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February 5 - February 6, 2022
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),
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
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.
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volunteered to testify on Butler’s behalf, and ultimately, Butler got off with a “reprimand” and his court-martial withdrawn.
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,
“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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
“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 Veterans of Foreign Wars commander, James Van Zandt, revealed that he, too, had been approached by “agents of Wall Street”
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.”
“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.
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.
And who benefited from our lying our way into Iraq? The Halliburtons of this world, the war profiteer contractors and their banker backers.
How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers? Not in Italy, to be sure.
What does the “open door” policy in China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in 35 years and we (our bankers and industrials and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000. Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war—a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of
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Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit—fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well. Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits? Yes, and what does it profit the nation? Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our Country. We forgot Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits—ah! that is another matter—twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent—the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.
Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 was $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit, we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only a pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam had a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought—and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit on it—so we had a lot of those McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in war days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equip-ment—knapsacks and the things that go to fill them—crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them—and they will do it all over again the next time. There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some to the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up—and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war period. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum.
The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee—with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator—to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
WHO provides the profits—these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500, and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them—in taxation.
We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the banker. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us—the people—got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par—and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.
Napoleon once said, “All men are enamored of decorations... they positively hunger for them.” So, by developing the Napoleonic system—the medal business—the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys like to be decorated.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.
But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parlays at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation to be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and mayors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds. Why shouldn’t they? They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered.
So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people—those who do the suffering and still pay the price—make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had “kept us out of war” and on the implied promise that he would “keep us out of war.” Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany. In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and to die.
The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group: There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) jive or six billion dollars. If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won’t. So...
eighteen years after, the world has less of a democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.
