Date: November 1, 1995 Publication: History Today
Author: Cramer, Clayton
Some Americans regard their country as superior to other nations
because they do not change governments by coup
d’etat – and never have. Perhaps because of a long tradition of
power changing hands by election, Americans regard their nation as immune to
the use of force for political purposes. True, assassins have killed four
presidents but these deaths did not lead to turmoil and chaos; the government
simply followed well-established procedures for transferring control to the
vice-president. Unlike other nations where assassination often leads to civil
war, the United States has avoided this.
How different is America from nations where political power
comes quite directly “from the barrel of a gun?” A curious footnote
to American history suggests that, except for the personal integrity of a
remarkable American general, a coup
d'etat intended to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt from office in a
1934 might have plunged America into civil war.
This remarkable man was Smedley
Darlington Butler, retired U.S. Marine Corps Major-General. Butler is the sort
of person for whom the word “colorful” is woefully inadequate.
This is a man who won America's highest military award for
bravery (the Congressional Medal of Honor) twice. His style of warfare was
unusual not only for his personal courage, but for the energy he put into
avoiding bloodshed when it was possible to achieve his aims in other ways. Not
surprisingly, this engendered a remarkable loyalty among the men who served
under him - and that loyalty was why certain men asked Butler to lead a
military attack on Washington D.C., with the goal of capturing President
Roosevelt.
Butler was more than a remarkable soldier. He served as
police commissioner of Philadelphia during 1924-25 (on loan from the Marines),
in an attempt to enforce Prohibition. While the effort was a failure, his insistence enforcing the law against wealthy partygoers as
well as poor immigrants established his reputation as a man of high integrity.
He was not universally loved, but he was widely respected.
Butler is best remembered today for his oft-quoted
statement in the socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935:
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 American 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... Looking back on
it, I felt I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was
to operate this racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three
continents.
In his book War Is a
Racket, Butler argued for a powerful navy, but one prohibited from
travelling more than 200 miles from the U.S. coastline. Military aircraft could
travel no more than 500 miles from the us coast and the army would be
prohibited from leaving the United States altogether. Butler also proposed that
all workers in defense industries, from the lowest laborer to the highest
executive, be limited to “thirty dollars a month, the same wage as the
lads in the trenches get.” He also proposed that a declaration of war
should be passed by a plebiscite in which only those subject to conscription
would be eligible to vote.
From 1935 to 1937, Butler was a spokesman for the League Against War and Fascism, a Communist-dominated organization
of the time. He also participated in the Third U.S. Congress against War and
Fascism, sharing the platform with well-known leftists of the era, including
the poet Langston Hughes, Heywood Broun, and Roger Baldwin. When the Spanish
Civil War threatened the collapse of the Soviet-supported Spanish government,
the League's pacifism evaporated and they supported intervention. Butler however,
remained true to his belief in non-interventionism. “What the hell is it
our business what's going on in Spain?” he asked. But before Butler
became involved in these causes, he had already exposed a fascist plot against
his own government.
Butler had friends in the press and Congress, so he could
not be ignored when he came forward in late 1934 with a tale of conspiracy
against President Roosevelt, in which he had been asked to take a leading role.
At first glance, Butler seems an unlikely candidate for such a position. Even
though Butler was a Republican, in 1932 he campaigned for Roosevelt, calling
himself a “Republican-for-Ex-President Hoover.” (Butler had a poor
relationship with Hoover going back to their time together during the Boxer Rebellion,
when Hoover had been a civilian engineer in Peking and had behaved in a rather
cowardly manner.)
But there were good reasons why someone seeking to
overthrow the U.S. government would have wanted Butler involved. Butler was a
powerful symbol to many American soldiers and veterans – an enlisted
man's general, one that spoke out for their interests while on active duty and
after retirement. Butler would have attracted men to his cause that would not
otherwise have participated in a march on Washington.
Butler would also have been a good choice because of his
military skills. His personal courage and tactical skill would have made him a
powerful commander of an irregular army. Finally, his ties of friendship to
many officers still on active duty might have undermined military opposition to
his force, as friends and colleagues sought to avoid a direct confrontation
with him.
Another reason that the plotters might have approached such
an unlikely candidate was that Butler was not regarded as having a great
intellect. After the First World War, the Marine Corps had begun to emphasize a
new college-educated professionalism. Butler, one of the old-style less
educated “bushwhacker” generals, might have seemed easy to
manipulate.
Butler testified that bond trader Gerald MacGuire had
approached him in the summer of 1933. MacGuire claimed to represent wealthy
Wall Street broker Grayson Murphy, Singer sewing machine heir Robert Sterling
Clark, and other unnamed men of wealth. They asked Butler to speak publicly on
behalf of the gold standard, recently abandoned by Roosevelt. MacGuire's
rationale as to why Butler should ally himself with the gold standard cause was
that the veterans of the First World War were due a bonus in 1945. As MacGuire
told Butler, “We want to see the soldiers' bonus paid in gold. We do not
want the soldiers to have rubber money or paper money.”
It appears that the plotters underestimated Butler's
intelligence and character. When this explanation failed to persuade Butler,
MacGuire and Clark offered him money, abandoning any pretence of
civic-mindedness. Butler's sense of honor prevented him from speaking in favor
of any policy for mercenary reasons.
MacGuire eventually told Butler their real aim. MacGuire
asked Butler to lead an army of 500,000 veterans in a march on Washington D.C.
The stated mission was to “protect” Roosevelt from other plotters,
and install a “secretary of general welfare” to “take all the
worries and details off of his shoulders ...” But Butler saw through
their supposed concern for Roosevelt. He testified before Congress that he told
MacGuire:
[M]y 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 ... Yes;
and then you will put somebody in there you can run; is that the idea? The
President will go around and christen babies and dedicate bridges and kiss
children Mr. Roosevelt will never agree to that himself.
Butler deduced that the real goal was a coup to take
Roosevelt captive and force reinstatement of the gold standard, the loss of
which many wealthy Americans feared would lead to rapid inflation. The plotters
would keep Roosevelt as a figurehead until he could be “encouraged' to
retire.”
That MacGuire had significant financial backing behind him
seems clear, considering the substantial bank savings books he showed to
Butler. What remains unclear is whether the names MacGuire dropped (other than
Robert Sterling Clark) were men really involved, or whether MacGuire was a
conman.
MacGuire's claims and financial resources alone did not
convince Butler that such a conspiracy actually existed. The fulfillment of a
series of startling predictions by MacGuire did finally persuade Butler that
there was more than just hot air involved.
MacGuire knew in advance of significant personnel changes
in the White House. He correctly predicted the formation of the American
Liberty League (the major conservative opposition to Roosevelt) and the
principal players in it. Especially disturbing was that many of the supposed
backers of the plot were also members of the League. MacGuire's claim that the
League was part of the plot could not be easily dismissed.
The American Liberty League was a successor to the highly
effective Association Against the Prohibition
Amendment, the lobbying organization responsible for the repeal of the
“Noble Experiment.” From its formation in 1918 until 1926, the AAPA made little progress, at least partly because it had
little money. But from 1926 money poured into the AAPA
from some of America's wealthiest men, including Pierre, Irenee
and Lammot du Pont, John J. Raskob
and Charles H. Sabin. The AAPA spent its new-found
wealth on the distribution of literature and on the formation of a bewildering
number of associated organizations. These gave the impression of a grassroots
movement, rather than a collection of millionaires feeding press releases to
friendly newspapers. The AAPA also rapidly took
control of the Democratic Party, with one of their supporters, Al Smith,
receiving the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination. While the AAPA had powerful friends within the Republican Party, they
never achieved control of it.
The AAPA's motivations were a
mixture of idealism and pragmatism. The stated concern was that Prohibition had
done serious damage to the principle of federalism – that the federal
government's authority did not include the police powers used to enforce Prohibition.
But it appears that this was not the only motivation, or even the reason most
important to the men who funded the AAPA. Like many
other Americans, these business leaders found themselves unable to gratify what
seemed a natural, more or less innocent, desire without breaking a law (i.e.,
the consumption of alcoholic beverages).
To suddenly find themselves among the criminal classes was
not pleasant to a group who had always thought of themselves as law-abiding and
respectable members of American society. There is also strong evidence that the
backers of the AAPA saw repeal as a method of
reducing income and corporate taxes, by taxing alcohol instead.
The AAPA went out of business at
the end of 1933, with the end of Prohibition. But within a year, from the same
offices, with most of the same backers, many of the same employees and much of
the same style, it reappeared as the American Liberty League. Throughout the
next six years, it led the fight against the New Deal, arguing that much of
Roosevelt's program was contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
In an age where Hitler and Mussolini had commandeered extraordinary economic
powers, the fears that the American Liberty League expressed about Roosevelt's
vaguely similar gathering of economic power could not be summarily dismissed.
The League, in spite of its impressive resources, was
rapidly made to appear “ridiculous or dangerous” or both by the
Roosevelt administration. Most importantly, the leadership of the League was made
up of largely rich men. The Depression-era gap between rich and poor had become
too wide, too obvious, and too painful for the League to be credible to the
majority of Americans. Butler's testimony before Congress claimed that some of
the people associated with the League were the very ones that had approached
him – including Grayson Murphy, the League's treasurer.
In the depths of the Depression, in that nadir of despair
before Roosevelt gave his stirring first inaugural address in 1933, America was
awash with political groups identifying in greater or lesser degrees with
communism or fascism. Samuel Dickstein, the Democrat Representative for New
York, concerned about the threat of such groups, persuaded the House of
Representatives to create the Special Committee to Investigate Nazi Propaganda
Activities in the United States. It was this committee which investigated
Butler's charges in late 1934.
MacGuire, not surprisingly, denied that such a plot
existed. Instead, he claimed his activities had been political lobbying to
preserve the gold standard. But he quickly destroyed his credibility as a
witness by giving contradictory testimony.
Yet while the final report agreed with Butler that there
was evidence of a plot against Roosevelt, no further action was taken on it.
The Committee's authority to subpoena witnesses expired at the end of 1934 and
the Justice Department started no criminal investigation.
Part of the reason for the lack of prosecution of the
alleged plotters may have been the untimely death of the only man who could
have testified against the rest: Gerald MacGuire. He died at thirty-seven from
complications of pneumonia, less than a month after the Committee released its
report. MacGuire's physician claimed that his death was partly the result of
the stress induced by the charges made by Butler, but there is no reason to
assume that MacGuire's death was in any way suspicious.
The Committee's report excluded many of the most
embarrassing names given by MacGuire and repeated by Butler. MacGuire had
claimed that the 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, General Hugh
Johnson (head of Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration), General Douglas
MacArthur, and a number of other generals and admirals were privy to the plot.
Since Butler had no evidence of their involvement, other
than MacGuire's claims, it was certainly reasonable for the Committee to
exclude these details from the final report as “certain immaterial and
incompetent evidence.” But in conjunction with MacGuire's apparent
advance knowledge of the details of internal White House staff activities, it certainly suggests that if a coup was
planned, it had significant support within the Roosevelt administration.
The news media gave an inappropriately small amount of attention
to the report. Time magazine
ridiculed Butler's claims. The week following Butler's testimony, Time described it as a “Plot Without Plotters,” simply because the alleged plotters
claimed innocence. But Time admitted
that the Veterans of Foreign Wars Commander James Van Zandt confirmed that he,
too, had been approached to lead such a march on Washington.
The leftist magazine New
Masses carried an article by John Spivak that included wild claims of
“Jewish financiers working with fascist groups.” Spivak's article
spun an elaborate web involving the American Jewish Congress, the Warburg
family, “which originally financed Hitler,” the Hearst newspaper
chain, the Morgan banking firm, the du Ponts, a truly
impressive list of prominent American Jewish businessmen, and Nazi spies.
Spivak's article raised some disturbing and legitimate questions about why much
of Butler's testimony was left out of the final committee report. But these
important concerns were seriously undermined by Spivak's paranoid ravings. The
left-of-centre magazines Nation and New Republic were unconcerned about the
plot, since in their view “fascism originated in pseudo-radical mass
movements,” and therefore could not come from a wealthy cabal.
Newspaper descriptions of the final report are also
astonishing for how lightly most treated it. A New York Times article about subversion and foreign agitators
started on the front page, but gave only two paragraphs to the coup plot inside
the paper. “It also alleged that definite proof has been found that the
much publicized Fascist march on Washington ... was actually
contemplated.” It was not a major story.
The San Francisco
Chronicle took the story more seriously. The only headline with a larger
type size that day concerned the recent fatal crash of the airship Macon. The Chronicle carried an Associated Press
story headlined, “Justice Aides Probe Butler Fascist Story.” The
first five paragraphs were devoted to Butler's allegations. The Chronicle quoted the Committee report
that it “was able to verify all the pertinent statements by General
Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting creation of the
organization.”
A third newspaper showed an even more astonishing lack of
interest than the New York Times: the
Sacramento Bee used a substantially
different Associated Press wire story that emphasized propaganda efforts by
foreign agents. Another AP wire story, at the bottom of page five, described
Butler's allegations, taking the Committee's report at face value. This wire story
includes the comforting knowledge that the Committee found “no evidence
to show a connection between this effort” and any foreign government.
An apparently serious effort to overthrow the government,
perhaps with the support of some of America's wealthiest men, largely
substantiated by a Congressional Committee, was mostly ignored. Why?
Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, wrote
a book in 1939 about the concentration of American journalism. He claimed that,
“in 1934, eighty-two per cent of all dailies had a complete monopoly in
their communities.” Newspaper chains,” in Ickes' view,
“control a dangerously large share of the national daily circulation and
in many cities have no competition.”
Ickes' book was largely devoted to proving that the major
newspapers of the United States were intentionally distorting the news and, in
some cases, directly lying. Ickes argued that newspaper editors did so in the
interests of both their advertisers and in defense of the capitalist class.
Ickes mentioned the Liberty League as one of the “propaganda outfits, who
were allied with the major newspapers.” Indeed the New York Times, one of the papers that had downplayed the
Committee's report, had editorialized in favor of the Liberty League's
formation.
Did newspapers and magazines consciously play down the
plot, because it represented an embarrassment to people of influence? Or did
editors simply give it low visibility because they regarded it as an absurd
story?
We must consider another disturbing possibility. Butler was
associated with the loose alliance of progressive and populist forces that were
dragging Roosevelt towards the left. It is easy to forget that for much of
Roosevelt's first term as president from 1932-36, he was the rope in a tug-of-war
between conservative and progressive forces in America. The popularity of men
such as Senator Huey Long, the Democrat from Louisiana, and the nationally
known radio priest Father Coughlin – and the need to short-circuit their
rising political power – appears to have caused Roosevelt's increasingly
leftward movement in 1935-36.
Is it possible that Butler concocted this story as a way of
creating animosity towards conservatives by Roosevelt? If Butler had lied to
the Committee and no such conspiracy was ever planned, why did MacGuire
apparently perjure himself before the Committee? Or, alternatively, could
left-leaning members of the Roosevelt administration have manipulated Butler
into believing that such a plot actually existed as a way of creating animosity
towards conservatives, thus dragging Roosevelt to the left? Either theory could
explain why MacGuire, Murphy, Clark, or the other supposed plotters were never
prosecuted.
Yet another possibility (though less likely) is that there
was no prosecution because Roosevelt's own advisers had taken part in the plot,
as MacGuire claimed. A criminal prosecution would have meant washing the
Roosevelt administration's dirty laundry in public.
Butler's account of the MacGuire plot was a very serious
accusation. If MacGuire had told Butler the truth, a large number of wealthy
men had made serious plans to overthrow representative government in the United
States -- though their concern that Roosevelt was creating a government in the
style of Mussolini or Hitler might provide some legitimate reason for their
actions. Why does this plot not appear in the history books? That conservatives
might discount the plot is not unexpected; that liberals have tended to ignore
it is a little more surprising.
It is hard to imagine how different American politics was
in the 1930s. The collapse of the world economy had shaken the faith of many
Americans in individualism and free-market capitalism. Many traditionalists, in
the U.S. and in Europe, toyed with the ideas of Fascism and National Socialism;
many liberals dallied with Socialism and Communism. Prominent populists such as
Huey Long and Father Coughlin sided with progressives in support of
isolationism, redistribution of wealth, and a federal government that would
play a more active role in the American economy.
In hindsight, the moral and economic deficiencies of these
various corporatist systems are now clear. In 1934, however, people of good
will persuaded themselves that Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were doing good,
and ignored the great evils that were already underway. To turn over the rock
exposing MacGuire's plot raises unpleasant questions about the political
sensibilities of both right and left in 1930s America.
It would be tempting to write off this entire matter as a
group of conmen separating wealthy conservatives from their money by pretending
to hatch a plot against Roosevelt. But there are too many disturbing pieces of
evidence in this tale that suggest that the Zeitgeist of the 1930s was not
limited to Europe.
If MacGuire's claims to Butler were true, some U.S.
military commanders were prepared to stand aside while 500,000 veterans marched
on Washington and took Roosevelt captive. (Between the World Wars, the United
States Army was so small that 500,000 veterans might have given them a serious
fight -- even if every officer remained loyal to Roosevelt).
But unlike many European countries, American government was
highly decentralized in 1934, and this would have hindered any serious military
action against the legitimate government. Every state governor had control of
state militia units, armed with out-of-date, but still serviceable, military
weapons.
In addition to the regularly organized state militias, the
population of the United States, then as now, was heavily armed with the sort
of weapons well suited to military operations. Whatever the advantages of the
plotters' army of veterans, they would have been far outnumbered by the
unorganized militia of the United States – consisting of every U.S. citizen
between eighteen and forty-five, and legally obligated by state laws to fight
at the order of the governor in the event of insurrection, invasion, or war.
But in a nation that was suffering from the ravages of the
Depression, another model exists for what might have happened: the Spanish Civil War. The divisions
over religion in America were not as dramatic as those that ripped apart
Spanish society. But many Americans were beginning to lose their faith in American
institutions – as evidenced by the growth of American Nazi and Communist
movements during the 1930s. It is frightening to think of what might have
happened if a general as capable as Butler had become the man on a white horse.
In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black,
delivered at New York University in 1960, concerning the protections of the
U.S. Bill of Rights:
I cannot agree
with those who think of the Bill of Rights as an eighteenth century
straitjacket, unsuited for this age... The evils it guards against are not only
old, they are with us now, they exist today ... Experience all over the world
had demonstrated, I fear, that the distance between stable, orderly government
and one that has been taken over by force is not so great as we have assumed.
Indeed, the plot that Butler exposed – if what
MacGuire claimed was true – is a sobering reminder to Americans. They
were not immune to the sentiments that gave rise to totalitarian governments
throughout the world in the 1930s. It would be a serious mistake to assume
“It can't happen here!”
FOR FURTHER READING:
Jules Archer, The
Plot To Seize The White House (Hawthorn Books, 1973); Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (Knopf, 1982); Smedley D. Butler, War
Is A Racket (New York, 1935); Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine (University Press of Kentucky, 1987); George Wolfskill, The Revolt
of The Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940
(Houghton Mifflin Co;, 1962); Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream (Knopf, 1946).
Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer with a Northern
California manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. He is the author of For The Defense of Themselves And The State:
The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right To Keep And Bear
Arms (Praeger, 1994).