Smedley Butler with the USMC mascot bulldogs at an Army-Navy game.
Butler with his wife, Ethel Conway Peters Butler, circa 1901.
Butler with his son, Smedley Butler Jr.
Butler at home with his cat.
An election flier from an unsuccessful run at U.S. Senator in 1932.
Editor’s Note
Major General Smedley D. Butler was an American hero. His knowledge and teachings not only improved our military, but our country as a whole.
With special thanks to Molly Swanton and the Butler family, as well as Christopher Ellis at the Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections, we have been able to not only publish Major General Butler’s famous exposé, War Is a Racket, but several other essays, articles, and speeches.
While we have transcribed several of these works, we wanted to include some of them in their original format. Because of this, there may be marks or other comments on the documents. We at Skyhorse felt that showing the truest and most authentic form of General Butler’s works would be best in remembering and respecting one of the most decorated Marines in United States history.
We hope that you enjoy his work as much as we have and that you’ll gain much wisdom and insight from “The Old Gimlet.”
Foreword
By David Talbot
Boys dream of war. That’s how I began Devil Dog, my illustrated biography of Smedley Darlington Butler, the legendary Marine hero. Butler ran off to join the Marines at the tender age of sixteen in 1898, just as the American empire began its rise. He made his military debut in Cuba during the Spanish American War—and then proceeded to follow America’s bloody imperial path around the world. Like many young men of his time—and today—Butler thought of war as a glorious, flag-waving adventure. “As a youngster, I loved the excitement of battle,” he said late in his life. “It’s lots of fun, you know, and it’s nice to strut around in front of your wife—or somebody else’s wife—and display your medals and your uniform.
“But there’s another side to it,” Butler bleakly added, making it clear that he had seen all too much of that side. In the course of his exploits, Butler became the most decorated Marine hero of his day. But by the time he retired from the military thirty-three years after he enlisted, Butler was thoroughly sickened by war and by what America demanded of its soldiers in the hellholes of empire. He and his fellow Marines had been called upon to brutally put down wars of national liberation all over the world, from the Far East to the Caribbean. And, as Butler came to realize, there was nothing patriotic or noble about what his leathernecks had been ordered to do.
In enforcing America’s will and commercial claims, Butler’s men engaged in the inevitable crimes and savagery of imperial war—torching villages, subjecting insufficiently compliant peasants to baroque forms of torture, raping women, and orphaning children. Butler knew that these grimy wars took as much from his fighting men’s souls as it did from their bodies. And the bloodletting was all about the filthy dollar, not about freedom or justice or the American Way, or any of the other self-aggrandizing claims of presidents and secretaries of state.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and the bankers,” Butler wrote, in 1935, in a bracingly honest article for a left-wing magazine called Common Sense. “In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for National City Bank boys to collect revenues. I helped in the raping of a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. . . . Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.”
Butler’s blunt truth-telling about what President Eisenhower would later label “the military-industrial complex” was all the more remarkable because he came from a Philadelphia family of influential politicians and bankers. Although the blue-blooded Butlers were Quakers, Smedley’s father—the powerful Republican congressman Thomas Butler—saw nothing wrong with using his seat on the Naval Affairs Committee to push for a bigger US war machine. But after he finally quit the Marines—leaving the service with the rank of major general, the highest rank of the time—Smedley would become one of the country’s toughest and best-known critics of the American war lobby.
Butler always stayed loyal to his former troops, risking his reputation by speaking before the Bonus Army encampment in Washington in July 1932—the ragtag assembly of World War I veterans who had occupied the nation’s capital to demand reimbursement for their military service. The protestors were later violently routed by troops under the command of another military legend, General Douglas MacArthur, assisted by his young aide Dwight Eisenhower (to Ike’s everlasting shame).
Butler crisscrossed the country, championing veterans’ rights and stumping for peace. He was appalled to see how shabbily veterans were treated—especially those who had sustained lifelong physical and mental wounds and were warehoused in federal hospitals that Butler called graveyards of “the living dead.” In Indiana, the general came upon a particularly dismal facility where hundreds of shell-shocked veterans were held in old barracks that Butler compared to “pens” for rabid dogs.
The crusading Marine was determined that the United States should never again maim a generation of America’s finest in a war of greed—and then discard these young men like spent cartridges. He poured his grief and outrage into his classic 1935 jeremiad War Is a Racket. If the United States ever went to war again, he argued in the book, this time it should be fought by the rich and powerful. The First World War had created over twenty thousand new millionaires, he pointed out. How many of these war profiteers “shouldered a rifle,” he acidly observed. “How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine-gun bullets?”
Butler never cashed in on war, never joined the boards of defense companies like other retired generals. After taking off his uniform, he supported his family by writing and speaking—giving away half of what he made to veterans’ causes. He remained so popular among rank-and-file soldiers that a group of wealthy conspirators approached him in 1933 about leading another Bonus Army–type march on Washington—this time with armed veterans—to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR had antagonized powerful Wall Street banking interests as well as right-wing manufacturers like the Du Ponts with his New Deal reforms. Only a man like Butler, the conspirators concluded, commanded enough respect to make former soldiers follow his lead. But instead of succumbing to the dazzling lures of money and power, Butler followed his conscience. And in dramatic testimony before a congressional committee in November 1934, the general again became a hero, exposing the plot against FDR and saving American democracy.
Butler’s inspirational life story and antiwar passion remain as relevant as ever today. A state of permanent war has become the norm in America. During the Cold War, American democracy had to contend with the growing power of the military-industrial sector. But during the endless War on Terror—a war that expands with every murky group and remote region that Washington declares our enemy—it’s the entire nation that has become militarized. The eyes of the surveillance state are everywhere, flag-waving patriotism is more compulsory than ever, and more and more boys are encouraged to dream of war. Movie posters across the land celebrate armed men pumped up with steroids and fury; video games wallow in gore and cold-blooded snipers become cult icons; sports fans are compelled to again and again honor our troops, to cheer the rockets’ red glare and God-graced America and the roar of Air Force flyovers; political office seekers vie to be the toughest on the block when it comes to punishing downtrodden, brown-skinned populations in the Middle East and reviving the Cold War against Russia.
And yet for all this aggression surging through the body politic, and for all the “honor” we heap on our troops, in reality we don’t give much of a damn for the plight of our soldiers. We don’t really want to know much about what is happening over there, in our name, in those forsaken desert battlegrounds. And when our fighting men and women return home, we begrudge them their benefits, even when they’re sick and damaged from war.
This is the sorry state of our war-obsessed, blood-saturated nation today. It was nearly half a century ago when Martin Luther King Jr. warned America about the violent path down which it was headed. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” declared King. Today—nearly fifty years after King himself fell victim to gunfire—the United States remains more deeply enthralled by the reign of violence and death than ever.
We desperately need visionaries and angels of our better nature like King to help lead us back to the light. And we need men and women like Smedley Darlington Butler, warriors who marched and fought bravely under the Stars and Stripes—only to realize that the more noble battle was at home, for America’s soul. Boys still dream of war. But men and women must dream of peace.
David Talbot is the founder of Salon.com, and the editorial director of Hot Books/Skyhorse. He is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.
In my humble opinion, this little book should be required reading for every high school history classroom in America. War Is a Racket was written in 1935, but don’t let that fool you. It’s as relevant today—three-quarters of a century later—as it was then. Maybe even more so. There’s an old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” and Smedley Butler’s hard-hitting assessment continues to hold a vital message to be heeded in our time.
The General was a man after my own heart. Having served honorably in the military—as I did as a Navy frogman—he knows whereof he speaks when it comes to war. He understands the soldiers who fight for their country. And he came to realize—and be outraged by—those making another kind of killing off of their blood, sweat, and tears.
You need to know some background about Smedley Butler in order to fully appreciate what you’re about to read. He was born in 1881 to a prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania, the oldest of three sons. His grandfather and later his father were elected to U.S. Congress. A fine athlete in high school, he left against his father’s wishes shortly before his seventeenth birthday to enlist in the Marines after the Spanish-American War broke out. Lying about his age, Butler received a direct commission as a second lieutenant.
He had contempt for red tape, worked devotedly alongside his men, and rose quickly in the ranks. Butler went on to take part in just about all the U.S. military actions of his time: in Cuba and Manila, then the Boxer Rebellion in China (where he was twice wounded in action and promoted to captain at only nineteen), and then a series of interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. Those were known as the “Banana Wars,” because the aim was to protect the Panama Canal and U.S. commercial interests in the region such as the United Fruit Company.
At only thirty-seven, Butler became a brigadier general. In command of a camp in France during World War I,
“[T]he ground under the tents was nothing but mud, [so] he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duckboards no longer needed for the trenches, carted the first one himself up that four-mile hill to the camp, and thus provided something in the way of protection for the men to sleep on.” 1
That’s the kind of guy Smedley Butler was.
He took some time off in the Roaring Twenties to become director of public safety in Philadelphia; running the city’s police and fire departments. There his no-bullshit style got him into some trouble. The municipal government and its cops were unbelievably corrupt, and from the get-go, Butler was raiding speakeasies while cracking down on prostitution and gambling. Let’s say he wasn’t too popular among the rich and powerful who were used to law enforcement turning a blind eye in exchange for their payoffs.
Plus, perish the thought, the general often swore while giving his regular radio talks. When the mayor told the press, “I had the guts to bring General Butler to Philadelphia and I have the guts to fire him,” a crowd of four thousand Smedley supporters came together and forced a truce to keep him in Philadelphia awhile longer. Resigning after nearly two tumultuous years as director of public safety, Butler later said, “Cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.”
During the late 1920s, Butler commanded a Marine Expeditionary Force in China and was named a major general upon his return. Nicknamed “The Fighting Quaker,” Butler had been hailed as “the outstanding American soldier” by Theodore Roosevelt. He is one of only nineteen people to this day who have been twice awarded the Medal of Honor. He also received the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, the highest Marine decoration at the time for officers. All told, Smedley served thirty-four years in the Marine Corps before retiring from active duty in 1931, at the age of fifty. When he became a civilian, the man had been under fire more than 120 times. He gave his men maps of how to get to his house, in case they ever needed him for anything.
That was around the same time Butler had landed in hot water with President Herbert Hoover for publicly stating some gossip about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who it was alleged had been involved in a hit-and-run accident on a young child. When the Italian government protested, if you can believe it, Hoover asked his secretary of the Navy to court-martial Butler! For the first time since the Civil War, a general officer was placed under arrest; confined to his post! A man with eighteen decorations—outrageous! But I guess our appeasement of Fascist dictators isn’t anything new. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, volunteered to testify on Butler’s behalf, and ultimately, Butler got off with a “reprimand” and his court-martial withdrawn.
But Smedley wasn’t about to go “gentle into that good night,” as Dylan Thomas’s famous poem states. He’d been a good soldier, following the orders of his superiors—like when the Taft Administration asked him to help rig elections in Nicaragua. But in the course of his service, he’d seen too much and started giving lectures about what he’d observed, donating much of the money that he earned to unemployment relief in his Philadelphia hometown, as we were then in the midst of the Great Depression.
In 1931, a speech Butler delivered before the American Legion made the papers. In it, he said:
“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. 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. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Wow! You don’t think that raised some hackles? (And probably had some folks wanting to put Smedley in shackles.) Deciding to run for the U.S. Senate, Butler spoke out strongly on behalf of the World War I veterans who’d never been paid their promised bonuses. When their “Bonus Army” set up a protest camp in Washington, DC, in 1932, Butler showed up with his young son to cheer the men on; this was the night before the Hoover Administration was preparing to evict them. He walked through the camp telling the vets they’d served honorably and had as much right to lobby Congress as any corporation did. He and his son ate with the men and spent the night. But before the month was out, General Douglas MacArthur came charging in with an Army cavalry, destroying the camp. Several vets were injured or killed during the melee. Smedley Butler was furious; he didn’t make it into the Senate, but he switched parties and voted for FDR for president.
And he wasn’t done making waves . . . of tidal proportions. On November 30, 1934, Butler testified before a House committee in closed-door executive session. The story then leaked in three newspapers, and began: “Major General Smedley D. Butler revealed today that he had been asked by a group of wealthy New York brokers to lead a Fascist movement to set up a dictatorship in the United States.”
You can read the whole story in a book called The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer, which is still in print. I did a summary of it in my earlier book, American Conspiracies. It’s a classic story of the power broker mind-set; that if you tempt someone with a big enough offer, they can’t help but come over to your side. Not Smedley Butler. He had too much integrity.
Here was the thing: President Roosevelt’s New Deal was considered downright anti-American and evil by the Wall Street crowd (as it still is blamed today by the radicals passing themselves off as legitimate conservatives). The president was taking on the stock speculators and setting up new watchdog federal agencies. He was putting a halt on farm foreclosures and forcing employers to accept union collective bargaining. He took the nation off the gold standard, which meant more paper money would be available to provide loans and create jobs for the millions of unemployed. Lo and behold, he even spoke of raising taxes on the rich to help pay for New Deal programs.
So a lot of titans of finance hated the man’s guts. Butler even suspected some of them might have been behind a failed assassination attempt against him shortly before he was elected president. Then one day in 1934, to Butler’s surprise, a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire approached him. The retired general smelled a rat, but decided to play along until he could figure out what was really going on. He let MacGuire court him for some months. The fellow turned out to be employed by financier Grayson Murphy.
Butler was told by MacGuire that some really important people with plenty of money wanted to establish a new organization. They had $3 million in working capital and as much as $300 million which they could tap into. Butler realized the truth of this when some captains of industry came together and announced they were forming a new American Liberty League that September. Its stated goals were “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” The League’s backers included Rockefellers, Mellons, and Pews, as well as two unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates, John W. Davis (an attorney for the Morgan banking interests) and Al Smith (a business associate of the DuPonts).
MacGuire arranged to put Butler back in touch with a fellow he’d once served alongside, Robert S. Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a by-now wealthy banker. Butler later remembered Clark saying, “You know, the president is weak. . . . He was raised in this class, and he will come back. . . . But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does.”
So who was their choice to lead a government takeover? That’s right, Smedley Butler. They knew how popular he was with veterans, and the idea was to have Smedley come out of retirement and lead another veterans’ “Bonus Army” march on the nation’s capital. They wanted to create havoc with as many as five hundred thousand men at Butler’s heels. Pressured by these events, so the twisted thinking went, FDR would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a secretary of “general affairs” or “general welfare.” Eventually, the president would agree to turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and FDR would become a mere ceremonial figurehead.
You need to remember that this was the same time as Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and Mussolini’s consolidation of his dictatorship in Italy, so such ideas were very much in the air. But they picked the wrong coup d’ dude in Butler. Smedley decided to bring a reporter friend in on the conspiracy, so it wouldn’t be just his word against the plotters’, and they worked together to gather more background.
After his testimony before the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee around Thanksgiving of 1934, the New York Times ran a front-page story with a two-column headline: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government by Force.” But most of the article was full of denials and outright ridicule from some of the bigwigs that he’d implicated, while the meat of Smedley’s charges got buried on an inside page. Time magazine followed up with a piece headlined “Plot without Plotters,” complete with a cartoon of Butler riding a white horse and asking veterans to follow him. “No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler,” the article said. Doesn’t seem like the big media have changed their spots much over the last eighty years, does it?
The House committee went ahead with mounting an investigation, which lasted for two months. They verified that Butler had been offered an $18,000 bribe—no paltry sum in those days—and a number of other facts. The Veterans of Foreign Wars commander, James Van Zandt, revealed that he, too, had been approached by “agents of Wall Street” to lead a Fascist dictatorship. Even Time came out with a small-print “footnote” that the committee was “convinced . . . that General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.”
But then the committee’s investigation came to a sudden stop and none of the alleged financiers were ever called for questioning. In fact, when the transcript of the committee’s interview with Butler came out, every person he’d named ended up being deleted. “Not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime,” said the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin. I can’t help but think of the current administration in Washington refusing to even consider prosecuting the Bush people for their involvement in torture.
When John McCormack, who chaired the committee and went on to become House Speaker, was interviewed years later about what had happened, he claimed he couldn’t remember why they’d avoided going after the bankers and other corporate powers. McCormack did say in 1971:
“If the plotters had got rid of Roosevelt, there’s no telling what might have taken place. They wouldn’t have told the people what they were doing, of course. They were going to make it all sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and a plan to make it all sound like a good American program. A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority, as Adolf Hitler did. . . . The people were in a very confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction. Mass frustration could bring about anything.”
That, again, feels to me like we’re in a déjà vu today.
Smedley Butler didn’t live a whole lot longer. He died at age fifty-eight on June 21, 1940, in the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, after becoming ill with probable stomach cancer a few weeks earlier. But he left us all an amazing legacy in this book, War Is a Racket. It’s an anti-war classic by a man who knew firsthand what he was talking about.
Like Smedley, I enlisted against my father’s wishes, going into the Navy right after I finished high school. Every member of my immediate family is a war veteran. My father had seven Bronze Battle Stars in World War II. My mother was an Army nurse in North Africa. My brother is a Vietnam veteran. So I know whereof I speak, too, when I stand with General Butler against America’s ongoing imperialist wars. I opposed the invasion of Iraq from day one, because we were lining our military up against another sovereign nation as an aggressor and an occupier. And who benefited from our lying our way into Iraq? The Halliburtons of this world, the war profiteer contractors and their banker backers.
Here’s the way Butler puts it in chapter 3 of War Is a Racket:
“Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the ‘war to end wars.’ This was the ‘war to make the world safe for democracy.’ No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason.”
He also points out that our national debt—such a rallying cry today—is directly tied big-time to “our fiddling in international affairs.”
“We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.”
And he was talking then about World War I!
I also resonated strongly with Butler’s noting the terrible dichotomy between those who promote these wars and those who must fight them. “How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” he writes. “How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?”
This goes along with something I’ve proposed in the past. If I ever became president, I’d push with every ounce of power I had for Congress to pass this into law:
Every elected federal official must pre-designate an individual in their immediate family who has to begin military service—the moment that official casts an affirmative vote toward going to war. This could be a grandchild, a niece or nephew, but someone. It doesn’t mean they necessarily go to the war zone. What it does mean is that they and their family experience some personal discomfort because of this decision. Going to war should bring difficulty, especially to those who are the orchestrators or the authorizers. Right now, it’s far too easy for them to go on TV with their bleeding hearts and give standing ovations to our service personnel. War should not be laissez-faire. If you’re not willing to send someone from your family, how can you be so willing to send someone else’s?
All in all, War Is a Racket demands a contemporary audience. We need real heroes for our young people to emulate, individuals who weren’t afraid to take a stand for the sake of our country. I believe the story—and the words—of General Butler need to be as widely known as those of Washington and Lincoln. If this means making us think about the fact that wealthy people can sometimes be out for evil purposes, let the chips fall where they may. Thank you, General Butler, for your inspiration!
Jesse Ventura
1 Quote spoken by Novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, after receiving a letter from U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker.