The Coup That Wasn’t
ONE FROSTY DAWN in November 1934, 500,000 World War I veterans rolled out of their blankets in the pine barrens around the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Elkridge, Maryland. The brassy bugle notes of “Assembly” hurried them to the camp’s parade ground, where, mounted on a white steed and surrounded by his staff, they found their leader, Major General Smedley Darlington (“Old Gimlet Eye”) Butler, U.S.M.C., retired.
Squad by squad, the men tramped briskly out onto U.S. Highway 1 (this being the days before Interstate 95 existed) and turned south. A lumbering ammunition train, supplied by the Remington Arms Company and E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, brought up the rear. At the head of the long column as it swung along through the misty morning rode General Butler with his high command. It was nearly sundown before the citizen army reached Washington and filled Pennsylvania Avenue from end to end.
His spurs clinked loudly as General Butler strode into President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s study.
“Mr. President,” barked the general, “I have 500,000 men outside who want peace but want something more. Let it be understood that henceforth I will act as the nation’s executive. You may continue to live here at the White House and draw your salary, but you will do and say only what I tell you. If not, you and Vice President Garner will be dealt with as I think best.”
The president nodded assent and the United States became a fascist state.
AS SCRIPTS for an American coup d’etat go, this one — condensed from the full-length, nine-paragraph treatment in the December 3, 1934 issue of Time magazine — seemed reassuringly ridiculous.
Thirteen days earlier, General Butler, a highly decorated war hero who Teddy Roosevelt once called “the finest fighting man in the armed forces,” had testified in secret session before a congressional committee investigating fascist propaganda activities in the United States. For nearly two hours, Butler’s steel-trap memory spilled out the details of a story astonishing in its implications, a story that seemed simply too evil to be true: a conspiracy by American multimillionaires, fearful that the New Deal would rob them of their wealth, to seize control of the White House and install their own fascist junta.
Butler said the plotters’ emissary had tried repeatedly to recruit him as the “man on the white horse” needed to mobilize a massive paramilitary army. To back up his allegations, Butler offered names, dates, and places.
By the time his story had been run through Henry Luce’s Time machine, however, Butler emerged as little more than a military malcontent whose marching orders came from sources unknown or imagined. From its headline (“PLOT WITHOUT PLOTTERS”) on down, Time took the facts and twisted them as it pleased. Even an out-of-focus photograph of Butler sufficed, presumably because an outstretched finger was implanted firmly in his ear. (Caption: “He was deaf to dictatorship.”)
“No military officer of the United States since the late, tempestuous George Custer,” Time advised its readers, “had succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler.”
Time’s phony portrait-in-print of Butler typified its treatment of those bold enough to do — or simply say — things publisher Luce might not like. Years earlier, as the ranking major general of the U.S. Marine Corps, Butler narrowly escaped court-martial for some off-the-cuff remarks in which he referred to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as a “hit-and-run driver.” Mussolini was something of a hero to Luce, who had, as his ablest biographer noted, a “long and semi-secret liaison with Fascism.” In a speech to a group of Rochester, New York businessmen in 1928, Luce had said: “America needs at this moment a moral leader, a national moral leader. The outstanding national moral leader in the world today is Mussolini.” Four years later, Butler had campaigned tirelessly for Roosevelt; FDR’s brand of moral leadership, however, was not exactly what Luce had in mind.
So it was that Butler, in performing what many later considered his greatest act of patriotism, fell victim to Time’s singular talent for character assassination by adjective, invective, and innuendo: Butler was a “hot-headed general” with a “sensational tongue” and “lurid tale” who had “found it best to retire from the Marines” after a series of “highly embarrassing incidents.” Which all went to prove, as it might have been expressed in the peculiarly backwards Timestyle, a lesson Henry Luce had learned long ago and applied many times since: mightier than the sword is the pen.
BUTLER’S BOMBSHELL was a startling news story — so startling, in fact, that it seemed destined to dwell somewhere in the murk between fiction and fact. Individual pieces of the plot were plausible enough, but the breadth of the story Butler described seemed frightening and, at the same time, fanciful. Wall Street’s unbridled enmity for FDR was well known, as were its right-wing political proclivities. European fascist movements had used organizations of disgruntled veterans as instruments for seizing power, as had Mussolini with his “March on Rome” in 1921.
But things, up to now, simply had not worked that way in America. It couldn’t happen here. Or could it?
The despair ushered in by the Great Depression led millions of Americans, including those on the top and bottom rungs of the nation’s economic ladder, to question a system of government that clearly was not working very well. The most vivid display of that despair — more than the street-corner apple vendors and snakelike unemployment and soup lines — came in the summer of 1932, when a pathetic army of homeless and out-of-work World War I veterans peaceably camped out in the nation’s capital, pleading for early payment of bonus certificates due but not yet delivered. Their government’s response was to summon the troops and scatter them out of Washington with tear gas and bayonets.
As President Roosevelt delivered his 1933 inaugural address the following March, more than fifteen million Americans still were out of work — roughly one-third of the nation’s labor force — and many of those lucky enough to have jobs were earning as little as a dime an hour. To these victims of a national economy gone haywire, Roosevelt offered at least some semblance of hope. During his first year in the White House, sixteen million Americans went on government relief rolls and two and a half million went back to work. Banks were ordered closed, then reopened with federal guarantees for depositors. New “alphabet soup” agencies seemed to spring up overnight, extending the reach of the national government into virtually every corner of the economy.
But problems — deep and seemingly intractable ones— persisted. The lingering depression served as an ideal breeding ground for new strains of demagoguery, everything from Father Charles Coughlin’s rabid radio sermons to Huey Long’s “every-man-a-king” scheme for sharing the wealth. A summertime wave of labor disputes in 1934, including the nation’s first general strike, took millions of Americans off their jobs and tied entire industries in knots. In September, one million members of the United Textile Workers went on strike. Manufacturers frequently resorted to recruiting strikebreakers from the ranks of the American Legion (still manipulated by the wealthy men who bankrolled its formation), which led, more often than not, to brutality and bloodshed.
The nation’s titans of industry and finance had no use for the New Deal and its principal engineer. Their list of grievances against FDR was long. He had abandoned the gold standard and intentionally inflated the dollar. He had recruited men for his “Brain Trust” like Rexford G. Tugwell, a self-proclaimed socialist who promised to give “human rights” priority over “property and financial rights.” And he had publicly derided the men on Wall Street as “economic royalists,” “unscrupulous money-changers,” and “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties.”
Throughout the early 1930s in America, fascism had not yet lost — at least within certain strata — its aura of respectability. “Popular government is a perilous extravagance in time of emergency,” wrote Demarest Lloyd, the publisher of Affairs magazine. “[Congress] should delegate its powers and functions to a small group, not over a hundred of the most well-informed, intelligent, and patriotic men in the country.”
Others thought the ruling class should be even smaller. In May 1932, two months after FDR’s inauguration, Republican David Reed of Pennsylvania said on the floor of the U.S. Senate: “I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini it needs one now”
AS HE WALKED into the supper room of the New York City Association of the Bar, General Butler prepared for what promised to be the most important battle of his career. In a few moments, he would sit down at a long mahogany table, face two congressmen — John W. McCormack of South Boston and Samuel Dickstein of Manhattan’s Lower East Side — representing the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and lay before them his formidable record and reputation. Butler, the committee’s lead witness for a closed-door session on the morning of November 20, 1934, soon would be describing how a group of right-wing multimillionaires had tried to recruit him to serve as an American-style Mussolini in a plot to seize control of the White House.
Their Wall Street emissary, Butler testified, had, over the course of nearly a dozen meetings, gradually told him of a plan for a nationwide organization of “supersoldiers” patterned after the Croix de Feu (“Cross of Fire”), a right-wing cadre of French veterans. Butler, the emissary said, would be the ideal leader for disgruntled American veterans. The veterans would be assembled and armed outside Washington, D.C., a half-million strong, forcing President Roosevelt to accept the initial demands of the powers-to-be: the resignations of the vice president and secretary of state and the appointment, in the latter’s stead, of a new “secretary of general affairs.”
If Roosevelt was willing to go along with the fascist movement, he would be permitted to remain in the White House as a figurehead chief executive. If he resisted, however, he would be forced to resign under a veil of failing health and exhaustion. Then, under the Constitution’s line of succession, the hand-picked leaders of the multimillionaires would take over the United States.
In toto, Butler’s story was richly detailed and, perhaps for that reason, downright nightmarish. Had the details been unloaded on the American public by anyone other than a military hero of unimpeachable integrity and patriotism, the entire episode probably would have been dismissed as either a bad dream or the ravings of a headline-hunting nut. Butler’s no-nonsense, straight-from-the-shoulder style had earned him plenty of critics over his thirty-five-year career; none of them, however, was foolish enough to say he lacked courage, conviction, or candor. Lying had never been one of Butler’s traits.
Born to Quaker parents in 1881, Smedley Darlington Butler left his West Chester, Pennsylvania, home at age sixteen to secure a second lieutenant’s commission in the Marine Corps. He was sent to Cuba, to the Philippines, and then to China, where, as a company commander during the Boxer Rebellion, he was twice wounded, cited for “eminent and conspicuous courage,” and breveted to captain before he turned twenty.
As a give-’em-hell commander in Panama, Nicaragua, and Mexico from 1909 to 1914, Butler earned his most enduring nickname, “Old Gimlet Eye” (from a savage bout with malaria that turned his eyes beet red), served a short stint as an American spy, and was rewarded for his role in the capture of the Mexican port city of Veracruz with a Congressional Medal of Honor. Butler’s unorthodox style in and out of battle made him one of the most popular officers in the Marines, but he had an absolute disdain for bureaucratic red tape and a penchant for stepping on the toes of his military superiors.
As a result, Butler was denied a combat command on the Western Front during World War I. In January 1924, a disgruntled Butler took a leave of absence from the Marine Corps to become Philadelphia’s director of public safety. The new mayor, W. Freeland Kendrick, had been elected on a reform ticket, and he brought in Butler as a way of fulfilling his campaign pledge to root out vice, corruption, and bootlegging.
Much to Kendrick’s dismay, however, Butler proceeded to do exactly that: he halved the city’s felony rate, ordered police raids on more than four thousand speakeasies and whorehouses, and arrested at least ten thousand Prohibition violators. He enraged the mayor’s supporters in high society by raiding not only blue-collar saloons but such centers of upper-crust nightlife as the Ritz-Carlton and Bellevue-Stratford hotels. In 1925, two days before Christmas, Kendrick fired him.
Butler was sent to China in 1927 as commander of the Marine Expeditionary Force. (“Smedley Butler has arrived in China,” Will Rogers quipped. “The war may continue but the parties will stop.”) He proved to be an able diplomat, protecting American lives and property without resorting to military force. His troops built roads and bridges from Tientsin to Peking, winning the friendship of the Chinese people, who twice presented him with the Umbrella of Ten Thousand Blessings — tokens so highly esteemed they often were buried with their recipients.
In the grand scheme of the nation’s military establishment, Butler had shown himself to be something of a square peg in a round hole. His forte was candor of the bluntest possible brand; he had little patience for the bureaucrats he derided as “desk admirals,” for blind obedience to authority, or for mincing words when a four-letter one would do. Even before his retirement from the Marine Corps in October 1931, Butler’s loose-cannon tendencies repeatedly irritated higher-ups, all the more so because he was the most popular officer with rank-and-file soldiers. When the position of Marine Corps Commandant opened up in 1930 — a job he had always wanted — Butler was passed over, even though he was the ranking major general available.
IN AUGUST 1931, Butler was invited to address an American Legion convention in Connecticut, where he issued a blistering attack on American war-mongering. What he said was so controversial that few newspapers printed more than sanitized excerpts. Butler later adapted the text of his remarks into a series of articles for Common Sense magazine, and his major antiwar theme was a bona fide eye-opener:
“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico 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 in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
“During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints.”
Butler pulled no punches. And something about his style appealed to millions of Americans, even if they might disagree with Butler’s actual sentiments. His civilian career began with a bid to secure the 1932 Republican nomination for Senator from Pennsylvania; he stumped the state in support of the bonus bill for veterans and called for more aggressive enforcement of the Volstead Act. (Later, however, Butler would renounce his views on Prohibition.) He lost the Republican primary, but continued with his coast-to-coast campaign to compel Congress to fulfill its pledge to American veterans.
In July 1932, Butler came to the nation’s capital to address the “Bonus Army,” the ragtag assemblage of destitute veterans and their families encamped at Anacostia Flats. More than any other American, he was their genuine hero. His audience at the camp may have been as large as twenty thousand, and he let loose a scathing denunciation of forked-tongued politicians while reminding the veterans of their contributions to the nation and cautioning them against violence.
Later that summer, President Herbert Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to clean the veterans out of the capital. MacArthur’s heartless tactics — his troops prodded the veterans with bayonets, showered them with tear gas, and burned their shanties to the ground — shocked the sensibilities of the nation; even to those who opposed the aims of the bonus marchers, the use of such force on a hapless and defenseless band of peaceful protesters seemed callous and cruel. The entire episode turned Butler’s stomach, and he abandoned his lifelong Republicanism to take to the campaign trail for Roosevelt.
Butler’s national reputation was enhanced the following year with publication of his military memoirs, Old Gimlet Eye — The Adventures of Smedley D. Butler, which he produced in collaboration with journalist Lowell Thomas. The volume of invitations for speaking engagements soon eclipsed Butler’s ability to respond to them, and he signed an agreement with the Alber-Wickes Platform Service of Boston to manage his lecture schedule (“Blowing the Lid Off Crime” and “My Thirty-Two Years With the Marines” were two typical subjects).
Few of Butler’s audiences were disappointed. (Some members of the New Bedford Woman’s Club in Massachusetts, however, branded him a “profane bag of hot air.”) With his hawklike nose and blazing stare, Butler quickly seized the attention of his listeners and did not let go; he paced about the platform with I feverish intensity, and his raspy, resonant voice carried to the farthest reaches of the largest auditoriums. In roughly three years, Butler once calculated, he had made 1,022 speeches in 752 cities and towns across the nation.
Butler was, to use Lowell Thomas’s phrase, “a stick of human dynamite.”
BUTLER HAD “SMELLED A RAT,” as he later put it to Congressmen McCormack and Dickstein, from the moment a chauffeur-driven Packard limousine rolled up in front of his Newton Square, Pennsylvania home in midsummer 1933. It marked his inauspicious introduction to Gerald C. MacGuire, a roly-poly, derby-hatted bond salesman for the New York investment/banking firm of Grayson M.-P. Murphy & Company, who purported to be chairman of the American Legion’s distinguished guest committee for its upcoming national convention.
MacGuire’s proposal, as he first laid it out, was for Butler to spearhead a movement at the convention to depose the “royal family” from leadership of the American Legion. Butler was somewhat sympathetic to that goal — he had, after all, been critical of the Legion’s refusal to endorse payment of bonuses that had been promised by the government to veterans — but he quickly grew skeptical as MacGuire disclosed in a rather roundabout way his ulterior motive: a grass-roots groundswell for a return to the gold standard, which FDR had abandoned.
“We want to see the soldiers’ bonus paid in gold,” Butler said MacGuire told him. “We do not want the soldier to have rubber money.”
Butler mentioned that it would be difficult for him to attend the convention, as he was not even a delegate. That could all be arranged, MacGuire replied; Butler could go as a delegate from Hawaii or Guam and deliver a speech advocating a return to the gold standard, the text of which MacGuire conveniently had brought along.
Butler wondered out loud why MacGuire would be associated with wealthy bankers if he really cared about the nation’s ordinary soldiers and payment of their war bonuses.
“Well, I am a businessman,” MacGuire said. “I have got a wife and family to keep, and they took good care of them. And if you would take my advice, you would be a businessman, too.”
On one occasion, Butler testified, MacGuire showed him a bankbook with entries reflecting more than $100,000 in deposits and on another offered him a “great, big mass of thousand-dollar bills” as compensation for his help. But through several meetings, Butler continued to demur, refusing all money and finally insisting to talk with some of the principals in the plan.
Butler soon found himself meeting with Robert Sterling Clark, a Wall Street stockholder said to have inherited $50 million from his father, a founder of the Singer sewing machine company.
“You understand just how we are fixed,” Butler said Clark told him. “I have got $30 million. I do not want to lose it. I am willing to spend half of the $30 million to save the other half.”
When it became apparent that Butler still would not go along with the convention plan, Clark said to him: “Why do you want to be so stubborn? Why do you want to be different from other people? We can take care of you. You have a mortgage on this house — that can all be taken care of. It is perfectly legal, perfectly proper.”
“Yes,” Butler replied, “but I just do not want to do it, that’s all.” The meeting marked the last time he talked with Clark.
MacGuire, however, would not give up. Butler had become an extremely popular speaker on the commercial lecture circuit, and MacGuire proposed to tag along as his traveling companion. “I want to go around and talk to soldiers in the background,” he told Butler, “and see if we cannot get them to join a great big super-organization to maintain democracy.”
As with MacGuire’s previous ideas, Butler didn’t like it one bit. But his curiosity still compelled him to try to get to the bottom of things, so he simply asked a lot of questions while refusing to make even the mildest kind of commitment.
MacGuire soon left the United States for an extended tour of Europe and Great Britain; he and Butler did not talk again for nearly nine months. In the meantime, Butler got to wondering whether MacGuire was really the middleman for a group of multimillionaires or just a con man, plain and simple. Was he stringing Clark along, promising Butler’s cooperation if he only had some more money at his disposal?
“I could see him working both ends against the middle and making a sucker out of Clark,” Butler later testified. “However, if Clark wanted to get rid of his money, it was none of my business.”
MacGuire returned from overseas in August 1934, and apparently he was itching to talk again with Butler. He called Butler on the telephone, saying that the matter was of the utmost importance, and arranged to meet him at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia later that afternoon. On Butler’s arrival, MacGuire directed him to the rear of the hotel’s lobby and then into an empty café there. The two sat down, and after a bit of meandering chitchat, MacGuire got to the point. In abbreviated form, this is what Butler testified MacGuire told him:
“The time has come for us to get the soldiers together. I went abroad to study the part that the veteran plays in the various set-ups of the governments. . . . I went to France, and I found exactly the organization we are going to have. It is an organization of supersoldiers. Now, that is our idea here in America — to get up an organization of that kind.
“We want to support the president. He has got to have more money. There is not any more money to give him. Eighty percent of the money now is in government bonds, and he cannot keep up this racket much longer. He has got to do something about it. He has either got to get more money out of us or he has got to change the method of financing the government, and we are going to see to it that he does not change that method.
“Now, did it ever occur to you that the president is overworked? We might have an assistant president, somebody to take the blame; and if things do not work out, he can drop him.
“You know, the American people will swallow that. We have got the newspapers. We will start a campaign that the president’s health is failing. Everybody can tell that by looking at him, and the dumb American people will fall for it in a second.
“Now, about this superorganization — would you be interested in heading it?”
“I AM VERY GREATLY INTERESTED in it,” Butler replied, “because you know my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.”
“We have got $3 million to start with, on the line,” MacGuire replied. “And we can get $300 million if we need it.” The money, Butler testified, was to come from Murphy & Company, J.P Morgan & Company, and Robert Sterling Clark.
MacGuire and the men behind him, Butler testified, planned to install as dictator/president General Hugh S. Johnson, the former administrator of the National Recovery Administration, who had resigned from the Roosevelt administration (some said he was fired) and become one of its most vocal and virulent critics. And if Butler refused to lead the fascist army, he said, at least two others were being considered: General Douglas MacArthur, the army’s chief of staff, and Hanford MacNider, the former national commander of the American Legion.
And, Butler asked MacGuire, what about the veterans?
“Well,” MacGuire said, “the government will not give them pensions, or anything of that kind, but we will give it to them. We will give privates $10 a month and destitute captains $35. We will get them all right. We will only have to do that for a year, and then everything will be all right again.”
“What,” Butler asked, “are you going to call this organization?”
“Well, I do not know,” MacGuire said. “In two or three weeks you will see it come out in the paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera.”
The long conversation was their last face-to-face meeting. Although Butler had recounted it to the McCormack-Dickstein committee in executive session, a reporter for the Philadelphia Record and the New York Evening Post, Paul Comly French, managed to break the conspiracy story the same day. Weeks earlier, Butler had told French about his meetings with MacGuire, asking him to see what he could find out about the plot. MacGuire talked openly with French — who he thought to be only a friend of Butler’s — discussing the need for a strong man to save the capitalist system. At the same time his scoop was rolling off the presses, French was offering his own sworn testimony to McCormack and Dickstein confirming the story Butler had just told them.
“The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers,” French said MacGuire told him, “and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.” It was not, in the opinion of detached observers, much of an exaggeration.
The next day’s newspapers contained a chorus of denials from those mentioned in Butler’s testimony and in French’s story. Clark threatened to sue Butler for libel “unless the whole affair is relegated to the funny sheets by Sunday.” From General Johnson: “Nobody said a word to me about anything of this kind, and if they did I’d throw them out the window” From General MacArthur: “It sounds like the best laugh story of the year.”
From Thomas W. Lamont, a House of Morgan partner: “Perfect moonshine! Too unutterably ridiculous to comment upon.” From Colonel Grayson M.-P. Murphy, MacGuire’s employer: “A fantasy! I can’t imagine how anyone could produce it or any sane person believe it.” And from MacGuire himself: “It’s a joke — a publicity stunt. The matter is made out of whole cloth.”
For the moment, however, the leaders of the House Committee on Un-American Activities seemed to believe otherwise. “From present indications, Butler has the evidence,” said vice chairman Dickstein. “We will have some men here with bigger names than Butler’s before this is over.” Added chairman McCormack: “We are going to get to the bottom of this matter and we are going to call witnesses and records that will bring out the truth — whatever that may be.”
FOUR DAYS AFTER they heard Butler’s incredible testimony, Representatives McCormack and Dickstein handed reporters a thirteen-page typewritten statement embargoed for release until the following Monday. The first paragraph was a curiosity in itself. “This committee,” the statement began, “has had no evidence before it that would in the slightest degree warrant calling before it such men as John W. Davis, General Hugh Johnson, General [James] Harbord, Thomas W. Lamont, Admiral [William] Sims, or Hanford MacNider.” None of these names was mentioned again.
That statement also noted that MacGuire’s testimony had been riddled with inconsistencies and retractions, and that two of his most common answers to the committee’s questions were “It is too far back” and “I don’t recall.”
“As the evidence stands, it calls for an explanation that the committee has been unable to obtain from Mr. MacGuire,” McCormack and Dickstein concluded.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities never got an explanation principally because it did not ask for it. By the time Butler appeared before McCormack and Dickstein in late November 1934, the committee was nearing the end of its official life.
On February 15, 1935, the McCormack-Dickstein committee released its final report covering all of the 1934 investigations. As to Butler’s allegations, the committee reported that it “was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization. [In other words, the “smoking gun.”] This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark of New York City.”
The committee, plainly enough, had concluded that Butler was telling the truth. Nearly three months after his original allegations became public, however, most of the nation’s newspapers had tired of the story. Almost all of them overlooked, or relegated to the back pages, the committee’s findings that there had been a fascist plot to depose Franklin Roosevelt from the White House.
“There is no question,” the committee said, “but that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”
Those “financial backers,” however, managed for the most part to keep their names out of the newspapers. Two weeks after Butler’s last meeting with MacGuire, he opened the newspaper and read about the formation of something called the American Liberty League, whose announced objectives were “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” It attacked the New Deal and FDR with unrestrained vehemence.
Financial contributors to the American Liberty League composed a who’s who of millionairedom: representatives of the Morgan, du Pont, Rockefeller, Mellon, Hutton, Pew, and Pitcairn interests. But what stunned Butler most was the mention that one of the American Liberty League’s financiers was Robert Sterling Clark, and that its treasurer was MacGuire’s employer, Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy. Just as MacGuire had predicted, Butler thought.
But none of the Wall Street titans and giants of American industry named by Butler in his congressional testimony ever offered their versions of the story, for the simple reason that the House Committee on Un-American Activities never asked. And when the committee eventually published transcripts of the sworn testimony given to McCormack and Dickstein, all references to the American Liberty League and its multimillionaire backers had been carefully — and secretly — excised. In the end, it seemed indisputable that the committee simply was afraid to call as witnesses, or even to offend, a handful of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens.
Butler had been criticized, cursed, even vilified many times in the past; seldom, however, had he been ignored. After taking dutiful note of his honesty and integrity and verifying the essential truth of his allegations, the Congress of the United States did exactly that.
BUTLER WAS, OF COURSE, ANGRY that the committee had “stopped dead in its tracks when it got near the top.” But his one-man barrage continued for months, and even gave him good reason to accelerate his speaking schedule. He continued his no-holds-barred attacks on the American Liberty League through the 1936 elections, denouncing its hateful propaganda campaign against FDR. The League had spent more than $500,000 trying to defeat President Roosevelt, even enlisting the support of the 1928 Democratic nominee, Al Smith. (“Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party,” Smith exhorted an American Liberty League audience, “and lay them down on your dining room table, side by side, and get a heavy lead pencil and scratch out the word Democratic and scratch out the word Socialist.”) The League was quietly disbanded after Roosevelt’s re-election.
During the next few years, Butler crisscrossed the nation with warnings that profit, not patriotism, would lead America into a second world war. In thirty-three years of military service, he had been under fire 121 times, but now he said he would never go to war again unless America was invaded. “War,” he told anyone who would listen, “is a racket.”
But Butler’s exhausting speaking schedule had taken a visible toll: his cheeks were sunken a bit, his hair was a bit grayer, and his bantamweight frame strained to contain his explosive energy. In May 1940 he checked himself into the U.S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, where doctors discovered he had cancer of the upper abdominal tract. In July, Butler died there at age fifty-eight.
Obituaries in the nation’s newspapers devoted long columns to Butler’s colorful and controversial military career and to the honors, medals, and promotions he had come close to scorning in his antiwar speeches. Most of them, however, did not mention what may have been his most courageous battle of all: exposing a plot to recruit a fascist army in America and engineer the coup of a sitting president.
Even today, history has rendered no verdict on Butler’s sensational story. Was there really such a plot? Were the wealthiest men in America prepared to finance it? At the height of the Watergate crisis, author Jules Archer, in The Plot To Seize the White House, so concluded, leaving only the slimmest margin of doubt to readers.
And, of course, the McCormack-Dickstein committee had answered both questions in the affirmative. Two journalists of an earlier era, George Seldes and John L. Spivak, believed Butler’s story, but some historians since have suggested that Butler was the victim of an elaborate con game perpetrated by a daydreaming Wall Street factotum who preyed upon — and profited from — the multimillionaires for whom he worked.
But the real answers to those questions — or at least clues to them — probably reside in the records of the McCormack-Dickstein committee, which today remain under seal and away from prying eyes at the National Archives.
This article originally appeared in the June/July 1983 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan