by Sally Denton
When he returned to active duty, waiting for retirement, he focused his energy on the plight of the Bonus veterans, whom he thought were getting a raw deal from the country they had served. In December 1929, in response to a groundswell of criticism, the U.S. Senate had begun an investigation of Latin American atrocities at the hands of U.S. Marines. Responding to an interviewer’s question about corruption in the Corps, Butler claimed that the 1912 Nicaraguan elections were rigged and that he had been ordered to use strong-arm tactics to disrupt the electoral process so that America’s puppet leader would not be overthrown. Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, was outraged by Butler’s public allegations: “There is nothing that can do this Government more disservice than such a misstatement of our policy in a Latin American country.” Called on the carpet “like an unruly schoolboy,” as he described it, and apparently at the behest of President Hoover himself, Butler made a final break from what he saw as the failed policy of gunboat diplomacy.
In January 1931, on the verge of retirement, the renegade Marine gave a speech at a banquet at the influential Contemporary Club of Philadelphia that would spark an international firestorm. In an address about the inhumanity of dictators that he believed was off the record and that was meant to diminish the allure of Fascism that was au courant in the country, Butler singled out Benito Mussolini for special condemnation. “A friend of mine said he had a ride in a new automobile with Mussolini, a car with an armored nose that could knock over fences and slip under barbed wire,” Butler told the audience. “He said that they drove through the country and towns at seventy miles per hour. They ran over a child and my friend screamed. Mussolini said he shouldn’t do that, that it was only one life and the affairs of the state could not be stopped with one life.” Calling Mussolini one of “the mad dogs who are about to break loose in Europe,” Butler said he was “one of those fellows who are waiting to start another war. He is polishing up all the brass hats in Italy. He is getting very Roman.”
The audience was naturally horrified by the tale. Unbeknownst to Butler, an Italian diplomat was in attendance, and he immediately cabled Rome. The outraged consul filed a protest with the State Department against a high-ranking U.S. military official, in full regalia, publicly insulting Il Duce—at the moment a staunch American ally. Mussolini adamantly denied that his auto had ever killed a child and that he had taken a ride through the Italian countryside with an American.
Headlines throughout the country shrieked GENERAL CALLS MUSSOLINI A HIT AND RUN DRIVER. When Butler refused to back down, confirming that he had indeed made the remarks and believed them to be true, Secretary Stimson issued a formal apology to Mussolini, and President Hoover ordered Butler court-martialed. Hastily drawn charges for “conduct unbecoming” were filed against Butler, and he was placed under arrest—the first such arrest of a general officer since the Civil War.
The man who wore eighteen decorations and was one of only four military men in American history to be awarded two Medals of Honor—“the only man that ever got a double header,” said Will Rogers—who had risen from teenage lieutenant to major general, was bolstered rather than chastened by the arrest. “Handed a loaded ‘pineapple,’ ” Butler wrote in his memoir, “… the thrust intended to disgrace me and shove me into oblivion acted as a boomerang on those who were howling for my scalp.” Thousands of anti-Fascist Americans and veterans rushed to show their support for the beleaguered fighting Quaker. Their letters poured into Marine headquarters. “General,” wrote a veteran, “the stamp on this letter cost me the two of my last four cents, but I wanted you to know that I am for you.” Then–New York governor Franklin Roosevelt was among many prominent men who offered to appear as a character witness for Butler. With public opinion firmly rooted on his side, the press took up his cause. “Unless we are mistaken the American people are likely to consider these Cabinet officials guilty of a strange timidity toward Mussolini on one hand and of an unwarranted harshness toward a splendid American soldier on the other,” Washington’s Daily News editorialized. Even Mussolini, worried about the anti-Fascist backlash, called it an “unfortunate error” and urged the federal government to quietly dismiss the case against Butler.
At first, Butler—with distinctive pride and self-righteousness, “preparing to fight to the end”—refused a settlement, eager for the public theater such a court-martial would provide. When the charges were dropped a few weeks later, the headlines said it all: YOU’RE A VERY BAD BOY. The affair “cemented my decision to get out in to civil life where I could do something for powerless juniors degraded by the autocratic action of their department superiors,” Butler wrote of his retirement. “It was not easy for me to leave the men … But I realized … it was best to retire while I still had time to build another life.”
Butler was now in great demand as a public speaker. Despite the attempts to muzzle him, or maybe as a result of them, he became ever more outspoken. He resisted attempts by right-wing military and patriotic organizations to entice him to their cause. He embarked on a lecture circuit, espousing isolationism to huge crowds of veterans and arguing for the establishment of a powerful Navy that was prohibited from venturing more than two hundred miles from the U.S. coastline. He told an American Legion audience in Connecticut that during his “thirty-three years and four months [in] the Marine Corps … I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues … I helped purify Nicaraguans for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903.” Calling it a “swell racket” for which he “was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion,” he said he felt as if he “might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best HE could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three CONTINENTS.”
Sharing the dais with Huey Long in New Orleans, Butler spoke to a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, claiming to be “the greatest bill collector Wall Street ever sent into the Central American republics, using my marines to collect, taking orders direct, not from Washington, but from Wall Street.”
After a short-lived and failed bid for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Butler turned his attention to writing his memoir, Old Gimlet Eye, and speaking around the country on behalf of the Bonus Marchers. When Alber Lecture Bureau of Cleveland contracted him for a highly lucrative sixty-city, hundred-thousand-mile tour of America—touting him as “one of the most picturesque and dynamic personalities in American life today”—he used it as an opportunity to meet firsthand the veterans so close to his heart. A lifelong Republican, as were many generations of his forbears, Butler switched parties after Hoover’s violent treatment of the marchers. He donated the earnings from that tour to unemployment relief in Philadelphia and to the Salvation Army, which he thought particularly responsive to the needs of the World War I doughboys.
During the 1932 presidential campaign, he called himself “a member of the Hoover-for-Ex-President League because Hoover used gas and bayonets on unarmed human beings.” ’ He became a devoted Roosevelt supporter, giving forty speeches for him around the country and promoting his candidacy to the four and a half million veterans who looked to Butler for leadership. He advocated for taxing the rich to finance unemployment, the establishment of government-financed school and road construction programs, and creating government subsidies for inventive and entrepreneurial industries. Without such measures, the maverick combatant warned, violent revolution was inevitable. Onstage he flailed his arms and raged against the money tyranny, against the “treasury raiders” who had pocketed “millions of dollars worth of patriotism … on a ten per cent plus cost basis.” The soldiers’ general,
as he was called, railed against vested interests, entrenched corruption, and the class-driven hierarchy within the U.S. military as epitomized by the American Legion. Since its formation in 1919, the Legion had been the instrument of big business and was notorious for its anti-Semitism and reactionary policies against labor unions and civil rights. Butler cautioned veterans to be wary of Wall Street’s flag-waving “Royal Family of financiers” that controlled the American Legion and that, Butler contended, was maneuvering the Legion into supporting the gold standard. He saw the Legion as a paramilitary organization out of touch with the nearly five million rank-and-file men. He thought of the veterans in populist terms and fueled class conflict among them, believing they were a potent political force that could, along with their families, deliver a voting bloc of nearly twenty million. He felt that the Legion was a militaristic reactionary force, in keeping with its roots, that was manipulating the veterans. Don’t be taken in by these Wall Street machinations, he inveighed. “What the hell do you know about the gold standard?… I believe in making Wall Street pay for it [the veterans’ bonuses]—taking Wall Street by the throat and shaking it up.”
Iconic hero to every soldier in America, Butler had a complete affinity for, and commitment to, the veterans. So it was with a dose of skepticism that he greeted two elite American Legion emissaries at his Pennsylvania home during the summer of 1933.
Chapter Thirty-four
We Want the Gold
On the morning of July 1, 1933, just as he finished breakfast at his secluded home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, General Butler’s telephone rang. A man identified himself as “Jack” and said he was an official with the American Legion in Washington. Butler remembered meeting Jack in connection with the veterans’ movement, but did not know him well. Jack told Butler that two veterans were on their way from Connecticut to meet with Butler on a pressing matter, and he urged Butler to receive them. Butler responded affirmatively.
“About five hours later a Packard limousine came up into my yard and two men got out,” Butler would later tell a U.S. congressional committee. “This limousine was driven by a chauffeur. The well-dressed men entered the house and introduced themselves.” One said his name was William H. Doyle, commander of the Legion in Massachusetts. The other identified himself as Gerald C. MacGuire of the Connecticut department of the American Legion. Both were absolute strangers to Butler.
He welcomed them into his house and led them down a hallway to his study. The overweight and perspiring MacGuire guided the conversation, first making small talk in which he claimed to have been a combat Marine who had been disabled with a head wound during World War I. He boasted of his Purple Heart and complained about the silver plate imbedded in his skull. Butler, ever sympathetic to aggrieved veterans, was patient as MacGuire rambled. Finally, the man got to the reason for their visit. Claiming to represent an untold number of rank-and-file Legionnaires who were dissatisfied with the higher-ups in the organization, MacGuire and Doyle were planning to unseat “the royal family in control of the American Legion” at the upcoming Legion convention in Chicago, to be held at the Majestic Hotel in early October, as Butler recalled the conversation. They desperately tried to convince Butler to run for the post of national commander to lead a revolt against the elite leadership, telling him it was of the utmost consequence. The two men were highly disconcerted about President Roosevelt and his New Deal treatment of the veterans.
MacGuire said that he had already made arrangements—as chairman of the Distinguished-Guests committee of the Legion—to have Butler invited to the convention. But when he had submitted Butler’s name to the White House to be a Distinguished Guest, as was pro forma since the American Legion was a quasi-governmental organization, Louis Howe had angrily crossed Butler’s name off the list and declared that the president was opposed to Butler’s invitation, according to MacGuire. “We represent the plain soldiers and we want you … to come there and stampede the convention in a speech and help us in our fight to dislodge the royal family.”
Butler’s suspicions were aroused—by their chauffeur-driven automobile and tailored suits, and by their effort to drive a wedge between him and Roosevelt, whom he admired and considered a friend. He was especially put off by their aspersions against Roosevelt’s treatment of the veterans, which, in Butler’s opinion, had been in stark contrast with the brutality of the previous president’s. He “smelled a rat” but sat silently as he tried to figure out their purpose. “So many queer people come to my house all the time,” Butler would later say, “and I like to feel them all out.”
Luckily, MacGuire enthused, the men had conceived a subterfuge for sneaking Butler into the convention without the White House stopping them. They had arranged for him to be credentialed as a delegate from Hawaii. Butler refused, telling them he had no intention of using a pretext to attend a veterans’ convention. He sent the two disappointed envoys on their way.
A month later they returned. They repeated their appeal, and before Butler could turn them down, MacGuire announced that they had changed tack. Butler was right to have objected, MacGuire told him, for it was beneath his dignity and prestige to attend as a common delegate under false pretenses. Their new plan entailed Butler gathering together several hundred Legionnaires from around the country and traveling with them by train to Chicago. The veterans, who would all be welcome at the gathering, would be strategically seated on the convention floor, and when Butler appeared in the spectator’s gallery, they would be roused to a frenzy, cheering and applauding and stomping their feet, demanding a speech from Butler. The Legion leadership would have no choice but to let Butler “make a speech,” despite the rejection of him by Louis Howe.
“A speech about what?” Butler asked. MacGuire and Doyle exchanged a satisfied look and placed a document on the table in front of Butler. “We will leave it here with you to read over.”
As they rose to leave, they asked Butler to try to round up a few hundred veterans to make the trip. Butler objected, telling them that even if he could interest some veterans, that these impoverished soldiers could never afford to travel back and forth to Chicago and stay in hotels for several days. When he estimated it would cost each man at least one hundred and fifty dollars, MacGuire quickly assured him that he had already made arrangements for the veterans’ expenses to be paid. Withdrawing a bankbook from his jacket pocket, MacGuire flipped the pages to show Butler deposits totaling more than a hundred thousand dollars to go toward the veterans’ expenses. He refused to identify the source of the money, which naturally piqued Butler’s curiosity, but said there was plenty more available.
Butler had been speaking out against the Legion leadership for several years, and he felt strongly that the “royal family” should be ousted. But he also felt that there was something amiss with these two allegedly disabled veterans and their big bank account. He sent them on their way and said he’d be in touch with them once he had read the speech that had been drafted for him to deliver.
As soon as they drove away Butler eagerly picked up the document. It was a highly polished, well-written speech ardently beseeching the Legionnaires to pass a resolution demanding that the United States return to the gold standard. Such a move was imperative, according to the address, so that when the government paid the soldiers their World War I bonuses, they would receive hard currency rather than worthless paper money. So, Butler surmised, someone sought to use the Legion as an instrument to pressure the Roosevelt administration into restoring the gold standard, and Butler was their pawn. But who were they, and was that their only motive?
Butler met MacGuire a third time in September 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, where Butler was addressing a convention of the Twenty-ninth Division. MacGuire appeared unexpectedly and alone and knocked on Butler’s hotel room door. Wearing a black derby over his “bullet-shaped head” with its “close-cropped hair,” MacGuire inquired anxiously about the progress Butler had made in rounding up veterans. Realizing that MacGuire was simply
the front man for powerful backers, Butler demanded to know the source of his money. Nine very wealthy men had put up the funds, MacGuire replied, including his employer—Legionnaire and Wall Street financier Colonel Grayson Meller-Provost Murphy, who operated a brokerage firm in New York City. A West Point graduate and veteran of the Spanish-American War, Murphy in 1919 had been one of twenty men who provided the necessary start-up funding—to the tune of $125,000—for the creation of the American Legion. In addition to owning a prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage firm, Murphy had extensive financial interests in Anaconda Copper Mining, Goodyear Tire, Bethlehem Steel, and numerous J. P. Morgan–owned banks. Mussolini had decorated Murphy, making him a Commander of the Crown of Italy, MacGuire claimed. Given Butler’s recent contretemps with Il Duce, MacGuire’s boast could hardly have improved the Marine’s opinion of Murphy.
MacGuire would only identify one other investor in the scheme—Robert Sterling Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a multimillionaire Wall Street broker famous for his art collection of modernists and masters. Butler remembered Clark as the “millionaire lieutenant” whom he had served under during the Boxer Rebellion in China. He later described the eccentric Clark to Congress as a “sort of batty, sort of queer” man who “did all sorts of extravagant things. He used to go exploring around China and wrote a book on it. He was never taken seriously by anybody. But he had a lot of money. An aunt and uncle died and left him ten million dollars.”
