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 www.WantToKnow.info/warcoverup.

 

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