The Plot To Seize The White House (2 page)

Sincere gratitude is also expressed to the following persons and institutions for their contributions to my research: Former Speaker of the House of Representatives John W.

McCormack, who headed the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and who answered all my questions about the hearings he held during which General Butler testified about the conspiracy.

General David M. Shoup, retired commandant of the United States Marine Corps, who served under General Butler in China and who shared some of his reminiscences with me.

George Seldes, whose newsletter
In Fact
and books
1000 Americans
and
Facts and Fascism
gave me my first inklings of the conspiracy many years ago and who generously helped me with my research efforts.

John L. Spivak, former foreign correspondent for International News Service, who rendered invaluable cooperation by answering all my questions and generously permitting me to quote from his own fascinating reminiscences,
A Man in His Time
, in which he relates how he was able to thwart efforts to suppress important names involved in the conspiracy.

xi

xii Acknowledgements

Senator Job Javits and Representative Hamilton Fish, Jr., who assisted me in obtaining copies of the testimony at the conspiracy hearings of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee.

E. Z. Dimitman, former executive editor of the Philadelphia
Inquirer
and close friend of General Butler’s, who shared his reminiscences of the general.

Jerry Doyle, Philadelphia
Daily News
staff artist, who helped me locate old friends of the general’s.

Jesse Laventhol, Philadelphia newsman, confidant, and press secretary for the general’s Senate campaign, now retired, who explained some of the behind-the-scenes political factors.

Tom O’Neil, former city editor of the Philadelphia
Record
at the time of the conspiracy, who helped put some of the pieces of the puzzle together.

William J. Stewart, Acting Director, National Archives and Records Service, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, who guided me through the Roosevelt papers in locating material pertaining to General Butler and helped me identify sources.

Mary Schutz and Charlotte Wright, of the Mid-Hudson Library System, Poughkeepsie, New York, who obtained for me rare and hard-to-get research on the conspiracy from universities and public libraries all over the East Coast; James Brock, Ethel Tornapore, and Jane McGarvey, of Adriance Library in Poughkeepsie; the Starr Institute Library, Rhinebeck, New York; Neda M. Westlake, Curator, Rare Book Collection, Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; and Mary Lou Alm, of the Pine Plains, New York, Library.

Colonel F. C. Caldwell, U.S. Marine Corps (retired), director of Marine Corps History, Historical Division, who gave me valuable research leads and provided me with helpful articles and public records from Marine Corps sources.

Warrant Officer D. R. Aggers, U.S. Marine Corps, Head, Administrative Section, Director of Information, for providing certain Marine Corps photos of General Butler.

Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., which permitted me to study a 1962 master’s thesis in library science by Eunice M. Lyon,
The Unpublished Papers of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler,
United States Marine Corps: a

Calendar
, based on files turned over by the Butler family to the Marine Corps.

Robert B. Pitkin, editor,
American Legion Magazine
, who gave me statistical information about past Legion commanders.

Donald R. McCoy, historian, University of Kansas, for granting permission to quote from his book,
Coming of Age: The United States
During the 1920’s and 1930’s
.

Assistant Professor Dane Archer, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who originally researched the conspiracy for me eight years ago in old newspaper files at Yale University’s Sterling Library.

My wife, Eleanor E. Archer, who aided me in interviews with Speaker McCormack, General Shoup, and General Butler’s family as well as serving as adviser, critic, indexer, and proofreader.

Time
magazine, for permission to quote from its article, “Plot Without Plotters,” December 3, 1934.

Susan Berkowitz and Joan Nagy, whose brilliant editorial help aided me in sifting and organizing the elements in this book to let what remained stand out like gold dust in a prospecting pan.

JULES ARCHER

Pine Plains, New York

The 
Plot

Perspiring on the raw-wood platform in the broiling heat of a July day in Washington, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, retired, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and opened his collar. His violent deep-set eyes surveyed ten thousand faces upturned among the lean-tos, shanties, and tents on Anacostia Flats.

Bums, riffraff, drifters, and troublemakers-those were some of the descriptions being applied to the Bonus Army. Many of the ragged veterans who had marched on the Capital had been sleeping in doorways and under bridges, part of the vast army of twelve million unemployed. Some were the same men who had fought under Smedley Butler in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines campaign, the Boxer Rebellion, the Caribbean interventions, the Chinese intervention of 1927-1928, and World War I.

Butler had come to Washington in 1932 at the urging of James Van Zandt, head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to lend moral support to veterans at a crucial moment. Congress had just voted down the Patman Bonus Bill to pay veterans the two-billion-dollar bonus promised them in bonus certificates payable in 1945. Bonus Army Commander Walter W.

Waters, a former army sergeant, and other leaders feared that their discouraged followers would now give up and return home.

When Waters introduced Smedley Butler to the huge crowd of veterans gathered along the Anacostia River to hear him, he was greeted with an enthusiastic roar of acclaim that echoed through Washington like thunder. They all knew Old Gimlet Eye, one of the most colorful generals who had ever led troops I
nto battle. He was even more famous and popular among rank-and-file leathernecks, doughboys, and bluejackets for the fierce battles he had fought against the American military hierarchy on behalf of the enlisted men. He was also admired, respected, and trusted because of his one-man fight to compel Americans to remember their tragic war casualties hidden away in isolated veterans’ hospitals.

Smedley Butler was a wiry bantam of a man, shoulders hunched forward as though braced against the pull of a heavy knapsack, his hawk nose prominent in the leathery face of an adventurer. Silhouetted against a flaming sunset, he made a blazing speech of encouragement in the blunt language that had kept him in hot water with the nation’s highest-ranking admirals and generals, not to mention Secretaries of State and Navy.

“If you don’t hang together, you aren’t worth a damn!” he cried in the famous hoarse rasp that sent a thrill through every veteran who had heard it before. He reminded them that losing battles didn’t mean losing a war.

“I ran for the Senate on a bonus ticket,” he said, “and got the hell beat out of me.” But he didn’t intend to stop fighting for the bonus, and neither should they, he demanded, no matter how stiff the opposition or the names they were called.

“They may be calling you tramps now,” he roared, “but in 1917 they didn’t call you bums! … You are the best-behaved group of men in this country today. I consider it an honor to be asked to speak to you. …

Some folks say I am here after something. That’s a lie. I don’t want anything.” All he wanted, he told the cheering veterans, was to see that the country they had served dealt with them justly. He concluded his exhortation by urging, “When you get home, go to the polls in November and lick the hell out of those who are against you. You know who they are. … No go to it!”

Afterward he was mobbed by veterans eager to speak to him. Until 2:30 A.M. he sat sprawled on the ground in front of his tent, listening sympathetically to tales of lost jobs, families in distress, and troublesome old wounds. He slept three hours, then woke up to resume talks with the veterans.

Sharing a Bonus Army breakfast of potatoes, hard bread, and 
coffee, he learned that the food was running out, and veterans were muttering about rioting against Congress if it did. Before he left for his home in Newtown Square, a small town outside of Philadelphia, he warned the Bonus Marchers, “You’re all right so long as you keep your sense of humor. If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind, you will lose the sympathy of a hundred twenty million people in the nation.”

It was the government, however, that unleashed the violence. Under orders from President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur led troops in driving the Bonus Army out of Washington at bayonet point and burning down their shacktowns.

By August 1 rumors spreading from the last stronghold of the veterans, an encampment at Johnstown, Virginia, indicated that the infuriated Bonus Marchers were determined to organize a new nonpartisan political organization of veterans and wanted General Butler to lead it. Reporters pressed him to comment.

“I have heard nothing about it at all, although I was in Washington about two weeks ago to address the veterans,” he replied with a shrug. “I have neither seen nor heard from Mr. Waters or any of the other leaders of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.”

Meanwhile he phoned the governors of a number of states and won their agreement to provide relief for those of their veterans who wanted to return home. He phones Waters in Washington to urge that the remnants of the Bonus Army break camp and start back home under this plan, and he issued a blast at the Hoover Administration as heartless for its treatment of the veterans and its failure to help them, their wives, and their children return home without further humiliation.

That November lifelong Republican Smedley Butler took the stump for Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped turn Herbert Hoover out of the White House.

5

The Plot to Seize the White House

On July 1, 1933, General Butler’s phone rang soon after he had had breakfast. Calling from Washington, an American Legion official he had met once or twice told Butler that two veterans were on their way from Connecticut to see him about an important matter and urged him to make time for him.

About five hours later, hearing a car pull up into his secluded driveway at Newtown Square, Butler glanced out the porch window. His lips pursed speculatively as two fastidiously dressed men got out of a chauffeur-driven Packard limousine.

At the door the visitors introduced themselves as Bill Doyle, commander of the Massachusetts American Legion, and Gerald C.

MacGuire, whom Butler understood to have been a former commander of the Connecticut department.

Butler led the visitors into his study at the rear of the house, and they took chairs opposite his desk. MacGuire, who did most of the talking, was a fat, perspiring man with rolls of jowls, a large mouth, fleshy nose, and bright blue eyes. He began a somewhat rambling conversation during which he revealed that he, too, had been a Marine, with a war wound that had left a silver plate in his head. Doyle established his combat credentials by mentioning that he also had a Purple Heart.

Butler’s compassion for wounded veterans made him patient as MacGuire encircled the subject of their visit in spirals that only gradually narrowed until their apex pierced the point. The point, it seemed, was that MacGuire and Doyle, speaking for a coterie of influential Legionnaires, were intensely dissatisfied with the current leadership of the American Legion. Considering it indifferent to the needs of rank-and-file veterans, they revealed that they hoped to dislodge the regime at a forthcoming Legion convention to be held in Chicago. They urged
The Plot
7

Butler to join them and stampede the convention with a speech designed to oust the “Royal Family” controlling the organization.

Their dissatisfaction with the leadership of the American Legion did not find Butler unsympathetic. He had long been privately critical of the organization’s close ties with big business and its neglect of the real interests of the veterans it presumably represented. These convictions were to be made dramatically public before the year was out, but now he declined his visitors’ proposal on the grounds that he had no wish to get involved in Legion politics and pointed out that, in any event, he had not been invited to take part in the Legion convention.

MacGuire revealed that he was chairman of the “distinguished guest committee” of the Legion, and was on the staff of National Commander Louis Johnson, a former Secretary of Defense. At MacGuire’s suggestion Johnson had included Butler’s name as one of the distinguished guests to be invited to the Chicago convention. Johnson had then taken this list to the White House, MacGuire said, and had shown it for approval to Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s secretary. Howe had crossed Butler’s name off the list, however, saying that the President was opposed to inviting Butler. MacGuire did not know the reason, but Bill Doyle assured Butler that they had devised a plan to have him address the convention anyhow.

Butler remained silent. He was used to oddball visitors who called with all kinds of weird requests. Curiosity, and the leisure afforded by retirement, often led him to hear them out in order to fathom their motives.

He thought about his visitors’ finely tailored suits and the chauffeur-driven Packard an their claim to represent the “plain soldiers” of the Legion. The story about the rejection of his name on the Legion convention guest list by the White House struck him as more than peculiar, in view of the fact that the President had gratefully accepted his campaign help in a “Republicans for Roosevelt” drive eight months earlier. Why should F.D.R. suddenly be so displeased with him?

It crossed his mind that the purpose of the story, true or false, might be intended to pique him against the Roosevelt Administration, for some obscure reason. Keeping his suspicions
8