Maverick Marine:
General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History
(excerpt from chapter about the fascist coup plot)

By Hans Schmidt

Tackling the political issue, he blasted the so-called Royal Family of financiers that controlled the [American] Legion. Speaking to members of the more restive and openly dissident [Veterans of Foreign Wars] VFW in New Orleans in December 1932, on the same platform with Huey Long appealing for "share the wealth," he repeated a mutinous attack he had made at a Legion convention in Cincinnati: "I said that I had never known one leader of the American Legion who had never sold them out-and I mean it." The Royal Family was maneuvering the Legion into supporting the gold standard, then advocated by certain Wall Street interests in opposition to inflationary New Deal monetary policies. Butler told the New Orleans veterans not to be taken in; "What the hell do you know about the gold standard? You stand by your friends and to hell with therest of them." As for Wall Street, it should pay their bonuses:

"I believe in making Wall Street pay for it - taking Wall Street by the throat and shaking it up."22

A year later in Atlanta, he began a tour of VFW posts on the invitation of its commander, fellow-Pennsylvanian James E. Van Zandt, whom he boosted as honest in contrast to Legion leadership. Denouncing war as "largely a matter of money" to profit the privileged classes, he cautioned the vets not to believe "the propaganda capital circulates. Capital owns all the newspapers." Politically, he advised skepticism: "Democrats take care of you, keep them in-if not, put 'em out." The speech was reported to FDR's political adviser Louis Howe by an operative who made behind-the-scenes inquiries into Butler's schedule of twenty VFW speeches around the country at $250 each. Butler had been "approached by a representative of the bankers gold group" and offered $750 extra per speech if he would make favorable references to the gold standard. "This would have meant an additional ten thousand dollars to General Butler, but he told the representative of the gold group that even if he were offered a hundred thousand dollars to do this, his answer would be 'no."' While he did not personally know Butler, the operative commented that rejection of the bribe "shows him to be a man of exceptional character." 23

Butler's dealings with the "bankers gold group" extended from the summer of 1933 until September 1934, and climaxed in his November exposé of an alleged plot by Wall Street interests to topple President Roosevelt and establish a dictatorship. The story broke in the New York Post and Philadelphia Record under the banner headline "GEN. BUTLER CHARGES FASCIST PLOT,' and revealed what purported to be Butler's testimony to a closed session of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in New York. Financiers led by broker Grayson M.-P. Murphy and Singer sewing machine heir Robert Sterling Clark had raised $3 million, with more in the offing, and approached Butler to lead an army of 500,000 veterans to overthrow the government in a bloodless coup. FDR would be persuaded to put Butler in charge of Civilian Conservation Corps camps which were to serve as support facilities during a paramilitary phase. Had Butler declined the role of man on the white horse, Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur and then Hanford MacNider, a former American Legion commander, were said to be next in line. Other former Legion commanders were mentioned as coconspirators.24

The New York Times added rumors, heatedly denied by Butler, that he had told friends that General Hugh S.Johnson was slated to be dictator and that J.P. Morgan & Company was involved. The Times' brief sketch of Butler's charges was followed by an authoritative "chorus of denials" which took up most of the two-column front page lead, .conveying an impression of skepticism. An editorial the next day dismissed the whole story as "a gigantic hoax." Morgan partner Thomas W Lamont called it "perfect moonshine." MacArthur referred to it as "the best laugh story of the year." Murphy said it was a "damned lie," and Clark threatened a libel suit. Gerald C. MacGuire, a Murphy & Company employee whom Butler named as intermediary, called it a "publicity stunt." On the other hand, Van Zandt, head of VFW, stated in Helena that Butler had told him about the plot two months previously, and that he had also been approached. Congressman John W McCormack announced that HUAC had been investigating for five weeks. Co-Chairman Samuel Dickstein, dismissed by Time magazine as "publicity-loving," said that "from present indications, General Butler has the evidence.. . . We will have some men here with bigger names than Butler's before this is over." 25

The sensation in the news media discouraged systematic investigation or discreet procedures, and everyone involved played to the galleries from the start. Moreover HUAC, even in these relatively scrupulous early days- stalking both Communists and Fascists-was itself engaged mainly in trial by publicity. There was no serious prospect of formal legal proceedings. The committee was powerless, Dickstein acknowledged privately, to compel witnesses to appear or produce documents. When McCormack was asked whether Robert Sterling Clark, who was in Europe, might be extradited to testif~y, he replied, "There's no question of extradition. No crime has been committed. Under our law, you can go ahead and form any organization you want."26

From Butler's perspective, the flourish of publicity suited his militant extrovert style and limited outsider's options-although later he toldJ. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that he informed HUAC he had reported the plot to the Treasury Department's Secret Service, apparently to no avail.27 Butler was a loner with no organizational base. He was well aware of the extent to which public facades of propriety and calm masked manipulations by the rich and powerful. But during the l93 Os, revelations of failure and scandal had tended to discredit many conventional illusions. From the perspective of more complacent times, Butler might have seemed a disgruntled loser; now there was something wildly heroic in his defiance. His protagonists in the present scrap-Wall Street brokers, their legal counselors, and shrewd political operatives-were backed by a supporting network that extended into veterans' affairs, politics, and the right-wing press. For Smedley this had become a war of attrition. In September he told the story to Paul Comly French, investigative reporter for the liberal J. David Stern newspapers-the Record, Post, and two Camden sheets. French interviewed the intermediary, MacGuire, and appeared before HUAC as a corroborating witness.

The story that Butler and French told under oath to the committee necessarily centered on MacGuire. Smedley related in impressive detail how MacGuire, first accompanied by another legionnaire, William H. Doyle, had contacted him repeatedly over the previous year and a half regarding Legion political intrigues. Initially, Butler was to accompany several hundred Pennsylvania legionnaires to the Chicago national convention, where they would be strategically placed on the convention floor to start a demonstration while he read a speech favoring the gold standard. MacGuire gave Smedley a copy of the speech and showed him bankbooks with deposits of $42,000 and $64,000. He offered to pay all expenses, and subsequently identified his sponsors as Murphy, by whom he was otherwise employed as a $100-a-week bond salesman, and multimillionaire Clark. In September 1933, when Butler refused the offer and accused him of bluffing, MacGuire threw down a wad of $1,000 bills on a Newark hotel bed, saying it was $18,000. Butler countered that this was an ensnarement, numbered bills to implicate him, and insisted on dealing directly with MacGuire's superiors.28

Several days later Butler wrote MacGuire that the Newark proposal was a great idea" and he would have no difficulty getting a hundred legionnaires. There must be "positive assurance of financial support" and no "slip-up in the arrangements, particularly in the matter of paying their expenses and treating them properly." He proposed that MacGuire stage a fight on the convention floor to have him invited to speak, in which case he would fly to Chicago. "If I am to be of any value to the cause you sponsor, I would necessarily have to have some position. All of this would be lost if I force my way into this part through an imitation delegateship."29 This letter is one of the few relevant items in Butler's papers. In the light of his subsequent testimony and HUAC documentation, he was presumably playing along with the scheme in order to draw out its sponsors.

Whereupon Clark, according to Butler's HUAC testimony, made the pilgrimage to Newtown Square. Smedley had known him briefly during the Boxer campaign in 1900 as the "millionaire lieutenant" serving with the army. Clark offered to pay off the mortgage on Butler's house and provide a private railroad car to take him to Chicago for the gold speech. The rationale for the veterans was that their bonuses would be paid in sound money. Smedley refused and berated Clark for trying to bribe him. Clark backed down, and using Smedley's phone gave instructions that neither he nor Butler would be at the convention, and to send telegrams instead.30
Butler noted that the Legion convention, after receiving a flood of telegrams, endorsed the gold standard but not the bonus. MacGuire turned up again to offer $1,000 and a private car for making a gold speech in Boston, but Smedley declined. MacGuire went to Europe in early 1934, then the two met in August and MacGuire allegedly unfolded plans for a coup. He had observed European veterans' movements, particularly in France, and proposed something similar. There would be $3 million to start with and $300 million later. Destitute captains would be paid $35 a month, privates $10. After the coup, a Secretary of General Welfare would supersede FDR in the national interest; all was to be patriotic and there was no need for violence. MacGuire, according to Butler, described Smedley's pivotal role: "The Morgan interests say that you cannot be trusted, that you will be too radical, and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow; you cannot be trusted. They do not want you. But our group tells them that you are the only fellow in America who can get the soldiers together. They say, 'Yes, but he will get them together and go in the wrong way."'31

French testified that during their interview MacGuire baldly advocated a Fascist government to save the country from communism. As for the existing government, "we might go along with Roosevelt and then do with him what Mussolini did with the King of Italy." Butler could organize a million men overnight; half the Legion and half the VFW would join.32

A great deal obviously depended upon how much the committee could get out of the middleman MacGuire, and to what extent he could be convincingly linked to alleged sponsors. He was a slippery witness. A short, pudgy, middle-aged man with what the Record described as "a plaintive voice with a faint East Side accent," MacGuire repeatedly perjured himself. He admitted meeting Butler eight or nine times, initially as a member of the Legion's distinguished guest committee to see if Smedley would favor the sound dollar and run for commander of the Legion. Together with Doyle, he proposed the gold resolution at the Chicago convention and sent ninety-nine telegrams. But he flatly denied just about everything else and was badly compromised by the committee's investigations into his bank accounts, by his movements as traced by hotel bookings, and then by the testimony of Clark's attorney who ran MacGuire as legman for the Committee for a Sound Dollar and Sound Currency. For instance, HUAC investigators established that MacGuire was in Newark and in possession of a large number of thousand-dollar bills on the date specified by Butler, and not in Chicago as MacGuire had testified in his alibi. Having denied ever having access to more than the $30,000 above-board capitalization of the Committee for a Sound Dollar, he was now shown to have been in possession of $64,000 at the convention and to have spent $24,000 for what Clark's attorney called "ii3~ HUAC also produced letters written by MacGuire from Europe reporting favorable impressions of the Croix de Feu, the right-wing French veterans' association, plus a few references to fascism, but this evidence was weak.

Clark's attorney, Albert Grant Christmas, testified frankly as to how he had run MacGuire as an agent in Legion politics. This clarified the conspiratorial workings of the Committee for a Sound Dollar, which was funded by Clark, but most of this was already known from Butler's testimony substantiated by HUAC investigations. Christmas offered extra tidbits that dramatized MacGuire's deceitfulness; while MacGuire denied proposing a gold speech to Butler, Christmas said that it was MacGuire's idea to begin with, and that he later received a report of Butler's refusal. In all, he laid everything neatly at the doorstep of the Committee for a Sound Dollar and made MacGuire look like a bungling, third-rate confidence artist. His testimony was limited to what he himself volunteered because of his privileged attorney-client relationship with Clark. Congressman Dickstein remarked to McCormack that there was "no question that MacQuire [sic] told an untruth and that this Committee ought to do something about it," but nothing was done. HUAC was at the end of its current congressional mandate, which was not renewed; Christmas testified on its final day...

Thus, testimony and other evidence convincingly established that a substantial part of Butler's story was true, but mainly that which dealt with the gold cabal. This involved more details of Wall Street manipulation of veterans affairs than had hitherto been publicly disclosed, but not so as to fundamentally recast conventional wisdom regarding the "Royal Family" or the stereotype of legionnaire dupes wielding baseball bats as auxilliary strikebreakers. Butler's personal integrity was vindicated insofar as he was shown to have rejected enticements to sell out the rank-and-file veterans. These significant disclosures tended to be lost, however, in the confusion surrounding the larger issue of an alleged plot to overthrow the government. In the HUAC proceedings, the grandiose conspiracy to mobilize 500,000 veterans reduced simply to what Butler and French said MacGuire had told them, supported by very few slender threads of circumstantial evidence.

Even if Butler was telling the truth, as there seems little reason to doubt, there remains the unfathomable problem of MacGuire's motives and veracity. He may have been working both ends against the middle, as Butler at one point suspected. In any case, MacGuire emerged from the HUAC hearings as an inconsequential trickster whose base dealings could not possibly be taken alone as verif~ing such a momentous undertaking. If he was acting as an intermediary in a genuine probe, or as agent provocateur sent to fool Butler, his employers were at least clever enough to keep their distance and see to it that he self-destructed on the witness stand.
But why did Butler publicize the plot in its most lurid scope just on the basis of MacGuire's fantastic pitch? Tactically, the gold cabal did constitute a prima facie case of Wall Street conspiracy, while the coup provided sensational impact to launch the whole package as a major exposé. The New York Times editorialized that "Butler himself does not appear to more than half credit it."35 But there were circumstantial details in MacGuire's pitch that predicted imminent major developments in Wall Street opposition to the Roosevelt administration, demonstrating, as MacGuire no doubt intended, that he had access to high-level inside information. These led Butler to believe, or so he testified, that MacGuire's plot was part of a formidable undertaking. MacGuire apparently made every effort to present the plot in this way. But most of Butler's and French's testimony regarding MacGuire's name-dropping and informed gossiping, crucial ploys in establishing his credibility as intermediary, were omitted as hearsay from HUAC's published extracts of the hearings.

The suppressed testimony was indeed hearsay, and defamatory insofar as it implicated leading Wall Street and government figures in the alleged plot. On the other hand, by the very conspiratorial nature of the undertaking, these circumstantial connections and innuendos provided the most important substantiation of a larger conspiracy. Most significant was the allusion in the published version to an unnamed "society to maintain the Constitution" with "big fellows in it" that, according to Butler quoting MacGuire, would be publicly announced in several weeks. This society was to be the "background" for the veterans plot, its members "the villagers in the opera." Censored out of the published extracts was Butler's comment:

"and in about two weeks the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be. That is the reason I tied it up with this other thing about Al Smith and some of the other people, because of the name [names] that appeared in connection with this Liberty League."36

Inasmuch as the Liberty League was the major organized right-wing assault on Roosevelt in the mid-1930s, and included in its leadership former Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and John W Davis, with both mentioned and Davis actually impugned in the Butler-MacGuire conversations, this was relevant circumstantial corroboration of sorts. More telling was the association between MacGuire, Murphy, and Clark with the Legion gold intrigue on the one hand and the League on the other. Murphy was treasurer of the Liberty League, Clark one of its founding donors.

The fact that HUAC suppressed testimony dealing with the Liberty League and prominent personalities tended to magnify the significance of deleted passages and discredit the integrity of HUAC's investigation. Circumstances of disclosure led to further distortion. JournalistJohn L. Spivak, researching Nazism and anti-Semitism for New Masses magazine, got permission from Dickstein to examine HUAC's public documents and was (it seems unwittingly) given the unexpurgated testimony amid stacks of other papers.

Spivak's two-part feature "Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy" appeared in early 1935, a month after the hearings closed. He cogently developed a case for taking the suppressed testimony seriously. But this relevant material was embellished with overblown aspersions against "Jewish financiers working with fascist groups"-a mishmash of guilt by association that connected Morgan interests with Jewish financier Felix Warburg, HUAC, and certain members of the American Jewish Committee. Spivak was intent upon grinding his own axes, and elucidation of the plot was obscured. The suppressed Butler-MacGuire conversations could hardly support all this. Moreover New Masses was left-wing with a limited readership; the scoop was stigmatized as "red" propaganda and generally not cited elsewhere.

Spivak's pieces contrasted with the treatment the plot received in the right-wing press. Time magazine outdid itself in superciliousness, ridiculing the story as its National Affairs lead story the first week with no followup coverage of the many developments until, three months later, brief mention in a footnote to a jaunty Butler-Jimmy Durante "personalities" photo. This curtly related HUAC's final report to Congress that the "story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true." The extravagant earlier piece featured a burlesque with half a million veterans marching through Maryland on US. Route 1 led by Butler on a white horse, accompanied by Johnson, MacArthur, and three former Legion commanders: "Between them and the first squad of marching men glided a shiny limousine. On its back seat, with a plush robe across their knees, were to be seen John P. Morgan and his partner, Thomas William Lamont, deep in solemn talk." Time remarked that "no military officer of the US. since the late, tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler." The liberal Nation and New Republic argued that fascism originated in pseudoradical mass movements; therefore Butler's revelations of a reactionary Wall Street plot were no cause for alarm.38

Smedley denounced HUAC on national radio for suppressing evidence and stopping "dead in its tracks when it got near the top" by failing to call Murphy, Clark, and others to testifr He denied the plot was Fascist, "except certain newspapers and the Committee itself so termed it," nor had a march on Washington ever been mentioned. In a rejoinder, Dickstein argued that Butler had never "made any specific charges" against the big names. But Dickstein's criticisms were qualified in Butler's favor, reflecting HUAC's final report to Congress: "There is no question that these attempts [the plot] were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient." The committee had verified "all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization.~~ The New York Times paraphrased the report in a front-page story: "Definite proof has been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at the hearing, was actually contemplated." But by this time, with HUAC terminated, there was no apparent means or inclination to pursue the story further.39
Butler may have blown the whistle on an incipient conspiracy, and the plot reverberated in contemporary events and down through the years. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis explored similar themes of collusion between the rich, the military and ex-military, and the right-wing press in his admonitory 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. Silver Shirts, Khaki Shirts and the Black Legion were highly visible reminders, however marginal and strange, that paramilitary strong-arm methods appealed to some Americans. A botched Khaki Shirt march on Washington the previous year served as paradigm for media coverage of Butler's charges, as did Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome.

Probably the most important effect of the Butler episode was to stigmatize right-wing protofascist linkages. The Liberty League proved particularly vulnerable, as noted by its historian, George Wolfskill: "Some people were easily spooked; and with the unthinking ones allegations, no matter how incredulous, were accepted as facts. From the Butler yarn there remained a residue of suspicion. The League was now more vulnerable to future attacks, attacks of perhaps not so serious a nature but no less worthy, attacks against which there was no adequate defense." But then the League itself gratuitously publicized its proneness to cranky right-wing fanaticism in the effusions of its leading spokesmen, such as Al Smith, who wildly attacked the New Deal as cryptocommunism. This was strikingly analogous to attacks on democratic governments by European Fascists. In this sense the gold plot, if not the march on Washington, was both sufficiently concrete and close to the League to justify larger suspicions. The League, as Wolf-skill noted, failed to protect itself from associations with right-wing extremists and suffered the consequences in terms of public distrust-and rightfully so.40

Butler's attack on Wall Street enhanced his reputation as a champion of the rank-and-file, spitting in the eyes of the rich and powerful, whether he took a drubbing in the right-wing press or not. In the fall of 1935 he was named secretary of war in presidential aspirant Huey Long's shadow cabinet, revealed in My First Days in the White House, which was published posthumously shortly after Long's assassination. Long "understood" Butler

"more intimately than some of my other appointees to the cabinet." In a chapter entitled "Wherein Rebellion Brews and Fades," he had Smedley putting down a right-wing putsch by Morgan interests intent upon sabotaging Share Our Wealth legislation. Butler, enroute to a VFW convention in New Orleans, commented that the selection was "the greatest compliment ever paid me," but in fact had almost nothing to do with Long except that they made speeches together favoring the bonus. In private letters he praised Long for siding with the underdog, and mentioned that "with Huey Long's death I lost most of my interest in the present political picture."4'

Otherwise, the plot and its ramifications isolated him further from conventional politics, and he seemed to relish the final burnings of bridges. He was now more than ever a loner, speaking his mind as a free spirit. And he was an emotional man. Spivak, on trudging through the snow to Butler's home in Newtown Square, was amazed to find a general who talked like a radical agitator: "When I saw him he said things about big business and politics, sometimes in earthy, four-letter words, the like of which I had never heard from the most excited agitators crying on streetcorners, from socialists speaking on the New Haven Green or, in later years, from communists." When Spivak reminded him he was from New Masses, reputedly "a communist magazine," Smedley replied, "So who the hell cares?" The United States had been founded by radicals. George Washington, after all, was "an extremist-a goddam revolutionist!" In 1936 he voted for Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas.42

He had started letting loose before retirement. In August 1931, according to Jules Archer's undocumented secondary account, he used the "racketeer for capitalism" epigram that appeared variously in his speeches and writings thereafter.43 Most frequently cited was the 1935 Common Sense article quoted at the front of this book and elaborated here:

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purifly Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested... . Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."

He was said to have used identical phrases in an unpublished November 1933 letter to Common Sense. Archer was probably right. Radical expressions were probably omitted from press reports of many of his speeches and toned down in articles submitted to conventional magazines. Snippets emerged. The previous January, Nation reported him characterizing the U.S. military as "a glorified bill-collecting agency~~ and saying he "wouldn't want to see a boy of mine march out with a Wall Street collar about his neck."45

Butler made the analogy between imperialism and domestic crime into an explicit indictment. His argument was rooted in conventional morality that had long sustained overseas and domestic coercion in the names of uplift and reform. When used to conquer injustice and backwardness and to spread the American way of life, the use of force was good. Conversely, force used for evil was all the more hateful when tainted with deceit and hypocrisy. Current popular fascination with gangsterism-witness the stardom of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson and the dozens of Hollywood gangster films each year-provided convenient jargon which Smedley used to drive home a conviction that had evolved out of a lifetime of military and police experience.

He had been inveighing against gangster-political manipulations since at least 1912, when he was outraged in Nicaagua by predatory client-government officials, the "gang," being allowed to subvert his own "honest" administration in Granada.46 Now his renunciation of war as a racket and imperialism as gangsterism matched exactly his invective against Capone. Crime fighting at home was sustained by ideals of uplift and fair play-the same as official rationales for intervention overseas. Abuse of the military for corrupt purposes overseas was equivalent to police corruption at home. The logic was inescapable once one had dispensed with the patriotic symbols, pious rhetoric, and specious legalism that had wafted a long succession of overseas military expeditions.

His anti-imperialist, anticapitalist rhetoric was offset neatly by vigorous support for domestic law and order. The issue was justice and morality, boldly asserted in terms of duty-bound American manliness. Likewise, his antiwar theme was complemented by unflinchingly militaristic support for national defense. He was always the patriot and battling marine, never the sniveling pacifist or convoluted ideologue. The marriage of extreme left-and right-wing themes enhanced his warrior method of attack.

The resulting system of contentious arguments was morally consistent and coherent enough to be convincing and, if not, to disarm and placate by its balanced audacity. Butler was careful not to commit himself to the many partisan organizations he encountered as an orator and propagandist, so that he could be taken on merit and be respected for his personal integrity. He thus maintained a degree of credibility across the political spectrum and was able to publish his radical views in such diverse forums as Woman's Home Companion, Reader's Digest, Common Sense, and New Masses. Even when toleration for dissent narrowed with the coming of war in the late 1930s, he remained a popular spokesman on the veterans' circuit. And he collaborated on friendly terms with such seeming irreconcilables as Earl Browder Maury Maverick, James G. Harbord, andJ. Edgar Hoover, not to mention ongoing loyal friendships with a number of Marine Corps officers. In 1936 when General Harbord, a widely respected military figure, published his The American Army in France, 1917-19, he included a glowing recitation of the Duckboard saga and referred to Butler as "that Marine of Marines," and "a great organizer of men, the best I have ever known in commands where personal contact was possible for the organizer." Smedley wrote a testimonial for the book.47

Most surprising, in retrospect, was his reputation in the law enforcement community as an expert and proponent of state and federal constabularies while he simultaneously expounded left-wing views on capitalism and imperialism. He frequently boosted the FBI as the shining example of how the federal government should respond to crime. Butler's FBI file contains a half dozen reports by field agents who heard and often shared speakers' platforms with him during the late l930s. He was reported to have told an Idaho American Legion convention "to support you [Director J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in every way," and to have praised the FBI as "the finest organization in the world today. . . with the possible exception of the Marine Corps." The agent, who was the only other speaker, noted that Smedley "spoke along his usual lines, calling on the Legion to keep the country out of war. His talk was extremely well received and he was congratulated by me at its conclusion." Hoover sent Smedley thank you notes and invited him to tour the Bureau in Washington. Butler often quoted Hoover in his speeches, for which Hoover sent pamphlets and copies of his own speeches, up to 1940 when an agent reported: "He is still a sincere admirer of you and the Bureau and showed me several of your recent addresses which he carries with him and from which he states he quotes in every talk."48

When Butler told a 1936 dentists' convention in Chicago that the FBI was one of the few government departments "which did not smell to high heaven," the agent who was his co-speaker warmly thanked him and reiterated Hoover's invitation to visit Bureau headquarters. That the agent considered the remainder of Smedley's speech, entitled "The Munitions Racket," to be "rather radical . . . he castigated everybody from the President down, and particularly the present Secretary of War," did not seem to matter. And he noted approvingly that the speech was "well received" by the audience. In 1961, when tolerance for dissent was very narrow, someone sent in a clipping quoting Butler's "racketeer for capitalism" diatribe. The agent researching the complaint found numerous references to Butler in bureau files and came to the conclusion that "our relations with him were very cordial." Since he had been dead for twenty years, the case was dropped.49

The FBI was aware of the alleged 1934 Wall Street plot but apparently did not investigate. In a curious sequel, while visiting the bureau in 1936 Butler told Hoover about a plot by Father Charles Coughlin to invade Mexico to protect the Catholic Church from harassment. Smedley said that Coughlin, the famous "radio priest" whose voice he recognized, had approached him by telephone and that the call was traced back to Coughlin afterward. It seems that Butler was being hoaxed. In any case, he was clearly wary of becoming involved in another publicized plot exposé. He did mention the Coughlin plot again to an agent in 1940 in connection with what he termed dozens of "screwball" organizations that had invited him to appear as a speaker.50

Butler's affinity with Hoover reflected what historian Samuel Walker bemoaned as a trend toward highly centralized authority by which police executives were given "almost complete discretion" to do as they liked:

"Like General Butler in Philadelphia and Boss Frank Hague in Jersey City, J. Edgar Hoover proved that the techniques of professionalism and efficiency could easily be perverted." Walker castigated Hoover for manipulating public fears of a crime wave during the 1930s by mounting an FBI "publicity blitz" regarding a few sensational criminals, in which the bureau's press releases "inflated to heroic proportions" its successes. A most disturbing aspect was the "vicious quality of the rhetoric" used, in which Hoover referred to criminals as "vermin~~ and "Public Rat Number One." The result was reorientation of police professionalism so that the "crime-fighter image" perniciously superseded "social work aspects of policing." Butler, with his fervid warrior-style exhortations to "put the law books in cold storage and bring out the high-powered rifles and machine guns," was a leading exponent of this trend.51

At the other end of the political spectrum, Butler wrote five articles for non-Marxist, socialist Common Sense magazine in 1935~36.52 During this period Common Sense featured intellectuals, such as John Dewey, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Bertrand Russell, and practicing politicians such as Floyd B. Olsen and Maury Maverick, with format and style pitched to the general public. Butler became a prominent spokesman for the League Against War and Fascism, which was considered by many to be Communistdominated.53 Local American Legion units occasionally harassed the League for its alleged subversive activities. No matter, Smedley retained his stature as a red-blooded patriot; the Marine Corps League (veterans) pleaded with him to attend its 1936 national convention: "We need you vitally... . We must have the support by personal presence of two or more of our Nationally known leaders, such as yourself." In 1941, the Smedley D. Butler Detachment petitioned President Roosevelt that a Tulsa newspaper was publishing "un-American" editorials.54