The Plot To Seize The White House (35 page)

He wired back indignantly, "Have never spoken for the Christian Front. I am a Quaker and am preaching tolerance and am not connected nor will I have anything to do with any movement or organization advocating intolerance or the entrance of this country into any foreign war."

His hatred for war did not cause any diminution in his hatred for fascism, but he refused to sanction one to fight the other except in absolute self-defense. Once he was visited by a female cousin who had married a German and brimmed over with praise for the Nazis. Butler's face grew taut as she babbled on, but he said nothing until it was time to say good-bye.

Unable to contain himself any longer, he rasped at the door, "Nellie, if Hitler comes over here, thee can be sure I will be on the beach at Atlantic City to kick the everlasting hell out of him!"

His taste in books increasingly reflected both his antiwar and his anti-Fascist convictions. In his library during his last years were
Sawdust
Caesar,
by George Seldes,
The Road to War,
by Walter Millis, and
Johnny
Got His Gun,
by Dalton Trumbo.
Europe Under the Terror,
by John L. 
Spivak, was inscribed to him as "one of the best fighters against Fascism in the country, with the respect and admiration of J.L.S."

In 1939 he wrote an antiwar piece for a book edited by Paul Comly French,
Common Sense Neutrality-Mobilizing for Peace.
Sharing the covers with him were such contributors as Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles A. Beard, Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, Senator William Borah, Norman Thomas, Sumner Welles, Herbert Hoover, Senator Robert La Follette, Jr., John L. Lewis, and Elliot Roosevelt.

But as the Nazis swept through Belgium and the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, bypassing the Maginot line and imperiling France, millions of Americans grew alarmed. A Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies was organized by William Allen White to rout the isolationists.

In a mood of black despair Butler delivered his last antiwar speech on May 24 at Temple University. Hating Hitler and Nazism, he nevertheless could not shake off the dread specter of one or two million dead American youths strewn over Europe's battlefields. He decried fears of a German invasion of the United States as alarmist, playing into the hands of war profiteers.

From the comfortable vantage of hindsight, it is easy to fault Smedley Butler as having been woefully shortsighted in his stubborn view that the best interests of Americans were served by persisting in a policy of neutrality. But thirty years in uniform, seeing active service in every war and campaign since the Spanish-American War, had convinced him that war was nothing but a cruel and bloody swindle of the people.

His suspicions were not eased by observing industrialists and bankers entering trade cartels with America's potential enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, while U.S. arms manufacturers made huge profits selling munitions to both sides and pressed Congress to spend new billions on "defense" to keep up with the "arms race" they themselves had promoted.

In his disillusionment he saw little difference between World War I and World War II. Ever since he had been a starry-eyed Marine recruit of sixteen, American administrations had persistently cried wolf in order to use him and the youths under him in order to protect and augment foreign investments wrapped in the flag. It was now impossible for him to believe that the 
shouts of wolf he heard once more any more genuine than all those he had heard at regular intervals since 1898.

Worn out by his strenuous speaking tours, discouraged as he saw the United States slipping step by step into another bloodbath, be fell ill with exhaustion. His doctor ordered him to enter the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia for a rest and examination.

"As soon as I get out," he promised Ethel Bitter, "I am going to take thee to Europe for the vacation I've never managed to find time for. Thee deserves it for thy patience!"

During his four weeks in the hospital, however, lie lost weight rapidly and guessed that his ailment was more serious than the doctors were letting him know.

On June 10 Italy declared war on Britain and France. Roosevelt promptly called for "full speed ahead" in the promotion of national defense and for the extension of material aid to "opponents of' force."

The next day Congress voted another $3.2 billion in military appropriations.

On June 14 Butler's gloom plunged to new depths when Germany invaded France unopposed. Four days later Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, asked Congress for a two-ocean navy in a $4-billion expansion program.

During a visit by his son Smedley, Jr., Butler reflected glumly on the futility of his long fight to keep his country from getting involved in another war. "I think," he said ruefully, "that I should have stayed with my own kind." He meant Quakers and Marines, rather than politicians.

On June 21, 1940, hours before France was scheduled to surrender officially to Adolf Hitler, Smedley Darlington Butler died in the hospital of an abdominal ailment suspected to be cancer.

Although the paths of President Roosevelt and Smedley Butler had diverged sharply over the questions of war and peace, the President sent a wire to Ethel Butler: "I grieve to hear of Smedley's passing. I shall always remember the old days in Haiti. My heart goes out to you and the family in this great sorrow."

Among others who sent condolences were former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, then ambassador to Mexico, and Major General Thomas Holcomb, commandant of the Marine Corps. A simple funeral service was held at the Butler home in Newtown Square, followed by burial in West Chester, with attendance limited to close friends and immediate members of the family. Ethel Butler knew that elaborate formal ceremonies would be a violation of the principles of her husband, who had always detested phony pomp and circumstance.

The general who could have had all the wealth and power he wanted as dictator of the United States died leaving an estate that totaled two thousand dollars.

The New York Times
now hailed him as "one of the most glamorous and gallant men who ever wore the uniform of the United States Marine Corps.... a brave man and an able leader of troops.... He laughed at danger, and he set an example to his men that helped them to carry out the traditions of the Marine Corps." Calling him also "often a storm center," the
Times
added, "It was when he ventured into public affairs that his impetuosity led him into trouble."

In an editorial obituary on June 23 the New York
Herald Tribune
had no cautious reservations:

It is as a great "leatherneck" that Gen. Smedley D. Butler will be remembered. He was an admirable officer, as tough 
in his speech as in the
fiber of his body
and soul. He came of Quaker ancestry, but no Quaker more dearly loved to be belligerent. . . . Because
he was
utterly unafraid, brave and unselfish, he earned the characterization of being the ideal American soldier, and, to use the words of an official citation of the Navy Department, of being "one of the most brilliant officers in the United States."

Thirty years later Tom Dick Butler told me wistfully, "Dad's experiences were an important part of our lives. He was always `where it was at.' We miss him tremendously."

When the war that Smedley Butler had dreaded and sought to prevent came to his country out of the clouds over Pearl Harbor, eighteen months after his death, an American destroyer was named the
U.S.S. Butler
in his honor. Converted to a high-speed minesweeper, it saw distinguished service during the war.

That would not have seemed inappropriate to the fighting hero who hated war as a racket, yet who had once declared, "I am a peaceloving Quaker, but when war breaks out every damn man in my family goes." Both his sons entered the service, Smedley, Jr. in the Marines, Tom Dick in the Navy.

A hell-for-leather Marine officer who drove himself as hard as his men, he had won their enthusiastic admiration and loyalty. He, in turn, had been passionately and stubbornly devoted to them, in service and out of it.

Former Marine Commandant David M. Shoup, who served under Butler in China, told me that he and all the men in the command had respected Butler as "one helluva fine soldier."

During World War II Butler's old newspaper friend, E. Z. Dimitman, interviewed Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific as a war correspondent.

Noting a resemblance between MacArthur's commander of the 32d Division, General Robert L. Eichelberger, and Old Gimlet Eye, Dimitman mentioned it to MacArthur and suggested that Eichelberger might prove another Butler.

"Never in a million years," MacArthur replied emphatically. "There's only one Butler. He was one of the
really
great generals in American history."

Although Butler may have been the first high-ranking Marine Corps general to challenge establishment policies, he was not the last.

Significantly, as early as January, 1966, another distinguished Marine general, former Commandant David M. Shoup, went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to warn the American people that President Lyndon B. Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam was a tragic mistake.

It might also be noted that before the explosion of the Pentagon Papers, two Marine Corps colonels wrote books denouncing the intervention in Vietnam as genocide against a people caught up in a civil war, in support of a corrupt Saigon dictatorship.

Perhaps the elite fighting team of the United States produces high-ranking dissenters like Butler, Shoup, and the two colonels because many men who choose careers as Marine Corps officers tend to be strongly motivated by patriotism and idealism. When there is an American military intervention overseas, it is usually the Marines who spearhead it, do the fighting, get an accurate picture of the real situation, and observe who is being politically supported or suppressed, and why.

All too often these officers have been disillusioned by the use of the Marines to suppress social change in small countries, on behalf of dictators, an elite military and business class, and American commercial interests. This realization outrages their idealism. They resent the expenditure of the lives of Marines under them for sordid motives in power games of dollar diplomacy and international politics.

Hence the most intelligent and high-principled Marine staff officers may become the bitterest critics of American administrations that misuse the Corps. The war records, motivation, and 
integrity of such generals as Butler and Shoup make it impossible to dismiss their testimony expressing dismay at the way United States expeditionary forces have been deployed in the name of national defense.

Although Butler had considered himself basically a pacifist who hated war, he had placed duty to his country above all other considerations and had spent thirty-three years of his life carrying out orders to defend it. His gradual disillusionment with those orders, and the men who gave them, had led him to speak out abrasively against the use of the military on behalf of American vested interests.

No matter whose corns he trod on, or the cost to his career, he had habitually said and did what he thought right. His bluntness had made him unpopular with some Presidents, Secretaries of State and Navy, and the highest-ranking generals and admirals in Washington, who considered him a military firebrand as irrepressible as Generals Billy Mitchell and George S. Patton. But it was just this quality in Butler that had given him the courage and integrity to face public ridicule to expose, in the name of service to his country, what John L. 
Spivak called "one of the most fantastic plots in American history."

"What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day," Spivak wrote. "Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories.

It would be regrettable if historians neglected this episode and future generations of Americans never heard of it."

In 1964 Speaker of the House John W. McCormack referred to the plot in his speech before the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, when he warned against rightwing extremists in the Barry Goldwater camp. But he did not give any details, and only a knowledgeable handful of Americans understood the full implications of what he was talking about.

The conspiracy unquestionably inspired the novel
Seven Days in
May,
made into a successful film, which portrayed a Fascist plot by high-placed American conspirators to capture the White House and establish a military dictatorship under the pretext 
of saving the nation from communism. Few of the millions of Americans who read the novel or saw the film suspected that it had a solid basis in fact.

It would seem time that school textbooks in America were revised to acknowledge our debt to the almost forgotten hero who thwarted the conspiracy to end democratic government in America.

If we remember Major General Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States-and for making damned sure no one else did either.

Adams, Charles Francis, 107-110, 112, 114-116

Aguinaldo, Emilio, 41

Alaska, 234

Alber Lecture Bureau, 117

All Quiet on the Western Front,
105

American Civil Liberties Union, 13, 197

American Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.), 74, 77, 79

American Labor party (A.L.P.), 222, 229-230

American League of Ex-Servicemen, 222-223

American League against War and Fascism, 229

American Legion, 6, 7, 9, 11-15, 17, 22, 26, 29, 31, 82, 106, 116, 118, 128-129, 135, 140-142, 144, 145, 156, 163, 165, 166, 168-169, 171, 175, 179, 181, 183, 190, 199, 200, 205, 206, 208-210, 213, 216, 217, 221, 222