American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [13]
The plotters’ idea was to enlist a military man who was popular with veterans from the First World War. Many veterans were disgruntled because they’d never been paid the bonuses promised them when the war ended. When their “Bonus Army” protested by camping out in Washington in 1932, Smedley Butler had shown up to support their cause. He was the most decorated Marine in American history. And when another general, Douglas MacArthur, led a charge to destroy the veterans’ tent city under orders from President Hoover, Butler got so pissed off that he switched parties and voted for FDR in the election that year.
But maybe the coup-makers didn’t know that when they decided Butler was the man to lead their takeover of the government. Or maybe they figured that, with enough money and the temptation of running the country, anybody was corruptible. The idea was to create havoc by Major General Butler leading a veterans’ march on Washington. Pressured by these events, FDR, so they thought, would be convinced to name Butler to a new cabinet post as a Secretary of “General Affairs” or “General Welfare” (Homeland Security would have to wait awhile longer). Eventually, the president would agree to turn over the reins of power to Butler altogether, under the excuse that his polio was worsening, and would become a ceremonial figurehead.
The whole notion seems pretty far-fetched today, especially given what we know about the integrity of Roosevelt through the Depression and World War II. Apparently though, the Wall Street group thought they could pull it off. But they sure didn’t do enough homework on the military man they thought would play along, Smedley Butler. He’d grown up in a politically prominent Quaker family in Pennsylvania, and gotten his baptism-under-fire with the Marines at Guantánamo during the Spanish-American War. During his distinguished service, he would come under fire more than 120 times and receive 18 decorations, including three Medals of Honor.
As a good soldier, Butler followed orders. The Taft Administration asked him to help rig elections in Nicaragua, which he later admitted doing. In what was then called “dollar diplomacy,” Butler also helped American business interests maintain their hold on other Latin American countries. If that’s all they knew about Butler, it’s understandable that the conspirators against FDR might figure he’d play along.
But he’d given a speech to an American Legion convention, the year before FDR was elected, that clearly showed he’d had a change of heart. When the Legion first formed in the 1920s, most veterans had no clue that big corporations were backing it to use later in breaking strikes. It turned out that one of the Legion’s main founders was Grayson Murphy, who ran one of Wall Street’s big brokerage firms along with being director of a Morgan bank, Guaranty Trust. His name would soon surface as one of the financiers who wanted to remove FDR from power.
In his speech, Butler decided to give the Legion veterans some insight into how things worked.
“I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” Butler said. “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape 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 its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions.... I might have