Jonathan M. Katz - Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of Americas Empire

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For Claire, for everything

The one who deals the blow forgets.

The one who carries the scar remembers.

Haitian proverb

1933

The bankers men were back. Smedley Butler sized up the one doing all the talkingthe bond salesman in the tailored suit. The visitor was sitting in the vaulted main hallway the Butlers used as a living room, his cannonball-shaped head framed by the retired generals old command flags, medals, swords, and assorted tropical bric-a-brac. Two mammoth red satin umbrellas, given to Butler by villagers on his last overseas mission, to China, swayed gently overhead atop their fifteen-foot poles.

The bond salesman, one Gerald C. MacGuire, represented himself as a member of the American Legion, a veterans organization founded at the end of the Great War. He was trying to persuade Butler to come to the next Legion convention, in Chicago, to give a speech denouncing President Franklin Delano Rooseveltspecifically his recent decision to take the dollar off the gold standard. Butler, the salesman said, would travel in secret with a few hundred legionnaire friends. Once they were at the convention, they would spread out around the assembly and start a chant to demand that Butler be given the floor.

What rank-and-file veteran could afford a five-day trip to Chicago in the middle of the Great Depression, Butler wondered. MacGuire replied it would all be taken care of: train tickets, hotels, everything.

How do you get the money to do that? the general asked.

Oh, we have friends, MacGuire responded. Then he opened a bank book showing $42,000 in depositsworth over $850,000 nearly a century later.

Butler was accustomed to people asking him for favors. It was the price of fame. For thirty-three years and four months he had been in active service as a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict dating back to the war against Spain in 1898. Over the course of his career, he had received the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals, the French Ordre de ltoile Noir, and, in the distinction that would ensure his place in the Marine Corps pantheon, the Medal of Honortwice.

But most who asked for an audience at the generals converted farmhouse in Newtown Square, a suburb on Philadelphias Main Line, did not carry thick bankbooks, as the bond salesman did. Nor did they pull up in his dirt driveway in a chauffeured Packard limousine. Butler wanted to know more. Asking around in the days that followed, he learned MacGuire had been a Navy man in the World War, and had suffered a skull fracture at sea in 1918off the exact spot on the coast of France where Butler had been stationed. That explained the ties to the American Legion, if little else.

Over the following weeks, MacGuire continued the courtship. In Newark, where Butler was attending the reunion of a National Guard division, MacGuire showed up at his hotel room and tossed a wad of cash on the bed$18,000, he said.

You put that money away before someone walks in here, Butler barked. Then he asked where all the money was coming from. MacGuire told the general he was working for several wealthy backers. One of them was Robert Sterling Clarkan heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, whom Butler had known as a lieutenant in China during the Boxer Rebellion decades earlier. Another was MacGuires boss, the well-connected financier Grayson M.-P. Murphy, who had close ties with the nations most powerful bank, J. P. Morgan & Co., and Wall Streets most influential law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. Clark himself paid a visit to the Newtown Square house soon after, hinting broadly that he would cover the Butlers mortgage if the Marine played ball.

The dates of the American Legion convention came and went. Butler did not go. But then, a few months later, in early 1934, Butler received a postcard from MacGuire. It was sent from the French Riviera, where the bond salesman had just arrived after visiting Fascist Italy. About two months later, Butler received another postcard, this time from Germany. The Reichstag fire had happened a year earlier. Hitler was now chancellor, on his way to becoming fhrer. MacGuire said he was having a wonderful time in Berlin.

In August 1934, MacGuire called Butler from Philadelphia and asked to meet. Butler suggested an abandoned caf at the back of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

The time has come to get the soldiers together, MacGuire said.

Yes, Butler replied. I think so, too.

He had no idea what they were talking about. He just wanted the salesman to keep talking until the outlines of what he was really after became clear.

First MacGuire excitedly recounted all he had seen in Europe. In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, hed learned that Mussolini and Hitler were able to stay in power because they kept soldiers on their payrolls in various ways. But that setup would not suit us at all. The soldiers of America would not like that, the businessman opined.

But in France, MacGuire had found just exactly the organization were going to have. Called the Croix de Feu, or Fiery Cross, it was like a more militant version of the American Legion: an association of French World War veterans and paramilitaries organized under the populist authoritarian Col. Franois de La Rocque. On February 6, 1934six weeks before MacGuire arrivedthousands of members of the Croix de Feu had taken part in a riot of mainly far-right and fascist groups that had tried to storm the French legislature. The insurrection was stopped by police; at least fifteen people, mostly rioters, were killed. But in the aftermath, Frances center-left prime minister had been forced to resign in favor of a conservative.

MacGuire had attended a meeting of the Croix de Feu in Paris. It was the sort of super-organization he believed Americans could get behindespecially with a beloved war hero like Butler at the helm.

Then he made his proposal: The Marine would lead half a million veterans in a march on Washington, blending the Croix de Feus assault on the French legislature with the March on Rome that had put Mussolinis Fascisti in power in Italy a decade earlier. They would be financed and armed by some of the most powerful corporations in Americaincluding DuPont, the nations biggest manufacturer of explosives and synthetic materials.

The purpose of the coup was to stop Roosevelts New Deal, the presidents program to end the Great Depression, which one of the millionaire du Pont brothers had deemed nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name. Butlers veteran army, MacGuire explained, would pressure the president to appoint a new secretary of state, or secretary of general affairs, who would take on the executive powers of government. If Roosevelt went along with this, he would be allowed to remain as a figurehead, like the king of Italy. Otherwise, he would be forced to resign, placing the new super-secretary in the White House.