War Is a Racket Read online

  WAR IS A RACKET

  Photo courtesy of the Butler family.

  Smedley Butler with the USMC mascot bulldogs at an Army-Navy game.

  WAR IS A RACKET

  The Antiwar Classic by

  America’s Most Decorated Soldier

  Brigadier General

  Smedley Darlington Butler

  INTRODUCTION BY

  JESSE VENTURA

  SKYHORSE PUBLISHING

  Additional material copyright © 2013 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2013 by Jesse Ventura Photographs and radio address courtesy of the Butler Family Other materials courtesy of the Marine Corps Archives % Special Collections

  No claim is made to material contained in this work that is derived from government documents. Nevertheless, Skyhorse Publishing claims copyright in all additional content, including, but not limited to, compilation copyright and the copyright in and to any additional material, elements, design, images, or layout of whatever kind included herein.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62873-565-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Butler with his wife, Ethel Conway Peters Butler, circa 1901.

  Photos courtesy of the Butler family.

  Butler with his son, Smedley Butler Jr.

  Photo courtesy of the Butler family.

  Butler at home with his cat.

  Contents

  Editor’s Note

  Introduction by Jesse Ventura

  War Is a Racket

  Speeches:

  Memorial Day Speech (1931)

  Memorial Day Speech (1933)

  Discovering America (1939)

  The War in Europe (Undated)

  Avoiding the War in the Pacific by Attending to our own Business (1939)

  Concerning Law Enforcement (Undated)

  Veterans’ Rights (Undated)

  Radio Addresses:

  Address from October 11, 1939

  Articles:

  My Service with the Marines (Undated)

  Dictatorship? (Undated)

  The Peace Racket (Undated)

  Let’s Quit Kidding Ourselves (Undated)

  America’s Veteran Problem (1936)

  Government Aid for Veterans (Undated)

  The Chip on Uncle Sam’s Shoulder (as told to Barney Yanofsky) (Undated)

  War Is a Racket (Draft)

  Flier courtesy of the Butler family.

  An election flier from an unsuccessful run at U.S. Senator in 1932.

  Editor’s Note

  Major General Smedley D. Butler was an American hero. His knowledge and teachings not only improved our military, but our country as a whole.

  With special thanks to Molly Swanton and the Butler family, as well as Christopher Ellis at the Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections, we have been able to not only publish Major General Butler’s famous exposé, War Is a Racket, but several other essays, articles, and speeches.

  While we have transcribed several of these works, we wanted to include some of them in their original format. Because of this, there may be marks or other comments on the documents. We at Skyhorse felt that showing the truest and most authentic form of General Butler’s works would be best in remembering and respecting one of the most decorated Marines in United States history.

  We hope that you enjoy his work as much as we have and that you’ll gain much wisdom and insight from “The Old Gimlet.”

  Introduction

  In my humble opinion, this little book should be required reading for every high school history classroom in America. War Is a Racket was written in 1935, but don’t let that fool you. It’s as relevant today—three-quarters of a century later—as it was then. Maybe even more so. There’s an old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” and Smedley Butler’s hard-hitting assessment continues to hold a vital message to be heeded in our time.

  The General was a man after my own heart. Having served honorably in the military—as I did as a Navy frogman—he knows whereof he speaks when it comes to war. He understands the soldiers who fight for their country. And he came to realize—and be outraged by—those making another kind of killing off of their blood, sweat, and tears.

  You need to know some background about Smedley Butler in order to fully appreciate what you’re about to read. He was born in 1881 to a prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania, the oldest of three sons. His grandfather and later his father were elected to U.S. Congress. A fine athlete in high school, he left against his father’s wishes shortly before his seventeenth birthday to enlist in the Marines after the Spanish-American War broke out. Lying about his age, Butler received a direct commission as a second lieutenant.

  He had contempt for red tape, worked devotedly alongside his men, and rose quickly in the ranks. Butler went on to take part in just about all the U.S. military actions of his time: in Cuba and Manila, then the Boxer Rebellion in China (where he was twice wounded in action and promoted to captain at only nineteen), and then a series of interventions in Central America and the Caribbean. Those were known as the “Banana Wars,” because the aim was to protect the Panama Canal and U.S. commercial interests in the region such as the United Fruit Company.

  At only thirty-seven, Butler became a brigadier general. In command of a camp in France during World War I,

  “[T]he ground under the tents was nothing but mud, [so] he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duck-boards no longer needed for the trenches, carted the first one himself up that four-mile hill to the camp, and thus provided something in the way of protection for the men to sleep on.” 1

  That’s the kind of guy Smedley Butler was.

  He took some time off in the Roaring Twenties to become director of public safety in Philadelphia; running the city’s police and fire departments. There his no-bullshit style got him into some trouble. The municipal government and its cops were unbelievably corrupt, and from the get-go, Butler was raiding speakeasies while cracking down on prostitution and gambling. Let’s say he wasn’t too popular among the rich and powerful who were used to law enforcement turning a blind eye in exchange for their payoffs.

  Plus, perish the thought, the general often swore while giving his regular radio talks. When the mayor told the press, “I had the guts to bring General Butler to Philadelphia and I have the guts to fire him,” a crowd of four thousand Smedley supporters came together and forced a truce to keep him in Philadelphia awhile longer. Resigning after nearly two tumultuous years as director of public safety, Butler later said, “Cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.”

  During the late 1920s, Butler commanded a Marine Expeditionary Force in China and was named a major general upon his return. Nicknamed “The Fighting Quaker,” Butler had been hailed as “the outstanding American soldier” by Theodore Roosevelt. He is one of only nineteen people to this day who have been twice awarded the Medal of Honor. He also received the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, the highest Marine decoration
at the time for officers. All told, Smedley served thirty-four years in the Marine Corps before retiring from active duty in 1931, at the age of fifty. When he became a civilian, the man had been under fire more than 120 times. He gave his men maps of how to get to his house, in case they ever needed him for anything.

  That was around the same time Butler had landed in hot water with President Herbert Hoover for publicly stating some gossip about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who it was alleged had been involved in a hit-and-run accident on a young child. When the Italian government protested, if you can believe it, Hoover asked his secretary of the Navy to court-martial Butler! For the first time since the Civil War, a general officer was placed under arrest; confined to his post! A man with eighteen decorations—outrageous! But I guess our appeasement of Fascist dictators isn’t anything new. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, volunteered to testify on Butler’s behalf, and ultimately, Butler got off with a “reprimand” and his court-martial withdrawn.

  But Smedley wasn’t about to go “gentle into that good night,” as Dylan Thomas’s famous poem states. He’d been a good soldier, following the orders of his superiors—like when the Taft Administration asked him to help rig elections in Nicaragua. But in the course of his service, he’d seen too much and started giving lectures about what he’d observed, donating much of the money that he earned to unemployment relief in his Philadelphia hometown, as we were then in the midst of the Great Depression.

  In 1931, a speech Butler delivered before the American Legion made the papers. In it, he said:

  “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service, and during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

  Wow! You don’t think that raised some hackles? (And probably had some folks wanting to put Smedley in shackles.) Deciding to run for the U.S. Senate, Butler spoke out strongly on behalf of the World War I veterans who’d never been paid their promised bonuses. When their “Bonus Army” set up a protest camp in Washington, DC, in 1932, Butler showed up with his young son to cheer the men on; this was the night before the Hoover Administration was preparing to evict them. He walked through the camp telling the vets they’d served honorably and had as much right to lobby Congress as any corporation did. He and his son ate with the men and spent the night. But before the month was out, General Douglas MacArthur came charging in with an Army cavalry, destroying the camp. Several vets were injured or killed during the melee. Smedley Butler was furious; he didn’t make it into the Senate, but he switched parties and voted for FDR for president.

  And he wasn’t done making waves . . . of tidal proportions. On November 30, 1934, Butler testified before a House committee in closed-door executive session. The story then leaked in three newspapers, and began: “Major General Smedley D. Butler revealed today that he had been asked by a group of wealthy New York brokers to lead a Fascist movement to set up a dictatorship in the United States.”

  You can read the whole story in a book called The Plot to Seize the White House by Jules Archer, which is still in print. I did a summary of it in my earlier book, American Conspiracies. It’s a classic story of the power broker mind-set; that if you tempt someone with a big enough offer, they can’t help but come over to your side. Not Smedley Butler. He had too much integrity.

  Here was the thing: President Roosevelt’s New Deal was considered downright anti-American and evil by the Wall Street crowd (as it still is blamed today by the radicals passing themselves off as legitimate conservatives). The president was taking on the stock speculators and setting up new watchdog federal agencies. He was putting a halt on farm foreclosures and forcing employers to accept union collective bargaining. He took the nation off the gold standard, which meant more paper money would be available to provide loans and create jobs for the millions of unemployed. Lo and behold, he even spoke of raising taxes on the rich to help pay for New Deal programs.

  So a lot of titans of finance hated the man’s guts. Butler even suspected some of them might have been behind a failed assassination attempt against him shortly before he was elected president. Then one day in 1934, to Butler’s surprise, a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire approached him. The retired general smelled a rat, but decided to play along until he could figure out what was really going on. He let MacGuire court him for some months. The fellow turned out to be employed by financier Grayson Murphy.

  Butler was told by MacGuire that some really important people with plenty of money wanted to establish a new organization. They had $3 million in working capital and as much as $300 million which they could tap into. Butler realized the truth of this when some captains of industry came together and announced they were forming a new American Liberty League that September. Its stated goals were “to combat radicalism, to teach the necessity of respect for the rights of persons and property, and generally to foster free private enterprise.” The League’s backers included Rockefellers, Mellons, and Pews, as well as two unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates, John W. Davis (an attorney for the Morgan banking interests) and Al Smith (a business associate of the DuPonts).

  MacGuire arranged to put Butler back in touch with a fellow he’d once served alongside, Robert S. Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a by-now wealthy banker. Butler later remembered Clark saying, “You know, the president is weak. . . . He was raised in this class, and he will come back. . . . But we have got to be prepared to sustain him when he does.”

  So who was their choice to lead a government takeover? That’s right, Smedley Butler. They knew how popular he was with veterans, and the idea was to have Smedley come out of retirement and lead another veterans’ “Bonus Army” march on the nation’s capital. They wanted to create havoc with as many as five hundred thousand men at Butler’s heels. Pressured by these events, so the twisted thinking went, FDR would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a secretary of “general affairs” or “general welfare.” Eventually, the president would agree to turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and FDR would become a mere ceremonial figurehead.

  You need to remember that this was the same time as Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and Mussolini’s consolidation of his dictatorship in Italy, so such ideas were very much in the air. But they picked the wrong coup d’ dude in Butler. Smedley decided to bring a reporter friend in on the conspiracy, so it wouldn’t be just his word against the plotters’, and they worked together to gather more background.

  After his testimony before the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee around Thanksgiving of 1934, the New York Times ran a front-page story with a two-column headline: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government by Force.” But most of the article was full of denials and outright ridicule from some of the bigwigs that he’d implicated, while the meat of Smedley’s charges got buried on an inside page. Time magazine followed up with a piece headlined “Plot without Plotters,” complete with a cartoon of Butler riding a white horse and asking veterans to follow him. “No military officer of the United States since the late tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much
hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler,” the article said. Doesn’t seem like the big media have changed their spots much over the last eighty years, does it?

  The House committee went ahead with mounting an investigation, which lasted for two months. They verified that Butler had been offered an $18,000 bribe—no paltry sum in those days—and a number of other facts. The Veterans of Foreign Wars commander, James Van Zandt, revealed that he, too, had been approached by “agents of Wall Street” to lead a Fascist dictatorship. Even Time came out with a small-print “footnote” that the committee was “convinced . . . that General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true.”

  But then the committee’s investigation came to a sudden stop and none of the alleged financiers were ever called for questioning. In fact, when the transcript of the committee’s interview with Butler came out, every person he’d named ended up being deleted. “Not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime,” said the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin. I can’t help but think of the current administration in Washington refusing to even consider prosecuting the Bush people for their involvement in torture.

  When John McCormack, who chaired the committee and went on to become House Speaker, was interviewed years later about what had happened, he claimed he couldn’t remember why they’d avoided going after the bankers and other corporate powers. McCormack did say in 1971:

  “If the plotters had got rid of Roosevelt, there’s no telling what might have taken place. They wouldn’t have told the people what they were doing, of course. They were going to make it all sound constitutional, of course, with a high-sounding name for the dictator and a plan to make it all sound like a good American program. A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an un-organized majority, as Adolf Hitler did. . . . The people were in a very confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction. Mass frustration could bring about anything.”