The Plot To Seize The White House (33 page)

On June 12 the American League of Ex-Servicemen asked him to speak at a rally in favor of the bonus with American Labor party Congressman Vito Marcantonio. Butler agreed, with the understanding that he spoke as an individual only, not as a 
representative of any group. The League adjutant quickly agreed, adding, 
"Millions of rank-and-file veterans have always looked to you as a champion of their cause in fighting for their rights and to receive justice from the government:"

Meanwhile a vigorous debate was taking place in Congress, sparked by the Nye Committee revelations and the weakness of the League of Nations, over the Ludlow Resolution calling for a national referendum before war could be declared. The resolution failed, but on August 31 
Congress passed the First Neutrality Act. It forbade transportation of munitions to any belligerents after the President had declared a state of war to exist between them and authorized the President to prohibit travel by American citizens on the ships of belligerents.

Butler regretted the failure of the Ludlow Resolution to pass, because he saw it as a way to prevent powerful men from making decisions that could drag the country to war. He praised Congress for passing the Neutrality Act, however, believing that it would help take the profits out of war for American munitions-makers, and also make it difficult for them to embroil the United States in a foreign war by stirring passions over Americans lost at sea in naval attacks.

When a book by Senator Huey Long appeared, hopefully called
My
First Days in the White House,
it listed as members of Long's mythical cabinet Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, with Smedley Butler as Secretary of War. On September
15,
one week after Long was assassinated, Butler was interviewed in Atlanta. He was asked how he felt about his inclusion in the late senator's proposed cabinet.

Characterizing it as "the greatest compliment ever paid to me," Butler smiled, "I certainly felt in good company."

Asked about his own political ambitions, Butler shrugged, "I'm just a gentleman farmer now." Reporters then asked him to comment on the government's transfer of veterans who had been lobbying for the bonus from Washington to Florida, where some had been killed in a violent hurricane.

"What I'm interested in," Butler replied, "is who approved the order to send them down there. They were in Washington, lobbying or pleading under their constitutional rights, when they 
were sent down to the sandspits. There are other lobbyists in Washington.

Why not deport them, too?"

On October 5, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee invoked an arms embargo against both countries under the Neutrality Act. Although Butler sympathized with Ethiopia, he approved of Congress's determination to keep clear of involvement in any foreign war.

On Armistice Day he spoke to a crowd of ten thousand in Philadelphia at a peace rally held by the Armistice Day Celebration Committee and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Deglamorizing the first war he had fought in, the Spanish-American War, he shouted, "That war was caused by the newspaper propaganda of William Randolph Hearst, and he's been trying to get us into another war ever since. Don't let the man you send to Washington get you into another war ... that is surely coming along." Urging an even stronger neutrality law to keep America at peace, he declared: My interest in peace is personal. I have three grown sons* and I'll be damned if anybody's going to shoot them! . . .

We pay the farmers in the West not to grow corn. We pay other farmers not to raise hogs . . . not to grow cotton. Let us pay the munitions makers not to make munitions! . . . We must work against war now. Wait until the war drums beat and you'll go half crazy. You'll march up Broad Street and raise Liberty loans to help Europe pay off its debts to the House of Morgan. . . .

The present man in the White House, Mr. Roosevelt, says he will do his utmost to keep us out of war. That language isn't strong enough for us. We want him to say we won't have war!

He told a Y.M.C.A. audience that Mussolini was invading Ethiopia to get oil because the nation was bankrupt:

The only way out for Mussolini is to declare war on somebody.

That's the regular way of dealing with such situations.
 

*He included his son-in-law, John Wehle.

If this country ever gets busted, you can look for a war in about six months. Before he started it, Mussolini called a conference with England and France ... and he thought he had everybody's permission to go ahead. Diplomacy is reeking with rotten polities. None of the representatives of any of the nations is sincere. I wouldn't trust any of them anywhere.

Interviewed on an N.B.C. radio program, he reported: After the war I began visiting the veterans' hospitals, where I saw the ghastly, human wreckage of that war.... What right have we to send men away from their homes to be shot? I'd limit the plebiscite to those who are actually going to do the fighting and dying, to the men of military age….

Do you want your son to go? Do you want your son to leave his home and lie down on the ground somewhere on the other side of the world with a bullet in him, cut down like a stalk of wheat? Oh, no, not your son! I've got three sons and I know! I've just come back from a 9,000-mile trip around the country and I know this, too. None of the American men I spoke to want to nominate their sons for the Unknown Soldier of the future!

Seeing the war clouds gathering over Europe, he grew worried that Americans would once again be fed slogans and half-truths to distort their judgment, and fall victims to professional propagandists for those who would urge war in support of one favored country or another. He sensed the President's growing internationalism and joined other liberal pacifists in demanding that Roosevelt stick to implementing the New Deal and steer clear of any foreign adventures.

Addressing the Third U.S. Congress Against War and Fascism in Cleveland on January 3, 1936, he urged strict neutrality: Every indication points to a second World War.... The nations of Europe and Asia are spending billions of dollars each year in military preparations. . . . These nations are bound to go to war because the men in charge of the governments 
of some of them have worked their people into a fanatical frame of mind. . . . Now that their people are getting out of control, these so-called leaders must attack some foreign objective if they are to remain in control. With many of them it is a question of a foreign war or being overthrown. None of these dictators is willing to cut his own throat, hence this war. . . .

If we pass a single, tiny thread of help to these leaders gone insane, these same leaders will pull a bigger line after the little one until the rope is so big they can drag us in with it.... When you take sides, you must eventually wind up by taking part. . . .

See that our Congress writes into law a command that no American soldier, sailor or Marine be used for any purpose except to protect the coastline of the United States, and protect his home-and I
mean,
his home-not an oil well in Iraq, a British investment in China, a sugar plantation in Cuba, a silver mine in Mexico, a glass factory in Japan, an American-owned share of stock in a European factory-in short, not an American investment anywhere except at home! . . . Let Congress say to all foreign investors: "Come on home or let your money stay out of the country-we will not defend it."

As the nation grew increasingly polarized between anti-Fascist interventionists and antiwar isolationists, Butler's uncompromising stand against war was sometimes confused with the right wing propaganda of pro-Fascists who wanted no American help given to the victims of Mussolini and Hitler.

In April, 1936, the Tacoma
News-Tribune
published an editorial on his antiwar speeches, intimating that he was "credited with fascist leanings." The Olympia, Washington, post of the United Spanish War Veterans immediately passed a resolution protesting this libel.

Demanding a retraction, they pointed out, "Less than three years ago he stifled an incipient fascist rebellion in the eastern United States, an accomplishment due solely to his own prompt initiative, thereby demonstrating once more his stalwart Americanism."

While Butler had become an isolationist out of disillusionment 
with the motives of those who had engineered armed U.S. intervention in other countries, he hated fascism as fervently as he hated war. He warned angrily that the Fascist fifth column in America was so active that one in every five hundred Americans had become "at heart a traitor to democracy."

One of his long-fought crusades ended in triumph in January, 1936, when Congress, under heavy pressure from the nation's veterans aroused by Butler, Senators Patman and Thomas, and the V.F.W. bonus rallies, finally passed the Patman Bonus Bill over Roosevelt's veto.

Many veterans groups now urged him to throw his hat into the presidential race of 1936. A realist, he declined, explaining, "I am too ignorant to be President of the United States and have not a definite plan for curing our present ills. I am doing the best I can to educate myself, but feel that no man should invite others to follow him unless he has a definite objective, and has the course marked out, day by day. I, of course, learned the above from my military life."

He devoted all his energies to keeping America out of the war he saw coming. Preoccupied with writing and speaking against it, as well as reading to learn more about it, he had no time for the theater, radio, or tennis, which he loved and played brilliantly. At the dinner table at home and elsewhere, guests listened to him spellbound in complete silence. He was kept talking so much that he frequently left the table without having had more than a mouthful of food.

A thoroughgoing extrovert, he was not ostensibly an egotist; it simply came naturally to him as a Marine general to be in command of any situation. His children could not recall any gathering at which their father did not hold forth, less because he wanted or needed to, than because he was urged on by a barrage of interested questions. People were fascinated by his views and experiences.

He was not, however, among the honored guests when the American Liberty League, in January, 1936, organized a banquet for two thousand of its members at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The principal speaker was Al Smith.

In his speech Smith warned Americans that they faced a choice between "the pure air of America or the foul breath of Communistic Russia." The New Deal, he charged, was taking the nation into communism. The press, 8o percent anti-Roosevelt, warmly applauded his attack. Militant C.LO. labor leader John L. Lewis growled that Smith had undoubtedly been "well paid" 
by his present employers for what he had said. New Deal partisans denounced Smith as a tool of Wall Street.

"I just can't understand it," Roosevelt told Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. "All the things we have done in the Federal Government are like the things Al Smith did as governor of New York. They're the things he would have done as President. . . . What in the world is the matter?"

The American Liberty League banquet marked the opening of their hate campaign of propaganda to defeat the reelection of Roosevelt in 1936.

The Scripps-Howard press and its United Press wire service, an exception to the rabidly anti-Roosevelt newspaper chains, rushed to the President's defense.

Following through on Butler's expose, their papers carried a story headlined: "Liberty League Controlled by Owners of $37,000,000,000."

Directors of the League were identified as also being directors of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase National Bank, Goodyear Tire, and Mutual Life Insurance Company. Liberal senators joined the attack.

On January 23 Senator Schwellenbach denounced "J. Pierpont Morgan and John J. Raskob and Pierre du Pont and all the rest of these rascals and crooks who control the American Liberty League." Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr., pointed out that the League's biggest contributors were the Du Ponts, A. P. Sloan, the Pews, E. T. Weir, Sewell Avery, and John J. Raskob,  
and declared, "It is not an organization that can be expected to defend the liberty of the masses of the American people. It speaks for the vested interests."

The attacks on the League, plus Roosevelt's reelection in 1936 over its desperate and expensive opposition, destroyed the organization as an effective force of reaction in America. It was disbanded soon afterward with a brief announcement to the press that the purposes for which the League had been formed had been served, and that it was therefore no longer necessary. But affiliates financed by the League, like the Sentinels of the Republic, the Crusaders, and other pro-Fascist and far-right organizations, continued their agitation.

Butler continued to stump the country through 1936 warning against involvement in the coming war he foresaw. He was gratified on February 29 
when Congress passed the Second Neutrality Act, amending the original act to prohibit either loans or credits to belligerent nations.

He was disturbed, however, when the Spanish civil war broke out in July. The Neutrality Act imposed a boycott of aid to the Loyalist Government, while it was apparent that Mussolini and Hitler were supplying both money and military assistance to Franco. But by this time Butler was so passionately opposed to the loss of another American soldier on foreign soil, he felt only strict neutrality could prevent it.

He shocked a meeting of the American League Against War and Fascism, which was trying to raise funds for the Loyalists, by asking them,

"What the hell is it our business what's going on in Spain? Use common sense or you'll have our boys getting their guts blown out over there.

Americans en masse never did a wrong thing. Mind your own business.

Have faith in your own country." He considered the argument that Hitler and Mussolini had to be "stopped now before it's too late" the kind of sophistry that had plunged America into World War I with frightening warnings about the Kaiser.