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PART TWO The Indispensable Man
Smedley Darlington Butler was born July 30th, 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the first of three sons. Both his parents came from old and distinguished Quaker families. Some of his forebears included pacifists who had operated an Underground Railroad station for runaway slaves, and grandparents who had joined the Union Army to defend Gettysburg against Robert E. Lee’s army.
On his mother’s side he was descended from the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends and Congressman Smedley Darlington, the grandfather for whom he was named. His paternal lineage traced back to Noble Butler, who came to America shortly after William Penn.
His father, Thomas S. Butler, was a bluntly outspoken judge who spent thirty-two years in Congress, where he wielded great influence as chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Once when he had advocated a large Navy, a close Quaker friend reproached him, “Thee is a fine Friend!”
“Thee,” the fine Friend snorted, “is a damn fool!”
The Quaker archaisms thee, thy, and thine were used only within the family and sometimes to intimate friends. The Quakerism of both Thomas Butler and his son Smedley was of that order of earlier hot-tempered Quakers who belabored each other with wagon tongues, while pausing between the hearty blows they exchanged to invoke divine forgiveness. Smedley picked up some of his father’s uninhibited language as early as age five, inviting maternal chastisement until his father went to his defense by roaring “I don’t want a son who doesn’t know how to use an honest ‘damn’ now and then!”
Reared in upper-class comfort with a politically prominent father, grandfather, and uncles, it was taken for granted that he was marked for prominence.
Subtle pressures were exerted by four maiden aunts who adored and fussed over their first nephew, keeping him in golden curls and dressing him in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. Jeering peers who mistook the clothes for the boy found his fistwork as fancy as his finery.
Stirred by tales of both his grandfathers in the Union Army, he developed a passionate love for tin soldiers, toy cannon, and books with pictures of battles. His mother, Maud Darlington Butler, sought to inculcate peaceful doctrines in her son by taking him to Hicksite Quaker meeting twice a week and sending him to the Friends’ grade school in West Chester. However, his early fascination with things martial persisted. When he was twelve, he joined a West Chester branch of the Boys’ Brigade, a preparedness youth movement that went in for military drills. His father had no objection and even bought his son the first uniform Smedley ever wore. He felt proud.
At Haverford Preparatory School near Philadelphia, a popular choice of old Quaker families, he joined both the baseball and the football teams. Although he was younger and lighter than his teammates, his fighting spirit, qualities of leadership, candor, and fair dealing made him highly popular and won him the captaincy of both teams.
He was only a little over sixteen and a half on February 15th, 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor at 9:40 P.M. Americans began chanting, “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain,” around public bonfires, and volunteer companies marched happily off to war singing, “We’ll Hang General Weyler to a Sour Apple Tree.”
Young Butler found himself swept up by the excitement. Struggling with math and English seemed a hopelessly insipid pursuit, with the newspapers full of blazing accounts of the terrible brutality of Spanish masters of the little Caribbean island they had enslaved. Smedley yearned to join the noble crusade to liberate Cuba in the company of the fine fellows he saw marching off from West Chester daily.
Fearful of revealing his aspirations to his parents, he attempted a fait accompli[1] 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[2] hilt sword pointed forward, inspiring the men behind him in a victorious charge.
At breakfast, heart pounding, he gave his mother an ultimatum. “I’m going to be a Marine. If thee doesn’t come with me and give me thy permission, I’ll hire a man to say he is my father. And I’ll run away and enlist in some faraway regiment where I’m not known!”
His mother reluctantly agreed to accompany him by train to Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, without telling his father. In the competitive examination for Marine lieutenants he ranked second among two hundred applicants. Joyfully he heard the gates of childhood close behind him; ahead beckoned the exciting world of manhood and adventure. But he swallowed hard when he had to face his father and admit that he had won acceptance in the Marine Corps by adding two years to his age.
“Well,” his father sighed. “If thee is determined to go, thee shall go. But don’t add another year to thy age, my son. Thy mother and I weren’t married until 1879!”
He could scarcely contain his pride when his lean, wiry frame was encased in a crisp new uniform. Only average in height with sloping shoulders, one higher than the other, the new second lieutenant nevertheless managed to look properly fierce because of a long, large nose and a pair of blazing, protruding eyes that gave him the bold look of a young adventurer. Huge-handed, he had a husky voice that quickly developed into a leatherneck growl, and a lively sense of humor that appealed to his fellow Marines.
His first glimpse of war came the day he arrived at Santiago, Cuba, on July 1st, 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.
{The} next day Mancil C. Goodrell, the captain of Butler’s company, took him on a two-man reconnaissance of enemy positions. As they moved along a mountain trail, a shot rang out, and a bullet whizzed past Butler’s head. He flung himself prone and hugged the earth, his heart beating wildly.
“What in hell is the matter?” Goodrell demanded. “That was a ... bullet.” “Well, what if it was? A little excitement now and then keeps you from going stale.”
Soldiering under Goodrell, who had had no formal military education, Butler became infused with the spirit of the Corps. He relished the bonds of comradeship, the fierce loyalties, the cool courage, the pride in being a Marine that united men who considered themselves a fighting elite. The officers were all professional soldiers who chewed tobacco, drank raw whiskey, cursed a blue streak, drilled the tails off their troops in garrison, and were experts on the Lee Straightpull 6-mm. rifle, Gatling gun, and Hotchkiss revolving cannon.
Thoroughly unorthodox, wild in their humor, they were fierce warriors who set an example for their men in battle by often fighting on after they were wounded.
In young Butler’s eyes they were heroes all.
He was enormously proud of his first two decorations-the Spanish and West Indian Campaign medals. But he was even prouder simply of being a full-fledged leatherneck who had shared the bonds of a campaign with the Marines of Guantanamo. By the time his battalion returned home, he and two other young Marine officers – John A. Lejuene and Buck 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.”
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 several more skirmishes had driven the Aguinaldo forces north to mountain strongholds. His pride in the Corps kept growing. When a Japanese tattooist turned up in the Navy yard at Cavite, he had an enormous Marine Corps emblem tattooed across his chest. Infection from the tattooist’s needle brought him down with a raging fever.
In June, 1900, he was ordered to a new Asian outpost of trouble under Major Littleton Tazewell Waller, a crusty bantam of a man with a fierce moustache. The Marines sailed for China to rescue the American legation, which had been imperiled by the Boxer uprising. The expedition numbered only a hundred Marines, but by the time they arrived in China, the situation had reached crisis proportions.
All of North China was now up in arms against the foreign powers who had carved the country into colonial spheres of influence. The Chinese bitterly resented the alien flags that flew over the imperialist compounds and the foreign ships that dominated Chinese ports, flooding the country with Western goods. Most infuriating of all were entrance signs the foreign legations had posted at their luxurious clubs: “Forbidden to dogs and Chinese.” Eventually the allied nations had to send over 100,000 troops to protect their nationals.
The eighteen-year-old Butler, who had no understanding of the political causes of the Boxer Rebellion, saw his role simply as that of a Marine doing his duty to protect American citizens on foreign soil.
Waller received word that the legation compound at Tientsin, twenty-five miles inland, was in desperate straits. A small defending force of allied soldiers was trying to hold off fifty thousand attacking Boxers.
Waller, Butler, and their ninety-eight men were joined by a column of four hundred Russians also en route to relieve the siege. At a gray mud village later known as Boxertown, bursts of heavy fire suddenly exploded from trenches on all sides. The Russians, who received the brunt of it, fell back swiftly through the lines of the Marines. Waller’s men flattened on the plain, returning the fire.
Three Marines were killed, nine wounded. Ordered to withdraw, Butler counted noses and found a private named Carter missing. With a lieutenant named Harding and four privates, he ran a gauntlet of fire to search for him. Locating Carter in a ditch, Butler found that his leg had been broken. While the four privates fought off Boxers, Butler and Harding removed their shirts to bandage Carter’s legs together, carrying him off between them. It took them an excruciating four hours to fight seven miles through the whine of persistent bullets to catch up with the company. Tripped several times by his sword, Butler unbuckled it in exasperation and flung it away.
During the weary retreat of the Marines, Butler constantly fought off an urge to collapse and give himself over to sleep or death, without caring too much which. Suddenly the crack of a bullet was followed by a dull sound right next to him.
Startled, he looked up to see a stream of blood flowing down the face of a grizzled sergeant. The veteran Marine made no sound, just scowled, pulled his hat over the wound, and continued the pace of the march. It was an image of tough Marine courage that engraved itself on Butler’s memory.
Stumbling on through a fierce North China dust storm with a raging toothache, his heels rubbed raw by marches that began at 2:30 A.M., famished by hunger, Butler was so miserable that Boxer gunfire seemed the mildest of his torments.
The Marines finally joined forces with a newly arrived column of three thousand international troops and fought their way through to the Tientsin compound. Routing a Chinese cohort, they broke the siege as overjoyed women and children rushed out to hug their rescuers.
The international troops defending the Tientsin compound were soon reinforced by an allied army of seven thousand men. On July 13, 1900, they attacked the native walled city of Tientsin to rout the Boxers from their stronghold. Butler was in the forefront of the assault, which required breaking through an outer mud wall twenty feet high and crossing fifteen hundred yards of rice paddies to an inner high stone wall.
Leading his company through a hail of Chinese shells and snipers’ bullets, he climbed over the mud wall only to find himself dropping into a moat. The Chinese had flooded the paddies between the walls. He and his men splashed through the morass, slipping and lurching in waist-high muck as they sought to fire their weapons. When they approached the inner wall gate, thousands of Chinese on the wall poured down a withering fire, forcing Butler to order a retreat.
A tall private next to him named Partridge was hit and seriously wounded. Butler and two Marines carried him above water level through the rain of bullets splashing around them.
A burning sensation in his right thigh puzzled Butler momentarily until he realized he had been shot. Ignoring his wound, he continued to help carry Partridge until they reached some high ground. There he applied first aid to the private’s wounds, then limped off in search of a medic for him.
By the time he found a Marine doctor, blood was pouring copiously out of his own wound. He protested volubly[3] 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 23rd, 1900, a week before he turned nineteen, Butler was made captain while recuperating in the hospital. The enlisted men who had helped him rescue Private Carter at Boxertown received Medals of Honor which, until 1914, were not awarded to officers. But Butler’s promotion took cognizance of his heroism, citing his “distinguished conduct and public service in the presence of the enemy.”
Insisting that his leg was fully healed, he painfully concealed a limp until he had nagged the doctors into getting rid of him with a hospital discharge so that he could lead his men on a march to relieve the siege of Peking. They were part of a large, colorful international army that included French Zouaves[4] in red and blue, Italian Bersaglieri[5] with plumed helmets, Royal Welsh Fusiliers[6] with ribbons down their napes, Bengal cavalry on Arab stallions, turbaned Sikhs, Germans in pointed helmets, and flamboyantly uniformed troops of half a dozen other countries.
Butler’s leg wound throbbed painfully, and he suffered spells of sickness from polluted water and food. His stomach was not soothed by sights en route to Peking: two Japanese soldiers, eyes and tongues cut out, nailed to a door; an old Chinese Mandarin pinned to his bed by a huge sword; village streets strewn with fly-covered corpses, their skulls smashed in. The Boxers were just as ruthless with Chinese “traitors” as with luckless foreigners.
In one village a Chinese family, frightened by the allied army’s approach, jumped into a canal and tried to drown themselves. Butler and his men rescued them and pinioned them firmly while an interpreter explained that the troops would not harm them. After some animated conversation, the interpreter told him, “Captain, these people say that since you have saved their lives, you are responsible for them as guardians and must now take care of them.”
“Good-bye!” yelled Butler, racing off with his men. Reaching the outskirts of Peking, they ran into blistering fire from the top of the city’s stone and mud wall. They joined a combined five-thousand-man American and British force hastily digging a trench before the city.
One British private left the trench in an attempt to wipe out a Chinese strongpoint at one gate but was hit between the trench and wall. Butler’s friend, Henry Leonard, sped out to rescue him but was shot and badly wounded. Clearing the trench at a bound, Butler raced through fire to reach him, but Leonard proved able to scramble back on his own, so Butler lifted the wounded Tommy on his back instead and staggered back to the trench with him.
Just as he eased the British soldier over the parapet, a stunning blow hit him in the chest. Whirling and falling, he lost consciousness briefly. When 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 14th 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.
The ailing captain was shipped to a naval hospital at Cavite, from which he was invalided home to San Francisco. Arriving on December 31st, 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 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 31st, 1902, he was put in command of a company of 101 men and shipped to the island of Culebra twenty miles east of Puerto Rico. There was trouble in Panama, and Butler’s company was part of two battalions being stationed in reserve on Culebra while the fleet, under Admiral George Dewey, conducted maneuvers offshore.
Living on field rations and fighting scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas, the Marines built docks and other naval constructions. In the midst of their perspiring labors Squadron Admiral Joe Coghlan sent 125 Navy gunnery experts ashore to challenge Butler and his men to a race in dragging five-inch coastal guns up four-hundred-foot hills. Admiral Dewey sent word that a victory shot was to be fired from the first gun mounted.
Stripped to the waist, Butler worked like a madman alongside his men to prove the superiority of leathernecks over bluejackets. At sunrise a jubilant Butler ordered his men to fire a victory shot. The shell sailed over Admiral Dewey’s flagship, landing a mile beyond. Instead of congratulating the winners, the furious hero of Manila Bay sent Butler an icy reprimand for “reckless firing.”
Their reward was an order to dig a canal. The work was backbreaking, with the ground solid rock in many places, marshland in others, all tenaciously guarded by a ferocious mosquito army. And the Navy insisted that they had to work under the broiling tropic sun in full uniform with leggings.
Unwilling to inflict any ordeal upon his men that he was not willing to endure himself, Butler wielded a shovel in the ditch beside them. Soon their ranks began to be decimated by tropical fever. A Marine major asked the Navy flagship, which had an ice machine aboard, for ice to bring down their fevers. His request scornfully refused, he returned to camp to find Butler unconscious. The major ordered him rowed immediately across the bay to a temporary Navy hospital.
Indignant at the Navy’s treatment, the major wrote to Butler’s father in Washington to tell him what was happening at Culebra. Thomas Butler let out an angry roar in the House Naval Affairs Committee. Secretary of the Navy William H. Moody sent swift orders to Admiral Dewey that no more Americans were to be used as forced labor on the miserable canal. The Navy brass fumed, convinced that it had been Captain Smedley Butler who had complained to his father. As soon as he was off the sick list, Admiral Coghlan put him in charge of sixty-five natives hired to finish the canal. Two weeks later, the canal finished, he collapsed with a relapse of tropical fever.
While Butler was in the hospital, a belated award of the Philippine Campaign Medal made him think about his old battalion under Major Waller, who was now back in the Philippines under Army General Adna Chaffee fighting rebels. He was stunned when an uproar in the American press compelled Waller’s court-martial for killing ten Filipino native carriers who had balked at orders during a march. Waller had been acquitted, however, on grounds that he had merely been obeying “kill and 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 wherever they might be; then the men under them; then their comrades-in-arms. From his own experience in the Philippines and China, Butler guessed that Waller had suspected the carriers of being rebels. It was impossible to tell apart insurrectionists and noncombatant natives.
The twenty-one-year-old Marine captain was not yet troubled by doubts as to what the Marines were ordered to do in the service of their country, or why. He shared the easy condescension of most Marines of that swashbuckling era toward people of underdeveloped countries as naive natives who had to be patronized, directed, and protected by Americans. The Marines were an elite gendarmerie entrusted with the duty of maintaining international law and order on behalf of civilization. A Marine’s only concern was carrying out his orders as expertly as possible, without questions.
It was only later, as 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.
When a revolution broke out in Honduras early in 1903, Butler’s battalion was dispatched there aboard an old banana freighter, the Panther, as part of a squadron under Admiral Coghlan.
On the second day out the ship’s commander summoned all hands to the quarterdeck to complain that someone had been using profane language near his cabin. “I know the guilty party cannot be one of these fine men,” he declared, indicating the sailors, “Therefore it must have been one of these men enlisted from the slums of our big cities.” Pointing to the Marines, he restricted their use of the deck. Butler restrained an impulse to apply the tip of his boot to the seat of the commander’s naval rectitude. “Then and there,” he recalled later, “I made up my mind that I would always protect Marines from the hounding to which they were subjected by some of the naval officers.”
At the end of his duty in Culebra, his father had reproached him for not having kept him better informed as to what was going on in America’s naval outposts. Now Butler did not hesitate to write his father field reports in the Plain Language, sometimes asking him to use his influence on the House Naval Affairs Committee on behalf of the Marine Corps. Thomas Butler did not always consent, but did serve informally as the Marines’ court of last resort against Navy hostility.
In Honduras Smedley was vague as to what the trouble was all about, noting, “It all seemed like a Gilbert and Sullivan war.” He led a force ashore at Trujillo between government and rebel forces {that} 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 30th at Bay Head, New Jersey, in a military wedding. Commented the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Cupid and Mars in a wedding by the sea at high noon today.”
Their honeymoon was a world trip made possible by orders assigning him to the Philippines as captain of Company E, Second Regiment. Arriving with his bride by way of Europe, India, and Singapore, he was stationed at a small naval base on Subic Bay, sixty miles north of Manila.
Here, in November, 1906, his daughter Ethel was born. Butler’s popularity led to her adoption by the regiment. Giving a dinner for the enlisted men, he carried her to the table on a pillow as guest of honor. Not surprisingly, she grew up a “Marine brat” and years later married a Marine lieutenant, John Wehle.
With a detachment of fifty men Butler spent several months dragging six-inch guns up mountaintops to defend Subic Bay against possible attack by Japan, an attack that did not materialize for another thirty-six years. He and his men lived ruggedly on hardtack,[7] 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, he 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[8] 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 12th, 1909; Butler was put in charge of the 4th Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and sent to Panama. Although he was stationed on the Isthmus[9] 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 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 25th, 1912, Butler was ordered to retake the captured train and open the railroad line. Angry that a Marine officer had failed in the task and made the Corps “a laughingstock,” he wrote his wife, “The idea prevails very strongly that Marines are not soldiers, and will not fight. I cannot stand any slur on our Corps and I will wipe it off or quit.”
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, {and} then glumly ordered his men to yield. The Marines manned the train, and as it pulled away, Butler calmly emptied the two bags out of a rear window in sight of the rebels. They contained sand.
Checking a bridge to make sure it was safe for the train to cross, he was suddenly confronted by a rebel general with an enormous moustache who whipped out a huge pistol and shoved it against Butler’s stomach. “If the train moved forward one inch”, the rebel officer yelled to Marines clustered around the locomotive, he would pull the trigger.
The slender Marine major suddenly sidestepped, simultaneously tearing the pistol out of the Nicaraguan’s hand. Emptying the cartridges out of the barrel, he calmly returned the gun to the crestfallen general and drew his own revolver. The vanquished rebel leader meekly marched back to the train as a hostage, and the train went through.
Butler discovered that most Nicaraguans were supporting the rebellion against the Diaz government, which had hired brutal Honduran mercenaries to crush it. The people themselves had slain many mercenaries, who looted, raped, and murdered. Unfortunately for American prestige, a few Americans had been conspicuous among them. Butler’s hundred Marines aboard the train were regarded with general hostility as similarly vicious instruments of the Diaz regime.
Butler and his men succeeded in opening the line between Managua and the port at Corinto. On the way back they had to build three new bridges and several miles of track. Returning to Managua after a fifteen-hundred-foot descent with the train’s brakes gone, Butler collapsed into bed and pulled the covers over his face. During the whole week-long trip he had had just seventeen hours’ sleep.
By now the cynicism of the American presence in Nicaragua was becoming depressingly obvious to him. “I expect a whole lot more rot about the property of citizens of ours . . . which has been stolen by the rebels and which I must see restored to their owners,” he wrote his wife on September 13th, 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 a 104° fever, he had to lie on a cot in a boxcar as his troop train pulled out of Managua. His eyes were so bloodshot and glaring that his men began calling him “Old Gimlet Eye”, a nickname that stuck.
Under constant harassment by guerrilla forces, Butler finally sent word ahead to Granada to warn General Mena that the Americans were prepared to attack him if he ordered any further assaults on the train. Mena replied that he was sending a peace delegation. Hoping to impress the emissaries with his military power, Butler ordered poles put in the muzzles of two small field guns on flatcars and covered them with tents to give them the appearance of fourteen-inch guns. He further awed the emissaries by receiving them seated on a wooden camp chair mounted on stilted legs like a primitive throne.
Glaring down at them, he warned that unless Mena signed an agreement surrendering the railroad property and moving his troops out of the railroad area, Marine “regiments” would attack Mena’s two-thousand-man force in Granada.
His bluff worked so well that Mena not only agreed but, to Butler’s amazement, also offered to surrender himself and his army if the Americans would provide a warship to take him safely to exile in Panama. The jubilant Marine major notified Admiral Southerland and the admiral at once agreed.
Butler was made temporary governor of the District of Granada until elections could be held. He promptly released all political prisoners Mena had thrown into dungeons and returned all the property that had been confiscated from them. He next issued a proclamation ordering all loot taken from the people by both rebel and government forces to be restored. The astonished Granadans hailed him as a liberator.
On September 30th, 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 4th, Butler and Colonel Joe Pendleton charged up the Coyatepe leading an 850-man Marine force. In a forty-minute battle twenty-seven rebels were killed in their trenches, nine captured, and the rest put to flight. Two Marines were killed.
The fall of Coyatepe put the town of Masaya, the last rebel outpost, in Marine hands. As they occupied it, some four thousand government troops celebrated by entering the town, looting it, and getting drunk. Incensed, Butler expressed his bitterness in a letter to his wife, decrying “a victory gained by us for them at the expense of two good American lives, all because Brown Brothers bankers have some money invested in this country.”
Resting in Masaya, the major began longing to see his family. “I feel terribly over missing my son’s most interesting period of development, but ... this separation can’t last forever,” he wrote Ethel on October 8th. “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 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 13th, 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 have some parts of it over again; the excitement was fine.” He indicated an early awareness that he was destined to play a meaningful role in American history: “Be sure to keep all my letters as they are a diary of my life, and may be useful sometime in the future.”
With a second bronze star added to his Expeditionary Medal and a new Nicaraguan Campaign Medal, the indefatigable young campaigner returned to Panama and his family. His second son, Thomas Richard, was born in October, 1913.
With Woodrow Wilson in the White House, war clouds loomed with Mexico when bandit General Victoriano Huerta overthrew legally elected Mexican President Francisco Madero. In an angry exchange of notes, Wilson insisted that Huerta must hold new elections barring himself as a candidate. Wilson’s choice was Huerta’s rival for power, General Venustiano Carranza. Banning all arms shipments to Mexico, the President asked all Americans without urgent business there to leave the country and sent the fleet to cruise significantly in the Gulf of Mexico during a period of “watchful waiting.”
Defying Wilson, Huerta began importing arms from Europe to crush Carranza. The President then violated his own embargo and rushed American arms to the Carranza forces. Full-scale fighting broke out all over Mexico, during which American industrial property was destroyed and United States businessmen were compelled to flee attacks against them from both sides.
In January, 1914, the Marines were ordered from Panama to the fleet standing off Vera Cruz. Ethel Butler took the children home to Pennsylvania, and her husband reported to the fleet flagship Florida, assigned to the staff of Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher. Welcoming him aboard, the admiral remarked on his courage and daring in the Chinese, Philippine, and Nicaraguan campaigns. He was just the man, the admiral thought, for a dangerous special mission for the War Department.
How did Butler feel about going into Mexico as a “civilian” spy to make an expert analysis of Huerta’s fighting forces in and around Mexico City, as well as to gather general intelligence, in case war was declared? He would carry no official orders of any kind, of course, and if he were caught, the Navy would have to disavow any knowledge of either him or his mission.
“How soon can I start, Admiral?” he asked.
Beneath a night sky of swollen black clouds, as most of the crew aboard the Florida watched, a Western movie starring Broncho Billy, a civilian-clad Butler dropped a small traveling bag out of his cabin port into a small boat, {and} 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.
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, {and} 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, {and} 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.
When war with Mexico seemed inevitable, on April 19th, 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 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, seven 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 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 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 16th, 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 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.”
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!”
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