American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [14]
In another talk, Butler told veterans that war was “largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know—I’ve been in eleven of these expeditions.” Butler also told the vets not to believe “the propaganda [that] capital circulates” in the controlled press. In 1932, the year after he gave that speech, at the age of fifty, Butler retired to civilian life. He handed out maps to his house to Marines who’d served under him, in case they ever needed anything.
Butler speculated privately that the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Roosevelt a few weeks before his inauguration might have been orchestrated by a big-business cabal. Now members of that same elite circle decided that Butler, not MacArthur, was the military man best able to lead their coup attempt. One day, they had a bond salesman named Gerry MacGuire approach him. Butler quickly smelled a rat, but decided to play along until he could figure out what was really going on. Over the course of some months, Maguire courted him. His employer turned out to be Legion sponsor and financier Grayson Murphy.
There were some important people, MacGuire told Butler, who wanted to establish a new organization in the U.S. They had money, lots of it, $3 million in working capital and as much as $300 million that could be tapped into. Butler realized the truth of this when some captains of industry came together and announced formation of a new American Liberty League in September 1934. The organization said its 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.” Backers included Rockefellers, Mellons, and Pews. Also two unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidates, John W. Davis (an attorney for the Morgan banking interests) and Al Smith (a business associate of the DuPonts). At first Butler couldn’t believe even Smith could be involved, until he suddenly published a scathing attack on the New Deal.2 (I guess you could say not a whole lot has changed with our two-party system.)
Butler had once served with a fellow named Robert S. Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and a wealthy banker. He now paid a visit and put forward more of the plan to Butler, who 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 Butler was their choice to lead the takeover.
I view Smedley Butler as someone who’d read the Constitution and followed the law. He didn’t have to be in FDR’s camp to realize that what he was being asked to do was wrong. FDR was the commander-in-chief of the country, and we have a system for how we exchange our leaders. That system is the vote and the election.
Butler brought a reporter friend in on the conspiracy, so it wouldn’t be just his word against the plotters. Together they worked together on gathering more background. Around Thanksgiving in 1934, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives took Butler’s testimony behind closed doors. The next day, the New York Times ran a two-column headline on the front page: “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government by Force.’” Butler was struck by how the paper played it. The gist of his charges was buried deep inside, while most of the article consisted of denials and outright ridicule from some of the prominent people he’d implicated. Time magazine followed up with a front-page piece headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” It caricatured Butler riding a white horse while 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 snidely. (Are we surprised that FDR started his