The Plot To Seize The White House (19 page)

Another article Butler wrote for
Liberty
stirred the wrath of the Honduras Government by exposing the collaboration of Honduran and other Central American dictators with American banking and commercial interests. The controlled Honduran press accused him of misrepresenting the situation and showered him with epithets. From Tegucigalpa a New
York Times
correspondent wired, "It is realized that he is now retired, and not subject to the restraint which can be imposed on an officer in active service."

More and more of Butler's attention was directed to the steadily worsening Depression and what it was doing to the country. He was outraged when hunger marchers who had gone to Washington on December 7 were denied admission to the White House to petition for jobs.

During 1932 stocks fell go percent, farm products 6o percent, industrial production 50 percent. By the end of the year fifteen million Americans were in the ranks of the unemployed. Homeowners and farmers were being dispossessed for nonpayment of taxes and debts.

Outraged neighbors in many communities were setting up roadblocks with guns to bar outside bidders at foreclosure auctions so that the property could be bought for a song and returned to its owners.

Alarmed bankers saw this development as a Communist threat.

Butler's antagonism toward big business intensified. On February 14, 1932, the United Press quoted him as saying, "I've about 
come to tile conclusion that some American corporations abroad are, in a measure, responsible for trouble with the natives simply because of the way they treat them. . . . I've seen hundreds of boys from the cities and farms of the United States die in Central American countries just to protect the investments of our large corporations." How could Washington criticize Japan for its takeover in Manchuria, he demanded, when we ourselves had been just as imperialistic?

In the spring Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot urged Butler to throw his hat into the political ring and oppose James J. 
Davis, former Secretary of Labor under Hoover, for the Republican nomination for senator. His admirers were already demanding that Butler run for governor.

"I am not going to run for the Senate or governorship," he growled to newspaper friends, "and then have the politicians laugh at me." But Pinchot's entreaties were too strong and persistent, and Butler reluctantly agreed.

Stumping the state, he appealed to Republican voters with a platform promising jobs for the unemployed and home property loans for debtors. Campaigning for a bonus bill, be placed all his decorations and uniforms in a vault, publicly vowing never to wear them again until soldiers got their bonus. Although he was personally popular, two issues he campaigned for in 1932Prohibition and the soldiers' bonus-were not.

Despite receiving half a million votes, he was defeated. Paul Comly French of the Philadelphia
Record
revealed that Governor Pinchot had set Butler up for defeat to eliminate him as a political threat, making a secret deal to support Davis. The Pinchot political machine had been used against Butler in key election districts.

Reporter Jesse Laventhol, later city editor of the Philadelphia
Record,
who had been Butler's press secretary during the campaign, told the author, "Butler's sponsors failed him . . . , trading off votes for Davis in return for electing certain state senators to give the governor control of that body."

So Smedley Butler never went to Congress like his father.

In the early summer of 1932 over twenty thousand veterans and their families joined in a Bonus Army march to Washington, camping on the edge of the Capital to demand payment of a two-billion-dollar cash bonus to all veterans. The House, tinder pressure, quickly passed the Patman Bonus Bill on June 17, but the Republican Senate rejected it, 62 
to 18.

Butler was indignant at the failure of Congress to honor America's pledge to its fighting men and was thoroughly disgusted with Hoover's failure to do anything about the plight of the nation except issue optimistic reports that prosperity was "just around the corner."

On June 30, while the Democratic convention was in session, he announced that he might, for the first time in his life, vote Democratic 
"if the right man is nominated for President." It was no secret that he saw the right man as New York's governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had already broadcast an impressive speech on the need of the American Government to discover its "forgotten man."

When Roosevelt won the nomination, pledging a New Deal along with the repeal of Prohibition, Butler wired him, "We salute your nomination as one of the greatest blessings granted any nation in an hour of desperate need." He offered to help F.D.R.'s campaign any way he could, and Roosevelt asked him to get in touch with Democratic campaign manager James A. Farley, or Roosevelt's chief secretary, Louis Howe. Butler soon began stumping for F.D.R. In a speech before the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen in New York on July 7 
he warned that the government had to be rescued from "the clutches of the greedy and dishonest":
 

Today, with all our wealth, a deathly gloom hangs over us.

Today we appear to be divided. There has developed, through the past few years, a new Tory class, a group that believes that the nation, its resources and its man-power, was provided by the Almighty for its own special use and profit.... On the other side is the great mass of the American people who still believe in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States.

This Tory group, through its wealth, its power and its influence, has obtained a firm grip on our government, to the detriment of our people and the well-being of our nation. We will prove to the world that we meant what we said a century and a half ago-that this government was instituted not only to secure to our people the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the right to eat and to all our willing millions the right to work.

A lecture bureau urged him to undertake a national speaking tour of 100,000 miles through the United States. He agreed, not only to earn the money involved but also because he saw the trip as a way to get to know his fellow Americans better. He knew more about the Cacos of Haiti than the residents of Michigan Boulevard, more about the thinking of Nicaraguans and Chinese than of Manhattanites and Californians. As "a stranger to my native land and to my fellow citizens," he felt a strong compulsion to "sec America last" and learn about them, too. So he began visiting over one hundred cities in forty-eight states, "keeping my eyes and cars open all the time."

Years of delivering training talks to his troops and pep talks before and during battle had made him an articulate extemporaneous speaker.

Without a note to refer to lie held audiences spellbound, and each time be delivered a talk it was different. A fast thinker on his feet, he spoke in the colorful idiom of everyday language, which he used with the impact of a shower of arrows.

He was only partially successful in his attempts to civilianize his colorful barracks argot. One Milwaukee newspaper, describing a speech lie made at a First Methodist Episcopal church in September, 1932, ran a story headlined: BUTLER TALKS IN CHURCH, 
USES
NICE
LANGUAGE. "Only one "hell' and two 'damns' spiced his remarks throughout the evening."

What he heard and saw on his tour convinced him that Americans were hungry for a change in the administration especially for a turn away from foreign affairs to home problems. But he found no indication that Main Street America either wanted revolutionary change or thought it likely, despite alarm over a Red menace in the conservative press.

"I held personal conversations with more than two thousand persons in all walks of life," he said on October 2, 1932
,
after his tour, "and they gave me a new and true insight into the people of America. I learned that the average American is convinced that no change in the form of our government is necessary or advisable."

The attempt by conservatives to smear "anyone who utters a progressive thought" as a Red, he pointed out, was helping a "handful of agitators in their vain efforts to foment disorder and discontent with our form of government." He branded Republican warnings that a Democratic victory would turn America socialist an absurd myth.

When a new political group called the Roosevelt Republican Organization was formed in Philadelphia, Butler was asked to take a leading role in it. Louis Howe assured him that Roosevelt would be most grateful for any help he could give the governor in that capacity.

A week before Election Day Butler made a slashing attack on Hoover in a speech to an enthusiastic rally of Queens, New York, veterans, describing himself as "a member of the Hoover-for-Ex-President League because Hoover used gas and bayonets on unarmed human beings.”

"Nobody has any business occupying the White House who doesn't love his own people," he declared, adding, "I was raised Republican, but I was born American. I have no ring through my nose, and I vote for whom I please."

He insisted that the bonus must be paid: "The bonus is an amount of money that the American people owe the soldier, but anybody demanding it is charged with lack of patriotism. During the war nobody charged the officers of the Bethlehem Steel 
Corporation or any of the other corporations who received enormous bonuses with `raiding the Treasury.'"

American big business, he accused, had been responsible for United States entry into World War I and was now "getting ready to start another one in the East."

On November 8 Butler's choice for President won, and the House of Representatives went Democratic by a margin of three to one. A chorus of newspaper fury and frustration reflected the dismay of banking and industrial interests over Roosevelt's election.

Less than three weeks before the President-elect's inauguration, an unsuccessful attempt was made to assassinate him at Miami. Could the assassin's bullet possibly have been negotiated for, Butler speculated, by a big-business cabal that hated Roosevelt and dreaded a New Deal?

Many veterans' posts now started a movement to have Butler appointed administrator of the U.S. Veterans Bureau in January, 1933, and sent resolutions to Roosevelt to this effect.

Soon after the N.R.A. began, General Hugh Johnson asked Butler to work with him in administering the program. Butler thanked him but refused, explaining, "I don't want to be tied up with anything I don’t know about.”

Meanwhile lie watched with fascination the swift unfolding of developments in the New Deal from the time Roosevelt declared at his inauguration on March 4, 1933, "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Next day the new President proclaimed a national bank holiday and embargoed the exportation of gold. The famous "Hundred Days Congress," 
in a special session called by the President, swiftly enacted into law the principal policies of the 
New Deal. As the American people stirred with new hope that at last the government was beginning to fight the nightmare Depression, Butler noted with satisfaction that the bankers and industrialists of the nation were horrified.

Meanwhile between July and December he had been pursued and wooed by Jerry MacGuire, the bond salesman for Grayson M.-P. Murphy and Company, who had sought to enlist him in the schemes of the financial group he represented. It was with some relief that he was temporarily freed from these persistent attentions on December 1, when MacGuire went abroad on an unexplained mission for his backers.

Early in December, 1933, Butler began touring the country for the V.F.W. and made headlines by speaking out with characteristic bluntness to attack the leadership of the American Legion. He told a large gathering of veterans in New Orleans that the V.F.W. commander "would not sell out his men as the officers in charge of the American Legion have."

Sharing the platform with Senator Huey Long, he urged Long to concentrate on fighting for the veterans' bonus and forget less important matters. "What the hell do you know about the gold standard?" he challenged Long. "Don't pay any attention to what the newspapers say.

Stand by your friends and to hell with the rest of them!"

Taking Long's political demagoguery at face value, he believed him to be sincere in his advocacy of a redistribution of national wealth and praised him as a man "with nerve enough to maintain a fight against Wall Street." He urged the veterans to "make Wall Street pay, to take Wall Street by the throat and shake it up." If they wanted to get the bonus that had been promised them, they would have "to organize . . . to get together . . . to do as the veterans of other wars have done."

It was a fighting speech in the classic populist vein, and it sparked national controversy. The
Cincinnati Times Star,
a newspaper controlled by American Legion officials, angrily accused Butler of advocating a "soldier dictatorship."

Interviewed afterward in Atlanta about his attack on the Legion, he stuck by his guns and added fuel to the fire by stating 
grimly, "I've never known one leader of the American Legion who has never sold them out!"

As for the
Star's
accusation that he wanted a military dictatorship, he replied with a speech denouncing crackpot rightist movements that advocated such a course for America. His suspicions about Clark and Maguire were obviously very much on his mind when he made it.

"To many it may seem strange for a military man to denounce dictatorship," he declared. "Generally it is the military men who are advocates of this stern measure. . . . But we do not need a dictator and we would not have one anyway, because our temperament and traditions forbid it."

He made it clear that he was stumping the country only on behalf of the ordinary "forgotten soldier," just as F.D.R. had crusaded for the 
"forgotten man."

He told reporters, "I went on the retired list after thirty-three years of making wars, to rock and rock. So many former soldiers came to me with their pathetic stories that I bounced out of retirement. All we soldiers are asking is that the nation give us the same break that is being given the manufacturers, the bankers, the industrialists. . . . Jimmie [Van Zandt] and I are going around the country trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class."