The Plot To Seize The White House (20 page)

If American Legion officialdom was furious at Butler's charges, the rank and file were not. Typical of the barrage of fan mail cheering him on was a letter from a Los Angeles Legionnaire: "Every word you say is true, and I, as an ex-soldier and one of the rank and file, respectfully request that you assume the active leadership of the ex-servicemen. These five million men and their families need you for a leader and will stick through thick and thin. The leadership of the American Legion voice actually the opposite of the true wishes of the membership. . . . Sir, the ex-serviceman of the United States is at your command."

But Butler's first bombshell was mild compared to his next broadside against the establishment, made in his Atlanta speech to the V.F.W. the next day.
The New York Times
featured it under the headline GEN. 
BUTLER LAYS WAR TO BANKERS.

War was "largely a matter of money," he told the veterans who had gathered to hear him. "Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay the President sends Marines to get it. I knowI've been in eleven of these expeditions." The world was not yet through with war, he warned, but we can help get rid of it when we conscript capital along with men."

He pointed out that soldiers who went through the horrors of war were not the same when they came back, adding vehemently, "We ought to make those responsible pay through the nose." That was why the V.F.W. was calling for immediate payment of the soldiers' bonus, in addition to compensation asked for disabled veterans and pensions for veterans' widows and orphans.

Ex-servicemen were made the butt of an Economy Act passed by Congress, Butler charged, because "the principle of taking care of soldiers is nothing at all but an old-age pension to which the nation eventually will come, and the bankers don't want it." He added caustically, "If Charles Dawes got ninety million dollars for a sick bank, soldiers ought to get it for sick comrades." Pointing out that veterans could muster twenty million votes among themselves and their families, he urged them to use this pressure at the polls to force decent care of the disabled.

If the "Democrats take care of you," he advised, "keep them in. If not-put 'em out!" He warned veterans not to believe "the propaganda capital circulates" in the press, which he condemned as largely capitalist-controlled. "The paper that takes the part of the soldier," he charged, "loses advertising."

His concern for disabled veterans was not mere rhetoric. He met many of them in the eighteen veterans' hospitals he visited during his tour of the country. His walks through the wards to talk with them filled him with an angry grief. In his days of combat he had seen many men killed and wounded. But the crushing impact of seeing fifty thousand young men gathered together in "living graveyards," forgotten by their country and the people for whom they had sacrificed arms, legs, faces, and minds, moved him to rage against the old men in power who had doomed them to lives of empty despair.
 

"Seventeen years ago they were the pick of the nation," he wrote grimly. ". . . In the government hospital at Marion, Ohio, 1,800 wrecks are in pens. Five hundred are in a barrack, under nurses, with wires all around the buildings and enclosing the porches. All have been mentally destroyed. They don't even look like human beings." He added in cold rage, "A careful study of their expressions is highly recommended as an aid to the understanding of the art of war."

On February 19, 1934, all the disabled veterans in the Veterans Administration hospital at Albuquerque signed a petition to Butler, urging him to testify in Congress to demand passage of the Bonus Bill and restoration of adequate compensation to disabled veterans. He replied, "I am doing everything humanly possible to help the veterans,"

and urged them to swamp Congress with letters and postcards.

George K. Brobeck, legislative representative for the V.F.W., wrote Butler:

Every member of our National Staff is deeply appreciative of your fine cooperation in our battle for the disabled men. I can think of no greater service that America's military leaders might dedicate themselves to than the one you have carried on so unceasingly, and I wish to repeat what Admiral R. E. Coontz said to me the other day....

You always know where Butler is and whether you like it or not, he is always on the level."

Army posts lie visited often hailed the ex-Marine with a military band, partly a tribute to his fame as commandant of the Army camp at Pontanezen, but even more for his championship of the Bonus Army and veterans' hospitals. Wherever he spoke to veterans’ 
meetings and rallies, enthusiastic ex-soldiers invariably outnumbered ex-Marines in his audience.

In his speeches for the V.F.W. he continued to plead their cause, along with assailing war-makers and demanding payment of the veterans' 
bonus. In March he was urged to attend the Indiana convention of the V.F.W. at Marion, which had the largest veterans' hospital in the United States.

John R. James, its chairman, asked him to come and "say something to these poor boys here to cheer them up in their lonesome surroundings.

We need you here at this time more than any other person in the country.

The Veterans all love you and look to you to guide them and tell them what to do. . . . I am unable to mention your name in a meeting without getting a round of applause."

He was gratified to read on April 12, 1934, that the Senate had voted an inquiry into the manufacture of and traffic in arms. Senator Gerald P. 
Nye, of North Dakota, as chairman of the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee. began holding public hearings stressing the heavy profits made by American financiers and armament-makers during World War I.

The Nye Committee produced shock waves by exposing the pressures exerted by the armament industry on the government to take America into that war. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor-publisher of
The
Nation,
wrote, "I never dreamed that I should live to see the time when public opinion in the United States would be practically united in recognizing that we were lied to and deceived into going to war . . . and when Congress would actually put a stop to those processes by which Wilson, House, Lansing and J. P. Morgan and Company brought us into the war." The Nye investigation, continuing until 1936, strengthened isolationist sentiment in the United States and inspired a series of neutrality acts during 1935-1937.

Following the hearings closely, Butler was tremendously impressed and influenced by their disclosures. They also confirmed his suspicions that big business-Standard Oil, United Fruit, the sugar trust, the big banks-had been behind most of the military interventions he had been ordered to lead.

In a broadcast over Philadelphia radio station WCAU he described his experiences 
in "the raping of little nations to collect money for big industries" that had large foreign investments.

Authentication for this view came thirty-eight years later when Milan B. Skacel, President of the Chamber of Commerce of Latin America in the United States, acknowledged on October 16, 1971, "Most of us freely admit that some of the past business practices of U.S. firms in Latin America were unconscionable."

Testifying before the Nye Committee, Eugene G. Grace, president of Bethlehem Steel, admitted that his corporation had received almost three million dollars in bonuses during World War I. He nervously expressed concern that such a revelation might "leave a bad taste" in the mouths of veterans who had served their country for a dollar a day, but nevertheless labeled their bonus movement an "unfortunate" enterprise.

"Bethlehem Steel made ten times as much money during the war as before," Butler roared over WCAU, "and this band of pirates calls the soldiers Treasury raiders!"

He urged reporter friends to get transcripts of the Nye hearings and read them, insisting, "You fellows ought to know this stuff." One wanted to know what had prompted him, even before the Nye disclosures, to "pull the whiskers off" the face of commercialism behind the pomp and patriotic glory of war.

"As a youngster, I loved the excitement of battle," he replied. "It's lots of fun, you know, and it's nice to strut around in front of your wife-or somebody else's wife-and display your medals, and your uniform. But there's another side to it, and that's why I have decided to devote the rest of my life to 'pulling off the whiskers."'

During his V.F.W. lecture tour he met an old war comrade, G. D. 
Morgan, who was now adjutant of the V.F.W. post in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and confided in him about the scheming of MacGuire, Doyle, and Clark. On May 14, 1934, Morgan wrote him, "My Dear Smed: I wish you would send me the Statistics as near as possible that you have on those two Ex-Service men and the Banker. We are getting in the middle of a hot Congressional Campaign and one Senator has been very adverse to our cause, so we want to shoot the works."

That month the Farmer-Labor party of Colorado urged Butler 
to become the party's candidate for President in 1936, stating, "We know of no other man in the U.S. that is as well informed on the situation with the nerve to carry out, make possible these reforms, and that has the confidence of the masses. The people need you badly."

In August, when Jerry MacGuire returned from Europe, the bond salesman had insisted upon another meeting with Butler on a matter "of the utmost importance." And at their discussion in the empty restaurant of Philadelphia's Bellevue Hotel, MacGuire had sought to get him to agree to lead a Fascist coup to capture the White House.

While smoking out the plot as far as he could and then getting reporter Paul Comly French to investigate it for corroborative evidence in preparation to exposing it, Butler continued his crusade against war and on behalf of justice for the veterans. Once more he found himself running into censorship trouble.

Radio station WAVE, carrying his speech on October 3 to the V.F.W. national convention, cut him off the air for "objectionable language" used before "a mixed audience." The convention unanimously adopted a resolution condemning WAVE for "unceremoniously curtailing the address of General Butler, an honored and beloved member of this organization."

Louis G. Burd, Adjutant of the Butte, Montana, post, wrote him:

... This assertion is just some more of the same old hooey to mislead the public. In our opinion you were cut off simply because you are one man before the public who has the courage to . . . give the public the true facts that they hunger to hear, and in a language of which there is no misunderstanding. . . . Be assured, General, that this effort 
to prevent the searchlight from being turned onto the malefactors of great wealth and veterans' enemies will prove futile [to stop] your untiring fight for justice for the veterans and the common people.

On Armistice Day Butler was vigorously applauded for a speech to a New York Jewish congregation appealing to all religious groups to

"stop the war racket." He created a sensation in the press by flatly declaring that he would never again carry a rifle on foreign soil. He proposed two constitutional amendments. The first would make it impossible for war to be declared except by the exclusive vote of those physically able to fight. The second would prevent United States warships from going beyond a two-hundred-mile limit, and airplanes from going more than five hundred miles from the American coastline.

On the same night from Richmond, Virginia, American Legion Commander Frank N. Belgrano, Jr., a banker, indirectly replied in an angry speech attacking "radical tendencies": "Some, it would seem, have forgotten that our country requires of us high and willing duty today as it did when we went forth to fight an enemy in the open. We are facing a new and more dangerous foe today.

It has seeped quietly into our country and whispered into the ears of our workers and our people everywhere that our ideals of government are out of date. We of the Legion are mobilized to meet that enemy and we are calling upon loyal Americans everywhere to join us in ridding our country of this menace."

To Butler that sounded suspiciously like the reams of propaganda the American Liberty League was now sending out, along with lecturers, to denounce the "socialism" of the Roosevelt Administration and call for a return to the doctrines of a laissez-faire economy.

The League's campaign failed to make any impact in the congressional elections of 1934, however, and F.D.R. won an enormous Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

Meanwhile gossip was spreading around Washington that the American Legion was going to provide the nucleus of a Fascist army that would seize the Capital. John L. Spivak, a crack reporter 
whose specialty was exposing American Fascists and of whom Lincoln Steffens once said, "He is the best of us," heard about it from an eminent Washington correspondent with excellent sources of information and decided to investigate it.

The rumors also reached the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives. This was the first House Un-American Activities Committee, at that time equally oriented against Fascist and Communist activities. Under Representative John W. McCormack, later Speaker of the House, it spent considerable time and energy unmasking Fascist agents in America. Not until 1939, when a new version of HUAC was reconstituted under the chairmanship of Martin Dies, did this committee become infamous for its relentless persecution directed almost exclusively against liberals and leftists of every persuasion, while ignoring subversion on the right.

One of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee's investigators contacted Butler to ask if there was any truth in the rumors that he could shed light on. Now that he had Paul Comly French's testimony to corroborate his own, Butler decided that there was little more to be gained by playing MacGuire along; between French and himself, the plotters' secret plans had been ferreted out to a significant extent.

Come hell or high water, press ridicule or denunciations terming him a madman, he was now determined to testify before the committee and spread the plot for a Fascist takeover of the United States all over the front pages. He would destroy it before it had a chance to crush democracy in the country he loved and had served all his life.