The Plot To Seize The White House (16 page)

Serving under him in China was David M. Shoup, later to win a Congressional Medal of Honor at Tarawa and become a 
commandant of the Marine Corps as well as a celebrated critic of the Vietnam war. "Butler was one helluva soldier-no doubt about his military capabilities," Shoup recalled later in admiration. "I really felt I wanted to emulate him in every way. Everything I saw in Tientsin indicated that he was a helluva showman, too, but a good warrior in the service of his country."

The author questioned General Shoup about the Marines' mission in China in 1927-1928 "I would say it was pretty hard to say who we were supporting there," he replied. "It was just our presence there that was the thing. I heard no solid reason for why we were being sent; we were just told we were going to fight the Chinese. We didn't know what the mission was. But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil's investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did. It was only some years later that I learned that General Butler had been thinking the same way. I thought I had been alone in suspecting it."

All through 1928 Butler nevertheless carried out his orders scrupulously and prevented a shot from being fired in anger. In March he wrote his father that he was wary of involvement with any other power represented in China because of his suspicion of their selfish interests: The Japanese are most anxious to control all of North China, particularly Manchuria, and will sacrifice anything and back anyone who will assure to them this control. . . . The British are perfectly willing . . .

if the Japanese will allow them to have the Yangtze Valley and, unless I 
am 
greatly mistaken, these English "cousins" of ours will be absolutely guided by their own selfish political and commercial interests. . . . It behooves us to keep absolutely aloof from everyone and to do nothing which is not directly in line with the saving of lives.

Letters from home told him that his father had become very ill.

Deeply worried, he wrote Thomas Butler in April: I do so hope . . . thee will not run thy legs off for this fool Navy. The American people never do know what they want and it is up to a few men like thee to guide them and persuade them to do the right thing but, after all . . . thy children think more of thy health than all the ships afloat. . . . We are so wholly controlled by selfish capital . . . abetted by foolish, shortsighted but no doubt well-meaning pacifists. We can never hope to be prepared for an emergency and sooner or later will suffer.

That was the last communication between them. His father died on May 26, 1928. When the news reached him in Tientsin, Butler wept. He was so stunned by the loss of the father who had been as much confidant and friend as parent that six weeks later he wrote his mother, grieving: Father always took pride in the fact that I was ever to be found at the front, and now, though it is simply killing me, I must go on and on trying to do the Nation's work. Ah, I don't care any more but must pretend I do-just hate it all, but Father drove himself to death for the Navy and I must do the same, I suppose. . . . I am all confused and dazed. Does thee know I am unable positively to remember the last time I saw Father? . . . Father has left us all such a beautiful reputation for kindly firmness that I am constantly overwhelmed with the responsibility of living up to it. . . . Be sure to write me fully any message that Father may have left for me, and if in his suffering he didn't leave any-make up one. It will be all the same-I must have something to go on.

As usual when he was depressed, he threw himself into an 
orgy of activity. Storms having washed away a bridge on the Tientsin-Peking main road in September, he ordered the Marines to build a temporary structure out of scrap lumber to keep the highway open. The delighted villagers urged him to allow the bridge to remain; instead he magnified Chinese-American goodwill by building a more permanent bridge for them. Chinese officials named it after him and made him an honorary Chinese citizen. He then offered to rebuild the whole road from Peking to Tientsin with Marine equipment, to make it suitable for motor use, if they would supply soldier labor. They happily provided fifteen hundred Chinese troops for the job, which he personally supervised. The Chinese peasants were grateful for the road and bridges that helped them get their fresh produce to market.

When the road was officially opened, the governor of the province held a celebration at which Butler was the guest of honor. Ancient Chinese custom decreed that when the citizens of a town or district unanimously voted a man to be a great public benefactor, he could be awarded an Umbrella of Ten Thousand Blessings-a magnificent canopy of red satin with small silk streamers proclaiming his greatness. No foreigner in Tientsin or Peking had ever rated one. But now the people of Tientsin presented a Blessings Umbrella to Smedley Butler.

Soon afterward he drove into Boxertown just as a detached column from Chiang Kai-shek's army advanced into the opposite end of the town to loot it. His car kicked up so much racket that it sounded like machine-gun fire. The Nationalists, thinking he had an army behind him, fled.

Despite Butler's protests that he had done nothing at all to help them, the people of Boxertown hailed him as a deliverer.

When he received a second Blessings Umbrella with its silk streamers inscribed in Chinese, one banner read, "Your kindness is always in the minds of people." The other: "General Butler loves China as he loves America."

The second award moved him deeply, because Boxertown was the very same town from which Boxers, twenty-eight years earlier, had poured fire on his company, killing three Marines and wounding nine.

After he made a speech recalling this event, he learned 
that five old men in the crowd that had just presented him with Boxertown's greatest honor had been among the Boxers who had shot at him in 1900.

He was equally popular with his men, frequently working beside them when there was physical labor to be done. Junior officers were so caught up by his gung-ho leadership, General Shoup recalled, that they, too, worked voluntarily beside the enlisted men. "Never before or since," one of them said later in awe, "have I ever known a general who could actually inspire officers to want to do physical labor."

In the fall of 1928 Butler followed developments by radio in the presidential race between Herbert Hoover and A1 Smith, deeply interested in the campaign issues that touched two facets of his personal experience-Prohibition and Latin American relations. He wrote Lejeune in October, "There seems no doubt that Hoover will be elected PresidentI guess, however, the country will survive."

Orders for the Marines to begin pulling out of China came from President Coolidge in December. As he left China in January, 1929, Butler's affection and admiration for the Chinese people was so great that he wrote Lejeune, "It may be that when I am retired I will live among them." Their enthusiasm for him was equally unrestrained. A friend with the Asiatic Fleet wrote him, "The sendoff which the newspapers at Tientsin gave to you and Mrs. Butler was a great and just tribute to the cordial relations which you had so successfully established, not only with the Americans and the Chinese, but with everybody you came in contact with during your stay in North China."

Butler was awarded the Yangtze Service Medal and in July, 1929, promoted to major general-at forty-eight the youngest Marine officer ever to have reached this rank. The Navy Department declared, "Probably no finer example of successful arbitration by American officers has been demonstrated in recent years than the peace-making achievements that crowned General Butler's efforts in China in 1927 and 1928."

Back home, Butler winced when Lejeune asked him to take command of the Parris Island, South Carolina, base. Weary after his China stint, he felt a need to renew his ties with kith and kin in his hometown of West Chester.

He talked of retiring.

"I had better begin to think what is best for me and my family," he told Lejeune. "I have given over thirty years of my best to the Marine Corps."

He was given a long leave home, where he became aware of a rising tide of American sentiment matching his own growing distrust of the reasons for which armed forces were sent overseas. It had begun with a belated disillusionment over World War I, sparked by such books as
All Quiet on
the Western Front
and
Merchants o
f
Death.
In 1925 a National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War had been founded, and a rapidly developing pacifist movement had compelled the government to enter disarmament negotiations. By August, 1928, the antiwar movement was worldwide.

Assigned once more to command the base at Quantico, Butler made it a Marine showplace and developed Marine football, baseball, and basketball teams with such high esprit de corps that they played the best college teams of the East and often beat them. His fatherly interest in his men led him to help them with personal problems, get them out of trouble, and encourage them to write home. The admiration of Marines' families was expressed in a typical letter to him from Philadelphia: "My brother in the Marines just came back from Nicaragua and he ask to be transferred to Phila. his Mother was Ill you complied with his wishes. His Mother was operated for Tumbers but it was a baby boy and to day it was Christend Smedley D. Butler Ruth."

Military and patriotic organizations persistently sought to lure 
him into joining. He wired the Sons of the American Revolution, "My ancestors were all Quakers and I regret to say took no part, as far as I know, in the American Revolutionary War, so I am not entitled to be a Son of the American Revolution." Actually, recently discovered evidence indicates that his great-great-grandfather, William Butler, although a Quaker, probably served in the Revolution, along with three brothers.

He did, however, finally yield to the pleas of American Legion official James J. Deighan that he attend the national convention in Scranton as a guest of honor. "The success of the 11th National Convention ... last week was in large part due," Deighan wrote him gratefully afterward, "to the fact that you were our guest.... The Legionnaires are all for you."

News came that John Lejeune was resigning as commandant to head the Virginia Military Academy and would be replaced by Butler's other old friend, Buck Neville, now a major general. Thirty years had gone by since they had been an inseparable trio in the feverish days of the Cuban campaign. Butler began to feel the weight of time and too many campaigns. The endless demands on him made retirement and rest seem alluring.

Asked once too often for a speech, he replied in October, 1929, "I am not a crusader or a propagandist, nor have I message for anybody, so there is no object in my appearing anywhere, except for money." He began to charge stiff lecture fees to cut down demands for him to travel everywhere to address luncheons and meetings as guest of honor.

Perusing the morning papers on October z, he noted a statement by Charles E. Mitchell, of the National City Bank: "I know of nothing fundamentally wrong with the stock market or with the underlying business and credit situation."

The following day there was a minor panic on the New York Stock Exchange, and a day later the market collapsed. On October 29 
the bottom fell out in the blackest day in stock-market history, and within two weeks over thirty billion dollars in stock values were wiped out.

The Great Depression had begun, and with it a swift rush of events that would involve Smedley Butler in a fantastic plot to overthrow the American Government.

At first the American people imagined that the stock-market crash was something that merely affected Wall Street. In a message to Congress President Hoover reassured them that there was nothing to worry about; business confidence had been reestablished. Bootleggers, gang wars, and crime continued to be the major preoccupation of the public.

Despite Butler's reluctance, more and more organizations insisted upon hearing the general who never pulled his punches speak out on the law-and-order problem. There was a ground swell in Pennsylvania to nominate Philadelphia's former crimebuster for governor on the Republican ticket. A friend wrote from Washington, "I note that some of the politicos may draft you as Dictator for Washington."

In December, 1929, Butler was glad when a demand arose for a Senate investigation of the use of Marines to intervene in Latin American affairs. He upset the Hoover Administration by shooting from the hip in an extemporaneous speech he made in Pittsburgh, revealing that the State Department had rigged the Nicaraguan elections of 1912 by ordering him to use strong-arm methods during the Marine intervention.

"The opposition candidates in Nicaragua were declared bandits when it became necessary to elect our man to office," he explained.

And he said of Diaz, "The fellow we had there nobody liked, but he was a useful fellow to us, so we had to keep him in. How to keep him in was a problem." Then he described how the election had been rigged, under orders, for that purpose. "When a Marine is told to do something," he said, "he does it."

Butler's disclosures, picked up by the press, created a sensation in Washington. Alarm bells rang in the State Department; the last thing the administration wanted was an investigation concerning Marines then stationed in Nicaragua. Officials angrily attacked Butler for "loose talk."

Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson wrote a furious memo to Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams:

. . . If the remarks are authentic, I consider them a highly improper and false statement as to American policy, and that I should call it to your attention for appropriate action.
 

There is nothing that can do this Government more disservice than such a misstatement of our policy in a Latin American country, and I am astounded that such an expression-if he is correctly quoted-should emanate from a commissioned officer of the United States.