The Plot To Seize The White House (13 page)

Torn between court-martialing him for his frequent intransigence toward higher authority and decorating him for his accomplishments in an almost impossible job, the Army finally awarded him its Distinguished Service Medal. The Navy felt impelled to follow suit with its own Distinguished Service Medal. The French awarded him their Order of the Black Star. He wore these decorations proudly beside his World War I Victory Medal with French clasp.

But the reward he treasured most was the gratitude of hundreds of thousands of doughboys back from the misery of the trenches, grateful for his efforts to ease their hardships as they waited for evacuation home. He did a lot of hard thinking as he watched the wounded and maimed pass through Pontanezen, some with their nervous systems irreparably shattered.

"Gradually it began to dawn on me to wonder," he related later, "what on earth these American boys are doing getting wounded and killed and buried in France." This uneasy reflection began to plant seeds of doubt in his mind about the ethics of his chosen calling.

With America once more at peace and Congress slashing military funds drastically, the future of the Marine Corps looked bleak. Butler was indignant when Marine Corps headquarters failed to protest its reduction to a mere appendage of the Navy. In disgust he announced his decision to retire and wrote his father urging that John Lejeune be appointed the new commandant in 1920 to save the Corps.

Thomas Butler saw eye to eye with his son on the need to preserve the Marine Corps's independence and agreed that Lejeune, who had distinguished himself in the Battle of Meuse-Argonne, was the man to fight for it in Congress. So on January 
30, 1920, Lejeune became the new commandant. He, in turn, coaxed Butler into staying on in command of Quantico to help in the struggle to save the Corps.

To dramatize the Corps's need of funds for modernization, Butler held summer maneuvers that restaged the Battle of the Wilderness between Grant and Lee. On the first day it was "fought" as it had happened; next day it was restaged with a significant difference-the use of modern equipment. The presence of President Warren G. Harding, a Civil War buff, helped win widespread news coverage. Butler's shrewd tactic was highly effective in getting a reluctant Congress to vote adequate funds for the Corps.

It was a forty-mile march from Quantico to the battleground. As usual wearing no insignia to identify him, Butler marched at the head of the column walking his horse, carrying full gear on his back in the hot July sun.

When one soldier faltered, Butler told him gently, "Son, I'm more than twenty years older than you, but we're going to do this together." He said later, "I wanted to show them that they could force themselves to do things that would be necessary in war." And they all did.

His troops never learned that following one such battlefield exercise the forty-year-old commander experienced a minor heart attack, for which a doctor prescribed rest and digitalis. The word that spread through Quantico was that it was useless to try to fall out of a hike, because the Old Man would just pick up your pack, add it to his own, and hike right alongside you with it.

The humdrum garrison life of peacetime, with no alarums and excursions to divert him, took its toll of Butler's temper. "I was itching for a scrap-action-something with a snap to it," he admitted later.

But he was never irascible in any matter that pertained to ailing Marines who had served under him. In August, 1920, a private wrote him, "I have been a patient in St. Elizabeth's hospital for the Insane since Sept. 20, 1918. I am writing to ask if you will arrange to have me transferred to one of the institutions in Philadelphia, so that I can be close to the folks at home."

"I will look into the matter and let you know," Butler replied gently.

"You can be assured that everything will be done for 
your comfort, for you are one of the prize soldiers of the Marine Corps, and we all like you very much."

He grew increasingly incensed at what he considered the in-gratitude of the nation toward its veterans. Once the war crisis was over and Americans felt safe, he reflected, the shattered heroes of yesterday were ignored as the "bums" of today. He was particularly embittered by the indifference of big business toward the men in uniform who had so often been called upon to spill blood for corporate profits.

The profiteering of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the price they charged for transporting troops led him to write his father angrily, "I am at a loss to understand why the Pennsylvania people are so antagonistic to men in uniform. The railroad can haul civilians from Washington to Philadelphia and back every Sunday for
$3.78
and want $14.00 to haul soldiers. . . . These Pennsylvania people are a lot of damned hogs and I hope that something will happen to them."

Butler raised Marine Corps morale by developing a great football team that became the talk of the sports world, and began building a sports stadium with volunteer Marine labor and with cement contributed by cement companies.

Proliferating veterans' groups vied with each other for the distinction of adding his name to their letterheads. He tactfully declined invitations to join, offering his view that all such groups "must be nonpolitical, and should never be heard on the floors of Congress." In June,
1923,
he sent regrets to the Marine Corps Veterans Association explaining, "I have very decided views on associations, and I am not a member of any but the American Legion, and most inactive, at that-only joining it because General Lejeune requested me to do so." He considered the Legion too political and undemocratic, with leaders who used it as a mouthpiece for big-business interests.

Late in 1923 Butler's career took an unorthodox twist.

W. Freeland Kendrick, the new mayor of Philadelphia, urged him to take a leave from the Marines to become the city's Director of Public Safety. The job was that of a "supercop," in charge of the police and firemen, with the task of smashing the links between crime and politics in Philadelphia.

Under Prohibition the city had become one of the most corrupt municipalities in the country. Over eight thousand places sold bootleg liquor without fear of prosecution; gangsters ran wide-open gambling joints and brothels; robberies, holdups, and other crimes were soaring.

All attempts to clean up the City of Brotherly Love had failed because of a profitable alliance among gangsters, speakeasy operators, and crooked ward bosses, who bribed and controlled the police.

Kendrick, a conservative Republican politician, had been elected mayor on a law-and-order campaign and was now under heavy pressure to keep his pledge. He was advised to bring in an outsider, preferably a military man, who could not be bought, bluffed, or bullied, to head the police. Brigadier General Smedley Butler, now a vigorous forty-two and a colorful war hero with an impressive list of credits in
Who's Who
in the Services,
seemed a perfect choice to please the voters. He had even had police experience organizing the Haiti Gendarmerie.

But Butler declined the job. On November 21 he wrote Kendrick, 
"While this position would appeal to me very greatly if I believed there were the slightest chance of success, I am convinced that the present political conditions existing would ... throw away the work of a lifetime in a perfectly hopeless undertaking."

He was relieved when the Navy ordered him to report for orders to the Scouting Fleet. But Kendrick and the Republican party of Pennsylvania now needed him desperately to still a storm of public criticism. So Kendrick, Congressman Bill Vare, and Pennsylvania's two senators went to the White House to plead with President Calvin Coolidge that Butler be given a year's leave of absence to clean up Philadelphia.

Only a man with Butler's reputation for total honesty, and the ability to discipline men while capturing their imagination and winning their loyalty, they told Coolidge, could reorganize the Philadelphia police force. The President finally agreed and sent word to Butler that the White House would like him to tackle the job in the interests of good government. His father warned him against it as a political quicksand, but Butler did not see 
how he could refuse a mandate from both the people of Philadelphia and the President.

His reluctant consent brought wondering letters from old comrades all over the world, many of whom imagined that he had resigned from the Corps. Butler assured them that it was only temporary. "This job is a terrible one and I will probably be cut to pieces," he wrote to Lieutenant Colonel H. 
L. Roosevelt in Paris. "On January 7 I will be sworn in as a Philadelphia cop, for better or worse."

Butler told a reporter for the Philadelphia
North American,
"Kendrick has his neck in a noose with me. If I fall or I am run out, lie is going to go down also. If he reverses me just once I'll quit, and the resignation will be in the form of a telephone call telling him I am on my way back to Quantico, and that the keys to my office are on my desk. I do not care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right or wrong. From January 7 they are going to be enforced." He was not opposed to drinking in principle, he added. What was at stake was enforcement of the law, pure and simple, not the ethics of Prohibition.

Even before he took office, "Boss" Vare sent an emissary to him, Judge Edwin O. Lewis, to offer Vare's "suggestions" for key appointments in reorganizing the police department. None too politely, Butler made it clear what Lewis and Vare could do with their suggestions.

He rented a home in nearby Overbrook, but his wife and children seldom saw him there because he spent seven days a week on the job, working until after midnight.

Sworn in on January 7, 1924, he took the oath of office in his Marine uniform, but half an hour later changed it for one of his own design. Blue with gold trim, it had a cape taken from the 
Marine mess jacket with a flaring red lining. It was dramatic and impressive, and meant to be.

He promptly summoned all police inspectors to his office.

"I want the lieutenants in your forty-two districts to clean up in forty-eight hours," he snapped, "or face immediate demotion. That is all." Then he visited each one of the districts until he had spoken to every man on the force. The new motto, he announced, was short and sweet: "Clean up or get out!"

In his first week on the job he raided and shut down 973 liquor and gambling joints, without even warning Mayor Kendrick. Philadelphians were electrified. The police winked at each other, convinced that Butler was a smart "grandstander" who would make a big splash for the headlines, then quiet down and take it easy. Vare would see to that.

Going night after night with only a few hours' sleep, he pressed his raids and inspections relentlessly. He demanded from his men a dedication to duty equal to his own, but many of them, cut off from former sources of graft, were hostile and resistant to the new broom sweeping too clean.

"Sherman was right about war," Butler sighed wearily, "but he should have tried leading the Philadelphia police!" Nevertheless he began to show results. Worried Philadelphia bootleggers began unloading their stocks at cut prices. Many crooks and gamblers began streaming out of the city in search of more hospitable territory.

Encouraging excessive zeal among his forces, Butler took responsibility for police who went too far on raids by using axes freely to destroy furniture and fixtures, searching private homes and vehicles on suspicion, and closing premises that had a right to stay open to sell nonintoxicating beverages. Magistrates began refusing to issue search warrants to permit police to enter known speakeasies masquerading as private residences. Many cases were dismissed on grounds of insufficient or illegal evidence.

Butler realized that he would have to modify his tactics, and astonished Philadelphians by frankly confessing his mistakes to both the press and the police.

"Guard against anything that will embarrass Mayor Kendrick's administration," he now ordered police. "Keep away from the 
hippodrome stuff. I must admit that I have sinned in this latter respect more than any of you, and the only excuse I have to offer is that I was unduly excited and enthusiastic."

Such candor won the affection and respect of reporters, who found Butler colorful copy and loved to join him for midnight suppers on Chestnut Street. There was never any question he would not answer for them directly and honestly. But if they were for him, their publishers-with the exception of the Philadelphia Record-were not; their editorial pages sought to ridicule and discredit him relentlessly, "They insisted on treating me like a queer animal from the circus,"

Butler related. "My chance remarks were twisted and distorted to paint me in the worst light. . . . About fifty of the minor officials and correspondents of the newspapers became my loyal friends, but they had no influence in shaping the editorial point of view."

By March angry Republican ward leaders were furious at Butler for disrupting their network of police control. They vigorously applauded City Treasurer Thomas J. Watson at a meeting when he shouted, "This country, as well as the Republican organization, would be a hell of a sight better off without Butler!" The Philadelphia City Council closed ranks against him.

"My foolish notion that the laws of our country applied to rich and poor alike accounted for the growing feeling of antipathy toward me," he recalled later, adding, "By the end of 1924 I had been cussed, discussed, boycotted, lied about, lied to, strung up, and reviled. Several times I was on the point of resigning. The only reason why I continued in my unpopular and uncomfortable position was to see what the hell was going to happen next!"

Try as he might, he was unable to break the power of the ward bosses.

In April he was forced to admit that be had been double-crossed by about half of his police lieutenants, who had bowed to ward-boss pressure to permit shuttered saloons, gambling houses, and speakeasies to reopen.