-
The Plot To
Seize The White House
- by Jules Archer
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PART FOUR
Fallout
About seven weeks after Butler
and French had testified, John Spivak asked McCormack for an interview, and it
was granted. McCormack had no fear of talking to a reporter from the New Masses,
for which Spivak was writing at the time. Communist oriented or not, McCormack
knew that the Masses {were} in the forefront of exposing Nazi and anti-Semitic
activities in the United States.
Asked about the deleted
testimony, McCormack at first suggested that Spivak was relying on gossip. When
Spivak revealed and convinced McCormack that he had ‘seen the transcript of the
executive session, the congressman grew annoyed and canceled the interview. He
agreed to let Spivak leave questions with him, however, and said he would reply
to those he chose to answer within three days.
Writing Spivak a letter three
days later, he gave no specific answers to questions about the American Liberty
League, the American Legion’s passage of the gold resolution, and the report
that John W. Davis had written the speech that MacGuire and Clark had wanted
Butler to make. “The reason for certain portions of General Butler’s testimony
in executive session being deleted from the public record,” he wrote, “has been
clearly stated in the public record.”
He went on to make a broad
attack against the plotters and to suggest that the hearings had defeated them:
“As a result of the investigation, and the disclosures made, this movement has
been stopped, and is practically broken up. There is no question but that some
of the leaders are attempting to carry on, but they can make no headway. Public
opinion, as a result of the disclosures of the investigation, is aroused.”
Spivak went to see Dickstein
and asked him why Colonel Grayson M.P. Murphy had not been called upon to
testify. “Your committee knew,” Spivak reminded him, “that Murphy’s men are in
the anti-Semitic espionage organization, Order of ‘76.”
“We didn’t have the time,”
Dickstein replied. “We’d have taken care of the Wall Street groups if we had the
time. I would have had no hesitation in going after the Morgans.”
“You had Belgrano, commander
of the American Legion, listed to testify. Why wasn’t he examined?”
“I don’t know,” Dickstein
replied, and referred him back to McCormack for the answer.
Spivak decided to inform
General Butler, who, he was sure, did not realize it, that portions of his and
French’s testimony had been omitted in the official report issued by the
McCormack-Dickstein Committee. “If he knew and said so publicly,” Spivak
reasoned, “he would reach a vastly greater audience than was available to me
through the New Masses.”
Telephoning the general,
Spivak announced that he was from the New Masses and wanted to see him about his
testimony. “Come on out,” Butler said promptly. “Glad to see you.” The roads had
not been cleared of a heavy snowfall of the night before, and Spivak trudged to
the house in Newtown Square through knee-deep snow. His Spartan march appealed
to Butler, who welcomed him heartily with the approval he had always shown to
soldiers who disregarded the foulest weather to push on doggedly with their
assigned missions.
Spivak saw a slender man with
receding hair, lined and sunken cheeks, thick eyebrows, furrowed lines between
keen eyes, generous nose, and jutting underlip. He liked Butler instantly, and
the feeling was apparently mutual.
During their talk Butler
revealed that he was intensely preoccupied with the corporate exploitation of
the military for profit. Anxious to arouse Americans to this spoliation, he now
believed it might be done by a more sophisticated book of memoirs and
reflections than Old Gimlet Eye.
“I think you’re the man I’ve
been hoping to run into to help me do an autobiography,” he told Spivak. “There
are things I’ve seen, things I’ve learned that should not be left unsaid.
War is a racket to protect
economic interests, not our country, and our soldiers are sent to die on foreign
soil to protect investments by big business.”
Spivak said regretfully that
he felt compelled to continue investigating and exposing a more urgent and
dangerous situation -Nazi activities in the United States. Butler agreed at once
that this activity was more important and offered to help by opening any doors
he could for Spivak. During their discussion Spivak learned “things about big
business and politics, sometimes in earthy, four-letter words, the like of which
I had never heard.” Butler spilled over with anger at the hypocrisy that had
marked American interference in the internal affairs of other governments,
behind a smoke screen of pious expressions of high-sounding purpose.
“We supervised elections in
Haiti,” he said wryly, “and wherever we supervised them our candidate always
won.”
Admiring Butler’s candor,
Spivak did not want to mislead him or sail under false colors. He reminded the
general that he was from the New Masses, and in case Butler didn’t know it,
added, “It’s supposed to be a Communist magazine.”
“So who the hell cares?”
Butler shrugged. “There wouldn’t be a United States if it wasn’t for a bunch of
radicals. I once heard of a radical named George Washington. As a matter of fact
from what I read he was an extremist – a goddam revolutionist!”
Because of his fierce
anti-Fascist and anti-big-business views, Butler was sometimes Red-baited. He
was scarcely unique in being made a target for this kind of attack by rightists
and ultraconservatives. As George Seldes told me, “If you are saying anything in
general about the fight against fascism in America, it seems to me that a point
to emphasize is that the entire Red-baiting wave which culminated in the
McCarthy era was successful in inundating the anti-Fascists by making every
anti-Fascist, whether liberal, socialist, or Communist, a Red.”
Butler was shocked when Spivak
showed him copies of the portions of his and French’s testimony that had been
deleted from the official report of the hearings. His scowl deepened as Spivak
revealed that Belgrano had been dismissed without being asked a single question
about what had happened at the “gold-standard resolution” Legion convention in
Chicago. According to Spivak, upon learning that the committee had reported to
Congress that it had verified the authenticity of the plot, yet no action had
been taken about MacGuire’s wholesale denials under oath, Butler lost control of
his volatile temper.
“I’ll be goddammed!” he
roared. “You can be sure I’m going to say something about this!”
Spivak asked him to hold off
long enough to let the tiny circulation New Masses break the story first. Butler
agreed. When the Masses appeared with the expose, it was a sensational news
scoop, but none of the Washington correspondents dared touch it or follow it up.
“Several expressed regret,”
Spivak related, “that the exposes were appearing in the New Masses; when they
quoted from one of my stories-solely on its news value-their editors cut the
material out and advised them that quotes from 'that magazine’ might make
readers say the paper was spreading Red propaganda. So great had the fear of
communism and 'Red propaganda’ become that even editors who did not swallow all
of it themselves went along because it was the popular attitude.”
In his broadcast over WCAU on
February 17th, 1935, Butler revealed that some of the “most
important” portions of his testimony had been suppressed in the
McCormack-Dickstein report to Congress. The committee, he growled, had “stopped
dead in its tracks when it got near the top.” He added angrily:
Like most committees, it has
slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even
called to testify. Why wasn’t Colonel Grayson M.P. Murphy, New York broker ...
called? Why wasn’t Louis Howe, Secretary to the President of the United States,
called?
Why wasn’t A1 Smith called?
And why wasn’t Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff of the United States Army,
called? And why wasn’t Hanford MacNider, former American Legion commander,
called? They were all mentioned in the testimony. And why was all mention of
these names suppressed from the committee report?
This was no piker set-up.
MacGuire, who was the agent of the Wall Street bankers and brokers who proposed
this organization, told me that $3,000,000 was “on the line” and that
$300,000,000-and that’s a lot of money even today was in view to put over this
plot to bluff the government. He kept up a running attack on the conspirators
night after night, revealing facts that had been omitted in the official
committee report. In another broadcast he lashed out at the American Legion with
no holds barred:
Do you think it could be hard
to buy the American Legion for un-American activities? You know, the average
veteran thinks the Legion is a patriotic organization to perpetuate the memories
of the last war, an organization to promote peace, to take care of the wounded
and to keep green the graves of those who gave their lives.
But is the American Legion
that? No sir, not while it is controlled by the bankers. For years the bankers,
by buying big club houses for various posts, by financing its beginning, and
otherwise, have tried to make a strikebreaking organization of the Legion. The
groups-the so-called Royal Family of the Legion-which have picked its officers
for years aren’t interested in patriotism, in peace, in wounded veterans, in
those who gave their lives…. No, they are interested only in using the veterans,
through their officers.
Why, even now, the commander
of the American Legion is a banker – a banker who must have known what
MacGuire’s money was going to be used for. His name was mentioned in the
testimony. Why didn’t they cal] Belgrano and ask him why he contributed? Butler
was incredulous when he read that Colonel William E. Easterwood, national
vice-commander of the Legion, while visiting Italy in 1935, had pinned a Legion
button on Mussolini, making him an “honorary member,” and had invited the
dictator to the next Legion convention in Chicago.
Why, Butler wondered, did the
Legion membership stand for such an abuse of the organization in their name?
Apparently an uproar of sorts did break out, because Mussolini’s honorary
membership was later canceled as “unconstitutional” on grounds that the Legion
had no honorary members.
Representative Dickstein was
given the job of replying to Butler’s radio blasts in a broadcast over the same
network. The fifty-year-old congressman gave the committee’s version of the
censored testimony:
General Smedley Butler saw fit
to employ this radio network to indulge in genera] criticism of the work done by
the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities and to cast aspersions on
the character of such men as Alfred E. Smith, Louis Howe, General MacArthur and
Hanford MacNider....
The committee felt it should
hear General Butler and ... follow out the “leads” which the general furnished
to the members of the committee. The testimony given by General Butler was kept
confidential until such time as the names of the persons who were mentioned in
his testimony could be checked upon and verified. The committee did not want to
hear General Butler’s allegations without giving itself the opportunity to
verify the assertions made by him.
It did not feel like dragging
into the mud of publicity names of persons who were mentioned by General Butler
unless his statements could be verified, since untold damage might be caused to
a person’s reputation, by public discussion of testimony which could not be
substantiated.
This accounts for the fact
that when the results of the hearings were finally made public, references to
Alfred E. Smith and others were omitted. They were wholly without consequence
and public mention might be misinterpreted by the public. The essential
portions, however, of General Butler’s testimony have been released to the
public and his specific charges relating to the proposed organization of a
“soldier’s movement” have been thoroughly aired and passed upon by the
committee....
General Butler asks why Clark
was not called before the committee. Well, the reason was that Mr. Clark has
been living in France for over a year, as General Butler well knows, and
naturally he could not be subpoenaed, but on the 29th of December,
1934, Mr. Clark was represented before the committee in the person of his
attorney, and full information was given the committee. Mr. Butler didn’t tell
you this....
For whatever additional light
could be shed on the plot to take over the White House that he had helped to
expose, I interviewed John W. McCormack on September 17th, 1971. At
seventy-nine, lean, bright, warm, and friendly, the former Speaker of the House
revealed a sharp, clear memory that enabled him to recall spontaneously many
names and details of the hearings over which he had presided as chairman
thirty-four years earlier. I reminded him that the committee had said that it
wanted to hear Clark’s testimony, and Clark had stated that he would return from
Europe to testify, but had not done so. Yet he had not called or subpoenaed
Clark to do so. Why not?
“We couldn’t subpoena Clark to
testify at the executive session because they were held outside of Washington,”
McCormack explained. “According to the law of that day, we had no power to
subpoena anyone to executive sessions outside the Capital. I subsequently
recommended changing the law to give congressional committees that right, and
the change was in fact made.”
Asked whether he knew what the
reaction of President Roosevelt or Louis Howe had been to the exposure of the
plot, he replied that he did not. Why had the Department of justice under
Attorney General Homer Cummings failed to initiate criminal proceedings against
the plotters?
“The way I figure it,” he
replied, “we did our job in the committee by exposing the plot, and then it was
up to the Department of Justice to do their job-to take it from there.”
John L. Spivak was equally
mystified by the lack of any action taken by the department against the
conspirators. When I asked him about it, he replied, “I have no knowledge why
the Attorney General did not pursue this matter except that most likely it was
deemed politically inadvisable.” He thought it possible that the decision might
actually have been made in the White House on a basis of sheer pragmatism. As he
speculated in his book A Man in His Time:
What would be the public gain
from delving deeper into a plot which was already exposed and whose principals
could be kept under surveillance? Roosevelt had enough headaches in those
troubled days without having to make a face-to-face confrontation with men of
great wealth and power. Was it avoidance of such a confrontation? Was it a
desire by the head of the Democratic Party to avoid going into matters which
could split the party down the middle, what with Davis and Smith, two former
party heads, among those named by Butler?
I asked McCormack what his own
reactions had been to MacGuire’s testimony denying all of Butler’s allegations.
“There was no doubt that
General Butler was telling the truth,” he replied. “We believed his testimony
one hundred percent. He was a great, patriotic American in every respect.”
“In your considered judgment,
Mr. Speaker, were those men Butler named as involved in the plot guilty?”
“Millions were at stake when
Clark and the others got the Legion to pass that resolution on the gold standard
in 1933,” he answered. “When Roosevelt refused to be pressured by it, and went
even further off the gold standard, those fellows got desperate and decided to
look into European methods, with the idea of introducing them into America. They
sent MacGuire to Europe to study the Fascist organizations. We found the
evidence that Clark and [Colonel] Grayson Murphy, who underwrote the American
Legion with $125,000, were involved when we examined MacGuire’s records and bank
accounts.”
I asked him about Colonel
Murphy’s role in the plot.
“Grayson Murphy was a
number-one kingmaker in the Legion. His firm had clients of great wealth. Those
fellows were afraid that Roosevelt would take their money away by taxes. They
were desperate and sought to take power and frighten Roosevelt into doing what
they wanted. But they made the mistake of approaching the wrong man to do the
job.”
“Had the plotters only wanted
to take over the White House to restore the gold standard, or were they also out
to destroy the New Deal and set up a Fascist dictatorship to run the country
through an American Mussolini?”
McCormack reflected a moment,
then said, “Well, we were in the depths of a severe depression, and we had a
good man, Roosevelt, in the White House, and he’d revived the hopes and
confidence of the American people. The plotters definitely hated the New Deal
because it was for the people, not for the moneyed interests, and they were
willing to spend a lot of their money to dump Mr. Roosevelt out of the White
House.”
“Could you say definitely that
the American Liberty League was the organization of
‘big fellows’ that MacGuire
had described as being behind the plotters?”
“I don’t know anything about
the Liberty League,” he replied in a crisp manner that did not encourage me to
pursue any further interrogation along that line.
“Mr. Speaker, why were the
plotters so insistent that General Butler accept their proposal that he be the
one to head the Fascist march on Washington they planned?”
“They chose Smedley Butler
because they needed an
‘enlisted man’s general,’ not a
‘general’s general.’ They
had to have a colorful figure half a million or more veterans who had been
privates and noncoms would follow. General Butler was the most popular one.”
“If General Butler bad been an
ambitious man like Aaron Burr and had been willing to be the Man on the White
Horse for the plotters, do you think their conspiracy to take over the White
House, with all that money behind it, might have succeeded?”
“Well, if General Butler had
not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the
plot certainly might very well have succeeded, having in mind the conditions
existing at that time. No one can say for sure, of course, but when times are
desperate and people are frustrated, anything like that could happen.”
And we might have gone
Fascist?”
“If the plotters had got rid
of Roosevelt, there’s no telling what might have taken place. They wouldn’t have
told the people what they were doing, of course. They were going to make it all
sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and
a plan to make it all sound like a good American program. A well-organized
minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority, as Adolf Hitler did. He
failed with his beer-hall putsch, but he succeeded when he was better organized.
The same thing could have happened here.
“How did it come about that
the committee first approached Butler before he approached the committee?”
“Oh, we heard something about
it and asked the general if he knew anything,” McCormack replied. “He said he
certainly did. He was giving the plotters a come-on and trying to get the whole
story from them. When he had all the information on who was behind it, and what
they were up to, he wanted to come to Washington, testify before our committee,
and break the whole thing wide open.”
Finally I asked him, “Then in
your opinion America could definitely have become a Fascist power had it not
been for General Butler’s patriotism in exploding the plot?”
“It certainly could have,”
McCormack acknowledged. “The people were in a very confused state of mind,
making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction.
Mass frustration could bring about anything.”
He reminded me that the
international smell of fascism had been very much in the air during the hectic
days of the plot and that much undercover Fascist activity had been going on in
the United States that the American people knew nothing about. The
McCormack-Dickstein Committee had exposed Ivy Lee, the noted public relations
expert ostensibly employed by the German dye trust, but actually on the payroll
of the Nazi Government to help them win favorable publicity in the American
press. The committee had brought about passage of the Foreign Agents’
Registration Act to smoke out hidden Nazi and Soviet agents into the limelight.
This committee was not the
headline-seeking, witch-hunting extravaganza that HUAC became under Martin Dies.
“Its manner of investigation commanded special respect,” notes historian Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr. “McCormack used competent investigators and employed as
committee counsel a former Georgia senator with a good record on civil
liberties. Most of the examination of witnesses was carried on in executive
sessions. In public sessions, witnesses were free to consult counsel.
Throughout, McCormack was eager to avoid hit-and-run accusation and
unsubstantiated testimony. The result was an almost uniquely scrupulous
investigation in a highly sensitive area.”
Schlesinger noted that the
McCormack Committee had “declared itself 'able to verify all the pertinent
statements made by General Butler’ except for MacGuire’s direct proposal to him,
and it considered this more or less confirmed by MacGuire’s European reports....
James E. Van Zandt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and
subsequently a Republican congressman, corroborated Butler’s story and said that
he, too, had been approached by ‘agents of Wall Street.’”
I queried McCormack about one
final point. One newspaper reporter had suggested that Butler had not himself
taken the plot very seriously.
“Oh, no, General Butler
regarded the plot very gravely indeed,” McCormack said emphatically. “He knew
that this was a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of rich men who
wanted fascism.”
I also discussed this point
with the Butler family. Smedley Butler, Jr., agreed with McCormack and explained
why his father did not immediately go to Washington when he realized what the
plotters were up to: “Dad was not stupid. He had no proof, and he could not name
names, so he had to be careful about it.”
In fairness to the American
Legion today, it needs to be pointed out that the Legion leadership of our times
is far different from what it was in the period during and preceding the Butler
hearings, when so many former commanders and high officials were involved in the
conspiracy and anti labor activities dictated by big-business interests.
John L. Spivak explained why:
A long struggle followed
within the Legion between those who would use the members for their own business
and political interests and those who wanted the organization used for the
benefit of former servicemen…. The latter won. At the time of the plot, the
cleavage between the rank and file and the Royal Family seemed-as it indeed
turned out to be-a permanent one. In the generation that followed, the Legion
underwent drastic changes and a mellowing.... Members now rarely participate in
anti labor activity. In fact, many Legionnaires are themselves loyal union men.
To carry his warnings further
to the American people, Butler began touring the country in a series of
lectures. On the podium lie held audiences fascinated not only by his vigorous
exposes of big business, war-makers, the American Liberty League, and the
American Legion “Royal Family,” but by the sheer dynamism of his personality.
As he grew more and more
heated, he would roam the stage, gesticulating vigorously as he made his points,
often extemporaneously, in salty, sometimes ribald, always blunt language.
He was flooded with requests
for appearances at huge veterans’ bonus rallies staged by the V.F.W. all over
the country. In his speeches to veterans he would growl at their naiveté as
“dumb soldiers” because they didn’t organize politically to fight for veterans’
benefits due them. They would grin and applaud enthusiastically, knowing that
behind his gruff manner was a genuine fondness and concern for their welfare.
Acknowledged as the spokesman
for the “forgotten veteran,” he was besieged with requests for help in getting
adequate pensions for disabled veterans, and through the V.F.W. put pressure on
the Veterans Administration in hundreds of cases.
The worshipful attitude of
veterans toward Butler was expressed in a typical letter to him in March, 1935,
by a veteran who wrote, “We all know that you speak our language, and that the
Vet is about as close to your heart as anything else in the world.”
There was no generation gap
between the fifty-four-year-old general and youth leaders of that period, who
were organizing the American Student Union to fight “against war and fascism.”
They felt a close kinship with the war hero who hated wars, and hated the men
who had sent him to fight them. Now constantly proselytizing against war in the
hope of stopping any new ones, Butler also wrote magazine articles condemning
Marine intervention in the affairs of China.
Speaking to a Y.M.C.A. in
Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in February, he accused the big industrialists of
America of fattening on the blood of soldiers. He pointed out that the average
profit of the DuPonts from 1910 to 1914 had been only $6 million, but had soared
to $58 million between 1914 and 1918. The jump in the same periods for Bethlehem
Steel had been $6 to $49 million; for International Nickel, $4 to $73 million.
“It makes you feel proud,” he
said bitingly. “A lot of the stockholders are members of the National Economy
League, and, after I complete my investigation, I will probably find they are
also members of the American Liberty League.”
On February 25th Time magazine
ran a two-column photo showing Butler and comedian Jimmy Durante, who attended a
dinner in Pittsburgh where the general was speaking, facing each other “nose to
nose” in a light moment for the photographer. The caption read “SCHNOZZLE,
GIMLET EYE. Fascist to Fascist?”
In a tiny footnote at the
bottom of the page, in five-point type that could barely be read, Time informed
those of its readers with 20-20 vision, “Also last week the House Committee on
Un-American Activities purported to report that a two-month investigation had
convinced it that General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was
alarmingly true.” This was Time’s microscopic amends for its lengthy page-one
ridicule of the plot a dozen weeks earlier.
In March, 1935, Butler began
lecturing to mass meetings called by the V.F.W., speaking on behalf of the
Patman Bonus Bill. He lost no opportunity to warn veterans also against those
big-business interests who favored war and fascism. His convictions were
strengthened by a new book based on the Nye munitions investigation, The Road to
War, by Walter Millis.
He wrote a small antiwar book
of his own that year; based on an earlier magazine article m which he favored a
foreign policy of strict neutrality. In War Is a Racket he advocated an
“ironclad defense a rat couldn’t crawl through,” but only to defend the United
States against attack. The job of the armed forces, he insisted, was only to
protect democracy at home – not waste lives on foreign soil to protect American
investments overseas:
[War] is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.... How many of these war
millionaires shouldered a rifle?.... Newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the…. self-same few who
wring dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill....
Newly-placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and
homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries.
Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a
soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil
life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds again
gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out....
There are 40,000,000 men under
arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity
to say that war is not in the making. Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men
being trained to be dancers? . . . [Mussolini is] ready for war.... [Hitler] is
an equal if not greater menace to peace.... The mad dogs of Europe are on the
loose.... Yes, they [munitions makers, bankers, ship-builders, manufacturers,
meat packers, speculators] are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t
they? It pays high dividends. But what does it profit the masses…. who are
killed? [American boys in past wars] were made to…. regard murder as the order
of the day.... We used them a couple of years and trained them to think nothing
at all of killing or being killed. Then suddenly, we discharged them and told
them to do their own readjusting.... Many, too many, of these fine young boys
were eventually destroyed mentally....
The soldiers couldn’t bargain
for their labor.... By developing the . . . medal business, the government
learned it could get soldiers for less money.... We gave them the large salary
of $30 a month!
All they had to do for that
munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in
swampy trenches, eat canned willy [when they could get it], and kill and kill
and kill ... and be killed.... But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it
by disarmament conferences.... by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively
only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to
conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation’s manhood can be
conscripted.... Let the officers and directors and the high-powered executives
of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and
our ship-builders and our airplane builders . . . as well as the bankers and the
speculators, be conscripted-to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the
trenches get.
Let the workers in these
plants get the same wages . . . yes, and all generals and all admirals and all
officers and all politicians.... Why shouldn’t they? They aren’t running any
risk of being killed or having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered....
Give capital and industry and
labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will
be no war. That will smash the war racket-that and nothing else.
Industrialists and financiers
were shocked by Butler’s “radical” notion. But if they had checked the Oxford
Dictionary, they would have found as one definition of conscription: “taxation
or confiscation of property for war purposes to impose equality of sacrifice on
non-conscripts.”
Butler’s speeches at bonus
rallies and over the air helped put pressure on Congress to pass the Patman
Bonus Bill. As it went to the White House, Butler urged the President to sign it
into law, pointing out that it was one way the nation could make amends to the
veterans for their exploitation by big business in America’s wars of the
twentieth century. In a radio broadcast on May 9th he urged his
listeners to deluge Roosevelt with a million wires and letters supporting the
bill.
But the President vetoed it.
On May 21st Butler conferred with Senator Elmer Thomas, of Oklahoma,
in Washington on tactics to get Congress to override the veto. Afterward he
declared his hope of organizing a large-scale political movement of veterans to
press for the bonus. “My idea,” he told the press, “would be a mammoth
organization like the Grand Army of the Republic, which would bring political
pressure to bear to take care of the soldiers.”
Now he criticized not only the
American Legion but also the V.F.W. for avoiding the political arena: “They’re
no good. They’ve got provisions in their bylaws which say they can’t engage in
political action. The politicians put them to sleep.... If the soldiers don’t
get theirs now, they’ll organize and get it. There’d be about five million of
them.” He was asked who would head the new organization. “I don’t know who we’d
get to lead it,” he replied.
He was instantly besieged with
requests from various veterans groups that he take them over as the nucleus for
his battle for the bonus and veterans’ pensions. Morris A. Bealle, publisher of
Plain Talk magazine, wrote Butler on May 24 that he had already begun
such an organization, calling it the Iron Veterans. He urged Butler to assume
its leadership. “You may be interested to know that Bill Doyle tried to finance
this organization for us,” Bealle wrote, “but acted so suspicious[ly] at Miami
that I thought he was trying to take it over for the Royal Family of the
American Legion, and declined to do business with him.” This was the same Doyle
who had accompanied MacGuire in the plotters’ first contact with Butler. Bealle
added, “A few weeks later I discovered to my horror that he was trying to take
it over for the House of Morgan.” But Butler, made wary by the Fascists’ plan
for a veterans’ “super-organization,” began to have second thoughts about the
wisdom of any attempt to organize a national veterans group for political
purposes.
“To attempt a national
association in the beginning,” he wrote to the organizer of the American
Warriors in Iowa, “would only lead to great financial expense and exploitation
of the veterans by chiseling professionals.... While it might be possible to
find those who would contribute the necessary funds, it would put the veterans
under obligation to the contributors.”
His fight for the Bonus Bill,
and his bare-knuckled attacks against the establishment, led to cancellation of
his radio broadcasts as of July 3. A month earlier, when Van Zandt urged him to
come to Montana to speak for the soldiers’ bonus at a V.F.W. rally there, Butler
declined.
“Such a trip would be a very
heavy drain on my pocketbook,” he explained. “And as long as I am being put off
the air for being too noisy in my criticism of this administration and for
taking the part of the soldiers, I more or less shall have to conserve my
resources.” But he was determined to get the truth as he saw it out to the
American people and undertook a new lecture tour that would cover the country.
Roosevelt had not been able to get the press to carry his message to the people,
so he had turned to national radio. Butler had not been able to get national
radio to carry his message, so he turned to town-hall meetings all over America.
On June 12th the
American League of Ex-Servicemen asked him to speak at a rally in favor of the
bonus with American Labor party Congressman Vito Marcantonio. Butler agreed,
with the understanding that he spoke as an individual only, not as a
representative of any group. The League adjutant quickly agreed, adding,
“Millions of rank-and-file veterans have always looked to you as a champion of
their cause in fighting for their rights and to receive justice from the
government.”
Meanwhile a vigorous debate
was taking place in Congress, sparked by the Nye Committee revelations and the
weakness of the League of Nations, over the Ludlow Resolution calling for a
national referendum before war could be declared. The resolution failed, but on
August 31st Congress passed the First Neutrality Act. It forbade
transportation of munitions to any belligerents after the President had declared
a state of war to exist between them and authorized the President to prohibit
travel by American citizens on the ships of belligerents.
Butler regretted the failure
of the Ludlow Resolution to pass, because he saw it as a way to prevent powerful
men from making decisions that could drag the country to war. He praised
Congress for passing the Neutrality Act, however, believing that it would help
take the profits out of war for American munitions-makers, and also make it
difficult for them to embroil the United States in a foreign war by stirring
passions over Americans lost at sea in naval attacks.
When a book by Senator Huey
Long appeared, hopefully called My First Days in the White House, it listed as
members of Long’s mythical cabinet Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover,
with Smedley Butler as Secretary of War. On September 15th, one week
after Long was assassinated, Butler was interviewed in Atlanta. He was asked how
he felt about his inclusion in the late senator’s proposed cabinet.
Characterizing it as “the greatest compliment ever paid to me,” Butler smiled,
“I certainly felt in good company.” Asked about his own political ambitions,
Butler shrugged, “I’m just a gentleman farmer now.” Reporters then asked him to
comment on the government’s transfer of veterans who had been lobbying for the
bonus from Washington to Florida, where some had been killed in a violent
hurricane.
“What I’m interested in,”
Butler replied, “is who approved the order to send them down there. They were in
Washington, lobbying or pleading under their constitutional rights, when they
were sent down to the sandpits. There are other lobbyists in Washington. Why not
deport them, too?” On October 5th, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia,
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee invoked an arms embargo against both
countries under the Neutrality Act. Although Butler sympathized with Ethiopia,
he approved of Congress’s determination to keep clear of involvement in any
foreign war.
On Armistice Day he spoke to a
crowd of ten thousand in Philadelphia at a peace rally held by the Armistice Day
Celebration Committee and the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom. Deglamorizing the first war he had fought in, the Spanish-American War,
he shouted, “That war was caused by the newspaper propaganda of William Randolph
Hearst, and he’s been trying to get us into another war ever since. Don’t let
the man you send to Washington get you into another war ... that is surely
coming along.” Urging an even stronger neutrality law to keep America at peace,
he declared:
My interest in peace is
personal. I have three grown sons
and I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to shoot them!.... We pay the farmers in
the West not to grow corn. We pay other farmers not to raise hogs…. not to grow
cotton. Let us pay the munitions makers not to make munitions!.... We must work
against war now. Wait until the war drums beat and you’ll go half crazy. You’ll
march up Broad Street and raise Liberty loans to help Europe pay off its debts
to the House of Morgan....
The present man in the White
House, Mr. Roosevelt, says he will do his utmost to keep us out of war. That
language isn’t strong enough for us. We want him to say we won’t have war!
He told a Y.M.C.A. audience
that Mussolini was invading Ethiopia to get oil because the nation was bankrupt:
The only way out for Mussolini
is to declare war on somebody. That’s the regular way of dealing with such
situations. If this country ever gets busted, you can look for a war in about
six months. Before he started it, Mussolini called a conference with England and
France.... and he thought he had everybody’s permission to go ahead. Diplomacy
is reeking with rotten polities. None of the representatives of any of the
nations is sincere. I wouldn’t trust any of them anywhere.
Interviewed on an N.B.C. radio
program, he reported:
After the war I began visiting
the veterans’ hospitals, where I saw the ghastly, human wreckage of that war....
What right have we to send men away from their homes to be shot? I’d limit the
plebiscite to those who are actually going to do the fighting and dying, to the
men of military age.... Do you want your son to go? Do you want your son to
leave his home and lie down on the ground somewhere on the other side of the
world with a bullet in him, cut down like a stalk of wheat? Oh, no, not your
son! I’ve got three sons and I know! I’ve just come back from a 9,000-mile trip
around the country and I know this, too. None of the American men I spoke to
want to nominate their sons for the Unknown Soldier of the future!
Seeing the war clouds
gathering over Europe, he grew worried that Americans would once again be fed
slogans and half-truths to distort their judgment, and fall victims to
professional propagandists for those who would urge war in support of one
favored country or another. He sensed the President’s growing internationalism
and joined other liberal pacifists in demanding that Roosevelt stick to
implementing the New Deal and steer clear of any foreign adventures.
Addressing the Third U.S.
Congress Against War and Fascism in Cleveland on January 3, 1936, he urged
strict neutrality:
Every indication points to a
second World War.... The nations of Europe and Asia are spending billions of
dollars each year in military preparations.... These nations are bound to go to
war because the men in charge of the governments of some of them have worked
their people into a fanatical frame of mind....
Now that their people are
getting out of control, these so-called leaders must attack some foreign
objective if they are to remain in control. With many of them it is a question
of a foreign war or being overthrown. None of these dictators is willing to cut
his own throat, hence this war.... If we pass a single, tiny thread of help to
these leaders gone insane, these same leaders will pull a bigger line after the
little one until the rope is so big they can drag us in with it.... When you
take sides, you must eventually wind up by taking part....
See that our Congress writes
into law a command that no American soldier, Sailor or Marine be used for any
purpose except to protect the coastline of the United States, and protect his
home – and I mean, his home – not an oil well in Iraq, a British investment in
China, a sugar plantation in Cuba, a silver mine in Mexico, a glass factory in
Japan, an American-owned share of stock in a European factory – in short, not an
American investment anywhere except at home! . . . Let Congress say to all
foreign investors: “Come on home or let your money stay out of the country-we
will not defend it.”
As the nation grew
increasingly polarized between anti-Fascist interventionists and antiwar
isolationists, Butler’s uncompromising stand against war was sometimes confused
with the right wing propaganda of pro-Fascists who wanted no American help given
to the victims of Mussolini and Hitler.
In April, 1936, the Tacoma
News-Tribune published an editorial on his antiwar speeches, intimating that he
was “credited with fascist leanings.” The Olympia, Washington, post of the
United Spanish War Veterans immediately passed a resolution protesting this
libel. Demanding a retraction, they pointed out, “Less than three years ago he
stifled an incipient fascist rebellion in the eastern United States, an
accomplishment due solely to his own prompt initiative, thereby demonstrating
once more his stalwart Americanism.”
While Butler had become an
isolationist out of disillusionment with the motives of those who had engineered
armed U.S. intervention in other countries, he hated fascism as fervently as he
hated war.
He warned angrily that the
Fascist fifth column in America was so active that one in every five hundred
Americans had become “at heart a traitor to democracy.”
One of his long-fought
crusades ended in triumph in January, 1936, when Congress, under heavy pressure
from the nation’s veterans aroused by Butler, Senators Patman and Thomas, and
the V.F.W. bonus rallies, finally passed the Patman Bonus Bill over Roosevelt’s
veto.
Many veteran’s groups now
urged him to throw his hat into the presidential race of 1936. A realist, he
declined, explaining, “I am too ignorant to be President of the United States
and have not a definite plan for curing our present ills. I am doing the best I
can to educate myself, but feel that no man should invite others to follow him
unless he has a definite objective, and has the course marked out, day by day.
I, of course, learned the above from my military life.”
He devoted all his energies to
keeping America out of the war he saw coming. Preoccupied with writing and
speaking against it, as well as reading to learn more about it, he had no time
for the theater, radio, or tennis, which he loved and played brilliantly. At the
dinner table at home and elsewhere, guests listened to him spellbound in
complete silence. He was kept talking so much that he frequently left the table
without having had more than a mouthful of food.
A thoroughgoing extrovert, he
was not ostensibly an egotist; it simply came naturally to him as a Marine
general to be in command of any situation. His children could not recall any
gathering at which their father did not hold forth, less because he wanted or
needed to, than because he was urged on by a barrage of interested questions.
People were fascinated by his views and experiences.
He was not, however, among the
honored guests when the American Liberty League, in January, 1936, organized a
banquet for two thousand of its members at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.
The principal speaker was Al Smith.
In his speech, Smith warned
Americans that they faced a choice between “the pure air of America or the foul
breath of Communistic Russia.” The New Deal, he charged, was taking the nation
into Communism. The press, 80 percent anti-Roosevelt, warmly applauded his
attack. Militant C.I.O. labor leader John L. Lewis growled that Smith had
undoubtedly been “well paid” by his present employers for what he had said. New
Deal partisans denounced Smith as a tool of Wall Street.
“I just can’t understand it,”
Roosevelt told Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. “All the things we have done
in the Federal Government are like the things A1 Smith did as governor of New
York. They’re the things he would have done as President.... What in the world
is the matter?”
The American Liberty League
banquet marked the opening of their hate campaign of propaganda to defeat the
reelection of Roosevelt in 1936. The Scripps-Howard press and its United Press
wire service, an exception to the rabidly anti-Roosevelt newspaper chains,
rushed to the President’s defense.
Following through on Butler’s
expose, their papers carried a story headlined: “Liberty League Controlled by
Owners of $37,000,000,000.” Directors of the League were identified as also
being directors of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National
Bank, Goodyear Tire, and Mutual Life Insurance Company. Liberal senators joined
the attack.
On January 23rd
Senator Schwellenbach denounced “J. Pierpont Morgan and John J. Raskob and
Pierre DuPont and all the rest of these rascals and crooks who control the
American Liberty League.” Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr., pointed out that
the League’s biggest contributors were the DuPonts, A. P. Sloan, the Pews, E. T.
Weir, Sewell Avery, and John J. Raskob, and declared, “It is not an organization
that can be expected to defend the liberty of the masses of the American people.
It speaks for the vested interests.”
The attacks on the League,
plus Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 over its desperate and expensive opposition,
destroyed the organization as an effective force of reaction in America.
It was disbanded soon
afterward with a brief announcement to the press that the purposes for which the
League had been formed had been served, and that it was therefore no longer
necessary. But affiliates financed by the League, like the Sentinels of the
Republic, the Crusaders, and other pro-Fascist and far-right organizations,
continued their agitation.
Butler continued to stump the
country through 1936 warning against involvement in the coming war he foresaw.
He was gratified on February 29th when Congress passed the Second
Neutrality Act, amending the original act to prohibit either loans or credits to
belligerent nations.
He was disturbed, however,
when the Spanish civil war broke out in July. The Neutrality Act imposed a
boycott of aid to the Loyalist Government, while it was apparent that Mussolini
and Hitler were supplying both money and military assistance to Franco. But by
this time Butler was so passionately opposed to the loss of another American
soldier on foreign soil, he felt only strict neutrality could prevent it.
He shocked a meeting of the
American League Against War and Fascism, which was trying to raise funds for the
Loyalists, by asking them, “What the hell is it our business what’s going on in
Spain? Use common sense or you’ll have our boys getting their guts blown out
over there. Americans en masse never did a wrong thing. Mind your own
business. Have faith in your own country.” He considered the argument that
Hitler and Mussolini had to be “stopped now before it’s too late” the kind of
sophistry that had plunged America into World War I with frightening warnings
about the Kaiser.
In September he endorsed the
candidacy of Representative Vito Marcantonio, of the left-wing American Labor
party, for his antiwar, anti-Fascist stand. Butler’s detractors assailed this
endorsement as “proof’ that he was some kind of Red, ignoring the fact that two
weeks earlier Roosevelt had accepted the invitation of the A.L.P. to become its
candidate, as well as the candidate of the Democratic party. The growing
isolationist movement in America now resulted in more prominence being given to
Butler’s antiwar speeches in the press. On September 17th when he
delivered a slashing attack on war makers before the V.F.W. in Denver, it was
carried in part on the wires of the Associated Press:
WAR IS CALLED 'HELL’
AND 'BUSINESS RACKET’
Gen. Butler and Senator
Bone
Warn Veterans of
Foreign Wars of the Future
Men who fought America’s
foreign wars cheered violently today as a major general and a Senator called
warfare “a business racket.” Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, used blunt
language as he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “war is hell.”…. “But what
in the hell are we going to do about it? I’ve got something for you to do about
it. I’m going to tell you in simple language so all of you can understand. Let
the world know that hereafter no American soldier is going to leave the shores
of this country!.... Soldiers never leave the country except to protect the
moneyed interests.”
One enthusiastic veteran who
applauded him afterward wrote to President Roosevelt urging Butler’s appointment
as Secretary of War to replace retiring George H. Dern:
This man is the most popular
Military figure with the Vets as a class. Pershing hasn’t one tenth of one
percent his color and personality. He’s a Quaker, and a helluva good one, i.e.,
not the Hoover type.... If you asked him to fill Dern’s place, the army and the
Republicans would holler, but the common people would understand, and so would
the rank-and-file of the veterans. Of course, the slap at Liberty Leaguer DuPont
would cost their family’s votes. P.S. You won’t get many anyhow!
The DuPonts supplied more grist for
Butler’s antiwar mill in September, when the Senate Munitions Investigating
Committee revealed that the munitions industry, led by the DuPonts, had
sabotaged a League of Nations disarmament conference held at Geneva.
“After the whole conference
was over and the munitions people of the world had made the treaty a
satisfactory one to themselves,” reported Chairman Gerald Nye, “we find that
Colonel Simons [of the DuPonts] is reporting that even the State Department
realized, in effect, who controlled the Nation:
On October 19th
Butler used his popularity with the dry forces, who remembered him
affectionately from the Volstead Act days in Philadelphia, to appeal to the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union to join the peace movement. Six days later
the mood of the nation grew more apprehensive, however, as Hitler and Mussolini
signed the Rome-Berlin Axis pact and the following month were joined by Japan,
which signed an Anti-Comintern
Pact with Germany.
Roosevelt’s landslide
reelection strengthened his hand against the isolationists, and there were signs
that the White House intended to take a tougher stand against the Axis powers.
Butler grew increasingly worried that the President might be starting the nation
down the road to war.
Speaking at an Armistice Day
dinner for veterans, Butler announced firmly that he, with a record of
thirty-three years of military service, would never again shoulder arms except
in defense of America’s own shores.
Attacking congressional
attempts to put loopholes in the Neutrality Act, Butler warned in a subsequent
speech that once the United States was lured into shipping supplies to a
belligerent.
Americans would soon hear the
old cry – “the American flag insulted, American property destroyed . . . same
old thing over again, just as it was in the World War.” America, he said, best
served itself and the world by staying at peace:
Help them to bind up the
wounds when the distressed world has fought itself to exhaustion and has
overthrown its false and selfish leaders. I am firmly convinced that every
government which hurls its loyal but dumb masses into this coming war will be
overthrown, win or lose. I am also firmly convinced that another universal war
will make man into a savage, ready to take by force what he wants, law or no
law.
His tone grew acrid and
resentful when Roosevelt won congressional consent to amending the Neutrality
Act in May, 1937, authorizing the sale to belligerents of some commodities on a
cash-and-carry basis. Since a national poll showed that 73 percent of Americans
favored some kind of popular referendum before the United States could declare
war, Butler felt that the President was ignoring the will of the people and
seeking to tie their fate to that of England and France.
On July 12th he
warned a thousand veterans at Paterson, New Jersey, that unless the nation’s
veterans banded together to demand peace, America would be at war again in a
short time. He urged them to demand that U.S. armed forces be kept within their
own borders and that the use of the American flag be restricted to
government-owned ships.
Speaking to a Writers’ Union
meeting in Philadelphia, he described how the United States might be dragged
into the next European war. A European ship would stop a U.S. ship carrying
munitions to a potential enemy. The American captain would radio William
Randolph Hearst that the flag had been insulted. Orators would begin demanding
that Americans avenge the insult. Ministers would discover that they were
“transmitters from God” and encourage a holy crusade. Arms manufacturers would
bring pressure to bear on Washington. And we would go to war.
A July speech he made to the
Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville was
broadcast:
Wars do not occur. They are
made by men.... There will never be a Congressional investigation into the steps
taken or the methods adopted which saves us from a war.... Lying propaganda is
almost certainly necessary to bring nations to the pitch where men kill and
women give their men and boys to be killed.... The object of war is to get
something for nothing.... When we have announced what we intend to defend, let
us put our national flag over it and forbid the flying of our flag over anything
else; then we will avoid insults to our flag, the most popular cause for our
wars.... We Americans who love and protect our flag should certainly have a
voice in where it is flown.
With Japanese troops sweeping
through China and seizing the coastal cities, Butler addressed the V.F.W.
convention in September urging that all American forces be withdrawn from China.
Three months later Japanese airmen sank the U.S. gunboat Panay in Chinese
waters. A poll showed that 53 percent of Americans agreed with Butler’s demand
for withdrawal of all United States forces. But instead Washington demanded
indemnity from Tokyo.
Butler was convinced that a
continued American presence in Asia could only lead to eventual war with an
aggressive Japan bent on becoming the dominant power in the Orient. He saw
confirmation of his belief that war was a business racket when Washington
continued to permit American corporations to sell scrap iron and oil to Tokyo
for its war machine. He also knew that there were over two billion dollars in
American investments in Germany, which was being goaded by British diplomacy
into attacking the Soviet Union.
If these facts seemed to him
more immediately menacing than the steadily escalating aggression of the Axis
powers, he was not alone among liberal and left-wing Americans in this myopia.
In January, 1938, John
Chamberlain, Alfred M. Bingham, Dwight MacDonald, Bertrand Wolfe, and Sidney
Hook were among those who opposed any strong action against Japan, or any of the
other Axis powers, arguing, “We believe that the first result of another War to
Make the World Safe for Democracy will be the establishment of virtual fascism
in this country.”
By now the country was almost
evenly divided between isolationists and those who advocated anti-Fascist
alliances. In late January Roosevelt asked Congress for appropriations to build
up the Army and Navy for “national defense.”
Interviewed on February 28,
1938, on a national radio program, Butler had strong doubts about F.D.R.’s
plans:
Now is the time to keep our
heads better than we ever kept them before.... We ought to agree on a definition
of the word “national.” If it means defense by our Army and Navy of every dollar
and American person anywhere they may happen to be on the surface of the earth,
then, just as sure as I’m standing here, we’ll be fighting a foreign war.
He was asked how long he
estimated it would take to train a man to fight. “Well,” he replied, “if you
want to send him three thousand miles away to fight, at least six months’
training will be needed. If he was defending his home, it would take about an
hour.”
On April 9th Butler
was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs on a
billion-dollar naval construction bill. Urging defeat of the bill, he called it
unnecessary for the real defense of the United States. In the event of war, he
told the committee, he favored abandoning Alaska, the Panama Canal, the Virgin
Islands, and Puerto Rico. The Canal, he asserted, could be destroyed by “a
handful of bombs.” He also insisted that all mercantile ships operated for
profit should fly commercial flags, not the American flag.
He explained that since his
retirement he had visited twelve hundred cities and towns and “talked to all
‘kinds of people in all parts of the country.” He said, “I have a feeling that
this bill does not represent a consensus of opinion among naval officers. I have
a feeling that it is a grand bluff. Furthermore, I believe that the American
people will turn against this bill before any of the keels provided are laid. I
cannot prove it, but I believe it is proposed for the purpose of doing somebody
else’s business.”
He had used up fifteen years
of his life, he growled, “going about the world guarding Standard Oil tins” and
had participated in twelve expeditions outside the United States which he
considered missions largely in the interest of Wall Street. “The whole thing is
a racket,” he added, “and the American people are going to catch up with it.”
The committee chairman asked if he considered the existing Navy adequate to
defend the continental United States. He did, he replied, and hoped that
Congress would fix a defense line beyond which the Navy would not be allowed to
operate.
“Suppose Japan tried to invade
the United States?” Her forces would be so weak by the time they reached the
Pacific Coast, Butler replied, that “we could knock her over with a feather.” He
recommended a force of twenty-thousand-ton battleships that would hug the coasts
and, with the aid of submarines, aircraft, and coastal defenses, would be able
to stand off any hostile forces that came within striking distance.
“I am a friend of the Navy,”
he declared, “and I have an anchor tattooed on my chest, but if we go to
building up the Navy as proposed in the bill, and loading down the people with
the cost of it, the people will turn on the Navy as they did in the eighties,
and not a ship will be able to leave port, for there just won’t be a dollar
appropriated for the Navy.”
He was joined in opposing the
Navy construction bill by eighteen peace organizations, including the American
Friends Service Committee, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America,
the National Council of Jewish Women, the Conference on World Peace of the
Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Council for the Prevention of War, the
Church Peace Union, and the National Student Federation. But Congress turned a
deaf ear, and in May it passed the Naval Construction Act, authorizing a
billion-dollar expansion program.
Butler’s raging hatred of war
led him into the same errors of judgment that ensnared the isolationists of
America. Like them, he approved of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts
to buy “peace in our time” at Munich. Confident that the Nazis could not get
through the French Maginot line, he also believed that every Frenchman would
fight fiercely to protect his own plot of land against any invasion.
The Stalin-Hitler
nonaggression pact of August 23, 1939, followed by the invasion of Poland, made
it clear that the world was tottering on the verge of another great war. On
August 31st Butler joined Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in appeals
to keep America out of it, at a V.F.W. convention in Boston.
“There are only two things for
which Americans should be permitted to fight,” Butler shouted over the whistles
and cheers of veterans. “Defense of home and the Bill of Rights.
Not a single drop of American
blood should ever again be spilled on foreign soil. Let’s build up a national
defense so tight that even a rat couldn’t crawl through!”
Three days later Great Britain
and France declared war on Germany. On the same day the British passenger liner
Athenia was torpedoed and sunk without warning off the Hebrides, drowning thirty
American passengers. That night, in a fireside radio chat to the American
people, Roosevelt declared, “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I
cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well.”
In November Congress passed a
new neutrality act that legalized the sale of munitions to belligerent nations
on a cash-and-carry basis. The news filled Butler with dismay.
“This country,” he protested,
“did not have one solitary blessed thing to do with the making of this mess over
there, and there is no possible sane and logical reason why we should feel any
impulse to take a hand in it.”
A spiteful rumor that Butler
had become a spokesman for Father Coughlin’s Christian Front led some Jewish
groups to threaten cancellation of speeches he was scheduled to make to them in
November.
“I couldn’t believe there was a word of
truth in this,” wrote Mildred Smith, executive secretary of the Open Forum
Speakers Bureau, “but I dared not say an official 'no’ without direct word from
you on this matter.”
He wired back indignantly,
“Have never spoken for the Christian Front. I am a Quaker and am preaching
tolerance and am not connected nor will I have anything to do with any movement
or organization advocating intolerance or the entrance of this country into any
foreign war.” His hatred for war did not cause any diminution in his hatred
for fascism, but he refused to sanction one to fight the other except in
absolute self-defense. Once he was visited by a female cousin who had married a
German and brimmed over with praise for the Nazis. Butler’s face grew taut as
she babbled on, but he said nothing until it was time to say good-bye.
Unable to contain himself any
longer, he rasped at the door, “Nellie, if Hitler comes over here, thee can be
sure I will be on the beach at Atlantic City to kick the everlasting hell out of
him!”
His taste in books
increasingly reflected both his antiwar and his anti-Fascist convictions. In his
library during his last years were Sawdust Caesar, by George Seldes,
The Road to War, by Walter Millis, and Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton
Trumbo. Europe Under the Terror, by John L. Spivak, was inscribed to him
as “one of the best fighters against Fascism in the country, with the respect
and admiration of J.L.S.”
In 1939 he wrote an antiwar
piece for a book edited by Paul Comly French, Common Sense Neutrality –
Mobilizing for Peace. Sharing the covers with him were such contributors as
Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles A. Beard, Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, Senator William
Borah, Norman Thomas, Sumner Welles, Herbert Hoover, Senator Robert La Follette,
Jr., John L. Lewis, and Elliot Roosevelt.
But as the Nazis swept through
Belgium and the Netherlands on May 10th, 1940, bypassing the Maginot
line and imperiling France, millions of Americans grew alarmed. A Committee to
Defend America by Aiding the Allies was organized by William Allen White to rout
the isolationists.
In a mood of black despair,
Butler delivered his last antiwar speech on May 24th at Temple
University. Hating Hitler and Nazism, he nevertheless could not shake off the
dread specter of one or two million dead American youths strewn over Europe’s
battlefields. He decried fears of a German invasion of the United States as
alarmist, playing into the hands of war profiteers.
From the comfortable vantage
of hindsight, it is easy to fault Smedley Butler as having been woefully
shortsighted in his stubborn view that the best interests of Americans were
served by persisting in a policy of neutrality. But thirty years in uniform,
seeing active service in every war and campaign since the Spanish-American War,
had convinced him that war was nothing but a cruel and bloody swindle of the
people.
His suspicions were not eased
by observing industrialists and bankers entering trade cartels with America’s
potential enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, while U.S. arms manufacturers made
huge profits selling munitions to both sides and pressed Congress to spend new
billions on “defense” to keep up with the “arms race” they themselves had
promoted.
In his disillusionment he saw
little difference between World War I and World War II. Ever since he had been a
starry-eyed Marine recruit of sixteen, American administrations had persistently
cried ‘wolf!’ in order to use him and the youths under him in order to protect
and augment foreign investments wrapped in the flag. It was now impossible for
him to believe that the shouts of ‘wolf!’ he heard once more any more genuine
than all those he had heard at regular intervals since 1898.
Worn out by his strenuous
speaking tours, discouraged as he saw the United States slipping step by step
into another bloodbath, he fell ill with exhaustion. His doctor ordered him to
enter the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia for a rest and examination.
“As soon as I get out,” he
promised Ethel Bitter, “I am going to take thee to Europe for the vacation I’ve
never managed to find time for. Thee deserves it for thy patience!”
During his four weeks in the
hospital, however, he lost weight rapidly and guessed that his ailment was more
serious than the doctors were letting him know.
On June 10th Italy
declared war on Britain and France. Roosevelt promptly called for “full speed
ahead” in the promotion of national defense and for the extension of material
aid to “opponents of’ force.” The next day Congress voted another $3.2 billion
in military appropriations.
On June 14th
Butler’s gloom plunged to new depths when Germany invaded France unopposed. Four
days later Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, asked Congress
for a two-ocean navy in a $4-billion expansion program.
During a visit by his son
Smedley, Jr., Butler reflected glumly on the futility of his long fight to keep
his country from getting involved in another war. “I think,” he said ruefully,
“that I should have stayed with my own kind.” He meant Quakers and Marines,
rather than politicians.
On June 21st, 1940, hours
before France was scheduled to surrender officially to Adolf Hitler, Smedley
Darlington Butler died in the hospital of an abdominal ailment suspected to be
cancer.
Although the paths of
President Roosevelt and Smedley Butler had diverged sharply over the questions
of war and peace, the President sent a wire to Ethel Butler: “I grieve to hear
of Smedley’s passing. I shall always remember the old days in Haiti. My heart
goes out to you and the family in this great sorrow.”
Among others who sent
condolences {was} former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, then ambassador
to Mexico, and Major General Thomas Holcomb, commandant of the Marine Corps. A
simple funeral service was held at the Butler home in Newtown Square, followed
by burial in West Chester, with attendance limited to close friends and
immediate members of the family. Ethel Butler knew that elaborate formal
ceremonies would be a violation of the principles of her husband, who had always
detested phony pomp and circumstance.
The general who could have had
all the wealth and power he wanted as dictator of the United States died leaving
an estate that totaled two thousand dollars.
The New York Times now hailed
him as “one of the most glamorous and gallant men who ever wore the uniform of
the United States Marine Corps.... a brave man and an able leader of troops....
He laughed at danger, and he set an example to his men that helped them to carry
out the traditions of the Marine Corps.” Calling him also “often a storm
center,” the Times added, “It was when he ventured into public affairs that his
impetuosity led him into trouble.”
In an editorial obituary on
June 23rd the New York Herald Tribune had no cautious reservations:
It is as a great “leatherneck”
that Gen. Smedley D. Butler will be remembered. He was an admirable officer, as
tough in his speech as in the fiber of his body and soul. He came of Quaker
ancestry, but no Quaker more dearly loved to be belligerent.... Because he was
utterly unafraid, brave and unselfish, he earned the characterization of being
the ideal American soldier, and, to use the words of an official citation of the
Navy Department, of being “one of the most brilliant officers in the United
States.”
Thirty years later Tom Dick
Butler told me wistfully, “Dad’s experiences were an important part of our
lives. He was always 'where it was at.’ We miss him tremendously.”
When the war that Smedley
Butler had dreaded and sought to prevent came to his country out of the clouds
over Pearl Harbor, eighteen months after his death, an American destroyer was
named the U.S.S. Butler in his honor. Converted to a high-speed minesweeper, it
saw distinguished service during the war.
That would not have seemed
inappropriate to the fighting hero who hated war as a racket, yet who had once
declared, “I am a peace-loving Quaker, but when war breaks out every damn man in
my family goes.” Both his sons entered the service, Smedley, Jr. in the Marines,
Tom Dick in the Navy.
A hell-for-leather Marine
officer who drove himself as hard as his men, he had won their enthusiastic
admiration and loyalty. He, in turn, had been passionately and stubbornly
devoted to them, in service and out of it. Former Marine Commandant David M.
Shoup, who served under Butler in China, told me that he and all the men in the
command had respected Butler as “one helluva fine soldier.”
During World War II Butler’s
old newspaper friend, E. Z. Dimitman, interviewed Douglas MacArthur in the
Pacific as a war correspondent. Noting a resemblance between MacArthur’s
commander of the 32d Division, General Robert L. Eichelberger, and Old Gimlet
Eye, Dimitman mentioned it to MacArthur and suggested that Eichelberger might
prove another Butler.
“Never in a million years,”
MacArthur replied emphatically. “There’s only one Butler. He was one of the
really great generals in American history.”
Although Butler may have been
the first high-ranking Marine Corps general to challenge establishment policies,
he was not the last. Significantly, as early as January, 1966, another
distinguished Marine general, former Commandant David M. Shoup, went before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee to warn the American people that President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam was a tragic mistake.
It might also be noted that
before the explosion of the Pentagon Papers, two Marine Corps colonels wrote
books denouncing the intervention in Vietnam as genocide against a people caught
up in a civil war, in support of a corrupt Saigon dictatorship.
Perhaps the elite fighting
team of the United States produces high-ranking dissenters like Butler, Shoup,
and the two colonels because many men who choose careers as Marine Corps
officers tend to be strongly motivated by patriotism and idealism. When there is
an American military intervention overseas, it is usually the Marines who
spearhead it, do the fighting, get an accurate picture of the real situation,
and observe who is being politically supported or suppressed, and why.
All too often these officers
have been disillusioned by the use of the Marines to suppress social change in
small countries, on behalf of dictators, an elite military and business class,
and American commercial interests. This realization outrages their idealism.
They resent the expenditure of the lives of Marines under them for sordid
motives in power games of dollar diplomacy and international politics.
Hence the most intelligent and
high-principled Marine staff officers may become the bitterest critics of
American administrations that misuse the Corps. The war records, motivation, and
integrity of such generals as Butler and Shoup make it impossible to dismiss
their testimony expressing dismay at the way United States expeditionary forces
have been deployed in the name of national defense.
Although Butler had considered
himself basically a pacifist who hated war, he had placed duty to his country
above all other considerations and had spent thirty-three years of his life
carrying out orders to defend it. His gradual disillusionment with those orders,
and the men who gave them, had led him to speak out abrasively against the use
of the military on behalf of American vested interests.
No matter whose corns he trod
on, or the cost to his career, he had habitually said and did what he thought
right. His bluntness had made him unpopular with some Presidents, Secretaries of
State and Navy, and the highest-ranking generals and admirals in Washington, who
considered him a military firebrand as irrepressible as Generals Billy Mitchell
and George S. Patton. But it was just this quality in Butler that had given him
the courage and integrity to face public ridicule to expose, in the name of
service to his country, what John L. Spivak called “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,” Spivak wrote.
“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 heard of it.”
In 1964 Speaker of the House
John W. McCormack referred to the plot in his speech before the Democratic
convention in Atlantic City, when he warned against right-wing extremists in the
Barry Goldwater camp. But he did not give any details, and only a knowledgeable
handful of Americans understood the full implications of what he was talking
about.
The conspiracy unquestionably
inspired the novel Seven Days in May, made into a successful film, which
portrayed a Fascist plot by high-placed American conspirators to capture the
White House and establish a military dictatorship under the pretext of saving
the nation from Communism. Few of the millions of Americans who read the novel
or saw the film suspected that it had a solid basis in fact.
It would seem time that school
textbooks in America were revised to acknowledge our debt to the almost
forgotten hero who thwarted the conspiracy to end democratic government in
America.
If we remember Major General
Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of
gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States-and
for making damned sure no one else did either.
 
FOOTNOTES
He included his son-in-law, John Wehle.
Temerity (noun) – boldness; reckless confidence that might be offensive.
The hearings were probably held in New York rather than in Washington
because the committee at the same time was investigating Communist
infiltration in the fur unions of that city.
Comintern (noun) - an
international organization of Communist parties set up by Lenin in 1919
and abolished in 1943.
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