The Plot To Seize The White House (32 page)

This committee was not the headline-seeking, witch-hunting extravaganza that HUAC became under Martin Dies. "Its manner of investigation commanded special respect," notes historian Arthur M.

Schlesinger, Jr. "McCormack used competent investigators and employed as committee counsel a former Georgia senator with a good record on civil liberties. Most of the examination of witnesses was carried on in executive sessions. In public sessions, witnesses were free to consult counsel.

Throughout,

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The Plot to Seize the White House

McCormack was eager to avoid hit-and-run accusation and unsubstantiated testimony. The result was an almost uniquely scrupulous investigation in a highly sensitive area."

Schlesinger noted that the McCormack Committee had "declared itself àble to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler'

except for MacGuire's direct proposal to him, and it considered this more or less confirmed by MacGuire's European reports.... James E. Van Zandt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and subsequently a Republican congressman, corroborated Butler's story and said that he, too, had been approached by àgents of Wall Street."'

I queried McCormack about one final point. One newspaper reporter had suggested that Butler had not himself taken the plot very seriously.

"Oh, no, General Butler regarded the plot very gravely indeed,"

McCormack said emphatically. "He knew that this was a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of rich men who wanted fascism."

I also discussed this point with the Butler family. Smedley Butler, Jr., agreed with McCormack and explained why his father did not immediately go to Washington when he realized what the plotters were up to: "Dad was not stupid. He had no proof, and he could not name names, so he had to be careful about it."

In fairness to the American Legion today, it needs to be pointed out that the Legion leadership of our times is far different from what it was in the period during and preceding the Butler hearings, when so many former commanders and high officials were involved in the conspiracy and antilabor activities dictated by big-business interests.

John L. Spivak explained why:

A long struggle followed within the Legion between those who would use the members for their own business and political interests and those who wanted the organization used for the benefit of former servicemen. The latter won. At the time of the plot, the cleavage between the rank and file and the Royal Family seemed-as it indeed turned out to be-a permanent one. In the generation that followed, the 
Legion underwent drastic changes and a mellowing. . . . Members now rarely participate in antilabor activity. In fact, many Legionnaires are themselves loyal union men.

To carry his warnings further to the American people, Butler began touring the country in a series of lectures. On the podium lie held audiences fascinated not only by his vigorous exposes of big business, war-makers, the American Liberty League, and the American Legion "Royal Family," 
but by the sheer dynamism of his personality.

As he grew more and more heated, he would roam the stage, gesticulating vigorously as he made his points, often extemporaneously, in salty, sometimes ribald, always blunt language.

He was flooded with requests for appearances at huge veterans' 
bonus rallies staged by the V.F.W. all over the country. In his speeches to veterans he would growl at their naiveté as "dumb soldiers" because they didn't organize politically to fight for veterans' benefits due them. They would grin and applaud enthusiastically, knowing that behind his gruff manner was a genuine fondness and concern for their welfare. "

Acknowledged as the spokesman for the "forgotten veteran," he was besieged with requests for help in getting adequate pensions for disabled veterans, and through the V.F.W. put pressure on the Veterans Administration in hundreds of cases.

The worshipful attitude of veterans toward Butler was expressed in a typical letter to him in March, 1935, by a veteran who wrote, "We all know that you speak our language, and that the Vet is about as close to your heart as anything else in the world."

There was no generation gap between the fifty-four-year-old general and youth leaders of that period, who were organizing 
the American Student Union to fight "against war and fascism." They felt a close kinship with the war hero who hated wars, and hated the men who had sent him to fight them. Now constantly proselytizing against war in the hope of stopping any new ones, Butler also wrote magazine articles condemning Marine intervention in the affairs of China.

Speaking to a Y.M.C.A. in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in February, he accused the big industrialists of America of fattening on the blood of soldiers. He pointed out that the average profit of the Du Ponts from 1910 to 1914 had been only $6 million, but had soared to $58 
million between 1914 and 1918. The jump in the same periods for Bethlehem Steel had been $6 to $49 million; for International Nickel, $4 to $73 million.

"It makes you feel proud," he said bitingly. "A lot of the stockholders are members of the National Economy League, and, after I complete my investigation, I will probably find they are also members of the American Liberty League."

On February 25
Time
magazine ran a two-column photo showing Butler and comedian Jimmy Durante, who attended a dinner in Pittsburgh where the general was speaking, facing each other "nose to nose" in a light moment for the photographer. The caption read "SCHNOZZLE, GIMLET EYE. Fascist to Fascist?"

In a tiny footnote at the bottom of the page, in five-point type that could barely be read,
Time
informed those of its readers with 20-20 
vision, "Also last week the House Committee on Un-American Activities purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler's story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true." This was
Time's
microscopic amends for its lengthy page-one ridicule of the plot a dozen weeks earlier.

In March, 1935, Butler began lecturing to mass meetings called by the V.F.W., speaking on behalf of the Patman Bonus Bill. He lost no opportunity to warn veterans also against those big-business interests who favored war and fascism. His convictions were strengthened by a new book based on the Nye munitions investigation,
The Road to War,
by Walter Millis.

He wrote a small antiwar book of his own that year, based on an earlier magazine article m which he favored a foreign 
policy of strict neutrality. In
War Is a Racket
he advocated an "ironclad defense a rat couldn't crawl through," but only to defend the United States against attack. The job of the armed forces, he insisted, was only to protect democracy at home-not waste lives on foreign soil to protect American investments overseas:

[War] is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.... How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? .

. . Newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the . . . self-same few who wring dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.... Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Backbreaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

Now that I see the international war clouds again gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out....

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers? . . . [Mussolini is] ready for war.... [Hitler] is an equal if not greater menace to peace. . . . The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose....

Yes, they [munitions makers, bankers, ship-builders, manufacturers, meat packers, speculators] are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends. But what does it profit the masses . . . who are killed? [American boys in past wars] 
were made to . . . regard murder as the order of the day.... We used them a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or being killed. Then suddenly, we discharged them and told them to do their own readjusting. . . . Many, too many, of these fine young boys were eventually destroyed mentally....

The soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor. . . . By developing the . . . medal business, the government learned it 
could get soldiers for less money. . . . We gave them the large salary of $30 a month!

All they had to do for that munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy [when they could get it], and kill and kill and kill ... and be killed....

But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences ... by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. . . .

Let the officers and directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders . . . as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted-to get $3o a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages . . . yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians. . . .

Why shouldn't they? They aren't running any risk of being killed or having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. . . .

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket-that and nothing else.

Industrialists and financiers were shocked by Butler's "radical"

notion. But if they had checked the Oxford Dictionary, they would have found as one definition of conscription: "taxation or confiscation of property for war purposes to impose equality of sacrifice on non-conscripts."

Butler's speeches at bonus rallies and over the air helped put pressure on Congress to pass the Patman Bonus Bill. As it went to the White House, Butler urged the President to sign it into law, pointing out that it was one way the nation could make amends to the veterans for their exploitation by big business in America's wars of the twentieth century. In a radio broadcast on May 9 he urged his listeners to deluge Roosevelt with a million wires and letters supporting the bill.

But the President vetoed it. On May 21 Butler conferred with Senator Elmer Thomas, of Oklahoma, in Washington on tactics to get Congress to override the veto. Afterward he declared his hope of organizing a large-scale political movement of veterans to press for the bonus.

"My idea," he told the press, "would be a mammoth organization like the Grand Army of the Republic, which would bring political pressure to bear to take care of the soldiers."

Now he criticized not only the American Legion but also the V.F.W. for avoiding the political arena: "They're no good. They've got provisions in their bylaws which say they can't engage in political action.

The politicians put them to sleep. . . . If the soldiers don't get theirs now, they'll organize and get it. There'd be about five million of them."

He was asked who would head the new organization. "I don't know who we'd get to lead it," he replied.

He was instantly besieged with requests from various veterans groups that he take them over as the nucleus for his battle for the bonus and veterans' pensions. Morris A. Bealle, publisher of Plain Talk magazine, wrote Butler on May 24 that he had already begun such an organization, calling it the Iron Veterans. He urged Butler to assume its leadership.
 

"You may be interested to know that Bill Doyle tried to finance this organization for us," Bealle wrote, "but acted so suspicious[ly] at Miami that I thought he was trying to take it over for the Royal Family of the American Legion, and declined to do business with him." This was the same Doyle who had accompanied MacGuire in the plotters' first contact with Butler.

Bealle added, "A few weeks later I discovered to my horror that he was trying to take it over for the House of Morgan."

But Butler, made wary by the Fascists' plan for a veterans' 
"superorganization," began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of any attempt to organize a national veterans group for political purposes.

"To attempt a national association in the beginning," he wrote to the organizer of the American Warriors in Iowa, "would only lead to great financial expense and exploitation of the veterans by chiselling professionals. . . . While it might be possible to find those who would contribute the necessary funds, it would put the veterans under obligation to the contributors."

His fight for the Bonus Bill, and his bare-knuckled attacks against the establishment, led to cancellation of his radio broadcasts as of July 3. A month earlier, when Van Zandt urged him to come to Montana to speak for the soldiers' bonus at a V.F.W. rally there, Butler declined.

"Such a trip would be a very heavy drain on my pocketbook," he explained. "And as long as I am being put off the air for being too noisy in my criticism of this administration and for taking the part of the soldiers, I more or less shall have to conserve my resources."

But he was determined to get the truth as he saw it out to the American people and undertook a new lecture tour that would cover the country. Roosevelt had not been able to get the press to carry his message to the people, so he had turned to national radio. Butler had not been able to get national radio to carry his message, so he turned to town-hall meetings all over America.