The Plot To Seize The White House (17 page)

Navy Secretary Adams, a wealthy, polo-playing yachtsman, sent for Butler and delivered a blistering reprimand, declaring that he was doing so at the direct personal order of the President of the United States. Butler saw red.

"This is the first time in my service of thirty-two years," he snapped back, "that I've ever been hauled on the carpet and treated like an unruly schoolboy. I haven't always approved of the actions of the administration, but I've always faithfully carried out my instructions. If I'm not behaving well it is because I'm not accustomed to reprimands, and you can't expect me to turn my cheek meekly for
official
slaps!"

"I think this will be all," Adams said icily. "I don't ever want to sec you here again!"

"You never will if I can help it!" Butler rasped, storming out of his
office
livid with anger.

Just two days after his attack on the government's gunboat diplomacy, which provoked a great public commotion, Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark privately submitted to Secretary of State Stimson the draft of a pledge that the United States would never again claim the right to intervene in the affairs of any Latin American country as an "international policeman." The Clark Memorandum, which later became official policy-for a while at least-repudiated the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that Smedley Butler had unmasked as raw gunboat diplomacy.

Defying Adams, Butler continued to express his convictions freely and publicly about current problems on which he felt qualified to speak out.

He was delighted in May, 1930, when Congress, over President Hoover's veto, passed a Spanish-American War pension bill for veterans. With the unemployment rate climbing steadily to almost five million that year, he urged passage of a bonus bill for all veterans. The government had a solemn obligation to citizens who had risked their lives to protect it, Butler insisted, to see to it that they, their wives, and their children were not allowed to languish in hunger, poverty, and despair.

Two deaths that year saddened him. His brother Horace was killed in a car accident in Texas, and his old friend Buck Neville died suddenly after briefly replacing Lejeune as commandant.

Now Butler was the senior-ranking major general in the Marine Corps, the logical choice as next commandant. An official inspection report had also praised Quantico as the finest post in the United States.

But on the same day that it appeared, Marine Corps headquarters sent Butler a curt letter suggesting that he make fewer speeches, because his Quantico post was in poor shape as a result of his frequent absences.

In July, 1930, Secretary Adams paid a visit to Quantico, undoubtedly to lay the groundwork for an official excuse to reject Butler's fitness to be appointed commandant. Butler was equally determined to demonstrate that the rebuke he had received about the "poor shape" of his post was totally unwarranted. Escorting Adams everywhere over the barracks and parade grounds, he proved that Quantico was a model of efficiency. The dress-uniform review of his crack regiments was flawless, and the Marine air squadron performed brilliant maneuvers.

The secretary acidly observed that Quantico was the most 
expensive place in the nation for training men. Controlling his temper, Butler pointed out the sports stadium built at almost no cost to the taxpayers.

"That's one of your damned follies!" Adams muttered. He was clearly attempting to provoke the volatile Butler into flaring up, and Butler knew it.

Clenching his jaw, the general remained outwardly calm but could not resist telling a sharply barbed joke about "an old buzzard" who couldn't be pleased by anything.

Several weeks later a Navy selection board met to choose a new commandant. One staff admiral declared that he'd be damned before he'd see Butler made commandant; in no time at all the damned fellow would be trying to run the whole Navy. Others agreed. Adams happily discarded Butler's name and proposed instead Brigadier General Ben H. Fuller who, despite being junior in rank, was approved by the board.

The news was the last straw for Butler, who now determined to retire within a year to devote himself to advocating the defense of the United States as he believed it ought to be defended. Resolutely opposed to military intervention overseas on behalf of Wall Street interests, he planned to arouse the American people into preventing any more. At the same time he had doubts about the wisdom of entering world disarmament agreements, as leading pacifists proposed. Could the United States afford to disarm and trust the word of military dictators like Italy's Mussolini, with Hitler's swiftly growing Nazi party in Germany already laying the groundwork for a new war by renouncing the Versailles Treaty?

In a speech before the influential Contemporary Club of Philadelphia on January 19, 1931, he declared, "I agree with Dr. Hull of Swarthmore; if we could all lay down our arms, there couldn't be any war. But there are mad-dog nations who won't get the word, who will refuse, to sign the agreement, or, if they sign it, refuse to abide by it."

Seeking to impress his listeners with the kind of men dictators were, he added, "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. 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 by one life."

His listeners gasped audibly. Arms akimbo, his head thrust forward angrily, Butler demanded in a scornful voice, "How can you talk disarmament with a man like
that?"

He had been told that the audience was a private one and that he could speak in confidence, but he soon learned that there was no such thing as confidential speech for a man so often in the public eye. Among his listeners, unknown to him, was an Italian diplomat from Washington who had been invited to attend.

The outraged diplomat at once reported Butler's remarks to Italian Ambassador de Martino. The embassy sent a frantic cable to Rome, then filed an official protest with the State Department. The morning papers broke the story, and it made sensational headlines. A high-ranking American officer, wearing the Marine uniform on active duty, had publicly insulted the head of a friendly power.

Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson felt compelled to deliver a formal apology to Mussolini: "The sincere regrets of this government are extended to Mr. Mussolini and to the Italian people for the discourteous and unwarranted utterances by a commissioned officer of this government on active duty."

The Washington military-diplomatic bureaucracy now decided that this time Butler had gone too far. Formal charges against him were hastily drawn and presented to President Hoover, who promptly signed them. On the morning of January 29 Marine Commandant Ben Fuller phoned Butler at Quantico.

"General Butler, you are hereby placed under arrest to await trial by general court-martial. You will turn over your command to your next senior, General Berkeley, and you will be restricted to the limits of your post. The Secretary of the Navy wishes you to know that this action is taken by the direct personal order of the President of the United States."

The charges were "conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline" and "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." These accusations were known in the armed forces as 
Mother Hubbard charges because they "covered everything." Most Marine officers were convinced that the powers-that-be had decided to "throw the book" at Old Gimlet Eye and drum him out of the Corps dishonorably, in revenge for his well-known fighting man's scorn of Washington's desk warriors.

Butler notified Brigadier General Randolph C. Berkeley, his junior officer at Quantico and a good friend, that he was under arrest-the first general officer to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. Butler's two-star command flag was lowered on the Quantico flagstaff, and he offered his sword to Berkeley, who indignantly refused to accept it.

Berkeley was outraged that Smedley Butler, who wore eighteen decorations and was one of only four military men in American history who had ever been awarded two Medals of Honor, should be put under arrest by a telephone call. He was even more indignant that Butler had been confined to the post, hindering his ability to arrange for his own defense at the court-martial.

Defying the wrath of Adams, Berkeley himself went to Washington to get Butler's old comrade-in-arms Henry Leonard, who had lost an arm fighting beside him in the Boxer Rebellion and who now had a law practice in the Capital, to act as Butler's counsel. Leonard rushed off to Quantico immediately.

A prisoner on his own post, Butler was wryly amused by an invitation to be guest of honor at a sportsmen's dinner. His aide-de-camp, L. C.

Whitaker, replied dryly for him: "As General Butler is under arrest, he will be unable to attend."

News of his arrest brought an outpouring of sympathy and support for him not only among his far-flung and influential staunch friends but also among millions of Americans who despised Mussolini and everything the dictator stood for. Admiring Butler 
appalled that he was being court-martialed for being a patriot who believed in democracy, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and distrusted dictators who denied such civil liberties to their own people.

Butler also had the support of millions of veterans who knew him as a magnificent fighting man and hero, as well as a general who was on the side of the enlisted man against the brass; and of hundreds of thousands of admirers who still remembered the courageous fight he had waged against the crooked politicians and racketeers of Philadelphia.

Many Americans, moreover, were fed up with the Hoover Administration for sitting on its hands with the Depression rapidly worsening, and esteemed a public leader who at least had the courage of his convictions and spoke them bluntly. Italian-American anti-Fascists also rallied to Butler's support by bitter protests against Stimson's apology to Mussolini.

The administration grew alarmed as a rolling tidal wave of angry criticism o£ Butler's arrest swept across the country.

"Unless we are mistaken," declared a Washington
Daily News
editorial, "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."

Public opinion on the side of Butler made itself felt so quickly and emphatically that the administration found it necessary to ameliorate the conditions of his arrest. His restriction to the post was lifted, allowing him to travel where he needed to in order to arrange for his defense.

He wired New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had presented him with one of his Medals of Honor as Undersecretary of the Navy, "Am in great trouble. Can you assist me in securing services of John W. Davis as counsel?" Davis, a leading Wall Street corporation lawyer, had been the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1924.

Roosevelt persuaded Davis to agree to argue Butler's case at the trial.

A visit to Butler's aunt, lawyer Isabel Darlington, also enlisted Roland S. Morris, a former ambassador to Japan, as Henry Leonard's counsel in preparing the case. 
Thousands of sympathetic messages poured into Quantico. Butler was deeply touched by two letters especially: Both Governor Roosevelt and former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels volunteered to testify in his behalf at the court-martial. That news stunned Adams and Hoover.

The trial date was set for February 16. Butler was impatient to have it sooner, anxious to get all the facts before the public, but Leonard and Morris argued that the torrent of favorable publicity was helping his case.

They proved correct. Protests against the court-martial were pouring into the White House by the sackful. The trial threatened to become a cause celebre, with, implications for the whole system of military justice, especially after a Marine colonel denounced American court-martials as basically unjust.

The impending trial was also throwing a spanner into Secretary of State Stimson's plans for forging an international naval arms limitation agreement. Crucial to that agreement were preliminary negotiations between Italy and France, which feared Italian and German fascism.

Resisting Stimson's pressure to sign an arms limitation agreement with Mussolini, the French cited as justification popular American support of Butler's view that Mussolini could not be trusted and widespread protest over his arrest for saying so.

Mussolini himself, alarmed by the bad press he was getting in the United States, with a few notorious exceptions, sent word to Stimson that he considered the whole incident an "unfortunate error" and believed it would be best for all concerned if the whole plan to court-martial Butler could be quietly dropped.

Stimson, who now realized that he had a tiger by the tail, passed the word to the crestfallen Adams. The Secretary of the Navy now had to beat a hasty retreat with as much dignity as he could muster out of his humiliating predicament. He sent Leonard a letter announcing his decision to "settle" the matter by calling off the court-martial and simply detaching Butler from his command with a reprimand, placing him on the inactive list with the limbo status of "awaiting orders."

In polite language Leonard told Adams to go to hell. A few hours later, after checking with his principals, the Secretary of 
the Navy then offered to let the whole thing drop by just detaching Butler from the command and issuing a reprimand. Again Leonard turned him down flatly. Adams frantically tried a third proposal. The administration would settle, he now pleaded, for an official letter of apology. There would be no court-martial and no removal of Butler from Quantico.

Roaring a third refusal, Leonard demanded that Adams stop dawdling and proceed to trial. By now the administration, in a state of near panic, meekly asked Leonard just what terms for settling the matter would be acceptable to General Butler.