-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Plot to Seize the White House Jules Archer(C)1973 Hawthorne Books, Inc. New York, NY ----- 11 With America once more at peace and Congress slashing military funds drastically, the future of the Marine Corps looked bleak. Butler was indignant when Marine Corps headquarters failed to protest its reduction to a mere appendage of the Navy. In disgust he announced his decision to retire and wrote his father urging that John Lejeune be appointed the new commandant in 1920 to save the Corps. Thomas Butler saw eye to eye with his son on the need to preserve the Marine Corps's independence and agreed that Lejeune, who had distinguished himself in the Battle of MeuseArgonne, was the man to fight for it in Congress. So on January 30, 1920, Lejeune became the new commandant. He, in turn, coaxed Butler into staying on in command of Quantico to help in the struggle to save the Corps. To dramatize the Corps's need of funds for modernization, Butler held summer maneuvers that restaged the Battle of the Wilderness between Grant and Lee. On the first day it was "fought" as it had happened; next day it was restaged with a significant difference-the use of modem equipment. The presence of President Warren G. Harding, a Civil War buff, helped win widespread news coverage. Butler's shrewd tactic was highly effective in getting a reluctant Congress to vote adequate funds for the Corps. It was a forty-mile march from Quantico to the battleground. As usual wearing no insignia to identify him, Butler marched at the head of the column walking his horse, carrying full gear on his back in the hot July sun. When one soldier faltered, Butler told him gently, "Son, I'm more than twenty years older than you, but we're going to do this together." He said later, "I wanted to show them that they could force themselves to do things that would be necessary in war." And they all did. His troops never learned that following one such battlefield exercise the forty-year-old commander experienced a minor heart attack, for which a doctor prescribed rest and digitalis. The word that spread through Quantico was that it was useless to try to fall out of a hike, because the Old Man would just pick up your pack, add it to his own, and hike right alongside you with it. The humdrum garrison life of peacetime, with no alarums and excursions to divert him, took its toll of Butler's temper. "I was itching for a scrap- action-something with a snap to it," he admitted later. But he was never irascible in any matter that pertained to ailing Marines who bad served under him. In August, 1920, a private wrote him, "I have been a patient in St. Elizabeth's hospital for the Insane since Sept. 20, 1918. 1 am writing to ask if you will arrange to have me transferred to one of the institutions in Philadelphia, so that I can be close to the folks at home." "I will look into the matter and let you know," Butler replied gently. "You can be assured that everything will be done for your comfort, for you are one of the prize soldiers of the Marine Corps, and we all like you very much." He grew increasingly incensed at what he considered the ingratitude of the nation toward its veterans. Once the war crisis was over and Americans felt safe, he reflected, the shattered heroes of yesterday were ignored as the "bums" of today. He was particularly embittered by the indifference of big business toward the men in uniform who had so often been called upon to spill blood for corporate profits. The profiteering of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the price they charged for transporting troops led him to write his father angrily, I am at a loss to understand why the Pennsylvania people are so antagonistic to men in uniform. The railroad can haul civilians from Washington to Philadelphia and back every Sunday for $3.78 and want $14.00 to haul soldiers. . . . These Pennsylvania people are a lot of damned hogs and I hope that something will happen to them." Butler raised Marine Corps morale by developing a great football team that became the talk of the sports world, and began building a sports stadium with volunteer Marine labor and with cement contributed by cement companies. Proliferating veterans' groups vied with each other for the distinction of adding his name to their letterheads. He tactfully declined invitations to join, offering his view that all such groups 11 must be nonpolitical, and should never be heard on the floors of Congress." In June, 1923, he sent regrets to the Marine Corps Veterans Association explaining, I have very decided views on associations, and I am not a member of any but the American Legion, and most inactive, at that-only joining it because General Lejeune requested me to do so." He considered the Legion too political and undemocratic, with leaders who used it as a mouthpiece for big-business interests. Late in 1923 Butler's career took an unorthodox twist. W. Freeland Kendrick, the new mayor of Philadelphia, urged him to take a leave from the Marines to become the city's Director of Public Safety. The job was that of a "supercop," in charge of the police and firemen, with the task of smashing the links between crime and politics in Philadelphia. Under Prohibition the city had become one of the most corrupt municipalities in the country. Over eight thousand places sold bootleg liquor without fear of prosecution; gangsters ran wide-open gambling joints and brothels; robberies, holdups, and other crimes were soaring. All attempts to clean up the City of Brotherly Love had failed because of a profitable alliance among gangsters, speakeasy operators, and crooked ward bosses, who bribed and controlled the police. Kendrick, a conservative Republican politician, had been elected mayor on a law-and-order campaign and was now under heavy pressure to keep his pledge. He was advised to bring in an outsider, preferably a military man, who could not be bought, bluffed, or bullied, to head the police. Brigadier General Smedley Butler, now a vigorous forty-two and a colorful war hero with an impressive list of credits fin Who's Who in the Services, seemed a perfect choice to please the voters. He had even had police experience organizing the Haiti Gendarmerie. But Butler declined the job. On November 21, he wrote Kendrick, "While this position would appeal to me very greatly if I believed there were the slightest chance of success, I am convinced that the present political conditions existing would ... throw away the work of a lifetime in a perfectly hopeless undertaking." He was relieved when the Navy ordered him to report for orders to the Scouting Fleet. Hut Kendrick and the Republican party of Pennsylvania now needed him desperately to still a storm of public criticism. So Kendrick, Congressman Bill Vare, and Pennsylvania's two senators went to the White House to plead with President Calvin Coolidge that Butler be given a year's leave of absence to clean& up Philadelphia. Only a man with Butler's reputation for total honesty, and the ability to discipline men while capturing their imagination and winning their loyalty, they told Coolidge, could reorganize the Philadelphia police force. The President finally agreed and sent word to Butler that the White House would like him to tackle the job in the interests of good government. His father warned him against it as a political quicksand, but Butler did not see how he could refuse a mandate from both the people of Philadelphia and the President. His reluctant consent brought wondering letters from old comrades all over the world, many of whom imagined that he had resigned from the Corps. Butler assured them that it was only temporary. "This job is a terrible one and I will probably be cut to pieces," he wrote to Lieutenant Colonel H. L. Roosevelt in Paris. "On January 7, I will be sworn in as a Philadelphia cop, for better or worse." 12 Butler told a reporter for the Philadelphia North American, "Kendrick has his neck in a noose with me. If I fall or I am run out, he is going to go down also. If he reverses me just once I'll quit, and the resignation will be in the form of a telephone call telling him I am on my way back to Quantico, and that the keys to my office are on my desk. I do not care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right or wrong. From January 7 they are going to be enforced." He was not opposed to drinking in principle, he added. What was at stake was enforcement of the law, pure and simple, not the ethics of Prohibition. Even before he took office, "Boss" Vare sent an emissary to him, judge Edwin O. Lewis, to offer Vare's "suggestions" for key appointments in reorganizing the police department. None too politely, Butler made it clear what Lewis and Vare could do with their suggestions. He rented a home in nearby Overbrook, but his wife and children seldom saw him there because he spent seven days a week on the job, working until after midnight. Sworn in on January 7, 1924, he took the oath of office in his Marine uniform, but half an hour later changed it for one of his own design. Blue with gold trim, it had a cape taken from the Marine mess jacket with a flaring red lining. It was dramatic and impressive, and meant to be. He promptly summoned all police inspectors to his office. "I want the lieutenants in your forty-two districts to clean up in forty-eight hours," he snapped, "or face immediate demotion. That is all." Then he visited each one of the districts until he had spoken to every man on the force. The new motto, he announced, was short and sweet: "Clean up or get out!" In his first week on the job he raided and shut down 973 liquor and gambling joints, without even warning Mayor Kendrick. Philadelphians were electrified. The police winked at each other, convinced that Butler was a smart "grandstander" who would make a big splash for the headlines, then quiet down and take it easy. Vare would see to that. Going night after night with only a few hours' sleep, he pressed his raids and inspections relentlessly. He demanded from his men a dedication to duty equal to his own, but many of them, cut off from former sources of graft, were hostile and resistant to the new broom sweeping too clean. "Sherman was right about war," Butler sighed wearily, "but he should have tried leading the Philadelphia police!" Nevertheless he began to show results. Worried Philadelphia bootleggers began unloading their stocks at cut prices. Many crooks and gamblers began streaming out of the city in search of more hospitable territory. Encouraging excessive zeal among his forces, Butler took responsibility for police who went too far on raids by using axes freely to destroy furniture and fixtures, searching private homes and vehicles on suspicion, and closing premises that had a right to stay open to sell nonintoxicating beverages. Magistrates began refusing to issue search warrants to permit police to enter known speakeasies masquerading as private residences. Many cases were dismissed on grounds of insufficient or illegal evidence. Butler realized that he would have to modify his tactics, and astonished Philadelphians by frankly confessing his mistakes to both the press and the police. "Guard against anything that will embarrass Mayor Kendrick's administration," he now ordered police. "Keep away from the hippodrome stuff. 1 must admit that 1 have sinned in this latter respect more than any of you, and the only excuse I have to offer is that 1 was unduly excited and enthusiastic." Such candor won the affection and respect of reporters, who found Butler colorful copy and loved to join him for midnight suppers on Chestnut Street. There was never any question he would not answer for them directly and honestly. But if they were for him, their publishers-with the exception of the Philadelphia Record-were not; their editorial pages sought to ridicule and discredit him relentlessly. "They insisted on treating me like a queer animal from the circus," Butler related. "My chance remarks were twisted and distorted to paint me in the worst light. . . . About fifty of the minor officials and correspondents of the newspapers became my loyal friends, but they had no influence in shaping the editorial point of view." By March angry Republican ward leaders were furious at Butler for disrupting their network of police control. They vigorously applauded City Treasurer Thomas J. Watson at a meeting when he shouted, "This country, as well as the Republican organization, would be a hell of a sight better off without Butler!" The Philadelphia City Council closed ranks against him. "My foolish notion that the laws of our country applied to rich and poor alike accounted for the growing feeling of antipathy toward me," he recalled later, adding, "By the end of 1924 1 had been cussed, discussed, boycotted, lied about, lied to, strung up, and reviled. Several times 1 was on the point of resigning. The only reason why I continued in my unpopular and uncomfortable position was to see what the hell was going to happen next!" Try as he might, he was unable to break the power of the ward bosses. In April he was forced to admit that he had been double-crossed by about half of his police lieutenants, who had bowed to ward-boss pressure to permit shuttered saloons, gambling houses, and speakeasies to reopen. Studying the structure, he found that every ward had one police station. The ward leader named the captain of the station, and the police thus belonged to the ward leader. In an attempt to destroy the power of the ward bosses, Butler now cut the stations down from forty-six to thirty-three. Infuriated politicians, racketeers, and realtors, who hated him for having cost them the rents of fifteen hundred closed brothels as well as the income from other illegally operated properties, joined forces to demand that Kendrick fire him. But nearly five thousand church congregations adopted resolutions in July demanding that the mayor give full support to the general. Added to this pressure were thousands of letters from women's clubs, civic groups, business organizations, and individuals. Kendrick, alarmed at being caught between the voters and the brokers of power, wavered back and forth. A report that he was preparing to knuckle under to the political bosses brought another roar of protest from the citizenry. A mass meeting of four thousand Philadelphians resolved that Butler must be kept in office: "Since General Butler has been in command here, more has been accomplished for the suppression of vice and crime than in any period of like duration in this city!" They flooded Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur with letters urging that Butler's leave of absence from the Marines be extended for another three years. President Calvin Coolidge reluctantly agreed to extend the general's leave for one more year, but he pointed out to the citizens of Philadelphia that the Federal Government could not continue indefinitely to be responsible for solutions to local problems: "The practice of detailing officers of the United States military forces to serve in civil capacities in the different states on leaves of absence is of doubtful propriety and should be employed only in cases of emergency. . . . Local self-government cannot be furnished from the outside." Reappointed, by the end of the year Butler had raided almost 4,000 speakeasies, shutting down 2,566, and had seized over a thousand stills, arresting 10,000 violators of the Volstead Act. But to his dismay, political pressure in the court system resulted in only 2,000 indictments by the grand jury, with only 300 convictions. Police magistrates, who were handpicked by the politicians, imposed only token fines on all but 4 percent of arrested speakeasy operators. Struggling to get honest law enforcement, Butler complained to the press, was like submitting to Chinese water torture: "Drops of water have been dripping on my head since I have been here. . . . Either I am unpopular, or the enforcement of the liquor laws is unpopular in this city. . . . When the people of Philadelphia or any other city stop playing the game of 'Enforce the law against others but not against me,' they will begin to win the fight against lawlessness." He was bitter when he learned of a secret deal between the brewers of Philadelphia and the Republican State Campaign Committee. A royalty of two dollars for each barrel of illegal beer distributed was to be paid into the Republican campaign fund, provided the politicians put the White House under heavy pressure to recall Butler to duty with the Marines. Toward the end of 1925, whether this deal was responsible or not, Coolidge refused to extend Butler's leave. The general was ordered to report after the first of the year to command the Marine post at San Diego. With his recall assured, Mayor Kendrick now shrewdly sought to make points with pro-Butler voters by declaring that he wished it were possible to keep the general as Director of Public Safety for the remainder of his own administration. A "Keep Butler" movement sprang up all over Philadelphia. Forced to go along with it, Kendrick told one mass meeting, "To announce that General Butler is to leave his post here would be tantamount to inviting an army of criminals to Philadelphia." But the mayor lost no time in grooming his successor. Meanwhile Butler had become increasingly irked by the fact that the pressure of powerful hotels and the Hotel Association had kept their ballroom social affairs, at which liquor was served to young teen-age girls from socially prominent Philadelphia families, from being raided for liquor violations. Ordering a raid on a formal ball at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he seized evidence showing that bootleg liquor was being served. Confronting Kendrick, he demanded that the mayor institute padlock proceedings against the Ritz- Carlton. "And I mean the whole hotel," he insisted. "Something must be done to teach these big fellows that they must obey the law as well as the little fellows!" A howl of outrage was heard in the ranks of the Republican party's wealthiest adherents. Politicians were threatened with a wholesale withdrawal of campaign contributions unless Butler was now unceremoniously dumped. Greatly upset, Kendrick urged him to "lay off" the big hotels. To the mayor's horror, Butler firmly announced his intention to organize a special police squad in evening clothes to invade all Philadelphia hotels, and signal for raids whenever they found liquor-law violations. His fighting spirit was now thoroughly aroused. Although he longed to get back to his beloved Marine Corps, it rankled him to leave a mission incomplete. If he left Philadelphia now, he would have enforced the law against small operators who bootlegged liquor to the poor, but not against the big operators who made it available to the rich. His egalitarian nature pressed him to balance the scales. He also felt an obligation to the honest cops who had defied the ward bosses to support his fight against corruption. Once he was gone, he feared, they would be punished for their loyalty to him. He decided that he owed it to them to sacrifice his career in the Marine Corps to stay on and finish the job, especially since Kendrick had made it clear-or so Butler believed-that he needed and wanted him. The morning papers carried the story that Butler was resigning from the Marine Corps to remain as Director of Public Safety. Appalled, the hotel owners of the city joined with local politicians in a demand that Kendrick fire Butler immediately. The mayor was reminded that the Hotel Association's cooperation with City Hall was absolutely essential for the success of a sesquicentennial celebration of American independence being planned for Philadelphia. Worried and upset, Kendrick called Butler to his office and told him, "I don't want any resigned generals around me. You ought to go back to the Service where you belong. The President doesn't want you here." 13 Shocked at the mayor's spineless surrender, Butler stalked out, storming, "Oh, hell, I can't talk to such a weak fish!" Kendrick then fired him by phone. In choice Marine language, Butler told Kendrick exactly what he thought of him. Clearing his desk, the general withdrew a blue-steel Army Colt .45 from it and inserted it in a holster engraved, "To General Smedley D. Butler from W. Freeland Kendrick." "Give him this letter of resignation and the pistol," he told his aide. "He can publish the letter and he can do what he pleases with the gun. I'm going back to the troops!" His letter of resignation declared, "Last week 1 decided that it was in keeping with my promise to the police of Philadelphia that if they stood up with me, 1 would do everything in my power to remain in Philadelphia.... I am being dismissed from public service because I am making the greatest sacrifice any Marine can make, and I should, without any other ties, be of more service to the City of Philadelphia than I was before." He had been fired, he charged, because "the gang that has ruled Philadelphia for many years" had been out to get him, and did. The Philadelphia Record, which had consistently supported Butler during his two years as the city's supercop, declared, "He was honest; that was taken for granted or he would not have been appointed. But he was 100 percent honest. We think we are doing the mayor no injustice in expressing the belief that this was a little more than he had counted on." Reviewing his experience in Philadelphia, Butler declared ironically, "The fact the mayor didn't know me led to my being chosen. The fact I didn't know the mayor led me to accept. I had a funny idea that law was applicable to everybody. I was a fool. I didn't get anywhere, except for getting a lot of money as the highest paid cop in America, $18,ooo. Had the kids educated, lost 35 pounds and my teeth, bought a car and ended up $300 in debt. . . . What Philadelphia really wanted was something to talk about, a real, live general. No other city had one as a cop. ... They wanted to throw up a smoke screen and make people think Philadelphia had thrown off the yoke of crime." Mary Roberts Rinehart, who visited Butler in Philadelphia to study his cleanup, wrote about it in her biography: He did a fine job. He replaced the old roundsman, fat and portly, with young and active men, and then he put into them something of the marine esprit de corps. He put the fear of God into the gamblers and dive keepers. He cut down the enormous graft which they had paid year after year. But they were only waiting. They could afford to wait. When Butler lost the front page they would come back.... I watched Butler and admired him; the same sheer ability, energy and knowledge of men which had succeeded at Brest were evident in all that he did. But it was an unbeatable game, that of the crooks, gamblers, bootleggers and dive keepers. As soon as he was fired, the mayor of Syracuse, New York, sent him a wire urging him to head that city's new Committee of Public Safety. But now Commandant John Lejeune quickly insisted that he withdraw his resignation from the Corps. "I told General Butler that 1 could not with equanimity contemplate his leaving the Marine Corps," his old friend told the press. "I have the highest regard for General Butler with whom I have served for twenty-seven years, and 1 don't want the Marine Corps to lose him." Butler was given a holiday leave with his family to his old home in West Chester for' a "quiet, oldfashioned, jolly Christmas" before reporting to take over the San Diego Naval Operating Base. On the eve of his departure Philadelphia Record reporter Paul Gomly French and other newsmen who admired his honesty and courage gave him an informal midnight dinner. They presented him with a square silver token, explaining, "Ifs the only kind of money he'll accept--square!" "Cleaning up Philadelphia's vice," he told them with a sigh, "is worse than any battle I was ever in." One group of Philadelphia citizens raised funds for a bronze tablet to honor his services to the city. The inscription read: 'We enforced the law impartially. He defended it courageously. He proved incorruptible." He thanked them but protested wearily, "If 1 have to keep earning that epitaph, it will wear me out!" Visiting his father in Washington, he admitted that his health had been impaired by working eighteen hours a day and longer, and he was bitter at having been used. "I was hired as a smoke screen," he charged. "The politicians were buying the reputation I had earned in twenty-six years' service as a Marine. 1 was to make a loud noise, put on a brass hat, stage parades, chase the bandits off the streets-and let vice and rum run their hidden course!" He was outraged by the huge sums he saw being made illegally by everyone involved in violating the Volstead Act, while Marines who served their country were paid a paltry twenty dollars a month. In December, 1926, he wrote his father angrily, "I do not suppose thee or the other men who are responsible for this Government have ever stopped to think what these $20 a mouth men are doing towards the preservation of the dignity of this Government. Now where can this Government get such devoted service for a total cost per capita Of $1,300 a year? Where can we hire men for $20 a month?" His health still suffering, he began to think of retirement. But Lejeune urged him to stay in uniform: "In the years to come the Corps will need your enthusiasm, and 1 had in mind that you would receive the next promotion to the rank of Major General. My retirement according to age is not very far in the future, and there is always the possibility of one of the Major Generals causing a Premature vacancy." Brooding over the whole question of Prohibition and law enforcement, Butler began to suspect that perhaps he had been wrong in trying to enforce an unenforceable law that the majority of the American people did not seem to want and went out of their way to violate. The government was wrong, he finally decided, in trying to legislate morality. In view of his fame as a stern enforcer of Prohibition, prudence suggested that he keep his changed views to himself. He was unpopular enough with the wets; to speak out now against the Volstead Act would only alienate millions of drys who considered him one of their knights in white armor. But popularity had never been as important to Smedley Butler as his compulsion to blurt out the truth in public and to kick sacred cows in the rump when they loitered in the path of justice. On January 7, 1927, in Washington, D.C., he gave the reporters a story that flashed from coast to coast. The Volstead Act, he now declared, was "a fool dry act, impossible of enforcement." It was, furthermore, "class legislation," because the rich could avoid it and the poor could not. The sensational denunciation of Prohibition by one of its leading Republican crusaders plunged the dry forces of the nation into consternation. Democrats, rejoicing, began laying plans to make repeal of the Volstead Act one of the key issues in the presidential campaign of 1928. Butler's presence in Washington was occasioned by the outbreak of a fresh crisis in China. To his delight, Lejeune informed him that he would soon be headed overseas once more at the head of a combat brigade. 14 China was being torn by civil war between Chiang Kai-shek, commander in chief of the new Nationalist armies of the South, and northern warlords led by Chang Tso-lin. Chiang Kai-shek had organized an anti-British boycott and had threatened to clear China of all foreign imperialists. Warlord Chang Tso-lin, supported by the colonial powers, had declared himself dictator of North China. As Chiang Kai-shek's forces fought their way north and battles broke out between his army and Chang Tso-lin's, panic swept foreign residents in the North. American missionaries and businessmen appealed to Washington for protection. The forty-six-year-old decorated hero of the Boxer Campaign who had helped relieve the sieges of Tientsin and Peking was made commander of a new Marine expeditionary force-the 3d Marine Brigade. His orders were "to protect the lives and property of our Nationals in Tientsin; to offer temporary refuge in Tientsin for our Nationals; evacuation from the Interior and to make safe evacuation to the sea." The War Department warned Butler to be extremely prudent in anything be did or said; the smallest error of judgment on his part might have disastrous consequences in the highly volatile situation. Not without good reason, Lejeune added some prudent parting advice: "Be careful to avoid talking to newspaper correspondents." He arrived in Shanghai on March 25, 1927, to find tension running high. Chinese troops had attacked several consulates at Nanking, killing many foreigners, looting and burning the city. American businessmen and missionaries had escaped on gunboats to Shanghai, whose port was now swarming with ships. Never before in history had the war vessels of so many different nations anchored together in one harbor. Barbed-wire entanglements bad been erected, and the International Settlement was under martial law. All legations bad ordered their nationals from the interior of China, from which there were daily reports of murders and outrages. A more violent version of the Boxer Rebellion seemed in the making, and the white settlements were gravely apprehensive. Butler's 3d Marine Brigade disembarked at the Standard Oil dock in the Whangpoo River opposite Shanghai and set up tents in the Standard Oil compound. Shortly afterward Butler was taken aboard the flagship of Admiral C. S. Williams, who greeted him frostily. "What do you think of the situation, and what do you think of our participation?" "We don't have half enough men to perform our task here," Butler replied. "We need more men to do it properly." The admiral snorted. "So you're one of these fellows who wants to build a big job for himself and get promoted." Butler saw red. "I intend to retire in a year," he snapped, "and don't care whether I am promoted or not. You asked for my opinion and I gave it to you. Now if you don't care to take my advice, and some Americans are murdered in this town, and you sit quietly here with half of the Marines available in the United States doing nothing but guarding coal piles, you will be held responsible!" The admiral glared at him, but not without an aspect of respect. He was soon one of Butler's chief admirers. Careful to keep the American forces from getting involved in the fighting between the rival Chinese armies, Butler sought to maintain cordial relations with the Chinese people themselves. He had no stomach for any more Haiti-style interventions that would jockey him into the position of defending American business interests against native rebels, and he did not intend -to risk a single Marine's life to get the job done he had been sent to China to do, unless it became absolutely necessary. Military leaders of other nations sought to organize a punitive expedition against the Kuomintang for the Nanking uprising. To Butler's relief, Admiral Williams refused to have anything to do with the scheme, although it had the enthusiastic endorsement of the American minister at Shanghai. On May 31, Butler wrote Lejeune, "Now for a little 'secret stuff.' The American Minister ... is a nervous wreck. He sits up all night and talks in circles and would have had me in my grave had I stayed much longer. He feels discredited because our Government has not adopted his plan, which meant an invasion of China, followed by intervention and military Government, and is -desirous of going home on leave to explain his side to the President with a hope of favorable action." He later observed, "I held to the principle that the Chinese bad to settle their own form of government and pick out their own rulers. Any attempt to solve the Chinese tangle would have been shadow boxing. All we could do was to see that mutinous Chinese troops didn't get out of hand and shoot Americans. It was up to me to prevent a repetition of the Boxer and Nanking difficulties." When the danger to Shanghai seemed to ease while growing more critical in the North, Butler left two thousand Marines stationed in the city under Colonel Henry Davis, and led four thousand men up to Tientsin. Not too clear about the mission expected of him, he wrote his father asking for clarification. His father replied: I do not think that anyone knows our State policies concerning the situation in China. I do not believe there are any.... I have but one word of caution to give thee; do not hurt a Chinaman unless it is absolutely necessary in order to protect the life of Americans in China or other foreigners associated with them. Do not interfere in the Chinese quarrel.... I have not heard one person worthy of quoting who does not deplore the presence of Americans in China. . . . We are not in China to maintain order. In a single word, use thy open hand to protect our people but don't kill the Chinamen to protect their property.... The Congress will never permit the use of its military to permanently protect it. Following this advice, he persistently reminded his men that they were there to keep the peace, not violate it. Any Marine who laid a hand on a ricksha coolie would be court-martialed, be warned, urging them to win goodwill for the Corps by friendly behavior. He himself cultivated the friendship of the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs and was invited to over twenty Chinese banquets. At one of them he met an American-educated Chinese woman named Mrs. Lu, who reminded him that be had helped evacuate her family by boat from Tientsin twenty-seven years earlier, when she had been three. "I well remember carrying you," be said to her delight. "You considered me a hateful 'foreign devil' and shrieked lustily, struggling every inch of the way." As fighting between the rival armies raged closer to Tientsin, the roar of guns echoed through the city. Butler kept the Marines on the alert as a defense force, as well as a rescue force ready to leave in minutes for any place in North China they were needed. To make sure that none of the warlords, whose allegiances were mercurial, entertained any notion of attacking his brigade, he invited them to review a dress parade. Some warlords were not intimidated and demanded that Butler take his Marines out of China. Explaining firmly that they were not going home until American nationals no longer needed protection, he insisted that they recognize one square mile of the base at Tientsin as a sanctuary where Americans could move about safely without being shot at. The warlords refused until he persuaded them by pointing out shrewdly that it was good insurance for them in their fight against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists: "What if you lose? Why, you can come into that square mile, too!" When they protested against the flights of Marine planes over Chinese territory, Butler gave them pause -for thought by reminding them, "You might want to escape in one some day." He also convinced them it would be imprudent to attack the American forces by taking them up in Marine planes for bombing practice. He later declared that he had fulfilled United States foreign policy requirements by intimidating the most hostile of the Chinese warlords "with considerable ease." He shared the detestation of the Chinese people for the warlords and their troops, expressing his sympathy with the people in a letter to Lejeune: There is a movement out here which is gaining great headway and is being conducted by a society known as the "Red Spears." Their aims and policies are similar to those of the Boxers in 1900 and is causing considerable uneasiness on the part of our people. The "Red Spears" are farmers and their society is said to number twenty million members. They have been so terribly treated by the soldiers, who every fall regularly billet themselves on them, driving out the men and misusing the women. This the farmers have tired of and now murder every soldier they can catch. I am on the side of the "Red Spears" and it may be this will be a good way to end this pathetic slaughtering of innocent people by a lot of brutal war- lords. The troops of other nations in the International Settlement marched around their perimeter defenses to intimidate the warlords and discourage any thought of attack. After flexing his muscles to impress them similarly at first, Butler then discreetly sought to "keep in the background as much as possible, and not in any way behave like an army of occupation-more like a fire company, ready to spring out to the rescue of our people, behaving simply as rescue squads." 15 On November 5, 1927, his wife, having left the children in San Diego, arrived in Tientsin and joined him in a small hotel next to a godown where the Marines had been quartered during the Boxer fighting and where he had been carried when he was wounded in the leg. China's civil war had quieted down for the moment. In a report from Shanghai Colonel Henry Davis wrote Butler: I had dinner last night with General Chiang Kai-shek. How in the name of God he ever exercised the control over. these people to the extent he did last summer is a mystery to me. Usually a man of strong character will demonstrate it in some way without ever speaking a word. This bird has nothing of that kind so far as I could see, and looked and acted like a love sick boob, his fiance, Miss May Soong [later Madame Chiang Kai-shek], also being present at the dinner.... Of all the stupid boobs I ever met he is it. I don't believe he ever was the brains behind the movement of last summer.... He looks like a stupid ricksha coolie and grunts like a pig when spoken to. By the end of December Butler found himself in a financial bind and complained to his father of the struggle to get along on a brigadier general's pay Of $530 a month, out of which he had to pay income tax and "maintain an establishment for Snooks [daughter Ethel] and Tom Dick in the United States, and send Tommy [Smedley, Jr.] thru college, to say nothing of supporting Bunny [wife Ethel] and myself here in China." He added, "I must entertain many, due to my official position, and I must pay for the little entertainment out of my own pocket." His father consoled him with the reflection that although he might be better off financially if he were home with no challenge to his abilities, "thee would rot and the world would have been no better because thee happened to live in it." Lejeune wrote him that at special ceremonies on December 7, with the Secretary of the Navy present, Lejeune had accepted the bronze tablet honoring Butler, presented by a committee of Philadelphia's grateful citizens, and it had been put up in the Navy Building in Washington. He also revealed that Thomas Butler was leading the fight in the House for a larger naval defense force, but the public was in a budget-cutting mood. Butler wrote his father: Thy courage in advocating something which will cost money fills me with pride. Our people are all gluttons and their desire to hoard money is so great that they will probably turn on thee and beat thee to death. It would probably be a good thing for our nation if we were to get a good trimming sometime, and perhaps they would learn that there is more in this world than unnecessarily fat bank accounts. The amount of money wasted by five rich men in America in one year would be sufficient to build and maintain a navy capable of preserving our position as a world power. The day before Christmas, 1927, the Standard Oil plant on the outskirts of Tientsin caught fire during a battle between the rival Chinese armies. Nine minutes after the alarm, Butler was leading a battalion of Marines to battle the blaze, utilizing firefighting experience he had gained as Director of Public Safety in Philadelphia. He arrived on the scene to find two huge warehouses blazing, with a warehouse filled with gasoline twenty feet away and six 3-million-gallon oil tanks close by. If they exploded, the death and devastation in Tientsin would be horrendous. Putting in a call for another thousand Marines, he fought furiously to contain the fire. They built a sixteen-foot wall of earth, empty drums, doors, and anything else that wouldn't bum between the blazing warehouses and the stores of gas, and bad the fire under control by nightfall. But at 3:00 A.M. the main drain of the plant blew up, showering the river with a stream of burning oil. They worked through Christmas Day building a bulkhead around the mouth of the drain, only to have ice floes carry off part of it. The river flamed again, threatening the foreign compound on the opposite shore. They fought the conflagration for four days before Butler succeeded in bringing it under control. On New Year's Eve he wrote his father, "It was a glorious fight and has done a great deal to weld this command together. ... Everybody in Tientsin and Peking is highly pleased with the magnificent showing of our men." Standard Oil estimated their loss at a million dollars but thanked Butler for having saved them four million more. At the height of the blaze the admiring official in charge of the company's Tientsin holdings had vowed to donate twenty thousand dollars toward a recreation hall for the Marines. Once the fire had been brought under control, however, Butler heard no more of the promise. He was disgusted with the company but on principle did not remind them. When he told Smedley, Jr., about it, his outraged son swore never to use a tank of Esso gas in his car for the rest of his life, and kept his word. Butler began having dark thoughts once more about the use of Marines to defend big-business profits overseas. Was the government's professed concern for the protection of Americans in China during the civil war the real reason for the -presence of the Marines? Or was it to defend the properties of Standard Oil and other big American corporations? Serving under him in China was David M. Shoup, later to win a Congressional Medal of Honor at Tarawa and become a commandant of the Marine Corps as well as a celebrated critic of the Vietnam war. "Butler was one helluva. soldier-no doubt about his military capabilities," Shoup recalled later in admiration. "I really felt I wanted to emulate him in every way. Everything I saw in Tientsin indicated that he was a helluva showman, too, but a good warrior in the service of his country." The author questioned General Shoup about the Marines' mission in China in 1927-1928. "I would say it was pretty hard to say who we were supporting there," he replied. "It was just our presence there that was the thing. I heard no solid reason for why we were being sent; we were just told we were going to fight the Chinese. We didn't know what the mission was. But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil's investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did. It was only some years later that I learned that General Butler had been thinking the same way. I thought I had been alone in suspecting it." 16 All through 1928 Butler nevertheless carried out his orders scrupulously and prevented a shot from being fired in anger. In March he wrote his father that he was wary of involvement with any other power represented in China because of his suspicion of their selfish interests: The Japanese are most anxious to control all of North China, particularly Manchuria, and will sacrifice anything and back anyone who will assure to them this control.... The British are perfectly willing . . . if the Japanese will allow them to have the Yangtze Valley and, unless I am greatly mistaken, these English "cousins" of ours will be absolutely guided by their own selfish political and commercial interests. . . . It behooves us to keep absolutely aloof from everyone and to do nothing which is not directly in line with the saving of lives. Letters from home told him that his father had become very ill. Deeply worried, he wrote Thomas Butler in April: I do so hope . . . thee will not run thy legs off for this fool Navy. The American people never do know what they want and it is up to a few men like thee to guide them and persuade them to do the right thing but, after all . . . thy children think more of thy health than all the ships afloat. . . . We are so wholly controlled by selfish capital . . . abetted by foolish, short- sighted but no doubt well-meaning pacifists. We can never hope to be prepared for an emergency and sooner or later will suffer. That was the last communication between them. His father died on May 26, 1928. When the news reached him in Tientsin, Butler wept. He was so stunned by the loss of the father who had been as much confidant and friend as parent that six weeks later he wrote his mother, grieving: Father always took pride in the fact that I was ever to be found at the front, and now, though it is simply killing me, I must go on and on trying to do the Nation's work. Ah, I don't care any more but must pretend I do-just hate it all, but Father drove himself to death for the Navy and I must do the same, I suppose.... I am all confused and dazed. Does thee know I am unable positively to remember the last time I saw Father? ... Father has left us all such a beautiful reputation for kindly firmness that I am constantly overwhelmed with the responsibility of living up to it.... Be sure to write me fully any message that Father may have left for me, and if in his suffering be didn't leave any-make up one. It will be all the same--I must have something to go on. As usual when he was depressed, he threw himself into an orgy of activity. Storms having washed away a bridge on the Tientsin-Peking main road in September, he ordered the Marines to build a temporary structure out of scrap lumber to keep the highway open. The delighted villagers urged him to allow the bridge to remain; instead he magnified Chinese-American goodwill by building a more permanent bridge for them. Chinese officials named it after him and made him an honorary Chinese citizen. He then offered to rebuild the whole road from Peking to Tientsin with Marine equipment, to make it suitable for motor use, if they would supply soldier labor. They happily provided fifteen hundred Chinese troops for the job, which he personally supervised. The Chinese peasants were grateful for the road and bridges that helped them get their fresh produce to market. When the road was officially opened, the governor of the province held a celebration at which Butler was the guest of honor. Ancient Chinese custom decreed that when the citizens of a town or district unanimously voted a man to be a great public benefactor, he could be awarded an Umbrella of Ten Thousand Blessings--a magnificent canopy of red satin with small silk streamers proclaiming his greatness. No foreigner in Tientsin or Peking had ever rated one. But now the people of Tientsin presented a Blessings Umbrella to Smedley Butler. Soon afterward be drove into Boxertown just as a detached column from Chiang Kai-shek's army advanced into the opposite end of the town to loot it. His car kicked up so much racket that it sounded like machine-gun fire. The Nationalists, thinking he bad an army behind him, fled. Despite Butler's protests that he had done nothing at all to help them, the people of Boxertown bailed him as a deliverer. When be received a second Blessings Umbrella with its silk streamers inscribed in Chinese, one banner read, "Your kindness is always in the minds of people." The other: "General Butler loves China as he loves America." The second award moved him deeply, because Boxertown was the very same town from which Boxers, twenty-eight years earlier, had poured fire on his company, killing three Marines and wounding nine. After he made a speech recalling this event, be learned that five old men in the crowd that had just presented him with Boxertown's greatest honor had been among the Boxers who had shot at him in 1900. He was equally popular with his men, frequently working beside them when there was physical labor to be done. junior officers were so caught up by his gung- ho leadership, General Shoup recalled, that they, too, worked voluntarily beside the enlisted men. "Never before or since," one of them said later in awe, "have I ever known a general who could actually inspire officers to want to do physical labor." In the fall of 1928 Butler followed developments by radio in the presidential race between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith, deeply interested in the campaign issues that touched two facets of his personal experience-Prohibition and Latin American relations. He wrote Lejeune in October, "There seems no doubt that Hoover will be elected President--I guess, however, the country will survive." Orders for the Marines to begin pulling out of China came from President Coolidge in December. As he left China in January, 1929, Butler's affection and admiration for the Chinese people was so great that he wrote Lejeune, "It may be that when I am retired I will live among them." Their enthusiasm for him was equally unrestrained. A friend with the Asiatic Fleet wrote him, "The sendoff which the newspapers at Tientsin gave to you and Mrs. Butler was a great and just tribute to the cordial relations which you had so successfully established, not only with the Americans and the Chinese, but with everybody you came in contact with during your stay in North China." Butler was awarded the Yangtze Service Medal and in July, 1929, promoted to major general-at forty-eight the youngest Marine officer ever to have reached this rank. The Navy Department declared, "Probably no finer example of successful arbitration by American officers has been demonstrated in recent years than the peace-making achievements that crowned General Butler's efforts in China in 1927 and 1928." 17 Back home, Butler winced when Lejeune asked him to take command of the Parris Island, South Carolina, base. Weary after his China stint, be felt a need to renew his ties with kith and kin in his hometown of West Chester. He talked of retiring. "I had better begin to think what is best for me and my family," he told Lejeune. "I have given over thirty years of my best to the Marine Corps." He was given a long leave home, where he became aware of a rising tide of American sentiment matching his own growing distrust of the reasons for which armed forces were sent overseas. It had begun with a belated disillusionment over World War I, sparked by such books as All Quiet on the Western Front and Merchants of Death. In 1925 a National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War had been founded, and a rapidly developing pacifist movement bad compelled the government to enter disarmament negotiations. By August, 1-928, the antiwar movement was worldwide. Assigned once more to command the base at Quantico, Butler made it a Marine showplace and developed Marine football, baseball, and basketball teams with such high esprit de corps that they played the best college teams of the East and often beat them. His fatherly interest in his men led him to help them with personal problems, get them out of trouble, and encourage them to write home. The admiration of Marines' families was expressed in a typical letter to him from Philadelphia: "My brother in the Marines just came back from Nicaragua and be ask to be transferd[sic] to Phila. his Mother was III you comeplied[sic] with his wishes. His Mother was opertad[sic] for Tumbers but it was a baby boy and to day it was Christend Smedley D. Butler Ruth." Military and patriotic organizations persistently sought to lure him into joining. He wired the Sons of the American Revolution, "My ancestors were all Quakers and I regret to say took no part, as far as I know, in the American Revolutionary War, so I am not entitled to be a Son of the American Revolution." Actually, recently discovered evidence indicates that his great- great-grandfather, William Butler, although a Quaker, probably served in the Revolution, along with three brothers. He did, however, finally yield to the pleas of American Legion official James J. Deighan that he attend the national convention in Scranton as a guest of honor. "The success of the 11th National Convention ... last week was in large part due," Deighan wrote him gratefully afterward, "to the fact that you were our guest.... The Legionnaires, are all for you." News came that John Lejeune was resigning as commandant to head the Virginia Military Academy and would be replaced by Butler's other old friend, Buck Neville, now a major general. Thirty years had gone by since they had been an inseparable trio in the feverish days of the Cuban campaign. Butler began to feel the weight of time and too many campaigns. The endless demands on him made retirement and rest seem alluring. Asked once too often for a speech, he replied in October, 1929, "I am not a crusader or a propagandist, nor have I message for anybody, so there is no object in my appearing anywhere, except for money." He began to charge stiff lecture fees to cut down demands for him to travel everywhere to address luncheons and meetings as guest of honor. Perusing the morning papers on October 2, be noted a statement by Charles E. Mitchell, of the National City Bank: "I know of nothing fundamentally wrong with the stock market or with the underlying business and credit situation." The following day there was a minor panic on the New York Stock Exchange, and a day later the market collapsed. On October 29 the bottom fell out in the blackest day in 'stock-market history, and within two weeks over thirty bill- ion dollars in stock values were wiped out. The Great Depression had begun, and with it a swift rush of events that would involve Smedley Butler in a fantastic plot to overthrow the American Government. At first the American people imagined that the stock-market crash was something that merely affected Wall Street. In a message to Congress President Hoover reassured them that there was nothing to worry about; business confidence had been reestablished. Bootleggers, gang wars, and crime continued to be the major preoccupation of the public. Despite Butler's reluctance, more and more organizations insisted upon bearing the general who never pulled his punches speak out on the law-and-order problem. There was a ground swell in Pennsylvania to nominate Philadelphia's former crimebuster for governor on the Republican ticket. A friend wrote from Washington, "I note that some of the politicos may draft you as Dictator for Washington." In December, 1929, Butler was glad when a demand arose for a Senate investigation of the use of Marines to intervene in Latin American affairs. He upset the Hoover Administration by shooting from the hip in an extemporaneous speech he made in Pittsburgh, revealing that the State Department had rigged the Nicaraguan elections Of 1912 by ordering him to use strong-arm methods during the Marine intervention. "The opposition candidates in Nicaragua were declared bandits when it became necessary to elect our man to office," he explained. And he said of Diaz, "The fellow we had there nobody liked, but he was a useful fellow to us, so we had to keep him in. How to keep him in was a problem." Then be described how the election had been rigged, under orders, for that purpose. "When a Marine is told to do something," he said, "he does it." Butler's disclosures, picked up by the press, created a sensation in Washington. Alarm bells rang in the State Department; the last thing the administration wanted was an investigation concerning Marines then stationed in Nicaragua. 'Officials angrily attacked Butler for "loose talk." Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson wrote a furious memo to Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams: If the remarks are authentic, I consider them a highly improper and false statement as to American policy, and that I should call it to your attention for appropriate action. There is nothing that can do this Government more disservice than such a misstatement of our policy in a Latin American country, and I am astounded that such an expression--if he is correctly quoted-should emanate from a commissioned officer of the United States. Navy Secretary Adams, a wealthy, polo-playing yachtsman, sent for Butler and delivered a blistering reprimand, declaring that he was doing so at the direct personal order of the President of the United States. Butler saw red. "This is the first time in my service of thirty-two years," he snapped back, "that I've ever been hauled on the carpet and treated like an unruly schoolboy. I haven't always approved of the actions of the administration, but I've always faithfully carried out my instructions. if I'm not behaving well it is because I'm not accustomed to reprimands, and you can't expect me to turn my cheek meekly for official slaps!" "I think this will be all," Adams said icily. "I don't ever want to see you here again!" "You never will if I can help it!" Butler rasped, storming out of his office livid with anger. Just two days after his attack on the government's gunboat diplomacy, which provoked a great public commotion, Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark privately submitted to Secretary of State Stimson the draft of a pledge that the United States would never again claim the right to intervene in the affairs of any Latin American country as an "international policeman." The Clark Memorandum, which later became official policy-for a while at least- repudiated the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that Smedley Butler bad unmasked as raw gunboat diplomacy. pp. 80-108 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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