The Plot To Seize The White House (34 page)

In September he endorsed the candidacy of Representative Vito Marcantonio, of the left-wing American Labor party, for his antiwar, anti-Fascist stand. Butler's detractors assailed this endorsement as "proof' that he was some kind of Red, ignoring 
the fact that two weeks earlier Roosevelt had accepted the invitation of the A.L.P. to become its candidate, as well as the candidate of the Democratic party.

The growing isolationist movement in America now resulted in more prominence being given to Butler's antiwar speeches in the press.

On September 17 when he delivered a slashing attack on war makers before the V.F.W. in Denver, it was carried in part on the wires of the Associated Press:

WAR IS CALLED `HELL' 
AND `BUSINESS RACKET'

Gen. Butler and Senator Bone

Warn Veterans of Foreign

Wars of the Future

Men who fought America's foreign wars cheered violently today as a major general and a Senator called warfare "a business racket." Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, used blunt language as he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars that "war is hell." . . . "But what in the hell are we going to do about it? I've got something for you to do about it. I'm going to tell you in simple language so all of you can understand. Let the world know that hereafter no American soldier is going to leave the shores of this country! . . . Soldiers never leave the country except to protect the moneyed interests."

One enthusiastic veteran who applauded him afterward wrote to President Roosevelt urging Butler's appointment as Secretary of War to replace retiring George H. Dern:

This man is the most popular Military figure with the Vets as a class. Pershing hasn't one tenth of one percent his color and personality. He's a Quaker, and a helluva good one, i.e., not the Hoover type. . . . If you asked him to fill Dern's place, the army and the Republicans would holler but the common people would understand, and so would the rank and file of the veterans. Of course, the slap at Liberty Leaguer Dupont would cost their family's votes.

P.S. You won't get many anyhow!
 

The Du Ponts supplied more grist for Butler's antiwar mill in September, when the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee revealed that the munitions industry, led by the Du Ponts, had sabotaged a League of Nations disarmament conference held at Geneva.

"After the whole conference was over and the munitions people of the world had made the treaty a satisfactory one to themselves," reported Chairman Gerald Nye, "we find that Colonel Simons [of the Du Ponts] is reporting that even the State Department realized, in effect, who controlled the Nation: On October 19 Butler used his popularity with the dry forces, who remembered him affectionately from the Volstead Act days in Philadelphia, to appeal to the Women's Christian Temperance Union to join the peace movement. Six days later the mood of the nation grew more apprehensive, however, as Hitler and Mussolini signed the Rome-Berlin Axis pact and the following month were joined by Japan, which signed an Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany.

Roosevelt's landslide reelection strengthened his hand against the isolationists, and there were signs that the White House intended to take a tougher stand against the Axis powers. Butler grew increasingly worried that the President might be starting the nation down the road to war.

Speaking at an Armistice Day dinner for veterans, Butler announced firmly that he, with a record of thirty-three years of military service, would never again shoulder arms except in defense of America's own shores.

Attacking congressional attempts to put loopholes in the Neutrality Act, Butler warned in a subsequent speech that once the United States was lured into shipping supplies to a belligerent, 
Americans would soon hear the old cry-"the American flag insulted, American property destroyed . . . same old thing over again, just as it was in the World War." America, he said, best served itself and the world by staying at peace:

Help them to bind up the wounds when the distressed world has fought itself to exhaustion and has overthrown its false and selfish leaders. I am firmly convinced that every government which hurls its loyal but dumb masses into this coming war will be overthrown, win or lose. I am also firmly convinced that another universal war will make man into a savage, ready to take by force what he wants, law or no law.

His tone grew acrid and resentful when Roosevelt won congressional consent to amending the Neutrality Act in May, 1937, authorizing the sale to belligerents of some commodities on a cash-and-carry basis. Since a national poll showed that 73 percent of Americans favored some kind of popular referendum before the United States could declare war, Butler felt that the President was ignoring the will of the people and seeking to tie their fate to that of England and France.

On July 12 he warned a thousand veterans at Paterson, New Jersey, that unless the nation's veterans banded together to demand peace, America would be at war again in a short time. He urged them to demand that U.S. armed forces be kept within their own borders and that the use of the American flag be restricted to government-owned ships.

Speaking to a Writers' Union meeting in Philadelphia, he described how the United States might be dragged into the next European war. A European ship would stop a U.S. ship carrying munitions to a potential enemy. The American captain would radio William Randolph Hearst that the flag had been insulted. Orators would begin demanding that Americans avenge the insult. Ministers would discover that they were "transmitters from God" and encourage a holy crusade. Arms manufacturers would bring pressure to bear on Washington. And we would go to war.

A July speech he made to the Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville was broadcast: Wars do not occur. They are made by men. . . . There will never be a congressional investigation into the steps taken or the methods adopted which saves us from a war.... Lying propaganda is almost certainly necessary to bring nations to the pitch where men kill and women give their men and boys to be killed. . . .

The object of war is to get something for nothing. . . . When we have announced what we intend to defend, let us put our national flag over it and forbid the flying of our flag over anything else; then we will avoid insults to our flag, the most popular cause for our wars.... We Americans who love and protect our flag should certainly have a voice in where it is flown.

With Japanese troops sweeping through China and seizing the coastal cities, Butler addressed the V.F.W. convention in September urging that all American forces be withdrawn from China. Three months later Japanese airmen sank the U.S. gunboat Panay in Chinese waters. A poll showed that 53 percent of Americans agreed with Butler's demand for withdrawal of all United States forces. But instead Washington demanded indemnity from Tokyo.

Butler was convinced that a continued American presence in Asia could only lead to eventual war with an aggressive Japan bent on becoming the dominant power in the Orient. He saw confirmation of his belief that war was a business racket when Washington continued to permit American corporations to sell scrap iron and oil to Tokyo for its war machine. He also knew that there were over two billion dollars in American investments in Germany, which was being goaded by British diplomacy into attacking the Soviet Union.

If these facts seemed to him more immediately menacing than the steadily escalating aggression of the Axis powers, he was not alone among liberal and left-wing Americans in this myopia. In January, 1938, John Chamberlain, Alfred M. Bingham, Dwight 
MacDonald, Bertrand Wolfe, and Sidney Hook were among those who opposed any strong action against Japan, or any of the other Axis powers, arguing, "We believe that the first result of another War to Make the World Safe for Democracy will be the establishment of virtual fascism in this country."

By now the country was almost evenly divided between isolationists and those who advocated anti-Fascist alliances. In late January Roosevelt asked Congress for appropriations to build up the Army and Navy for "national defense."

Interviewed on February 28, 1938, on a national radio program, Butler had strong doubts about F.D.R.'s plans:

Now is the time to keep our heads better than we ever kept them before. . . . We ought to agree on a definition of the word 
"national." If it means defense by our Army and Navy of every dollar and American person anywhere they may happen to be on the surface of the earth, then, just as sure as I'm standing here, we'll be fighting a foreign war.

He was asked how long he estimated it would take to train a man to fight. "Well," he replied, "if you want to send him three thousand miles away to fight, at least six months' training will be needed. If he was defending his home, it would take about an hour."

On April 9 Butler was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs on a billion-dollar naval construction bill. Urging defeat of the bill, he called it unnecessary for the real defense of the United States. In the event of war, he told the committee, he favored abandoning Alaska, the Panama Canal, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. The Canal, he asserted, could be destroyed by "a handful of bombs." He also insisted 
that all mercantile ships operated for profit should fly commercial flags, not the American flag.

He explained that since his retirement he had visited twelve hundred cities and towns and "talked to all 'kinds of people in all parts of the country." He said, "I have a feeling that this bill does not represent a consensus of opinion among naval officers. I have a feeling that it is a grand bluff. Furthermore, I believe that the American people will turn against this bill before any of the keels provided are laid. I cannot prove it, but I believe it is proposed for the purpose of doing somebody else's business."

He bad used up fifteen years of his life, he growled, "going about the world guarding Standard Oil tins" and had participated in twelve expeditions outside the United States which he considered missions largely in the interest of Wall Street. "The whole thing is a racket," he added, "and the American people are going to catch up with it."

The committee chairman asked if he considered the existing Navy adequate to defend the continental United States. He did, he replied, and hoped that Congress would fix a defense line beyond which the Navy would not be allowed to operate.

"Suppose Japan tried to invade the United States?"

Her forces would be so weak by the time they reached the Pacific Coast, Butler replied, that "we could knock her over with a feather." He recommended a force of twenty-thousand-ton battleships that would hug the coasts and, with the aid of submarines, aircraft, and coastal defenses, would be able to stand off any hostile forces that came within striking distance.

"I am a friend of the Navy," he declared, "and I have an anchor tattooed on my chest, but if we go to building up the Navy as proposed in the bill, and loading down the people with the cost of it, the people will turn on the Navy as they did in the eighties, and not a ship will be able to leave port, for there just won't be a dollar appropriated for the Navy."

He was joined in opposing the Navy construction bill by eighteen peace organizations, including the American Friends Service Committee, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Conference on World Peace of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 
the National Council for the Prevention of War, the Church Peace Union, and the National Student Federation. But Congress turned a deaf ear, and in May it passed the Naval Construction Act, authorizing a billion-dollar expansion program.

Butler's raging hatred of war led him into the same errors of judgment that ensnared the isolationists of America. Like them, he approved of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's efforts to buy "peace in our time" at Munich.

Confident that the Nazis could not get through the French Maginot line, he also believed that every Frenchman would fight fiercely to protect his own plot of land against any invasion.

The Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact of August 23, 1939, followed by the invasion of Poland, made it clear that the world was tottering on the verge of another great war. On August 31 Butler joined Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in appeals to keep America out of it, at a V.F.W. convention in Boston.

"There are only two things for which Americans should be permitted to fight," Butler shouted over the whistles and cheers of veterans. "Defense of home and the Bill of Rights. Not a single drop of American blood should ever again be spilled on foreign soil. Let's build up a national defense so tight that even a rat couldn't crawl through!"

Three days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.

On the same day the British passenger liner
Athenia
was torpedoed and sunk without warning off the Hebrides, drowning thirty American passengers.

That night, in a fireside radio chat to the American people, Roosevelt declared, "This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well."

In November Congress passed a new neutrality act that legalized the sale of munitions to belligerent nations on a cash-and-carry basis. The news filled Butler with dismay.

"This country," he protested, "did not have one solitary blessed thing to do with the making of this mess over there, and there is no possible sane and logical reason why we should feel any impulse to take a hand in it."

A spiteful rumor that Butler had become a spokesman for Father Coughlin's Christian Front led some Jewish groups to threaten cancellation of speeches he was scheduled to make to them in November.

"I couldn't believe there was a word of truth in this," wrote Mildred Smith, executive secretary of the Open Forum Speakers Bureau, "but I dared not say an official `no' without direct word from you on this matter."