[CTRL] [11] The Plot to Seize the White House

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from:
The Plot to Seize the White House
Jules Archer(C)1973
Hawthorne Books, Inc.
New York, NY
-----
6

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 9 he urged his listeners to deluge Roosevelt with a million wires and
letters supporting the bill.

But the President vetoed it. On May 21 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'
superorganization," 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 chiselling
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 12 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 31 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
munitionsmakers, 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 15, 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 bad 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 sandspits. There are
other lobbyists in Washington. Why not deport them, too?"

On October 5, 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'* [He included his
son-in-law, John Wehle.]  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 politics. 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 axe 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 rightwing 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 veterans 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, be 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.


7

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 Al 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 23 Senator Schwellenbach denounced "J. Pierpont Morgan and John J.
Raskob and Pierre du Pont 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 Du Ponts, 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 29 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 17 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 wont get many anyhow!

The Du Ponts supplied more grist for Butler's antiwar mill in September, when
the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee revealed that the munitions
industry, led by the Du Ponts, 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 Du Ponts] is reporting that even the
State Department realized, in effect, who controlled the Nation."

On October 19 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 12 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 beads 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 9 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 31 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."

10

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
be 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 10 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 24
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 were 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 Butler, "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 10 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 14 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 21, 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.

11

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 were 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 23 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
highspeed 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.
Eicbelberger, 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."

12

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 higbest-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 bad 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 Statesand for making damned sure no one else did
either.

pp.221-244

--fini—

Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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