plant seeds of doubt in his mind about the ethics of his chosen calling.

 

 

 

11

 

 

 

With America once more at peace and Congress slashing military funds drastically, the future of the Marine Corps looked bleak. Butler was indignant when Marine Corps headquarters failed to protest its reduction to a mere appendage of the Navy. In disgust he announced his decision to retire and wrote his father urging that John Lejeune be appointed the new commandant in 1920 to save the Corps.

Thomas Butler saw eye to eye with his son on the need to preserve the Marine Corps's independence and agreed that Le­jeune, who had distinguished himself in the Battle of Meuse-­Argonne, was the man to fight for it in Congress. So on January

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30, 1920, Lejeune became the new commandant. He, in turn, coaxed Butler into staying on in command of Quantico to help in the struggle to save the Corps.

To dramatize the Corps's need of funds for modernization, Butler held summer maneuvers that restaged the Battle of the Wilderness between Grant and Lee. On the first day it was "fought" as it had happened; next day it was restaged with a significant difference-the use of modern equipment. The pres­ence of President Warren G. Harding, a Civil War buff, helped win widespread news coverage. Butler's shrewd tactic was highly effective in getting a reluctant Congress to vote adequate funds for the Corps.

It was a forty-mile march from Quantico to the battleground. As usual wearing no insignia to identify him, Butler marched at the head of the column walking his horse, carrying full gear on his back in the hot July sun. When one soldier faltered, Butler told him gently, "Son, I'm more than twenty years older than you, but we're going to do this together." He said later, "I wanted to show them that they could force themselves to do things that would be necessary in war." And they all did.

His troops never learned that following one such battlefield exercise the forty-year-old commander experienced a minor heart attack, for which a doctor prescribed rest and digitalis. The word that spread through Quantico was that it was useless to try to fall out of a hike, because the Old Man would just pick up your pack, add it to his own, and hike right alongside you with it.

The humdrum garrison life of peacetime, with no alarums and excursions to divert him, took its toll of Butler's temper. "I was itching for a scrap-action-something with a snap to it," he admitted later.

But he was never irascible in any matter that pertained to ailing Marines who had served under him. In August, 1920, a private wrote him, "I have been a patient in St. Elizabeth's hospital for the Insane since Sept. 20, 1918. I am writing to ask if you will arrange to have me transferred to one of the institu­tions in Philadelphia, so that I can be close to the folks at home."

"I will look into the matter and let you know," Butler replied gently. "You can be assured that everything will be done for

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your comfort, for you are one of the prize soldiers of the Marine Corps, and we all like you very much."

He grew increasingly incensed at what he considered the in­gratitude of the nation toward its veterans. Once the war crisis was over and Americans felt safe, he reflected, the shattered heroes of yesterday were ignored as the "bums" of today. He was particularly embittered by the indifference of big business toward the men in uniform who had so often been called upon to spill blood for corporate profits.

The profiteering of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the price they charged for transporting troops led him to write his father angrily, "I am at a loss to understand why the Pennsylvania people are so antagonistic to men in uniform. The railroad can haul civilians from Washington to Philadelphia and back every Sunday for $3.78 and want $14.00 to haul soldiers. . . . These Pennsylvania people are a lot of damned hogs and I hope that something will happen to them."

Butler raised Marine Corps morale by developing a great foot­ball team that became the talk of the sports world, and began building a sports stadium with volunteer Marine labor and with cement contributed by cement companies.

Proliferating veterans' groups vied with each other for the distinction of adding his name to their letterheads. He tactfully declined invitations to join, offering his view that all such groups "must be nonpolitical, and should never be heard on the floors of Congress." In June, 1923, he sent regrets to the Marine Corps Veterans Association explaining, "I have very decided views on associations, and I am not a member of any but the American Legion, and most inactive, at that-only joining it because Gen­eral Lejeune requested me to do so." He considered the Legion too political and undemocratic, with leaders who used it as a mouthpiece for big-business interests.

Late in 1923 Butler's career took an unorthodox twist.

W. Freeland Kendrick, the new mayor of Philadelphia, urged him to take a leave from the Marines to become the city's Di­rector of Public Safety. The job was that of a "supercop," in charge of the police and firemen, with the task of smashing the links between crime and politics in Philadelphia.

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Under Prohibition the city had become one of the most cor­rupt municipalities in the country. Over eight thousand places sold bootleg liquor without fear of prosecution; gangsters ran wide-open gambling joints and brothels; robberies, holdups, and other crimes were soaring. All attempts to clean up the City of Brotherly Love had failed because of a profitable alliance among gangsters, speakeasy operators, and crooked ward bosses, who bribed and controlled the police.

Kendrick, a conservative Republican politician, had been elected mayor on a law-and-order campaign and was now under heavy pressure to keep his pledge. He was advised to bring in an outsider, preferably a military man, who could not be bought, bluffed, or bullied, to head the police. Brigadier General Smedley Butler, now a vigorous forty-two and a colorful war hero with an impressive list of credits in Who's Who in the Services, seemed a perfect choice to please the voters. He had even had police experience organizing the Haiti Gendarmerie.

But Butler declined the job. On November 21 he wrote Kendrick, "While this position would appeal to me very greatly if I believed there were the slightest chance of success, I am convinced that the present political conditions existing would ... throw away the work of a lifetime in a perfectly hopeless un­dertaking."

He was relieved when the Navy ordered him to report for orders to the Scouting Fleet. But Kendrick and the Republican party of Pennsylvania now needed him desperately to still a storm of public criticism. So Kendrick, Congressman Bill Vare, and Pennsylvania's two senators went to the White House to plead with President Calvin Coolidge that Butler be given a year's leave of absence to clean up Philadelphia.

Only a man with Butler's reputation for total honesty, and the ability to discipline men while capturing their imagination and winning their loyalty, they told Coolidge, could reorganize the Philadelphia police force. The President finally agreed and sent word to Butler that the White House would like him to tackle the job in the interests of good government. His father warned him against it as a political quicksand, but Butler did not see

 

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how he could refuse a mandate from both the people of Philadelphia and the President.

His reluctant consent brought wondering letters from old comrades all over the world, many of whom imagined that he had resigned from the Corps. Butler assured them that it was only temporary. "This job is a terrible one and I will probably be cut to pieces," he wrote to Lieutenant Colonel H. L. Roosevelt in Paris. "On January 7 I will be sworn in as a Philadelphia cop, for better or worse."

 

 

 

12

 

 

 

Butler told a reporter for the Philadelphia North American, "Kendrick has his neck in a noose with me. If I fall or I am run out, lie is going to go down also. If he reverses me just once I'll quit, and the resignation will be in the form of a telephone call telling him I am on my way back to Quantico, and that the keys to my office are on my desk. I do not care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right or wrong. From January 7 they are going to be enforced." He was not opposed to drinking in principle, he added. What was at stake was enforcement of the law, pure and simple, not the ethics of Prohibition.

Even before he took office, "Boss" Vare sent an emissary to him, Judge Edwin O. Lewis, to offer Vare's "suggestions" for key appointments in reorganizing the police department. None too politely, Butler made it clear what Lewis and Vare could do with their suggestions.

He rented a home in nearby Overbrook, but his wife and chil­dren seldom saw him there because he spent seven days a week on the job, working until after midnight.

Sworn in on January 7, 1924, he took the oath of office in his Marine uniform, but half an hour later changed it for one of his own design. Blue with gold trim, it had a cape taken from the

The Indispensable Man              85

 

 

Marine mess jacket with a flaring red lining. It was dramatic and impressive, and meant to be.

He promptly summoned all police inspectors to his office.

"I want the lieutenants in your forty-two districts to clean up in forty-eight hours," he snapped, "or face immediate demotion. That is all." Then he visited each one of the districts until he had spoken to every man on the force. The new motto, he announced, was short and sweet: "Clean up or get out!"

In his first week on the job he raided and shut down 973 liquor and gambling joints, without even warning Mayor Ken­drick. Philadelphians were electrified. The police winked at each

other, convinced that Butler was a smart "grandstander" who would make a big splash for the headlines, then quiet down and take it easy. Vare would see to that.

Going night after night with only a few hours' sleep, he pressed his raids and inspections relentlessly. He demanded from his men a dedication to duty equal to his own, but many of them, cut off from former sources of graft, were hostile and resistant to the new broom sweeping too clean.

"Sherman was right about war," Butler sighed wearily, "but he should have tried leading the Philadelphia police!" Nevertheless he began to show results. Worried Philadelphia bootleggers began unloading their stocks at cut prices. Many crooks and gamblers began streaming out of the city in search of more hospitable territory.

Encouraging excessive zeal among his forces, Butler took re­sponsibility for police who went too far on raids by using axes freely to destroy furniture and fixtures, searching private homes and vehicles on suspicion, and closing premises that had a right to stay open to sell nonintoxicating beverages. Magistrates began refusing to issue search warrants to permit police to enter known speakeasies masquerading as private residences. Many cases were dismissed on grounds of insufficient or illegal evidence.

Butler realized that he would have to modify his tactics, and astonished Philadelphians by frankly confessing his mistakes to both the press and the police.

"Guard against anything that will embarrass Mayor Kendrick's administration," he now ordered police. "Keep away from the

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hippodrome stuff. I must admit that I have sinned in this latter respect more than any of you, and the only excuse I have to offer is that I was unduly excited and enthusiastic."

Such candor won the affection and respect of reporters, who found Butler colorful copy and loved to join him for midnight suppers on Chestnut Street. There was never any question he would not answer for them directly and honestly. But if they were for him, their publishers-with the exception of the Phila­delphia Record-were not; their editorial pages sought to ridicule and discredit him relentlessly,

"They insisted on treating me like a queer animal from the circus," Butler related. "My chance remarks were twisted and distorted to paint me in the worst light. . . . About fifty of the minor officials and correspondents of the newspapers became my loyal friends, but they had no influence in shaping the editorial point of view."

By March angry Republican ward leaders were furious at Butler for disrupting their network of police control. They vig­orously applauded City Treasurer Thomas J. Watson at a meet­ing when he shouted, "This country, as well as the Republican organization, would be a hell of a sight better off without Butler!" The Philadelphia City Council closed ranks against him.

"My foolish notion that the laws of our country applied to rich and poor alike accounted for the growing feeling of antipathy toward me," he recalled later, adding, "By the end of 1924 I had been cussed, discussed, boycotted, lied about, lied to, strung up, and reviled. Several times I was on the point of resigning. The only reason why I continued in my unpopular and uncomfort­able position was to see what the hell was going to happen next!"

Try as he might, he was unable to break the power of the ward bosses. In April he was forced to admit that be had been double-crossed by about half of his police lieutenants, who had bowed to ward-boss pressure to permit shuttered saloons, gambling houses, and speakeasies to reopen.

Studying the structure, he found that every ward had one police station. The ward leader named the captain of the sta­tion, and the police thus belonged to the ward leader. In an

 

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attempt to destroy the power of the ward bosses, Butler now cut the stations down from forty-six to thirty-three.

Infuriated politicians, racketeers, and realtors, who hated him for having cost them the rents of fifteen hundred closed brothels as well as the income from other illegally operated properties, joined forces to demand that Kendrick fire him.

But nearly five thousand church congregations adopted resolu­tions in July demanding that the mayor give full support to the general. Added to this pressure were thousands of letters from women's clubs, civic groups, business organizations, and indi­viduals. Kendrick, alarmed at being caught between the voters and the brokers of power, wavered back and forth.

A report that he was preparing to knuckle under to the politi­cal bosses brought another roar of protest from the citizenry. A mass meeting of four thousand Philadelphians resolved that Butler must be kept in office: "Since General Butler has been in command here, more has been accomplished for the suppression of vice and crime than in any period of like duration in this city!" They flooded Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur with letters urging that Butler's leave of absence from the Marines be extended for another three years.

President Calvin Coolidge reluctantly agreed to extend the general's leave for one more year, but he pointed out to the citizens of Philadelphia that the Federal Government could not continue indefinitely to be responsible for solutions to local problems: "The practice of detailing officers of the United States military forces to serve in civil capacities in the different states on leaves of absence is of doubtful propriety and should be em­ployed only in cases of emergency. . . . Local self-government cannot be furnished from the outside."

Reappointed, by the end of the year Butler had raided almost 4,000 speakeasies, shutting down 2,566, and had seized over a thousand stills, arresting 10,000 violators of the Volstead Act. But to his dismay, political pressure in the court system resulted in only 2,000 indictments by the grand jury, with only 300 con­victions. Police magistrates, who were handpicked by the poli­ticians, imposed only token fines on all but 4 percent of arrested speakeasy operators. Struggling to get honest law enforcement,

 

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Butler complained to the press, was like submitting to Chinese water torture:

"Drops of water have been dripping on my head since I have been here. . . .Either I am unpopular, or the enforcement of the liquor laws is unpopular in this city. . . . When the people of Philadelphia or any other city stop playing the game of `Enforce the law against others but not against me,' they will begin to win the fight against lawlessness."

He was bitter when he learned of a secret deal between the brewers of Philadelphia and the Republican State Campaign Committee. A royalty of two dollars for each barrel of illegal beer distributed was to be paid into the Republican campaign fund, provided the politicians put the White House under heavy pressure to recall Butler to duty with the Marines.

Toward the end of ¹9²5, whether this deal was responsible or not, Coolidge refused to extend Butler's leave. The general was ordered to report after the first of the year to command the Marine post at San Diego. With his recall assured, Mayor Kendrick now shrewdly sought to make points with pro-Butler voters by declaring that he wished it were possible to keep the general as Director of Public Safety for the remainder of his own administration.

A "Keep Butler" movement sprang up all over Philadelphia. Forced to go along with it, Kendrick told one mass meeting, "To announce that General Butler is to leave his post here would be tantamount to inviting an army of criminals to Philadelphia." But the mayor lost no time in grooming his successor.

Meanwhile Butler had become increasingly irked by the fact that the pressure of powerful hotels and the Hotel Association had kept their ballroom social affairs, at which liquor was served to young teen-age girls from socially prominent Philadelphia families, from being raided for liquor violations.

Ordering a raid on a formal ball at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he seized evidence showing that bootleg liquor was being served. Confronting Kendrick, he demanded that the mayor institute pad­lock proceedings against the Ritz-Carlton.

"And I mean the whole hotel," he insisted. "Something must

 

The Indispensable Man                                       89

 

 

he done to teach these big fellows that they must obey the law as well as the little fellows!"

A howl of outrage was heard in the ranks of the Republican party's wealthiest adherents. Politicians were threatened with a wholesale withdrawal of campaign contributions unless Butler was now unceremoniously dumped. Greatly upset, Kendrick urged him to "lay off" the big hotels. To the mayor's horror, Butler firmly announced his intention to organize a special po­lice squad in evening clothes to invade all Philadelphia hotels, and signal for raids whenever they found liquor-law violations.

His fighting spirit was now thoroughly aroused. Although he longed to get back to his beloved Marine Corps, it rankled him to leave a mission incomplete. If he left Philadelphia now, he would have enforced the law against small operators who boot­legged liquor to the poor, but not against the big operators who made it available to the rich. His egalitarian nature pressed him to balance the scales.

He also felt an obligation to the honest cops who had defied the ward bosses to support his fight against corruption. Once he was gone, he feared, they would be punished for their loyalty to him. He decided that he owed it to them to sacrifice his career in the Marine Corps to stay on and finish the job, especially since Kendrick had made it clear-or so Butler believed-that he needed and wanted him.

The morning papers carried the story that Butler was re­signing from the Marine Corps to remain as Director of Public Safety. Appalled, the hotel owners of the city joined with local politicians in a demand that Kendrick fire Butler immediately. The mayor was reminded that the Hotel Association's coopera­tion with City Hall was absolutely essential for the success of a sesquicentennial celebration of American independence being planned for Philadelphia.

Worried and upset, Kendrick called Butler to his office and told him, "I don't want any resigned generals around me. You ought to go back to the Service where you belong. The President doesn't want you here."

 

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13

 

 

 

Shocked at the mayor's spineless surrender, Butler stalked out, storming, "Oh, hell, I can't talk to such a weak fish!"

Kendrick then fired him by phone. In choice Marine language, Butler told Kendrick exactly what he thought of him. Clearing his desk, the general withdrew a blue-steel Army Colt .q5 from it and inserted it in a holster engraved, "To General Smedley D. Butler from W. Freeland Kendrick."

"Give him this letter of resignation and the pistol," he told his aide. "He can publish the letter and he can do what he pleases with the gun. I'm going back to the troops!"

His letter of resignation declared, "Last week I decided that it was in keeping with my promise to the police of Philadelphia that if they stood up with me, I would do everything in my power to remain in Philadelphia.... I am being dismissed from public service because I am making the greatest sacrifice any Marine can make, and I should, without any other ties, be of more service to the City of Philadelphia than I was before." He had been fired, he charged, because "the gang that has ruled Philadelphia for many years" had been out to get him, and did.

The Philadelphia Record; which had consistently supported Butler during his two years as the city's supercop, declared, "He was honest; that was taken for granted or he would not have been appointed. But he was 100 percent honest. We think we are doing the mayor no injustice in expressing the belief that this was a little more than he had counted on."

Reviewing his experience in Philadelphia, Butler declared ironically, "The fact the mayor didn't know me led to my being chosen. The fact I didn't know the mayor led me to accept. I had a funny idea that law was applicable to everybody. I was a fool. I didn't get anywhere, except for getting a lot of money as

The Indispensable Man                                       91

 

 

the highest paid cop in America, $18,000 Had the kids educated, lost 35 pounds and my teeth, bought a car and ended up $300 in debt. . . . What Philadelphia really wanted was something to talk about, a real, live general. No other city had one as a cop. ... They wanted to throw up a smoke screen and make people think Philadelphia had thrown off the yoke of crime."

Mary Roberts Rinehart, who visited Butler in Philadelphia to study his cleanup, wrote about it in her biography:

 

 

He did a fine job. He replaced the old roundsman, fat and portly, with young and active men, and then he put into them something of the marine esprit de corps. He put the fear of God into the gamblers and dive keepers. He cut down the enormous graft which they had paid year after year. But they were only waiting. They could afford to wait. When Butler lost the front page they would come back....

I watched Butler and admired him; the same sheer ability, energy and knowledge of men which had succeeded at Brest were evident in all that he did. But it was an unbeat­able game, that of the crooks, gamblers, bootleggers and dive keepers.

 

 

As soon as he was fired, the mayor of Syracuse, New York, sent him a wire urging him to head that city's new Committee of Public Safety. But now Commandant John Lejeune quickly in­sisted that he withdraw his resignation from the Corps.

"I told General Butler that I could not with equanimity con­template his leaving the Marine Corps," his old friend told the press. "I have the highest regard for General Butler with whom I have served for twenty-seven years, and I don't want the Marine Corps to lose him." Butler was given a holiday leave with his family to his old home in West Chester for a "quiet, old­-fashioned, jolly Christmas" before reporting to take over the San Diego Naval Operating Base.

On the eve of his departure Philadelphia Record reporter Paul Comly French and other newsmen who admired his honesty and courage gave him an informal midnight dinner. They presented him with a square silver token, explaining, "It's the only kind of money he'll accept-square!"

 

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"Cleaning up Philadelphia's vice," lie told them with a sigh, "is worse than any battle I was ever in."

One group of Philadelphia citizens raised funds for a bronze tablet to honor his services to the city. The inscription read: "He enforced the law impartially. He defended it courageously. He proved incorruptible." He thanked them but protested wearily, "If I have to keep earning that epitaph, it will wear me out!"

Visiting his father in Washington, lie admitted that his health had been impaired by working eighteen hours a day and longer, and he was bitter at having been used.

"I was hired as a smoke screen," lie charged. "The politicians were buying the reputation I had earned in twenty-six years' service as a Marine. I was to make a loud noise, put on a brass hat, stage parades, chase the bandits off the streets-and let vice and rum run their hidden course!"

He was outraged by the huge sums lie saw being made illegally by everyone involved in violating the Volstead Act, while Marines who served their country were paid a paltry twenty dollars a month. In December, 1926, he wrote his father angrily, "I do not suppose thee or the other men who are responsible for this Government have ever stopped to think what these $20 a month men arc doing towards the preservation of the dignity of this Government. Now where can this Government get such devoted service for a total cost per capita of $1,300 a year? Where can we hire men for $20 a month?"

His health still suffering, he began to think of retirement. But Lejeune urged him to stay in uniform: "In the years to come the Corps will need your enthusiasm, and I had in mind that you would receive the next promotion to the rank of Major General.   “­My retirement according to age is not very far in the future, and there is always the possibility of one of the Major Generals causing a premature vacancy."

Brooding over the whole question of Prohibition and law enforcement, Butler began to suspect that perhaps he had been wrong in trying to enforce an unenforceable law that the majority of the American people did not seem to want and went out

The Indispensable Man                                       93

 

of their way to violate. The government was wrong, he finally decided, in trying to legislate morality.

In view of his fame as a stern enforcer of Prohibition, pru­dence suggested that he keep his changed views to himself. He was unpopular enough with the wets; to speak out now against the Volstead Act would only alienate millions of drys who considered him one of their knights in white armor. But popularity had never been as important to Smedley Butler as his compulsion to blurt out the truth in public and to kick sacred cows in the rump when they loitered in the path of justice.

On January 7, 1927, in Washington, D.C., he gave the re­porters a story that flashed from coast to coast. The Volstead Act, he now declared, was "a fool dry act, impossible of enforce­ment." It was, furthermore, "class legislation," because the rich could avoid it and the poor could not.

The sensational denunciation of Prohibition by one of its leading Republican crusaders plunged the dry forces of the nation into consternation. Democrats, rejoicing, began laying plans to make repeal of the Volstead Act one of the key issues in the presidential campaign of 1928.

Butler's presence in Washington was occasioned by the out­break of a fresh crisis in China. To his delight, Lejeune informed him that lie would soon be headed overseas once more at the head of a combat brigade.

 

 

 

 

14

 

 

 

China was being torn by civil war between Chiang Kai-shek, commander in chief of the new Nationalist armies of the South, and northern warlords led by Chang Tso-lin. Chiang Kai-shek had organized an anti-British boycott and had threatened to clear China of all foreign imperialists. Warlord Chang Tso-lin,

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supported by the colonial powers, had declared himself dictator of North China.

As Chiang Kai-shek's forces fought their way north and battles broke out between his army and Chang Tso-lin's, panic swept foreign residents in the North. American missionaries and businessmen appealed to Washington for protection.

The forty-six-year-old decorated hero of the Boxer Campaign who had helped relieve the sieges of Tientsin and Peking was made commander of a new Marine expeditionary force-the 3d Marine Brigade. His orders were "to protect the lives and prop­erty of our Nationals in Tientsin; to offer temporary refuge in Tientsin for our Nationals; evacuation from the Interior and to make safe evacuation to the sea."

The War Department warned Butler to be extremely prudent in anything he did or said; the smallest error of judgment on his part might have disastrous consequences in the highly volatile situation. Not without good reason, Lejeune added some prudent parting advice: "Be careful to avoid talking to newspaper cor­respondents."

He arrived in Shanghai on March 25, ¹9²7, to find tension run­ning high. Chinese troops had attacked several consulates at Nanking, killing many foreigners, looting and burning the city. American businessmen and missionaries had escaped on gun­boats to Shanghai, whose port was now swarming with ships. Never before in history had the war vessels of so many different nations anchored together in one harbor.

Barbed-wire entanglements had been erected, and the Inter­national Settlement was under martial law. All legations had ordered their nationals from the interior of China, from which there were daily reports of murders and outrages. A more violent version of the Boxer Rebellion seemed in the making, and the white settlements were gravely apprehensive.

Butler's 3d Marine Brigade disembarked at the Standard Oil dock in the Whangpoo River opposite Shanghai and set up tents in the Standard Oil compound. Shortly afterward Butler was taken aboard the flagship of Admiral C. S. Williams, who greeted him frostily.

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"What do you think of the situation, and what do you think of our participation?"

"We don't have half enough men to perform our task here," Butler replied. "We need more men to do it properly."

The admiral snorted. "So you're one of these fellows who wants to build a big job for himself and get promoted."

Butler saw red. "I intend to retire in a year," he snapped, "and don't care whether I am promoted or not. You asked for my opinion and I gave it to you. Now if you don't care to take my advice, and some Americans are murdered in this town, and you sit quietly here with half of the Marines available in the United States doing nothing but guarding coal piles, you will be held responsible!"

The admiral glared at him, but not without an aspect of re­spect. He was soon one of Butler's chief admirers.

Careful to keep the American forces from getting involved in the fighting between the rival Chinese armies, Butler sought to maintain cordial relations with the Chinese people themselves. He had no stomach for any more Haiti-style interventions that would jockey him into the position of defending American busi­ness interests against native rebels, and he did not intend to risk a single Marine's life to get the job done he had been sent to China to do, unless it became absolutely necessary.

Military leaders of other nations sought to organize a punitive expedition against the Kuomintang for the Nanking uprising. To Butler's relief, Admiral Williams refused to have anything to do with the scheme, although it had the enthusiastic endorsement of the American minister at Shanghai.

On May 31 Butler wrote Lejeune, "Now for a little ‘secret stuff.’ The American Minister ... is a nervous wreck. He sits up all night and talks in circles and would have had me in my grave had I stayed much longer. He feels discredited because our Government has not adopted his plan, which meant an invasion of China, followed by intervention and military Government, and is desirous of going home on leave to explain his side to the President with a hope of favorable action."

He later observed, "I held to the principle that the Chinese had to settle their own form of government and pick out their own

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rulers. Any attempt to solve the Chinese tangle would have been shadow boxing. All we could do was to see that mutinous Chinese troops didn't get out of hand and shoot Americans. It was up to me to prevent a repetition of the Boxer and Nanking difficulties."

When the danger to Shanghai seemed to ease while growing more critical in the North, Butler left two thousand Marines stationed in the city under Colonel Henry Davis, and led four thousand men up to Tientsin. Not too clear about the mission expected of him, he wrote his father asking for clarification. His ­father replied:

 

I do not think that anyone knows our State policies concerning the situation in China. I do not believe there are any....I have but one word of caution to give thee; do not hurt a Chinaman unless it is absolutely necessary in order to protect the life of Americans in China or other foreigners associated with them. Do not interfere in Chinese quarrel....

I have not heard one person worthy of quoting who does not deplore the presence of Americans in China. . . . We are not in China to maintain order. In a single word, use thy open hand to protect our people but don't kill the Chinamen to protect their property. . . . The Congress will never permit the use of its military to permanently protect it.

 

 

Following this advice, he persistently reminded his men that they were there to keep the peace, not violate it. Any Marine who laid a hand on a ricksha coolie would be court-martialed, he warned, urging them to win goodwill for the Corps by friendly behavior. He himself cultivated the friendship of the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs and was invited to over twenty Chinese banquets. At one of them he met an American-educated Chinese woman named Mrs. Lu, who reminded him that he had helped evacuate her family by boat from Tientsin twenty-seven years earlier, when she had been three. and their society is said to number twenty million members.

"I well remember carrying you," he said to her delight. "You considered me a hateful `foreign devil' and shrieked lustily, struggling every inch of the way."

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As fighting between the rival armies raged closer to Tientsin, the roar of guns echoed through the city. Butler kept the Marines on the alert as a defense force, as well as a rescue force ready to leave in minutes for any place in North China they were needed. To make sure that none of the warlords, whose allegiances were mercurial, entertained any notion of attacking his brigade, he invited them to review a dress parade.

Some warlords were not intimidated and demanded that Butler take his Marines out of China. Explaining firmly that they were not going home until American nationals no longer needed protection, he insisted that they recognize one square mile of the base at Tientsin as a sanctuary where Americans could move about safely without being shot at.

The warlords refused until lie persuaded them by pointing out shrewdly that it was good insurance for them in their fight against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists: "What if you lose? Why, you can come into that square mile, tool"

When they protested against the flights of Marine planes over Chinese territory, Butler gave them pause for thought by re­minding them, "You might want to escape in one some day." He also convinced them it would be imprudent to attack the American forces by taking them up in Marine planes for bombing practice.

He later declared that he had fulfilled United States foreign policy requirements by intimidating the most hostile of the Chinese warlords "with considerable ease. He shared the detestation of the Chinese people for the warlords and their troops, expressing his sympathy with the people in a letter to Lejeune:

 

There is a movement out here which is gaining great headway and is being conducted by a society known as the "Red Spears." Their aims and policies are similar to those of the Boxers in 1900 and is causing considerable uneasiness on the part of our people.  The “Red Spears” are farmers and their society is said to number twenty million members.  The have been so terribly treated by the soldiers, who every fall regularly billet themselves on them, driving out the men and misusing the women.

This the farmers have tired of and now murder every

 

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soldier they can catch. I am on the side of the "Red Spears" and it may be this will be a good way to end this pathetic slaughtering of innocent people by a lot of brutal war-lords.

 

The troops of other nations in the International Settlement marched around their perimeter defenses to intimidate the warlords and discourage any thought of attack. After flexing his muscles to impress them similarly at first, Butler then discreetly sought to "keep in the background as much as possible, and not in any way behave like an army of occupation-more like a fire company, ready to spring out to the rescue of our people, behaving simply as rescue squads."

 

 

 

15

 

 

 

On November 5, 1927, his wife, having left the children in San Diego, arrived in Tientsin and joined him in a small hotel next to a godown where the Marines had been quartered during the Boxer fighting and where he had been carried when he was wounded in the leg.

China’s civil war had quieted down for the moment. In a report from Shanghai Colonel Henry Davis wrote Butler:

 

 

I had dinner last night with General Chiang Kai-shek. How in the name of God he ever exercised the control over these people to the extent he did last summer is a mystery to me. Usually a man of strong character will demonstrate it in some way without ever speaking a word. This bird has nothing of that kind so far as I could see, and looked and acted like a love sick boob, his fiance, Miss May Soong [later Madame Chiang Kai-shek], also being present at the dinner. . . . Of all the stupid boobs I ever met he is it. I don't believe he ever was the brains behind the movement of last summer.... He looks like a stupid ricksha coolie and grunts like a pig when spoken to.

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By the end of December Butler found himself in a financial bind and complained to his father of the struggle to get along on a brigadier general's pay of $530 a month, out of which he had to pay income tax and "maintain an establishment for Snooks [daughter Ethel] and Tom Dick in the United States, and send Tommy [Smedley, Jr.] thru college, to say nothing of supporting Bunny [wife Ethel] and myself here in China." He added, "I must entertain many, due to^' my official position, and I must pay for the little entertainment out of my own pocket."

His father consoled him with the reflection that although he might be better off financially if he were home with no chal­lenge to his abilities, "thee would rot and the world would have been no better because thee happened to live in it."

Lejeune wrote him that at special ceremonies on December 7, with the Secretary of the Navy present, Lejeune had accepted the bronze tablet honoring Butler, presented by a committee of Philadelphia's grateful citizens, and it had been put up in the Navy Building in Washington. He also revealed that Thomas Butler was leading the fight in the House for a larger naval defense force, but the public was in a budget-cutting mood.

Butler wrote his father:

 

Thy courage in advocating something which will cost money fills me with pride. Our people are all gluttons and their desire to hoard money is so great that they will prob­ably turn on thee and beat thee to death. It would probably be a good thing for our nation if we were to get a good trimming sometime, and perhaps they would learn that there is more in this world than unnecessarily fat bank ac­counts. The amount of money wasted by five rich men in America in one year would be sufficient to build and main­tain a navy capable of preserving our position as a world power.

 

The day before Christmas, 1927, the Standard Oil plant on the outskirts of Tientsin caught fire during a battle between the rival Chinese armies. Nine minutes after the alarm, Butler was leading a battalion of Marines to battle the blaze, utilizing fire­-fighting experience he had gained as Director of Public Safety

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in Philadelphia. He arrived on the scene to find two huge ware­houses blazing, with a warehouse filled with gasoline twenty feet away and six 3-million-gallon oil tanks close by. If