Fighting Quaker

How Major General Smedley D. Butler Saved the Future of America

The

By Samantha R. Selman January 11, 2012

The Fighting Quaker

I. Smedley Butler's Family Background A. Smedley's father, Thomas Stalker Butler, was a wealthy politician 1. Served also as a lawyer 2. Elected to House of Representatives in 1897 B. Was enrolled in a school for the sons of wealthy Quakers II. Marine Corps. A. Joins Marines in 1898 1. came in second of two hundred in officer exam 2. joins at sixteen years of age B. Earned two Congressional Medals of Honor 1. the first in Panama in 1914 2. the second after taking Ft. Riviere in 1915 C. Came under fire 120 times, and was shot twice III. A Plot to Seize the White House A. Wall Street businessmen conceive a plot to take over the government B. Several businessmen confront Smedley, and Smedley turns them in C. The newspapers make a mockery out of him, but the plot is foiled.

The Fighting Quaker

FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, began implementing his New Deal. He confronted the stock speculators and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures, and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions. He took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed and provide loans. This outraged some of the conservative financiers. FDR then went even further and began raising their taxes to help pay for these programs. The oligarchs of finance hated him and everything he stood for. They considered the new president a traitor to his own class. Within a year of FDRs taking office, they had begun hatching a plan to get rid of him. In 1934, several wealthy businessmen from Wall Street set their sights on Butler. They were sick of Roosevelt's "Robin Hood" tactics of taking from Wall Street and giving the money to poor and unemployed Americans. Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was sophisticated and persuasive, and they believed he could carry out the coup. This was an attempt to turn America into a fascist country run by corporate powers; if they would have succeeded, today's America would be comparable to that of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy. However, they chose the wrong man for the job. The plotters idea was to enlist a military man who was popular with veterans from the First World War. Many veterans were disgruntled because theyd never been paid the bonuses promised them when the war ended. When their Bonus Army protested by camping out in Washington in 1932, Smedley Butler had shown up to support their cause. He was the most decorated Marine in American history. When another general, Douglas MacArthur, led a charge to destroy the veterans tent city under orders from President Hoover, Butler was fuming. He switched parties and voted for FDR in the election that year. Perhaps the coup-makers didnt know that when they decided Butler was the man to lead their takeover of the government. Or maybe they figured that, with enough money and the temptation of running the country, anybody was corruptible. The idea was to create havoc by Major General Butler leading a veterans march on Washington. Pressured by these events, FDR, so they thought, would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a Secretary of General Affairs or General Welfare. Eventually, the president would agree to turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and Butler would become a ceremonial figurehead. The notion seems pretty far-fetched today, especially given what we know about the integrity of Roosevelt through the Depression and World War II. Apparently the Wall Street group thought they could pull it off. They did not do enough homework on the military man they thought would play along, Smedley Butler. Hed grown up in a politically prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania and during his service, he would come under fire more than 120 times and receive 18 decorations, including two Congressional Medals of Honor. As a genuine soldier, Butler followed orders. The Taft Administration asked him to help rig elections in Nicaragua, which he later admitted to. In what was then called dollar diplomacy, Butler also helped American business interests maintain their hold on other Latin American countries. If thats all they knew about Butler, its understandable that the conspirators against FDR might figure he would play along. He had given a speech to an American Legion convention, the year before FDR was elected, that clearly showed he had a change of heart. When the Legion first formed in the 1920s, most veterans had no clue that big corporations were backing it to use later in breaking strikes. It turned out that one of the Legions main founders was Grayson Murphy, who ran one of Wall Streets big brokerage firms along with being director of a Morgan bank, Guaranty Trust. His name would soon surface as one of the financiers who wanted to remove FDR from power.

The Fighting Quaker

In his speech, Butler decided to give the Legion veterans some insight into how things worked. I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers, Butler stated. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents. In another talk, Butler told veterans that war was largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I knowIve been in eleven of these expeditions. Butler also told the vets not to believe the propaganda [that] capital circulates in the press. In 1932 at the age of fifty Butler retired to civilian life. He handed out maps to his house to Marines who had served under him in case they ever needed his help. Butler speculated that the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Roosevelt a few weeks before his inauguration might have been orchestrated by a big business clique. Now members of that same elite circle decided that Butler, not MacArthur, was the military man best able to lead their coup attempt. One day, they ordered a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire to approach him. Butler was quickly suspicious, but decided to play along until he could figure out what was really going on. Over the course of some months, Maguire incited him. His employer turned out to be financier Grayson Murphy. There were some important people, MacGuire told Butler, who wanted to establish a new organization in the U.S. They had $3 million in working capital and as much as $300 million that could be tapped into. Butler realized the truth of this when a few industrialists united and announced formation of a new American Liberty League in September of 1934. The organization said its goals were to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to promote free enterprise. The Rockefellers were only one of many elite families involved with this. Also involved were two unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates, John Davis (an attorney for the Morgan banking interests) and Al Smith (a business associate of the DuPonts). At first Butler couldnt believe Al Smith could be involved, until Smith published a scathing attack on the New Deal. Butler had once served with a fellow named Robert S. Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a wealthy banker. He now paid a visit and disclosed more of the plan to Butler, who remembered Clark saying: The President is weak. He was raised in this class, and he will come back to it. But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does. So Butler was their choice to lead the takeover. I believe Smedley Butler had studied the Constitution and followed the law. He didnt have to be in FDRs camp to realize that what he was being asked to do was wrong. FDR was the commander-in-chief of the country, and we have a system for how we exchange our leaders. That system is the vote and the election and Butler knew it. Butler brought a reporter in on the conspiracy, so it wouldnt be just his word against the plotters'. They worked together on gathering more information. Around Thanksgiving in 1934, the Committee of the House of Representatives took Butlers testimony behind closed doors. The next day, the New York Times ran a two column headline on the front page: Gen. Butler Bares Fascist Plot To Seize Government by Force. Butler was struck by how the paper wrote about it. The gist of his charges was buried deep inside, while most of the article consisted of denial and ridicule from some of the prominent people he had incriminated. Time magazine followed up with a front-page piece headlined Plot Without Plotters. It caricatured Butler riding a white horse while asking veterans to follow him. No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George 3

The Fighting Quaker

Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler, the article said snidely. The House committee commenced in a two month long investigation. It verified an $18,000 bribe offered to Butler, and came up with a number of other facts to verify his story. The VFW Commander, James Van Zandt, revealed that he had also been approached by agents of Wall Street to lead a fascist dictatorship. Even Time, which twelve weeks before had made fun of the plot idea, came out with a small-print footnote that the committee was convinced ... that General Butlers story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true. After that, though, the committees investigation came to a sudden stop. They never called the financiers for questioning. In fact, when the transcript of the committees interview with Butler appeared, all the names he had disclosed were deleted. Some said that the names were omitted at the request of a member of FDRs cabinet, who did not want to embarrass the two former candidates. FDR never made any comment on the plot. Maybe he thought, now that this was public knowledge, everyone knew the truth of the matter. For whatever reason, the Justice Department avoided any steps toward fuller investigation. That caused Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to issue an angry statement: Not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime. I believe we must include this incident in our history textbooks. Before my father, a former marine, told me about him, I had never heard of Major General Smedley Butler. Couldn't we all learn from this story of how big business stooped to the lowest low to prevent the redistribution of wealth? How one man saved the greatest nation in the world from becoming Nazi Germany, just by refusing to succumb to the plotters' plans? I think everyone could learn from this. Further more, don't our children need someone to look up to besides fictitious comic book heroes?