The Plot To Seize The White House

By Jules Archer

PART TWO

The Indispensable Man

Smedley Darlington Butler was born July 30, 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the first of three sons. Both his parents came from old and distinguished Quaker families. Some of his forebears included pacifists who had operated an underground railroad station for runaway slaves, and grandparents who had joined the Union Army to defend Gettysburg against Robert E. Lee's army.

On his mother's side he was descended from the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends and Congressman Smedley Darlington, the grandfather for whom he was named. His paternal lineage traced back to Noble Butler, who came to America shortly after William Penn.

His father, Thomas S. Butler, was a bluntly outspoken judge who spent thirty-two years in Congress, where he wielded great influence as chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee. Once when he had advocated a large Navy, a close Quaker friend reproached him, "Thee is a fine Friend!"

"Thee," the fine Friend snorted, "is a damn fool!"

The Quaker archaisms thee, thy, and thine were used only within the family and sometimes to intimate friends. The Quakerism of both Thomas Butler and his son Smedley was of that order of earlier hot-tempered Quakers who belabored each other with wagon tongues, while pausing between the hearty blows they exchanged to invoke divine forgiveness.

Smedley picked up some of his father's uninhibited language as early as age five, inviting maternal chastisement until his father went to his defense by roaring, "I don't want a son who doesn't know how to use an honest damn now and then!"

Reared in upper-class comfort with a politically prominent father, grandfather, and uncles, it was taken for granted that he was marked for prominence. Subtle pressures were exerted by four maiden aunts who adored and fussed over their first nephew, keeping him in golden curls and dressing him in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. Jeering peers who mistook the clothes for the boy found his fistwork as fancy as his finery.

Stirred by tales of both his grandfathers in the Union Army, he developed a passionate love for tin soldiers, toy cannon, and books with pictures of battles. His mother, Maud Darlington Butler, sought to inculcate peaceful doctrines in her son by taking him to Hicksite Quaker meeting twice a week and sending him to the Friends' grade school in West Chester.

However, his early fascination with things martial persisted. When he was twelve, he joined a West Chester branch of the Boys' Brigade, a preparedness youth movement that went in for military drills. His father had no objection and even bought his son the first uniform Smedley ever wore. He felt proud.

At Haverford Preparatory School near Philadelphia, a popular choice of old Quaker families, he joined both the baseball and the football teams. Although he was younger and lighter than his teammates, his fighting spirit, qualities of leadership, candor, and fair dealing made him highly popular and won him the captaincy of both teams.

He was only a little over sixteen and a half on February 15, 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor at 9:40 P.M. Americans began chanting, "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain," around public bonfires, and volunteer companies marched happily off to war singing, "We'll Hang General Weyler to a Sour Apple Tree."

Young Butler found himself swept up by the excitement. Struggling with math and English seemed a hopelessly insipid pursuit, with the newspapers full of blazing accounts of the terrible brutality of Spanish masters of the little Caribbean island they had enslaved. Smedley yearned to join the noble crusade to liberate Cuba in the company of the fine fellows he saw marching off from West Chester daily.

Fearful of revealing his aspirations to his parents, he attempted a fait accompli by seeking to enlist with the 6th Pennsylvania Volunteers in his hometown. Rejected as under age, he braced himself to corner his father in the sunlit library of their house on Miner Street one morning.

"Father," he said, "I want to enlist. Thee could get me into the Navy, as an apprentice, if necessary."

Thomas Butler tugged at his thick handlebar moustache with stubby fingers, regarding his slender son skeptically. "I have known of thy desire to go to war. But thee is too young."

Smedley's jaw jutted. "If thee won't help me, I'll run away and join the general army!"

"If thee does, it will avail thee nothing," his father said quietly. "I will see that they discharge thee."

One night the crestfallen youth overheard his father tell his mother privately that Congress had authorized an increase of the Marine Corps by two thousand men and twenty-four second lieutenants for the duration of the war. "The Marine Corps is a finely trained body of men," his father said. "Too bad Smedley is so young. He seems determined to go."

A new idea took root. Smedley had seen a Marine in West Chester-a young god in a magnificent uniform of dark blue coat decorated with many shiny buttons, and light blue trousers with scarlet stripes running down the seams. Wouldn't a fellow cut a fine figure in that! That night he fell asleep with visions of himself as a faultlessly tailored Marine charging up a Cuban hill, his Mamluk hilt sword pointed forward, inspiring the men behind him in a victorious charge.

At breakfast, heart pounding, he gave his mother an ultimatum. "I'm going to be a Marine. If thee doesn't come with me and give me thy permission, I'll hire a man to say he is my father. And I'll run away and enlist in some faraway regiment where I'm not known!"

His mother reluctantly agreed to accompany him by train to Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, without telling his father. In the competitive examination for Marine lieutenants he ranked second among two hundred applicants. Joyfully he heard the gates of childhood close behind him; ahead beckoned the exciting world of manhood and adventure. But he swallowed hard when he had to face his father and admit that he had won acceptance in the Marine Corps by adding two years to his age.

"Well," his father sighed. "if thee is determined to go, thee shall go. But don't add another year to thy age, my son. Thy mother and I weren't married until 1879!"

He could scarcely contain his pride when his lean, wiry frame was encased in a crisp new uniform. Only average in height with sloping shoulders, one higher than the other, the new second lieutenant nevertheless managed to look properly fierce because of a long, large nose and a pair of blazing, protruding eyes that gave him the bold look of a young adventurer. Huge-handed, he had a husky voice that quickly developed into a leatherneck growl, and a lively sense of humor that appealed to his fellow Marines.

His first glimpse of war came the day he arrived at Santiago, Cuba, on July 1, 1898, past a Spanish cruiser still burning in the harbor. Rigid with excitement, he boarded another ship that took him to Guantanamo Bay, where he joined the Marine Battalion of the North Atlantic Squadron.

Next day Mancil C. Goodrell, the captain of Butler's company, took him on a two-man reconnaissance of enemy positions. As they moved along a mountain trail, a shot rang out, and a bullet whizzed past Butler's head. He flung himself prone and hugged the earth, his heart beating wildly.

"What in hell is the matter?" Goodrell demanded.

"That was a ... bullet."

"Well, what if it was? A little excitement now and then keeps you from going stale."

Soldiering under Goodrell, who had had no formal military education, Butler became infused with the spirit of the Corps. He relished the bonds of comradeship, the fierce loyalties, the cool courage, the pride in being a Marine that united men who considered themselves a fighting elite.

The officers were all professional soldiers who chewed tobacco, drank raw whiskey, cursed a blue streak, drilled the tails off their troops in garrison, and were experts on the Lee straightpull 6-mm. rifle, Gatling gun, and Hotchkiss revolving cannon.

Thoroughly unorthodox, wild in their humor, they were fierce warriors who set an example for their men in battle by often fighting on after they were wounded.

In young Butler's eyes they were heroes all.

He was enormously proud of his first two decorations-the Spanish and West Indian Campaign medals. But he was even prouder simply of being a full-fledged leatherneck who had shared the bonds of a campaign with the Marines of Guantanamo. By the time his battalion returned home, he and two other young Marine officers-John A. Lejuene and Buck Neville had become an inseparable trio. Lejuene and Neville were each destined to rise to the rank of commandant of the Marine Corps.

"The Spanish-American War was a high point in my life when I went to it at the age of sixteen," Butler later reminisced wryly, "to defend my home in Pennsylvania against the Spaniards in Cuba."





2


Commissioned a first lieutenant on April 8, 1899, Butler left four days later with a battalion of three hundred Marines bound for the Philippines. Emilio Aguinaldo had begun a revolution against American occupation of the islands following Spain's surrender.

He led his company at the head of a battalion attack on Nocaleta, a fiercely defended rebel stronghold that the Spaniards had never been able to take. Stumbling onto concealed trenches and rifle pits, his company met with a blanket of heavy fire. The men went prone, waiting for his orders.

Desperation overcoming fright, Butler sprang to his feet, waving the company to charge and open fire. The battle drove the insurgents back from the trench. He pursued them through waist-high rice paddies until they turned and fled.

He grew increasingly confident of his ability to survive after several more skirmishes had driven the Aguinaldo forces north to mountain strongholds. His pride in the Corps kept growing. When a Japanese tattoist turned up in the Navy yard at Cavite, he had an enormous Marine Corps emblem tattoed across his chest. Infection from the tattoist's needle brought him down with a raging fever.

In June, 1900, he was ordered to a new Asian outpost of trouble under Major Littleton Tazewell Waller, a crusty bantam of a man with a fierce moustache. The Marines sailed for China to rescue the American legation, which had been imperiled by the Boxer uprising. The expedition numbered only a hundred Marines, but by the time they arrived in China, the situation had reached crisis proportions.

All of North China was now up in arms against the foreign powers who had carved the country into colonial spheres of influence. The Chinese bitterly resented the alien flags that flew over the imperialist compounds and the foreign ships that dominated Chinese ports, flooding the country with Western goods. Most infuriating of all were entrance signs the foreign legations had posted at their luxurious clubs: "Forbidden to dogs and Chinese." Eventually the allied nations had to send over 100,000 troops to protect their nationals.

The eighteen-year-old Butler, who had no understanding of the political causes of the Boxer Rebellion, saw his role simply as that of a Marine doing his duty to protect American citizens on foreign soil. Waller received word that the legation compound at Tientsin, twenty-five miles inland, was in desperate straits. A small defending force of allied soldiers was trying to hold off fifty thousand attacking Boxers.

Waller, Butler, and their ninety-eight men were joined by a column of four hundred Russians also en route to relieve the siege. At a gray mud village later known as Boxertown, bursts of heavy fire suddenly exploded from trenches on all sides. The Russians, who received the brunt of it, fell back swiftly through the lines of the Marines. Waller's men flattened on the plain, returning the fire.

Three Marines were killed, nine wounded. Ordered to withdraw, Butler counted noses and found a private named Carter missing. With a lieutenant named Harding and four privates, he ran a gauntlet of fire to search for him. Locating Carter in a ditch, Butler found that his leg had been broken. While the four privates fought off Boxers, Butler and Harding removed their shirts to bandage Carter's legs together, carrying him off between them. It took them an excruciating four hours to fight seven miles through the whine of persistent bullets to catch up with the company. Tripped several times by his sword, Butler unbuckled it in exasperation and flung it away.

During the weary retreat of the Marines, Butler constantly fought off an urge to collapse and give himself over to sleep or death, without caring too much which. Suddenly the crack of a bullet was followed by a dull sound right next to him. Startled, he looked up to see a stream of blood flowing down the face of a grizzled sergeant. The veteran Marine made no sound, just scowled, pulled his hat over the wound, and continued the pace of the march. It was an image of tough Marine courage that engraved itself on Butler's memory.

Stumbling on through a fierce North China dust storm with a raging toothache, his heels rubbed raw by marches that began at 2:30 A.M., famished by hunger, Butler was so miserable that Boxer gunfire seemed the mildest of his torments.

The Marines finally joined forces with a newly arrived column of three thousand international troops and fought their way through to the Tientsin compound. Routing a Chinese cohort, they broke the siege as overjoyed women and children rushed out to hug their rescuers.

The international troops defending the Tientsin compound were soon reinforced by an allied army of seven thousand men. On July 13, 1900, they attacked the native walled city of Tientsin to rout the Boxers from their stronghold. Butler was in the forefront of the assault, which required breaking through an outer mud wall twenty feet high and crossing fifteen hundred yards of rice paddies to an inner high stone wall.

Leading his company through a hail of Chinese shells and snipers' bullets, he climbed over the mud wall only to find himself dropping into a moat. The Chinese had flooded the paddies between the walls. He and his men splashed through the morass, slipping and lurching in waist-high muck as they sought to fire their weapons. When they approached the inner wall gate, thousands of Chinese on the wall poured down a withering fire, forcing Butler to order a retreat.

A tall private next to him named Partridge was hit and seriously wounded. Butler and two Marines carried him above water level through the rain of bullets splashing around them.

A burning sensation in his right thigh puzzled Butler momentarily until he realized he had been shot. Ignoring his wound, he continued to help carry Partridge until they reached some high ground. There he applied first aid to the private's wounds, then limped off in search of a medic for him.

By the time he found a Marine doctor, blood was pouring copiously out of his own wound. He protested volubly when the doctor, who outranked him, insisted on treating him first. By the time he got the doctor back to Partridge, the private was dead. Grieved and angry, he refused to leave when the doctor ordered him to the rear with the other wounded.

His first lieutenant, Henry Leonard, and a sergeant insisted on dragging him off to the other side of the mud wall. Here he was joined by a Marine lieutenant who had been wounded in the left leg. Tying their disabled legs together, they hobbled three-legged back to the nearest first-aid station. When they had been treated and bandaged, they helped dress the wounds of hundreds of casualties now pouring in.

Recommending Butler for promotion, Major Waller declared, "I have before mentioned the fine qualities of Mr. Butler in control of men, courage, and excellent example in his own person of all the qualities most admirable in a soldier."

On July 23, 1900, a week before he turned nineteen, Butler was made captain while recuperating in the hospital. The enlisted men who had helped him rescue Private Carter at Boxertown received Medals of Honor which, until 1914, were not awarded to officers. But Butler's promotion took cognizance of his heroism, citing his "distinguished conduct and public service in the presence of the enemy."

Insisting that his leg was fully healed, he painfully concealed a limp until he had nagged the doctors into getting rid of him with a hospital discharge so that he could lead his men on a march to relieve the siege of Peking. They were part of a large, colorful international army that included French Zouaves in red and blue, Italian Bersaglieri with plumed helmets, Royal Welsh Fusiliers with ribbons down their napes, Bengal cavalry on Arab stallions, turbaned Sikhs, Germans in pointed helmets, and flamboyantly uniformed troops of half a dozen other countries.

Butler's leg wound throbbed painfully, and he suffered spells of sickness from polluted water and food. His stomach was not soothed by sights en route to Peking: two Japanese soldiers, eyes and tongues cut out, nailed to a door; an old Chinese mandarin pinned to his bed by a huge sword; village streets strewn with fly-covered corpses, their skulls smashed in. The Boxers were just as ruthless with Chinese "traitors" as with luckless foreigners.

In one village a Chinese family, frightened by the allied army's approach, jumped into a canal and tried to drown themselves. Butler and his men rescued them and pinioned them firmly while an interpreter explained that the troops would not harm them. After some animated conversation, the interpreter told him, "Captain, these people say that since you have saved their lives, you are responsible for them as guardians and must now take care of them."

"Good-bye!" yelled Butler, racing off with his men. Reaching the outskirts of Peking, they ran into blistering fire from the top of the city's stone and mud wall. They joined a combined five-thousand-man American and British force hastily digging a trench before the city.

One British private left the trench in an attempt to wipe out a Chinese strongpoint at one gate but was hit between the trench and wall. Butler's friend, Henry Leonard, sped out to rescue him but was shot and badly wounded. Clearing the trench at a bound, Butler raced through fire to reach him, but Leonard proved able to scramble back on his own, so Butler lifted the wounded Tommy on his back instead and staggered back to the trench with him.

Just as he eased the British soldier over the parapet, a stunning blow hit him in the chest. Whirling and falling, he lost consciousness briefly.

When he recovered, he heard one Marine say he'd been shot through the heart. He tried to speak but found he had no breath to vocalize. His shirt was torn open, and it was discovered that a bullet had struck the second button of his military blouse, flattening it and driving it into his chest. The button had gouged a hole in the eagle of the Marine Corps emblem he had had tattooed on his chest in the Philippines. The wound was not serious, although for weeks afterward his bruised chest ached painfully, and he spat blood when he coughed.

He was later congratulated by General A. R. R. Dorward, commanding general of the British contingent, who called Butler's rescue of the wounded Tommy the bravest act he had ever seen on the battlefield and recommended him for the Victoria Cross. But the American Government in those days did not permit an American officer to accept foreign decorations of any kind.

By August 14 Peking was in the hands of the allies, and the Boxer Rebellion was crushed. Butler's company of Marines, the longest in China, had suffered the greatest casualties in the fighting-twenty-six killed or wounded. Exhausted, Butler now came down with a bad case of typhoid fever that wasted his already spare frame down to a skeletonized ninety pounds.





3


The ailing captain was shipped to a naval hospital at Cavite, from which he was invalided home to San Francisco. Arriving on December 31, 1900, he was embraced at the port by his worried father and mother, who had rushed to the West Coast to meet him. But during his convalescence he had gained thirty pounds and was almost fully recovered. He returned home with his parents resplendent in his dress blues with two new decorations-a Marine Corps Brevet Medal for "eminent and conspicuous personal bravery" and a China Campaign Medal.

The town of West Chester gave him a hero's reception attended by the Secretary of the Navy and the commandant of the Marine Corps. It was a heady tribute for a boy not yet twenty.

His parents now suggested that since his enlistment period was about up, and he had done more than his duty in serving his country, he might want to return to his Quaker heritage in civilian life. As a boy he had sometimes talked of becoming a civil engineer. Why not go to college and study for it?

He found himself powerless to explain why he felt bound to the blue brotherhood; to make his parents understand his deep pride in the Corps, the warm bonds of solidarity that united Marines, the enjoyable excitement of danger, the honor of being foremost in defense of the nation and its citizens. Any other way of life seemed pale and drab by comparison.

"I'm reenlisting," he told them.

On October 31, 1902, he was put in command of a company of 101 men and shipped to the island of Culebra twenty miles east of Puerto Rico. There was trouble in Panama, and Butler's company was part of two battalions being stationed in reserve on Culebra while the fleet, under Admiral George Dewey, conducted maneuvers offshore.

Living on field rations and fighting scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas, the Marines built docks and other naval constructions. In the midst of their perspiring labors Squadron Admiral Joe Coghlan sent 12,5 Navy gunnery experts ashore to challenge Butler and his men to a race in dragging five-inch coastal guns up four-hundred-foot hills. Admiral Dewey sent word that a victory shot was to be fired from the first gun mounted.

Stripped to the waist, Butler worked like a madman alongside his men to prove the superiority of leathernecks over bluejackets. At sunrise a jubilant Butler ordered his men to fire a victory shot. The shell sailed over Admiral Dewey's flagship, landing a mile beyond. Instead of congratulating the winners, the furious hero of Manila Bay sent Butler an icy reprimand for "reckless firing."

Their reward was an order to dig a canal. The work was backbreaking, with the ground solid rock in many places, marshland in others, all tenaciously guarded by a ferocious mosquito army. And the Navy insisted that they had to work under the broiling tropic sun in full uniform with leggings.

Unwilling to inflict any ordeal upon his men that he was not willing to endure himself, Butler wielded a shovel in the ditch beside them. Soon their ranks began to be decimated by tropical fever. A Marine major asked the Navy flagship, which had an ice machine aboard, for ice to bring down their fevers. His request scornfully refused, he returned to camp to find Butler unconscious. The major ordered him rowed immediately across the bay to a temporary Navy hospital.

Indignant at the Navy's treatment, the major wrote to Butler's father in Washington to tell him what was happening at Culebra. Thomas Butler let out an angry roar in the House Naval Affairs Committee. Secretary of the Navy William H. Moody sent swift orders to Admiral Dewey that no more Americans were to be used as forced labor on the miserable canal. The Navy brass fumed, convinced that it had been Captain Smedley Butler who had complained to his father. As soon as he was off the sick list, Admiral Coghlan put him in charge of sixty-five natives hired to finish the canal. Two weeks later, the canal finished, he collapsed with a relapse of tropical fever.

While Butler was in the hospital, a belated award of the Philippine Campaign Medal made him think about his old battalion under Major Waller, who was now back in the Philippines under Army General Adna Chaffee fighting rebels. He was stunned when an uproar in the American press compelled Waller's court-martial for killing ten Filipino native carriers who had balked at orders during a march. Waller had been acquitted, however, on grounds that he had merely been obeying "kill and burn" orders relayed from General Chaffee.

Butler was distressed by the news. Having served under both Waller and Chaffee, he admired them as courageous officers whose code called for protecting, first, American civilians wher ever they might be; then the men under them; then their comrades-in-arms. From his own experience in the Philippines and China, Butler guessed that Waller had suspected the carriers of being rebels. It was impossible to tell apart insurrectionists and noncombatant natives.

The twenty-one-year-old Marine captain was not yet troubled by doubts as to what the Marines were ordered to do in the service of their country, or why. He shared the easy condescension of most Marines of that swashbuckling era toward people of underdeveloped countries as naive natives who had to be patronized, directed, and protected by Americans.

The Marines were an elite gendarmerie entrusted with the duty of maintaining international law and order on behalf of civilization. A Marine's only concern was carrying out his orders as expertly as possible, without questions. It was only later, as he gradually came to know native peoples better and learned to admire their age-old customs and traditions, that Smedley Butler felt impelled to question his role as an instrument of American foreign policy.





4


When a revolution broke out in Honduras early in 1903, Butler's battalion was dispatched there aboard an old banana freighter, the Panther, as part of a squadron under Admiral Coghlan.

On the second day out the ship's commander summoned all hands to the quarterdeck to complain that someone had been using profane language near his cabin. "I know the guilty party cannot be one of these fine men," he declared, indicating the sailors, "therefore it must have been one of these men enlisted from the slums of our big cities." Pointing to the Marines, he restricted their use of the deck. Butler restrained an impulse to apply the tip of his boot to the seat of the commander's naval rectitude.

"Then and there," he recalled later, "I made up my mind that I would always protect Marines from the hounding to which they were subjected by some of the naval officers."

At the end of his duty in Culebra, his father had reproached him for not having kept him better informed as to what was going on in America's naval outposts. Now Butler did not hesitate to write his father field reports in the Plain Language, sometimes asking him to use his influence on the House Naval Affairs Committee on behalf of the Marine Corps. Thomas Butler did not always consent, but did serve informally as the Marines' court of last resort against Navy hostility.

In Honduras Smedley was vague as to what the trouble was all about, noting, "It all seemed like a Gilbert and Sullivan war." He led a force ashore at Trujillo between government and rebel forces who were firing at each other to rescue the American consular agent.

After - seeing some duty in Panama, for which he won an Expeditionary Medal, he returned to the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1905. A pretty Georgia-born girl named Ethel Conway Peters, some of whose family had been prominent in the affairs of Philadelphia since Colonial times, helped him make good use of his leave time. They were married on June 3o at Bay Head, New Jersey, in a military wedding. Commented the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Cupid and Mars in a wedding by the sea at high noon today."

Their honeymoon was a world trip made possible by orders assigning him to the Philippines as captain of Company E, Second Regiment. Arriving with his bride by way of Europe, India, and Singapore, he was stationed at a small naval base on Subic Bay, sixty miles north of Manila. Here, in November, 1906, his daughter Ethel was born. Butler's popularity led to her adoption by the regiment. Giving a dinner for the enlisted men, he carried her to the table on a pillow as guest of honor. Not surprisingly, she grew up a "Marine brat" and years later married a Marine lieutenant, John Wehle.

With a detachment of fifty men Butler spent several months dragging six-inch guns up mountaintops to defend Subic Bay against possible attack by Japan, an attack that did not materialize for another thirty-six years. He and his men lived ruggedly on hardtack, hash, and coffee. A Navy supply tug, which never brought them supplies or rations, continued to ignore them even when they signaled that they had run out of hash.

Butler decided to sail to the Navy supply base across the bay. With two volunteers he set out in a native outrigger. A typhoon blew up suddenly behind them, ripping away their sail and snapping their paddles. For five hours they fought to keep from drowning until the storm finally blew the seafaring trio ashore at the supply base.

Soaked and chilled, Butler lost no time in arranging to have the supply tug carry beef and vegetables back to his men. The hungry Marines cheered his return on the tug. The camp dock had been swept away by the typhoon, so they splashed out into the bay to form a chain that passed the food they splashed from tug to shore. Butler was a hero to his men, but not to the Navy brass who heard about his bypass of official channels.

A Navy board of medical survey decided that his taking the outrigger into a typhoon, and use of the tug to take supplies hack to his men, indicated signs of an "impending nervous breakdown." He was ordered home.

In October, 1908, despite the dim view of him taken by the Navy brass, be was promoted to the rank of major. His fitness reports submitted by his commanding officers could not be ignored; all unanimously rated him "outstanding," commending him as a strict disciplinarian impatient of inefficiency, laziness, or cowardice.

His contempt for red tape and his personal bravery were acknowledged to have made him one of the most popular and successful officials in the Corps. His units were distinguished by a high esprit de corps because of his devotion to his men, his concern for their welfare and pride in their accomplishments, and his democratic insistence upon rolling up his sleeves to work beside them physically.

Soon after his second child, Smedley, Jr., was born, July 12, 1909, Butler was put in charge of the 4th Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, and sent to Panama. Although he was stationed on the Isthmus for four years until the Panama Canal was opened, he was temporarily detached three times to command expeditions into strife-torn Nicaragua.

Washington had decided to intervene openly in the internal affairs of that Central American country. Butler's orders each time were "to protect American lives and property." He soon realized that this general order involved propping up Nicaraguan governments or factions that were favored in Washington for business reasons.

The Conservative party was seeking to drive the Liberals out of power. Their revolt was led by Adolfo Diaz, secretary treasurer of the La Luz Mining Company, in which Secretary of State Philander C. Knox was said to own stock. The Liberal Government had smashed Diaz's forces and pinned 350 survivors at Bluefields, where Butler had been sent with the 4th Battalion. The American Consul at Bluefields made it clear to Butler that the State Department wanted Diaz to prevail.

Two Liberal generals prepared to take Bluefields with fifteen thousand well-armed men. Before the shooting could start, Butler sent them a message. The Marines were there only as neutrals protecting American residents, he told the attackers. The government forces could take the town but must leave their guns outside the city so that no Americans were accidentally shot. Marine guards would be posted outside the city to collect all weapons from Nicaraguans entering it.

How could they take the town, the dismayed generals protested, without arms? And why weren't Diaz's forces inside the town also being disarmed? Butler thought fast.

"There is no danger of the defenders killing American citizens, because they will be shooting outward," he replied blandly, "but your soldiers would be firing toward us."

The ploy compelled the government forces to retract, giving the Conservative forces time to regroup and mount a counterattack that soon overthrew the Liberals. Juan Estrada became the new President, with Diaz as Vice-President.

Butler felt somewhat uneasy about the role the Marines had been compelled to play in this coup, especially since he knew that the American people had no idea of how Secretary of State Knox was using the armed forces in Central America, or why. But as a Marine officer he did not feel responsible for foreign policy. He saw his role simply as implementing that policy by dutifully carrying out his country's orders as he was sworn to do.

Before the Marines returned to Panama, he was confronted by a host of Bluefields shopkeepers who presented him with unpaid bills signed by members of his battalion, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Yankee Doodle. From the handwriting Butler deciphered the true identity of these pseudonyms and saw to it that they paid up. The first to defend his men against injustices, he also insisted that they scrupulously honor their word to tradesmen in whatever foreign land they were stationed, to protect the Corps's good name.

One month later the Nicaraguan revolutionary pot boiled over again. General Luis Mena, the Conservative party's Minister of War, had overthrown Estrada as President and had been overthrown in turn by Diaz. Mena went into rebellion with government troops loyal to him and had returned to attack Managua, the capital. Butler was rushed to Managua with a force of 350 men and ordered to prop up the faltering Diaz government.

Finding Diaz in the field and government forces in the capital in chaos, he took command of them. The American minister informed him that American banking interests had taken over the national railroad as security for a loan to the Diaz government, so that it must now be protected as "American property." But it ran through territory controlled by three thousand of Mena's troops, who had captured a train and held it against a small Marine force sent to retake it.

Nicaraguan newspapers mocked the Americans' rout. Mena's forces refused to let any other trains through, cutting off supplies from the port.

On August 25, 1912, Butler was ordered to retake the captured train and open the railroad line. Angry that a Marine officer had failed in the task and made the Corps "a laughingstock," he wrote his wife, "The idea prevails very strongly that Marines are not soldiers, and will not fight. I cannot stand any slur on our Corps and I will wipe it off or quit."





5


With a hundred Marine volunteers behind him, Butler located the train and approached the rebel forces guarding it with two heavy cloth bags in his hands. His way was barred by machetes and bayonets, and he was warned to retreat or have his small force annihilated. Through an interpreter he informed the rebels that the bags in his hands held dynamite, and he intended to blow them off the map if they did not back off and let his men repossess the train.

The rebel commander hesitated, then glumly ordered his men to yield. The Marines manned the train, and as it pulled away, Butler calmly emptied the two bags out of a rear window in sight of the rebels. They contained sand.

Checking a bridge to make sure it was safe for the train to cross, be was suddenly confronted by a rebel general with an enormous moustache who whipped out a huge pistol and shoved it against Butler's stomach. If the train moved forward one inch, the rebel officer yelled to Marines clustered around the locomotive, he would pull the trigger.

The slender Marine major suddenly sidestepped, simultaneously tearing the pistol out of the Nicaraguan's hand. Emptying the cartridges out of the barrel, he calmly returned the gun to the crestfallen general and drew his own revolver. The vanquished rebel leader meekly marched back to the train as a hostage, and the train went through.

Butler discovered that most Nicaraguans were supporting the rebellion against the Diaz government, which had hired brutal Honduran mercenaries to crush it. The people themselves had slain many mercenaries, who looted, raped, and murdered. Unfortunately for American prestige, a few Americans had been conspicuous among them. Butler's hundred Marines aboard the train were regarded with general hostility as similarly vicious instruments of the Diaz regime.

Butler and his men succeeded in opening the line between Managua and the port at Corinto. On the way back they had to build three new bridges and several miles of track. Returning to Managua after a fifteen-hundred-foot descent with the train's brakes gone, Butler collapsed into bed and pulled the covers over his face. During the whole week-long trip he had had just seventeen hours' sleep.

By now the cynicism of the American presence in Nicaragua was becoming depressingly obvious to him. "I expect a whole lot more rot about the property of citizens of ours . . . which has been stolen by the rebels and which I must see restored to their owners," he wrote his wife on September 13, 1912. The following day he complained of orders from Admiral William H. H. Southerland, who headed the fleet at Corinto, "virtually changing our status from neutral to partisanship with the government forces."

He was next ordered to open the railroad south to Granada, Mena's rebel headquarters. Another malaria attack delayed the expedition. Always restless and unhappy when illness forced him to be idle, Butler held ice in his mouth and drove down his temperature until the doctor reluctantly let him out of bed. Weak and haggard with 104 ° fever, he had to lie on a cot in a boxcar as his troop train pulled out of Managua. His eyes were so bloodshot and glaring that his men began calling him Old Gimlet Eye, a nickname that stuck.

Under constant harassment by guerrilla forces, Butler finally sent word ahead to Granada to warn General Mena that the Americans were prepared to attack him if he ordered any further assaults on the train. Mena replied that he was sending a peace delegation. Hoping to impress the emissaries with his military power, Butler ordered poles put in the muzzles of two small field guns on flatcars and covered them with tents to give them the appearance of fourteen-inch guns. He further awed the emissaries by receiving them seated on a wooden camp chair mounted on stilted legs like a primitive throne.

Glaring down at them, he warned that unless Mena signed an agreement surrendering the railroad property and moving his troops out of the railroad area, Marine "regiments" would attack Mena's two-thousand-man force in Granada.

His bluff worked so well that Mena not only agreed but, to Butler's amazement, also offered to surrender himself and his army if the Americans would provide a warship to take him safely to exile in Panama. The jubilant Marine major notified Admiral Southerland and the admiral at once agreed.

Butler was made temporary governor of the District of Granada until elections could be held. He promptly released all political prisoners Mena had thrown into dungeons and returned all the property that had been confiscated from them. He next issued a proclamation ordering all loot taken from the people by both rebel and government forces to be restored.

The astonished Granadans hailed him as a liberator.

On September 30, 1912, Butler was dismayed when the admiral transmitted cabled orders from Secretary of the Navy George von L. Meyer to side openly with the Diaz regime and turn over to it all captured rebels. Apologetically he disarmed Mena and his troops, confining troops, confining them m their barracks under guard.

"I must say," he wrote his wife, "that I hated my job like the devil . . . but orders are orders, and of course, had to be carried out." But he protested bitterly to Admiral Southerland at the betrayal of his promise to Mena. Southerland finally agreed to stand behind his pledge and explain to Meyer.

Local Granadan politicians, deprived by Butler of their customary loot, loudly complained to the admiral that he was interfering in local affairs. Southerland felt compelled to relieve him as governor, sending him to crush the final remnants of the revolution. Zeledon's force of two thousand rebels was dug in at a fort on top of the Coyatepe Mountain, a stronghold that had never been taken in Nicaragua's stormy history.

On October 4, Butler and Colonel Joe Pendleton charged up the Coyatepe leading an 850-man Marine force. In a forty-minute battle twenty-seven rebels were killed in their trenches, nine captured, and the rest put to flight. Two Marines were killed.

The fall of Coyatepe put the town of Masaya, the last rebel outpost, in Marine hands. As they occupied it, some four thousand government troops celebrated by entering the town, looting it, and getting drunk. Incensed, Butler expressed his bitterness in a letter to his wife, decrying "a victory gained by us for them at the expense of two good American lives, all because Brown Brothers, bankers, have some money invested in this country."





6


Resting in Masaya, the major began longing to see his family. "I feel terribly over missing my son's most interesting period of development, but ... this separation can't last forever," he wrote Ethel on October g. "I get so terribly homesick at times that I just don't see how I can stand it."

The Taft Administration had another unpleasant assignment for him-rigging the new Nicaraguan elections to make certain that Diaz was returned to power. Checking on the country's election laws, Butler found that the polls had to be open a sufficient length of time ("at least that's the way we translated it") and that voters had to register to be able to vote.

He ordered a canvass of the district to locate four hundred Nicaraguans who could be depended upon to vote for Diaz. Notice of opening of the polls was given five minutes beforehand. The four hundred Diaz adherents were assembled in a line, and two hours later, as soon as they had finished voting, the polls were closed. Other citizens had either failed to register or didn't know balloting was going on.

"Today," Butler wrote Ethel sardonically, "Nicaragua has enjoyed a fine `free election,' with only one candidate being allowed to run-President Adolfo Diaz-who was unanimously elected. In order that this happy event might be pulled off without hitch and to the entire satisfaction of our State Department, we patrolled all the towns to prevent disorders and of course there were none."

He consoled himself by reflecting that the constant revolutions in Central American politics did not represent a struggle for power by the people themselves, but were most often simply attempts by rascals out of office to overthrow rascals in office. He had a high regard for the Nicaraguan people and genuine compassion for their suffering.

On November 13, 1912, over five thousand Nicaraguans turned out in Granada to present him with a gold medal for saving them from troop disorders and looting. They also gave him a scroll signed by Granada's leading citizens, expressing gratitude for his "brave and opportune intervention" that "put an end to the desperate and painful situation in which this city was placed-victim of all the horrors of an organized anarchy."

They told him, "From this terrible situation and from the anguish that the future held for us, we passed as by magic to a state of complete guarantee for life, property, and well-being for all, as soon as the American hoops entered the city. The tact and discretion with which you fulfilled your humane mission, so bristling with difficulties, was such that your name will be forever engraved in the hearts of the people."

There were fireworks and a fiesta. "The whole thing was very impressive and made me feel quite silly," he wrote sheepishly to his wife, "but rather proud for my darlings' sakes."

A people's committee urged him to stay on as police commissioner of the district. The twenty-nine-year-old major found himself intrigued by the prospect of introducing honest law enforcement in Granada. "What would thee think," he wrote Ethel, "of my accepting a $15,000 job as Chief of this Police down here, not to leave the Marine Corps, but to have a three-years' leave?" But he finally decided against it.

Despite his reservations about the ethics of the Nicaraguan campaign, it had filled him with exhilaration of adventure. "This is the end of the expedition," he wrote his wife. "Would like to have some parts of it over again; the excitement was fine." He indicated an early awareness that he was destined to play a meaningful role in American history: "Be sure to keep all my letters as they are a diary of my life, and may be useful sometime in the future."

With a second bronze star added to his Expeditionary Medal and a new Nicaraguan Campaign Medal, the indefatigable young campaigner returned to Panama and his family. His second son, Thomas Richard, was born in October, 1913.

With Woodrow Wilson in the White House, war clouds loomed with Mexico when bandit General Victoriano Huerta overthrew legally elected Mexican President Francisco Madero. In an angry exchange of notes, Wilson insisted that Huerta must hold new elections barring himself as a candidate. Wilson's choice was Huerta's rival for power, General Venustiano Carranza. Banning all arms shipments to Mexico, the President asked all Americans without urgent business there to leave the country and sent the fleet to cruise significantly in the Gulf of Mexico during a period of "watchful waiting."

Defying Wilson, Huerta began importing arms from Europe to crush Carranza. The President then violated his own embargo and rushed American arms to the Carranza forces. Full-scale fighting broke out all over Mexico, during which American industrial property was destroyed and United States businessmen were compelled to flee attacks against them from both sides.

In January, 1914, the Marines were ordered from Panama to the fleet standing off Vera Cruz. Ethel Butler took the children home to Pennsylvania, and her husband reported to the fleet flagship Florida, assigned to the staff of Admiral Frank Friday Fletcher. Welcoming him aboard, the admiral remarked on his courage and daring in the Chinese, Philippine, and Nicaraguan campaigns. He was just the man, the admiral thought, for a dangerous special mission for the War Department.

How did Butler feel about going into Mexico as a "civilian" spy to make an expert analysis of Huerta's fighting forces in and around Mexico City, as well as to gather general intelligence, in case war was declared? He would carry no official orders of any kind, of course, and if he were caught, the Navy would have to disavow any knowledge of either him or his mission.

"How soon can I start, Admiral?" he asked.

Beneath a night sky of swollen black clouds, as most of the crew aboard the Florida watched a Western movie starring Broncho Billy, a civilian-clad Butler dropped a small traveling bag out of his cabin port into a small boat, then slipped off the ship after it. His disappearance from the Florida was carried on the ship's rolls as "desertion."

Ashore in Vera Cruz, he decided to disguise himself as an Englishman. There were many English in Mexico at the time traveling on business. Attiring himself in a tweed suit, spats, deerstalker's hat, and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses with a black ribbon, he undertook a stage English accent. A fraudulent British passport and forged letters of introduction to important Britons in Mexico City completed his impersonation.

He left Vera Cruz aboard the private railroad car of the line's superintendent, a secret Carranza supporter cooperating with the Americans. The train rolled toward Mexico City along the road American troops would use if they invaded. The superintendent stopped the train several times en route, letting Butler inspect electric power plants and reservoirs by introducing him to leading citizens as "Mr. Johnson," a public utilities expert. Managing to stray inside some army forts on his own, he was apprehended several times but released.

"I carried a butterfly net and studied rocks," he grinned in recollection. "They thought I was a nut and let me pass."

In Mexico City he changed to American garb and posed as a private detective from the United States seeking a condemned murderer who had escaped and fled to Mexico. Mexican secret police escorted him to all the garrisons to help his search for the imaginary criminal. He soon had vital data on the troop strength and disposition of munitions dumps around Mexico City.

Making military maps of everything he had seen, Butler buried them in the false bottom of his bag and took the train back to Vera Cruz. He became aware that two Mexicans were following him. Apparently he had aroused suspicions, and the Mexican secret service was keeping an eye on him.

In the early morning when the train reached Vera Cruz, it paused temporarily to allow a rail switch to be thrown that took it into the station. During this pause Butler went to the washroom in pajamas, his bag concealed under his bathrobe. Locking the door behind him, he slipped out of the train window. He donned his clothes in the freight yard, then sped to the American consulate to contact Admiral Fletcher.

Two naval officers were sent ashore to the consulate. He turned over all his maps and data to them, then left separately, dressed once more in his British guise. Seeking to board a British steamer at the wharf to a port down the coast, from which he would secretly be picked up and brought back to the Florida, he was suddenly seized by a squad of police.

They considered it odd for a "British entomologist" to have been visiting the American embassy. His baggage was opened and searched thoroughly, but nothing incriminating was found. Threatening "you blighters" with official reprisals from the British Foreign Office, Butler bluffed them into letting him go. A few days later he was safely back aboard the Florida, where Admiral Fletcher warmly congratulated him on the success of his daring mission.





7


When war with Mexico seemed inevitable, on April 19, 1914, Admiral Fletcher put six companies of Marines ashore at Vera Cruz under Butler's old friend, Buck Neville, now a colonel.

At dawn when the six companies began marching through the city Mexican troops fired at them from rooftops and house windows, using machine guns as well as rifles. Marines rushed from house to house smashing in doors and searching for snipers.

The Marines Butler led were not his own command, and he was not sure of their behavior under fire. To inspire coolness he led them through Vera Cruz with no weapon of his own except a stick. The Marines in two columns kept close to the doorways for cover while he walked calmly down the center of the street for a better view of snipers in houses on both sides. Ignoring bullets spurting dust at his feet, he used the stick to point out snipers to his sharpshooters.

By nightfall the Marines had won control of the city, but at a cost of 135 Americans killed or wounded, 7 of the casualties Butler's men. Mexican casualties were four or five times as great.

Returning to Panama, Butler relieved tedious garrison duty by expending his inexhaustible energy in making Camp Elliott an exemplary Marine outpost. After a visit to the Panama Canal Zone, Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison wrote him, "I was delighted . . . to observe the esprit de corps exhibited by your command. Their alertness, skill, and proficiency were models for military organizations."

Congress had by now authorized officers as well as enlisted men to receive Congressional Medals of Honor. One was now awarded to Butler for being "eminent and conspicuous in command of his Battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22nd and in the final occupation of the city [Vera Cruz]."

"I've no more courage than the next man," he protested, "but it's always been my job to take my fellows through a mess the quickest way possible, with the loss of the fewest men. You can't do that from a distance. Besides, I was paid to do what I did. I've been scared plenty, but if I'd ever let my men know it, they'd have been scared. And soldiers who are scared aren't worth so much. They'll keep their lives, but the job won't get done."

To the astonishment of the Navy Department, he refused to accept his Medal of Honor, explaining that he did not consider what he had done at Vera Cruz worthy of the nation's highest military award. Admiral Fletcher, questioned by the Navy, replied that Butler was wrong; he had certainly merited the Medal of Honor not only for his courageous leadership in the Vera Cruz battle but also for his heroism as a spy.

The Navy Department thereupon sent the medal back to the reluctant hero with a terse order to keep it and wear it, but for Butler a matter of principle was involved. He was proud of his decorations and would wear none that he did not believe he fully deserved. He returned the medal to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, writing stubbornly, "I must renew my request that the Department reconsider its action in awarding this decoration." The matter was shelved by the outbreak of World War I in August, 1914, but Butler was later pressured into accepting the medal.

Wilson was keeping a careful and worried eye on Haiti. During 1914 four presidents of that volatile little republic were overthrown. The Germans were threatening to intervene to protect their economic interests. Wilson suspected that they wanted to use the volatile little republic as a naval base, which would put them within easy striking distance of the Panama Canal and the Florida coast.

Then in 1915 a new Haitian president, pursued by an angry mob, was forced to seek sanctuary in the French legation. The mob dragged him out and killed him. Now the angry French Government threatened intervention. Squirming in an agony of indecision, the anti-imperialist Wilson finally decided to put Haiti under American control to prevent any of the warring European powers from seizing it.

Besides, he told Secretary of State Robert Lansing, an American occupation would give him a chance to bring law, order, democracy, and prosperity to the wretched people of the misruled little country. Wilson's missionary impulse dovetailed neatly with less exalted plans by big-business interests. The National City Bank controlled the National Bank of Haiti and the Haitian railroad system. Dollar diplomacy also involved the sugar barons who saw Haiti's rich plantations as an inviting target for investment and takeover.

Rioting in the capital of Haiti in August, 1915, gave Wilson the excuse he needed to intervene with warships and Marines under Colonel Littleton Waller, Butler's commanding officer. Haiti was placed under an American commissioner who controlled the republic's affairs through the Haitian President. Cabinet ministers were puppets with only advisory powers. The government was not allowed to incur any "foreign obligations" without American consent, and an American customs official collected all money due Haiti. The Marines "pacified" the population and maintained the President's authority.

When the Haitian National Assembly met in Port-au-Prince, Marines stood in the aisles with bayonets drawn until Philippe Dartiguenave, the Haitian selected by the American minister, was "elected" President by the Assembly. He was the first Haitian President to serve out his full seven-year term, only because of the occupation of the Marines.

Under Dartiguenave American control of the island was assured by a treaty signed on September 16, 1915, which entitled the United States to administer Haitian customs and finance for twenty years, or longer if Washington saw fit. The Haitian constitution was revised to remove a prohibition against alien ownership of land, enabling Americans to purchase the most fertile areas in the country, including valuable sugar cane, cacao, banana, cotton, tobacco, and sisal plantations.

Northern Haiti, however, remained in the grip of rebels known as Cacos, whose chiefs Dartiguenave labeled bandits. Posing as nationalists, they were actually precursors of the brutal Tonton Macoutes of the later Duvalier regime, just as cruel to the peasants as the government's soldiers were.

Butler led a reconnaissance force of twenty-six volunteers in pursuit of a Caco force that had killed ten Marines. Like the Cacos in the mountains, he and his men lived for days off the orange groves. For over a hundred miles they followed a trail of peels, estimating how long before the Cacos had passed by the dryness of the peels. A native guide they picked up helped them locate the Cacos' headquarters, a secret fort called Capois, deep in the mountain range.

Studying the mountaintop fort through field glasses, Butler made out thick stone walls, with enough activity to suggest they were defended by at least a regiment. He decided to return to Cape Haitien for reinforcements and capture it. On the way back they were ambushed by a force of Cacos that outnumbered them twenty to one. Fortunately it was a pitch-black night, and Butler was able to save his men by splitting them up to crawl past the Cacos' lines through high grass.

Just before dawn he reorganized them into three squads of nine men each. Charging from three directions as they yelled wildly and fired from the hip, they created such a fearful din that the Cacos panicked and fled, leaving seventy-five killed. The only Marine casualty was one man wounded.

When he was able to return with reinforcements, spies had alerted the Cacos, and Butler took a deserted Fort Capois without firing a shot. Only one last stronghold remained to be cleared-the mountain fortress at Fort Riviere, which the French, who had built it during their occupation of Haiti, considered impregnable. Butler was told it would be difficult to capture, even with a strong artillery battery.

"Give me a hundred picked volunteers," he said, "and I'll have the colors flying over it tomorrow."



8


Butler earnestly assured his volunteers that they could do the job. His pep talks were enormously persuasive because they were sincere-so sincere that after he gave one, he would often feel emotionally spent and limp. He refused to believe that any job was impossible for Marines and frequently hypnotized him self into believing it. His fervor made believers out of his men, who never hesitated to follow him against overwhelming odds.

His officers gave him unreasoning loyalty, even though he was a tough taskmaster and never played favorites. One captain, asked to explain his devotion to Butler, said, "Well, damn him, I don't know. I'd give him my shirt, and he would not only not thank me, but he'd probably demand that I give him my other one. I stick because-hell, I don't know why!"

What happened when Butler led his tiny force against Fort Riviere was subsequently described in a memo by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who visited Haiti in January, 1917, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The Congressional Medal of Honor could not be awarded to an officer unless a high official of the military branch concerned first made a personal investigation and authenticated the citation. When Butler was recommended for the award, Roosevelt went to Haiti to investigate.

He was taken by Butler on an inspection tour of Haiti and the ruins of Fort Riviere, which Butler had demolished with explosives after its capture to deny its reuse to the Cacos. In his memorandum Roosevelt wrote what he had learned from others about Smedley Butler's attack on the four-thousand-foot-high mountain fortress in November, 1915:


This was the famous fortification captured by Butler and his 24 Marines in the Caco rebellion of a few months before. The top is a hog's back ridge a quarter of a mile long. Butler and his Marines left a machine gun at one end of the ridge while he and about 18 Marines crawled through the grass into the fort itself. Crawling down into a corner, they found a tunnel into the courtyard, serving as a drain when it rained.

Butler started to crawl through it (about 2 1/4 ' high x 2' wide) and the old sergeant [Ross lams] said, "Sir, I was in the Marines before you and it is my privilege." Butler recognized his right, and the sergeant crawled through first. On coming to the end within the courtyard, he saw the shadows of the legs of 2 Cacos armed with machetes guarding the place. He took off his hat, put it on the end of his revolver, and pushed it through. He felt the two Cacos descend on it and he jumped forward into the daylight.

With a right and left he got both Cacos, stood up and dropped 2 or 3 others while his companions, headed by Smedley Butler, got through the drain hole and stood up. Then ensued a killing, the news of which put down all insurrections, we hope, for all time to come. There were about 300 Cacos within the wall, and Butler and his 18 companions killed [many] . . . others jumping over the wall and falling prisoner to the rest of the force of Marines which circled the mountain.

I was so much impressed by personal inspection of the scene of the exploit that I awarded the Medal of Honor to the Marine Sergeant and Smedley Butler. Incidentally, Butler had received the Medal of Honor at Tientsin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion.* He had been awarded at the capture of Vera Cruz in 1914 but declined to accept it. The third at Fort Riviere he did accept.


Butler saw pathos as well as bravery in the episode at Riviere. "The futile efforts of the natives to oppose trained white soldiers impressed me as tragic," he declared. "As soon as they lost their heads, they picked up useless, aboriginal weapons. If they had realized the advantage of their position, they could have shot us like rats as we crawled out one by one, out of the drain."

But the power of the Cacos was broken, and the revolution was over. Surviving Cacos sought to keep the movement alive, but their ancient horse pistols, Spanish cutlasses, Napoleonic sabers, French carbines, and even flintlocks were futile against the superior weaponry and training of the Marines.

President Dartiguenave awarded Butler the Haitian Medal of Honor, with great praise for his dynamic personality, intense determination, direct and unrelenting attacks against heavy odds, and masterful ability to lead men.

Soon after peace was restored, Butler sent for his wife and children. They had seen little of him since the beginning of his tour in Panama, because of his three expeditions to Nicaragua followed by the Mexican and Haitian campaigns.

They joined him at Port-au-Prince in a large, comfortable house with white verandas and a pleasant, shaded garden, located on the outskirts of the town. Sumptuous by island standards, it nevertheless lacked indoor plumbing, and the family had to share a two-hole privy.

A stern taskmaster in the Corps, Butler was a gentle and undemanding father. It was Ethel Butler who disciplined the children, a matter of necessity because of his frequent absences. The children loved the exotic flavor of the tropical republic. Smedley, Jr. was sent to an integrated school with Haitian children and a few other white youngsters. Young Ethel went to a convent taught by nuns in French and English.

Never allowed into town, as it was considered unsafe, they were accompanied everywhere by a gendarme. One night while the family was seated on the veranda, a Caco concealed somewhere on the hillside took a shot at their father, narrowly missing him.

Washington decided to reorganize the ineffective Haitian military, which had almost one general for every three privates in its thirteen-hundred-man army. Dartiguenave agreed to its replacement by a native constabulary of three thousand men to be trained and directed by Butler. Although still only a major, Butler's rank as head of the Haitian Gendarmerie was major general, and his power that of Minister of the Interior.

He was paid $3,000 a year as commandant of the Gendarmerie, which cost the American Government $800,000 a year. Ostensibly under the direction of the Haitian President, the new force was actually controlled by Washington. All of its officers were Marines.

Haiti's foreign minister demanded that the Gendarmerie be put under Haitian control. Butler refused, pointing out that according to an agreement signed by Dartiguenave, the commandant alone was made responsible for the force. The foreign minister angrily drew up a new constitution for Haiti that would force the Americans to relinquish their power over both the Gendarmerie and Haiti itself, and prepared to introduce it in the Haitian National Assembly.

Alarmed, Dartiguenave told Butler that the foreign minister had the support of a majority of the Assembly's legislators, who intended to ram the new constitution through the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Then they planned to vote to impeach Dartiguenave, ostensibly for violating the old constitution, in reality because they considered him an American pawn.

The American minister, A. Bailly-Blanchard, cabled a warning to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who cabled back that since the new constitution was "unfriendly" to the United States, it must not be approved by the Haitian Legislature. Bailly-Blanchard was ordered to take any steps necessary to prevent its passage. He summoned Butler, Butler's regimental commander, Colonel Cole, and the top naval commander, Admiral Anderson, to a conference, and read them Lansing's cable.

It was decided that Americans would have no legal justification for interfering in Haiti's internal affairs, but that Butler, as major general of the Haitian Constabulary, did have that right. Commanded to carry out the State Department's orders, Butler went to see Dartiguenave, who urged him to use the Gendarmerie to dissolve the National Assembly.

But Butler had no relish for the role of dictator. If Dartiguenave and his cabinet wanted the Assembly suspended, he insisted, then they had to take full responsibility. He refused to act until they had apprehensively signed a decree ordering dissolution of the Assembly "to end the spirit of anarchy which animates it."

When Butler led his gendarmes to the National Assembly, he was greeted with loud, prolonged hissing. The gendarmes began cocking their rifles. Many, veterans of previous coups d'etat, were amazed at Butler's order to lower their guns.

He then handed the President's decree to the presiding Assembly officer to be read aloud to the chamber. Instead the latter launched into a wrathful tirade against the American occupation. His outburst threw the hall into an uproar.

Fearful of being charged, the gendarmes again threw up their weapons, and Butler once more snapped an order to ground arms. The reluctant presiding officer finally read Dartiguenave's decree and bitterly declared the Assembly dissolved. The gloomy legislators then filed into the street, and the gendarmes locked the hall behind them.





9


The Marine Corps promoted Butler to lieutenant colonel in August, 1916. Winning commendation as a capable administrator, he kept Haiti stable and at peace for the first time in half a century. He grew fond of Dartiguenave while acknowledging, "I knew lie was an old political crook." Typical of the President's expenditures from the treasury was sixteen hundred dollars "to have the hole in a carpet mended."

Traveling all over Haiti without a gun, despite the Cacos, Butler established a postal service, a country school system, a network of telegraph lines, a civil hospital in Port-au-Prince, and a five-hundred-mile road system; he also restored lighthouses and channel buoys. Although these civic and economic improvements unquestionably benefited American investors, Butler's primary purpose was to improve life for the Haitians.

"I was, and have been ever since, very fond of the Haitian people," he wrote later, "and it was my ambition to make Haiti a first-class black man's country."

But no amount of Butler's "good works" could erase from Haitian minds the humiliating awareness that they had been robbed of their independence by a military occupation. Haitians had no shortage of legitimate grievances. The supreme power on the island was not Butler, who was preoccupied with the Gendarmerie, but the commanding officer of the Marines in Haiti, Littleton Waller, who was made a brigadier general in the fall of 1916. As the officer who had once been court-martialed for brutality toward Filipino natives, he did not inspire among his staff officers any vast respect for Haitian sensibilities.

In the interior they talked as casually of shooting "gooks" as sportsmen talked of duck-hunting. Patrolling against the Cacos, some Marine officers looted the homes of native families they were supposed to protect. Others talked of "cleaning out" the island by killing the entire native population. Prisoners were beaten and tortured to make them tell what they knew about Cacos' whereabouts. Some were allowed to "escape," then were shot as they fled.

Haitians in the interior were forced to carry bon habitant (good citizen) passes. Any native stopped by a Marine and unable to produce a bon habitant could be either shot or arrested. Understandably, many Haitians became convinced that all Americans were racial bigots who hated black men. And behind the Americans in uniform were the American businessmen, who plundered the wealth of the island with impunity.

Butler, now in his early thirties, did not take Haitian politicians very seriously. He viewed most of them as banana republic opportunists not too different from the crooked ward bosses who infested the American body politic. The ingenuity and pretensions of the shrewdest, like Dartiguenave, tickled his sense of humor, but he regarded the Haitian people themselves with respect and affection, if blind to the irony implicit in the presumption to offer superior government to a black republic by a nation that had signally failed to solve its own serious race problem.

His eyes opened increasingly, however, to the fact that he was being used by big-business interests to pacify the population in order to protect profitable American investments.

"The Haitian Government, such as it is, either yields perforce to American pressure," reported correspondent Herbert J. Seligmann in The Nation, "or finds itself in feeble and ineffectual opposition.... The present Government of Haiti, which dangles from wires pulled by American fingers, would not endure for twenty-four hours if United States armed forces were withdrawn; and the President, Dartiguenave, would face death or exile."

Butler protested to Washington about some of the injustices of the occupation. On April g, 1916, he wrote to the State Department to point out that the Haitians logically objected to the retention of Marine officers in the Gendarmerie unless they were made subject to trial by Haitian courts. since otherwise the United States could mount a coup d'etat whenever it chose to order one. His protest fell on deaf ears.

By the spring of 1916 Haitian discontent was growing rapidly. Waller warned Butler to be on guard because Cacos, spreading the rumor that the Americans would soon pull out, were urging the people to rise and destroy them now.

Butler felt deeply discouraged. Despite everything he had tried to do for the people, the dollar sign behind the occupation had made all his efforts useless. In July he wrote to Lejeune, "All of us gendarmes are mighty tired, and I for one am going to ask to be relieved at the first opportunity presenting itself."

In August Waller ordered him into Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic sharing the island with Haiti, to put down a revolt led by Celidiano Pantilion and "stabilize the economy." The Dominican Government had defaulted its obligations to American banks and paid for its sins with an American occupation to protect U.S. investments that lasted eight years.

When he returned from Santo Domingo, mission accomplished, a letter was waiting for him from Lejeune. "Assistant Secretary Roosevelt came back with glowing accounts of the splendid work being done by the Marine Corps in connection with the Gendarmerie," Lejeune wrote enthusiastically. "You certainly deserve the greatest credit for what you have done in making a soldier out of the ignorant Haitian."

But Butler had begun to brood about the virtue of leading American boys into battle, causing some to lose their lives and others to suffer permanent disablement, to protect American business interests in the Caribbean. He grew quietly cynical about some of the compliments paid to him.

In neighboring Santo Domingo revolutionists joined bandits in shaking down American plantation managers for money. Repulsed, they set cane fires and sought to prevent cane from being cut and ground. The American sugar interests there wanted Butler to come to their rescue once again.

"Members of the Sugar Association and myself," their spokesman, businessman Frank H. Vedder, wrote to Roosevelt, "desire to express to you our appreciation of . . . the improvement in conditions, the hard work being done by the marines in the field. . . . The dangers from bandit operations are by no means past or remote. Additional troops would be of great assistance in clearing up the situation."

To Butler's relief Roosevelt replied, "I appreciate, of course, that the complete elimination of bandit operations is at the present time exceedingly difficult, but I trust that the Acting Military Governor will be able to give all the protection necessary with the forces under his command."

Butler sought to convince the State Department that the Haitians would never cease to be anti-American until Washington allowed them to hold honest elections and choose their own President. Spies tipped off Dartiguenave, who grew chilly toward Butler for putting his job in jeopardy.

But Haiti received little attention now from the State Department, which was carefully studying developments in World War I. Reading about the war from his remote outpost, Butler regarded it with loathing as "madness . . . a European bloodbath." He fervently hoped that Wilson would have the good sense to keep American boys out of it.

When the President took America into the war, however, Butler instantly appealed to Lejeune for a combat assignment in France, where he felt that he would at least be serving his country instead of Wall Street. Lejeune replied that the State Department was so pleased with his work as an administrator in Haiti that it had refused to transfer him to the European war front. Unappeased, Butler moaned to Lejeune in June, 1917, "The service is becoming more and more detestable every day, and the knowledge that I am not allowed to fight for my country makes it even more unbearable."

He appealed to Roosevelt. "Secretary Roosevelt and I," replied John McIlhenny, head of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, "are of the same opinion that the work which you have in hand should not be interfered with or disturbed because it is the most potent factor in maintaining a peaceful occupation."

An entreaty to his father also failed to work. "Your father," wrote Representative W. L. Hensley, of the House Naval Affairs Committee, "has gone into all these matters with the Secretary of War concerning your ambitions. They feel you are doing a great work where you are, and for you to be transferred from there would turn things topsy-turvy."

Disconsolate, Butler threw himself into a new orgy of roadbuilding. In forty-five days lie built a new road from Port-au-Prince to Cape Haitien, across twenty-one miles of the roughest, densest tropical country he had ever seen. After he had driven the first car over it, Secretary of State Lansing cabled congratulations. McIlhenny wrote him, "I think your achievement in building a road from Port-au-Prince to Cape Haitien in such a time and at such a cost is a miracle."

"Someone has misled you," he replied impatiently, "concerning my value to this country, and to the aims of the U.S. down here, for I am simply a subordinate to the Chief of the American Occupation . . . and have no independent authority."

By now Butler was strongly suspicious that he was being held in Haiti by the War Department's lack of confidence in his fitness for a command in France. When he asked a friend in Washington to snoop and investigate for him, he was assured that his suspicions were unfounded: The government was really having trouble finding a competent man to replace him.

He still didn't believe it. His instincts told him that his old enemies in the Navy Department were working against him. He had trodden on a good many other important toes as well during his two years in Haiti, and he had heard rumors spread by some naval officers that he had won all his medals and promotions because of his father's influence.

He did not hesitate to try to use that influence when Thomas Butler became chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1918. But his renewed pleas to be allowed to serve in the A.E.F. failed to move his father, and he remained bogged down disconsolately in Haiti. He grew increasingly unhappy with the government's management of the island's affairs.

Under wartime censorship Port-au-Prince's newspapers were suppressed, and their editors jailed, for suggesting that since Mr. Wilson was so concerned about the fate of poor little nations overrun by powerful military aggressors that he had gone to war in Europe for them, he might consider rescuing little Haiti from its invaders.

Some years later when Harding succeeded Wilson in the White House, Dartiguenave called upon him to remove all Marines from Haiti and liberate the Haitian people. To dramatize his case, Dartiguenave accused Butler of having dissolved the Haitian National Assembly by force of arms, without authority, conveniently ignoring the fact that he had begged Butler to do it and that he had written him upon his departure, "I regret to see you obliged to cease your services in this country, and I was well pleased with the broad and intelligent cooperation that you have constantly given to the Government."

Dartiguenave's memorial to Harding, published widely in the United States, "stirred up a hell of a commotion," as Butler put it. The Senate appointed an investigating committee with Senator Medill McCormick, of Illinois, as chairman. Butler was summoned as a witness. A lawyer for the American N.A.A.C.P. demanded to know on what authority he had presumed to dissolve the Haitian National Assembly.

"The President [Dartiguenave] himself dissolved the Congress," Butler replied. "I merely carried his decree of dissolution to the Assembly."

Haitian witnesses jeered at this assertion, but their faces fell when Butler produced the decree signed by Dartiguenave and his cabinet; it had been prudently saved among Butler's memorabilia. The upset Haitian politicians denounced it as a forgery, but were compelled to acknowledge it as authentic when it was compared with other documents signed by Dartiguenave. His case won, Butler saw no need to embarrass the State Department by also revealing that Secretary of State Robert Lansing had secretly ordered "any steps necessary" to stop the National Assembly from passing an anti-American constitution.

Soon afterward Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby asked Butler to return to Haiti as High Commissioner with a "civilian financial adviser" who, Butler knew, would represent American big-business investors and dictate economic policy. He had had enough of letting Wall Street profiteers use the Marines as their private army. He would prefer not to go, he told Denby, and certainly not with any civilian financial adviser. In that case, Denby said coldly, he need not go at all.

In March, 1918, bursting with frustration over his inability to get into the action on France's battlefields, Butler decided to press the matter personally with Lejeune, who was now a general, during a medical leave to Washington for dentistry.





10


Lejeune finally succeeded in getting him detached from Haitian service, but to Butler's dismay, instead of being sent overseas, he was ordered to take over a swampy new Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, on the Potomac, thirty miles south of Washington. Here he had to train regiments of raw boots for the front and glumly watch them pull out for France without him.

He felt irked with his father for failing to use his influence to get him into combat. Thomas Butler had visited the front and had been greatly disturbed by the high casualties of American troops. Smedley wondered whether his father had refused to help him get overseas out of a dread of losing him in the European carnage.

He persisted in nagging Marine headquarters for an overseas command, but his refusal to be discreet even now antagonized his superior officers. Learning that a move was afoot to raise the rank of the Marine commandant to lieutenant general, he spoke out against it as a rank piece of opportunism. No similar promotions were being suggested, he pointed out acidly, for the leathernecks in the trenches of France.

His friends in the Corps moaned at this bull-in-a-china-shop gaffe, warning him that his indiscreet candor was hurting his career. He remained stubbornly convinced of his right to speak out vigorously against injustice in the Corps.

He finally found a way to get overseas when the 13th Marines came to Quantico for training. Josephus Daniels, Jr., son of the Secretary of the Navy, was with the regiment. Meeting his father, Butler persuaded Daniels, Sr., that young Marines like his son needed the protection overseas of veteran Marine commanders like Smedley Butler. Despite the opposition of the desk admirals in Washington, Butler was finally ordered overseas with the regiment.

Bidding farewell to his family, Butler was happy in the conviction that he was heading for the front at last. For twenty years, he told his wife, he had been preparing for the big war that he had dreaded, yet had anticipated. At last he would be serving his country in its greatest hour of crisis. In his patriotic zeal his qualms about the commercial intrigues he had learned to suspect behind troop movements were swept away.

Anchoring at Brest on September 24, 1918, he and his men were assigned to a dreary Army debarkation center, Camp Pontanezen, consisting of seventeen hundred acres of mud flats occupied by 75,000 American soldiers, of whom 16,000 had the flu. Returning casualties had complained of scandalous conditions at Pontanezen, where they had been forced to await ships home lying in mud, hungry, chilled, and medically neglected.

Day after day he waited impatiently for his orders to move up to the fighting zone. After two weeks he was handed a telegram from A.E.F. Commander General John J. Pershing informing the thirty-seven-year-old Butler that he had been promoted to the rank of brigadier general, making him the youngest Marine ever to achieve that rank. And he was finally assigned his new command-in charge of Camp Pontanezen.

Butler read the telegram three times, unable to believe it. Then be let out a roar of fury. The bastards! The unutterable bastards! They couldn't do this to him. After twenty years as a fighting Marine, to be denied the opportunity to lead his men into battle and be forced to sit instead in a dirty mud hole a light-year away from the fighting!

To make matters worse, he discovered that one officer after another had been put in charge of the miserable concentration camp and pest trap that was now his responsibility, only to fail dismally in their attempts to clean it up. It was obvious to him that he had been handed a "lemon" of a command, ending his dreams of fighting in the Meuse-Argonne. Bitter, he added Pershing to his list of enemies in top echelons.

Pershing, actually, had been motivated only by the desperate need for a good administrator who could do something about the mess at Pontanezen, the linchpin for troops and equipment coming into France and for wounded and sick troops going home. Butler's record as an able administrator in Haiti and Quantico had marked him as the man for the job. So he was forced to watch glumly as the 13th Marines left for the front, leaving him behind in command of an all-Army outfit in Brest.

Shaking off his despond and self-pity, Butler went to work. Not long afterward writer Mary Roberts Rinehart arrived with orders from Secretary of War Newton Baker to investigate the terrible conditions at Pontanezen. Touring the camp talking to the troops, she was astonished to find morale high. One private told her enthusiastically, "I'd cross hell on a slat if Butler gave the word!" She wrote later:


In charge of the camp was that dynamo of energy, courage and sheer ability, General Smedley Butler of the Marines. And Butler was no red tape man. In defiance of regulations he was issuing double rations of food, and serving hot soup all day long to those who needed it. He had issued, also, six blankets to each man, and as the ground under the tents was nothing but mud, he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duck-boards no longer needed for the trenches, carried 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.

To have produced the morale I found under existing conditions was nothing short of a miracle of ability, and I said so. Even the flu, taking its daily toll of men in the hospital nearby, was practically non-existent in the camp. . . . I had never seen General Butler before, and I went prepared to send in a blistering report to Washington. . . . But the men were in fine condition, and cheerful.


Her report to Baker was so glowing that the Secretary of War promised to send Butler everything he needed.

Soon after the Armistice Butler threw the gears of camp operation into reverse. In a single day 26,000 men were processed onto ships, 2,000 newcomers were processed into France, and 10,000 men fresh from the line were processed into camp. Every man back from the front was deloused, bathed, and freshly dressed and equipped within twenty-four hours. The camp was the outstanding marvel of American efficiency on French soil,

During an inspection visit by Pershing, the commander of the A.E.F. noticed that as Butler drove him around the camp, doughboy after doughboy failed to salute them. Irked, he snapped to Butler, "Don't you think they should be taught to salute?"

"Well, General," Butler said with a shrug, "if the Army had them from six months to six years and they haven't learned to salute, you can't expect a Marine to teach them in six days!"

He was always on the side of the powerless against the brass. One day while he was absent his superior, General Helmick, made a surprise inspection of Pontanezen. Finding wastefulness in one mess, Helmick savagely tongue-lashed the lieutenant in charge. When Butler learned about it, he phoned the Army Chief of Staff.

"If the general has any complaint with the camp," he stormed, "tell him to pick on me and not on a young lieutenant who is doing his level best!" When Helmick came to see him, Butler pounded on the desk and told his superior what he thought of him for "jumping on a boy."

After Butler's angry outburst had subsided, Helmick replied, "Now, Smedley, I'll talk. I've let you abuse me, your commander, for two reasons. First, because you've been of such tremendous value to my organization, and second, because I know I didn't do the right thing by that boy. I realize also that you've worked yourself into a state of nervous collapse to make the camp a success. I know you don't mean what you're saying. I never permit myself to be aroused by a tired man's utterances, when that tired man is a good man."

"General, by God," Butler said hoarsely, struck with admiration, "you are some commander!"

Helmick then went with Butler to the young lieutenant and apologized to him publicly in front of all the cooks and KP's.

Torn between court-martialing him for his frequent intransigence toward higher authority and decorating him for his accomplishments in an almost impossible job, the Army finally awarded him its Distinguished Service Medal. The Navy felt impelled to follow suit with its own Distinguished Service Medal. The French awarded him their Order of the Black Star. He wore these decorations proudly beside his World War I Victory Medal with French clasp.

But the reward he treasured most was the gratitude of hundreds of thousands of doughboys back from the misery of the trenches, grateful for his efforts to ease their hardships as they waited for evacuation home. He did a lot of hard thinking as he watched the wounded and maimed pass through Pontanezen, some with their nervous systems irreparably shattered.

"Gradually it began to dawn on me to wonder," he related later, "what on earth these American boys are doing getting wounded and killed and buried in France." This uneasy reflection began to plant seeds of doubt in his mind about the ethics of his chosen calling.





11


With America once more at peace and Congress slashing military funds drastically, the future of the Marine Corps looked bleak. Butler was indignant when Marine Corps headquarters failed to protest its reduction to a mere appendage of the Navy. In disgust he announced his decision to retire and wrote his father urging that John Lejeune be appointed the new commandant in 1920 to save the Corps.

Thomas Butler saw eye to eye with his son on the need to preserve the Marine Corps's independence and agreed that Lejeune, who had distinguished himself in the Battle of Meuse-Argonne, was the man to fight for it in Congress. So on January 30, 1920, Lejeune became the new commandant. He, in turn, coaxed Butler into staying on in command of Quantico to help in the struggle to save the Corps.

To dramatize the Corps's need of funds for modernization, Butler held summer maneuvers that restaged the Battle of the Wilderness between Grant and Lee. On the first day it was "fought" as it had happened; next day it was restaged with a significant difference-the use of modern equipment. The presence of President Warren G. Harding, a Civil War buff, helped win widespread news coverage. Butler's shrewd tactic was highly effective in getting a reluctant Congress to vote adequate funds for the Corps.

It was a forty-mile march from Quantico to the battleground. As usual wearing no insignia to identify him, Butler marched at the head of the column walking his horse, carrying full gear on his back in the hot July sun. When one soldier faltered, Butler told him gently, "Son, I'm more than twenty years older than you, but we're going to do this together." He said later, "I wanted to show them that they could force themselves to do things that would be necessary in war." And they all did.

His troops never learned that following one such battlefield exercise the forty-year-old commander experienced a minor heart attack, for which a doctor prescribed rest and digitalis. The word that spread through Quantico was that it was useless to try to fall out of a hike, because the Old Man would just pick up your pack, add it to his own, and hike right alongside you with it.

The humdrum garrison life of peacetime, with no alarums and excursions to divert him, took its toll of Butler's temper. "I was itching for a scrap-action-something with a snap to it," he admitted later.

But he was never irascible in any matter that pertained to ailing Marines who had served under him. In August, 1920, a private wrote him, "I have been a patient in St. Elizabeth's hospital for the Insane since Sept. 20, 1918. I am writing to ask if you will arrange to have me transferred to one of the institutions in Philadelphia, so that I can be close to the folks at home."

"I will look into the matter and let you know," Butler replied gently. "You can be assured that everything will be done for your comfort, for you are one of the prize soldiers of the Marine Corps, and we all like you very much."

He grew increasingly incensed at what he considered the ingratitude of the nation toward its veterans. Once the war crisis was over and Americans felt safe, he reflected, the shattered heroes of yesterday were ignored as the "bums" of today. He was particularly embittered by the indifference of big business toward the men in uniform who had so often been called upon to spill blood for corporate profits.

The profiteering of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the price they charged for transporting troops led him to write his father angrily, "I am at a loss to understand why the Pennsylvania people are so antagonistic to men in uniform. The railroad can haul civilians from Washington to Philadelphia and back every Sunday for $3.78 and want $14.00 to haul soldiers. . . . These Pennsylvania people are a lot of damned hogs and I hope that something will happen to them."

Butler raised Marine Corps morale by developing a great football team that became the talk of the sports world, and began building a sports stadium with volunteer Marine labor and with cement contributed by cement companies.

Proliferating veterans' groups vied with each other for the distinction of adding his name to their letterheads. He tactfully declined invitations to join, offering his view that all such groups "must be nonpolitical, and should never be heard on the floors of Congress." In June, 1923, he sent regrets to the Marine Corps Veterans Association explaining, "I have very decided views on associations, and I am not a member of any but the American Legion, and most inactive, at that-only joining it because General Lejeune requested me to do so." He considered the Legion too political and undemocratic, with leaders who used it as a mouthpiece for big-business interests.

Late in 1923 Butler's career took an unorthodox twist.

W. Freeland Kendrick, the new mayor of Philadelphia, urged him to take a leave from the Marines to become the city's Director of Public Safety. The job was that of a "supercop," in charge of the police and firemen, with the task of smashing the links between crime and politics in Philadelphia.

Under Prohibition the city had become one of the most corrupt municipalities in the country. Over eight thousand places sold bootleg liquor without fear of prosecution; gangsters ran wide-open gambling joints and brothels; robberies, holdups, and other crimes were soaring. All attempts to clean up the City of Brotherly Love had failed because of a profitable alliance among gangsters, speakeasy operators, and crooked ward bosses, who bribed and controlled the police.

Kendrick, a conservative Republican politician, had been elected mayor on a law-and-order campaign and was now under heavy pressure to keep his pledge. He was advised to bring in an outsider, preferably a military man, who could not be bought, bluffed, or bullied, to head the police. Brigadier General Smedley Butler, now a vigorous forty-two and a colorful war hero with an impressive list of credits in Who's Who in the Services, seemed a perfect choice to please the voters. He had even had police experience organizing the Haiti Gendarmerie.

But Butler declined the job. On November 21 he wrote Kendrick, "While this position would appeal to me very greatly if I believed there were the slightest chance of success, I am convinced that the present political conditions existing would ... throw away the work of a lifetime in a perfectly hopeless undertaking."

He was relieved when the Navy ordered him to report for orders to the Scouting Fleet. But Kendrick and the Republican party of Pennsylvania now needed him desperately to still a storm of public criticism. So Kendrick, Congressman Bill Vare, and Pennsylvania's two senators went to the White House to plead with President Calvin Coolidge that Butler be given a year's leave of absence to clean up Philadelphia.

Only a man with Butler's reputation for total honesty, and the ability to discipline men while capturing their imagination and winning their loyalty, they told Coolidge, could reorganize the Philadelphia police force. The President finally agreed and sent word to Butler that the White House would like him to tackle the job in the interests of good government. His father warned him against it as a political quicksand, but Butler did not see how he could refuse a mandate from both the people of Philadelphia and the President.

His reluctant consent brought wondering letters from old comrades all over the world, many of whom imagined that he had resigned from the Corps. Butler assured them that it was only temporary. "This job is a terrible one and I will probably be cut to pieces," he wrote to Lieutenant Colonel H. L. Roosevelt in Paris. "On January 7 I will be sworn in as a Philadelphia cop, for better or worse."





12


Butler told a reporter for the Philadelphia North American, "Kendrick has his neck in a noose with me. If I fall or I am run out, lie is going to go down also. If he reverses me just once I'll quit, and the resignation will be in the form of a telephone call telling him I am on my way back to Quantico, and that the keys to my office are on my desk. I do not care whether the state laws or city ordinances are right or wrong. From January 7 they are going to be enforced." He was not opposed to drinking in principle, he added. What was at stake was enforcement of the law, pure and simple, not the ethics of Prohibition.

Even before he took office, "Boss" Vare sent an emissary to him, Judge Edwin O. Lewis, to offer Vare's "suggestions" for key appointments in reorganizing the police department. None too politely, Butler made it clear what Lewis and Vare could do with their suggestions.

He rented a home in nearby Overbrook, but his wife and children seldom saw him there because he spent seven days a week on the job, working until after midnight.

Sworn in on January 7, 1924, he took the oath of office in his Marine uniform, but half an hour later changed it for one of his own design. Blue with gold trim, it had a cape taken from the Marine mess jacket with a flaring red lining. It was dramatic and impressive, and meant to be.

He promptly summoned all police inspectors to his office.

"I want the lieutenants in your forty-two districts to clean up in forty-eight hours," he snapped, "or face immediate demotion. That is all." Then he visited each one of the districts until he had spoken to every man on the force. The new motto, he announced, was short and sweet: "Clean up or get out!"

In his first week on the job he raided and shut down 973 liquor and gambling joints, without even warning Mayor Kendrick. Philadelphians were electrified. The police winked at each other, convinced that Butler was a smart "grandstander" who would make a big splash for the headlines, then quiet down and take it easy. Vare would see to that.

Going night after night with only a few hours' sleep, he pressed his raids and inspections relentlessly. He demanded from his men a dedication to duty equal to his own, but many of them, cut off from former sources of graft, were hostile and resistant to the new broom sweeping too clean.

"Sherman was right about war," Butler sighed wearily, "but he should have tried leading the Philadelphia police!" Nevertheless he began to show results. Worried Philadelphia bootleggers began unloading their stocks at cut prices. Many crooks and gamblers began streaming out of the city in search of more hospitable territory.

Encouraging excessive zeal among his forces, Butler took responsibility for police who went too far on raids by using axes freely to destroy furniture and fixtures, searching private homes and vehicles on suspicion, and closing premises that had a right to stay open to sell nonintoxicating beverages. Magistrates began refusing to issue search warrants to permit police to enter known speakeasies masquerading as private residences. Many cases were dismissed on grounds of insufficient or illegal evidence.

Butler realized that he would have to modify his tactics, and astonished Philadelphians by frankly confessing his mistakes to both the press and the police.

"Guard against anything that will embarrass Mayor Kendrick's administration," he now ordered police. "Keep away from the hippodrome stuff. I must admit that I have sinned in this latter respect more than any of you, and the only excuse I have to offer is that I was unduly excited and enthusiastic."

Such candor won the affection and respect of reporters, who found Butler colorful copy and loved to join him for midnight suppers on Chestnut Street. There was never any question he would not answer for them directly and honestly. But if they were for him, their publishers-with the exception of the Philadelphia Record-were not; their editorial pages sought to ridicule and discredit him relentlessly,

"They insisted on treating me like a queer animal from the circus," Butler related. "My chance remarks were twisted and distorted to paint me in the worst light. . . . About fifty of the minor officials and correspondents of the newspapers became my loyal friends, but they had no influence in shaping the editorial point of view."

By March angry Republican ward leaders were furious at Butler for disrupting their network of police control. They vigorously applauded City Treasurer Thomas J. Watson at a meeting when he shouted, "This country, as well as the Republican organization, would be a hell of a sight better off without Butler!" The Philadelphia City Council closed ranks against him.

"My foolish notion that the laws of our country applied to rich and poor alike accounted for the growing feeling of antipathy toward me," he recalled later, adding, "By the end of 1924 I had been cussed, discussed, boycotted, lied about, lied to, strung up, and reviled. Several times I was on the point of resigning. The only reason why I continued in my unpopular and uncomfortable position was to see what the hell was going to happen next!"

Try as he might, he was unable to break the power of the ward bosses. In April he was forced to admit that be had been double-crossed by about half of his police lieutenants, who had bowed to ward-boss pressure to permit shuttered saloons, gambling houses, and speakeasies to reopen.

Studying the structure, he found that every ward had one police station. The ward leader named the captain of the station, and the police thus belonged to the ward leader. In an attempt to destroy the power of the ward bosses, Butler now cut the stations down from forty-six to thirty-three.

Infuriated politicians, racketeers, and realtors, who hated him for having cost them the rents of fifteen hundred closed brothels as well as the income from other illegally operated properties, joined forces to demand that Kendrick fire him.

But nearly five thousand church congregations adopted resolutions in July demanding that the mayor give full support to the general. Added to this pressure were thousands of letters from women's clubs, civic groups, business organizations, and individuals. Kendrick, alarmed at being caught between the voters and the brokers of power, wavered back and forth.

A report that he was preparing to knuckle under to the political bosses brought another roar of protest from the citizenry. A mass meeting of four thousand Philadelphians resolved that Butler must be kept in office: "Since General Butler has been in command here, more has been accomplished for the suppression of vice and crime than in any period of like duration in this city!" They flooded Secretary of the Navy Curtis D. Wilbur with letters urging that Butler's leave of absence from the Marines be extended for another three years.

President Calvin Coolidge reluctantly agreed to extend the general's leave for one more year, but he pointed out to the citizens of Philadelphia that the Federal Government could not continue indefinitely to be responsible for solutions to local problems: "The practice of detailing officers of the United States military forces to serve in civil capacities in the different states on leaves of absence is of doubtful propriety and should be employed only in cases of emergency. . . . Local self-government cannot be furnished from the outside."

Reappointed, by the end of the year Butler had raided almost 4,000 speakeasies, shutting down 2,566, and had seized over a thousand stills, arresting 10,000 violators of the Volstead Act. But to his dismay, political pressure in the court system resulted in only 2,000 indictments by the grand jury, with only 300 convictions. Police magistrates, who were handpicked by the politicians, imposed only token fines on all but 4 percent of arrested speakeasy operators. Struggling to get honest law enforcement, Butler complained to the press, was like submitting to Chinese water torture:

"Drops of water have been dripping on my head since I have been here. . . .Either I am unpopular, or the enforcement of the liquor laws is unpopular in this city. . . . When the people of Philadelphia or any other city stop playing the game of `Enforce the law against others but not against me,' they will begin to win the fight against lawlessness."

He was bitter when he learned of a secret deal between the brewers of Philadelphia and the Republican State Campaign Committee. A royalty of two dollars for each barrel of illegal beer distributed was to be paid into the Republican campaign fund, provided the politicians put the White House under heavy pressure to recall Butler to duty with the Marines.

Toward the end of 1925, whether this deal was responsible or not, Coolidge refused to extend Butler's leave. The general was ordered to report after the first of the year to command the Marine post at San Diego. With his recall assured, Mayor Kendrick now shrewdly sought to make points with pro-Butler voters by declaring that he wished it were possible to keep the general as Director of Public Safety for the remainder of his own administration.

A "Keep Butler" movement sprang up all over Philadelphia. Forced to go along with it, Kendrick told one mass meeting, "To announce that General Butler is to leave his post here would be tantamount to inviting an army of criminals to Philadelphia." But the mayor lost no time in grooming his successor.

Meanwhile Butler had become increasingly irked by the fact that the pressure of powerful hotels and the Hotel Association had kept their ballroom social affairs, at which liquor was served to young teen-age girls from socially prominent Philadelphia families, from being raided for liquor violations.

Ordering a raid on a formal ball at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he seized evidence showing that bootleg liquor was being served. Confronting Kendrick, he demanded that the mayor institute padlock proceedings against the Ritz-Carlton.

"And I mean the whole hotel," he insisted. "Something must he done to teach these big fellows that they must obey the law as well as the little fellows!"

A howl of outrage was heard in the ranks of the Republican party's wealthiest adherents. Politicians were threatened with a wholesale withdrawal of campaign contributions unless Butler was now unceremoniously dumped. Greatly upset, Kendrick urged him to "lay off" the big hotels. To the mayor's horror, Butler firmly announced his intention to organize a special police squad in evening clothes to invade all Philadelphia hotels, and signal for raids whenever they found liquor-law violations.

His fighting spirit was now thoroughly aroused. Although he longed to get back to his beloved Marine Corps, it rankled him to leave a mission incomplete. If he left Philadelphia now, he would have enforced the law against small operators who bootlegged liquor to the poor, but not against the big operators who made it available to the rich. His egalitarian nature pressed him to balance the scales.

He also felt an obligation to the honest cops who had defied the ward bosses to support his fight against corruption. Once he was gone, he feared, they would be punished for their loyalty to him. He decided that he owed it to them to sacrifice his career in the Marine Corps to stay on and finish the job, especially since Kendrick had made it clear-or so Butler believed-that he needed and wanted him.

The morning papers carried the story that Butler was resigning from the Marine Corps to remain as Director of Public Safety. Appalled, the hotel owners of the city joined with local politicians in a demand that Kendrick fire Butler immediately. The mayor was reminded that the Hotel Association's cooperation with City Hall was absolutely essential for the success of a sesquicentennial celebration of American independence being planned for Philadelphia.

Worried and upset, Kendrick called Butler to his office and told him, "I don't want any resigned generals around me. You ought to go back to the Service where you belong. The President doesn't want you here."





13


Shocked at the mayor's spineless surrender, Butler stalked out, storming, "Oh, hell, I can't talk to such a weak fish!"

Kendrick then fired him by phone. In choice Marine language, Butler told Kendrick exactly what he thought of him. Clearing his desk, the general withdrew a blue-steel Army Colt .q5 from it and inserted it in a holster engraved, "To General Smedley D. Butler from W. Freeland Kendrick."

"Give him this letter of resignation and the pistol," he told his aide. "He can publish the letter and he can do what he pleases with the gun. I'm going back to the troops!"

His letter of resignation declared, "Last week I decided that it was in keeping with my promise to the police of Philadelphia that if they stood up with me, I would do everything in my power to remain in Philadelphia.... I am being dismissed from public service because I am making the greatest sacrifice any Marine can make, and I should, without any other ties, be of more service to the City of Philadelphia than I was before." He had been fired, he charged, because "the gang that has ruled Philadelphia for many years" had been out to get him, and did.

The Philadelphia Record; which had consistently supported Butler during his two years as the city's supercop, declared, "He was honest; that was taken for granted or he would not have been appointed. But he was 100 percent honest. We think we are doing the mayor no injustice in expressing the belief that this was a little more than he had counted on."

Reviewing his experience in Philadelphia, Butler declared ironically, "The fact the mayor didn't know me led to my being chosen. The fact I didn't know the mayor led me to accept. I had a funny idea that law was applicable to everybody. I was a fool. I didn't get anywhere, except for getting a lot of money as the highest paid cop in America, $18,000 Had the kids educated, lost 35 pounds and my teeth, bought a car and ended up $300 in debt. . . . What Philadelphia really wanted was something to talk about, a real, live general. No other city had one as a cop. ... They wanted to throw up a smoke screen and make people think Philadelphia had thrown off the yoke of crime."

Mary Roberts Rinehart, who visited Butler in Philadelphia to study his cleanup, wrote about it in her biography:


He did a fine job. He replaced the old roundsman, fat and portly, with young and active men, and then he put into them something of the marine esprit de corps. He put the fear of God into the gamblers and dive keepers. He cut down the enormous graft which they had paid year after year. But they were only waiting. They could afford to wait. When Butler lost the front page they would come back....

I watched Butler and admired him; the same sheer ability, energy and knowledge of men which had succeeded at Brest were evident in all that he did. But it was an unbeatable game, that of the crooks, gambl