Smedley Butler

Smedley Darlington Butler ( July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "the fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Butler was awarded the Medal of Honor twice during his career, one of only 19 people to be so decorated. He was noted for his outspoken non-interventionist views and his book War is a Racket, one of the first works describing the military-industrial complex. After retiring from service, Butler became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, communists, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s. Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (See Business Plot)

Early life

Butler was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the oldest in a family of three sons. His parents were Thomas Stalker and Maud (Darlington) Butler, both members of distinguished Quaker families. His father was a lawyer, judge, and for thirty-one years a Congressman. During his time in congress, Thomas S. Butler was chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee during the Harding and Coolidge administrations.

Butler was educated at the Friends' Graded High School at West Chester and later at the Haverford School near Philadelphia.

Military career

Despite his father's desire that he remain in school, Smedley Butler dropped out when the United States declared war against Spain in 1898. As he was only 16 years old, Butler lied about his age to secure a second lieutenant's commission in the Marines.

After six weeks of basic training, Second Lieutenant Butler was sent to Guantanamo, Cuba, in July 1898. The bay was already secured, but a Spanish sniper's bullet barely missed Butler's head one night.

Butler was twice wounded during the Boxer rebellion. Following one engagement near Tientsin on July 13, 1900, Butler, another lieutenant and four enlisted men carried a wounded officer to the rear for medical attention — a 17-mile trek under heavy fire. Four of the men received the Medal of Honor. At that time, however, officers were not eligible to receive the award. In recognition of his bravery in the incident, Butler was commissioned a captain by brevet, receiving his promotion while in the hospital recovering from a wound incurred at the Battle of Tientsin, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday.

In 1903, he fought to protect the U.S. Consulate in Honduras from rebels. An incident during that expedition allegedly earned him the first of several colorful nicknames, "Old Gimlet Eye," attributed to the feverish, bloodshot eyes which enhanced his habitually penetrating and bellicose stare.

Butler was married in 1905 to Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia. He had a daughter, Ethel Peters, and two sons, Smedley Darlington and Thomas Richard.

From 1909 to 1912, he served in Nicaragua.

First Medal of Honor

Between the Spanish-American War and the American entry into the first World War in 1917, Butler achieved the distinction, shared with only three other Marines since that time, of being twice awarded the Medal of Honor for outstanding gallantry in action.

The first award was for his activities in the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Mexico in 1914 at Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. But the large number of Medals of Honor awarded during that campaign — one for the Army, nine for Marines and 46 to Navy personnel — diminished the medal's prestige. During World War I, Butler, then a major, attempted to return his Medal of Honor, explaining that he had done nothing to deserve it. It was returned with orders that not only would he keep it, but that he would wear it as well.

Second Medal of Honor

The Marines tried to secure Haiti against the "Cacos" rebels in 1915. On October 24, 1915, a patrol of forty-four mounted Marines led by Butler was ambushed by some 400 Cacos. The Marines maintained their perimeter throughout the night, and early the next morning they charged the much larger enemy force from three directions. The startled Haitians fled. Dan Daly received a Medal of Honor for his gallantry in the battle and might have received an unprecedented third Medal of Honor but was denied it for his foul language during the June 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, when he uttered what later became a classic Marine battle cry: "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?" (This was actually a slightly more vulgar version of a phrase uttered by a Confederate officer at the Civil War Battle of Malvern Hill.)

By mid-November 1915, most of the Cacos had been dispersed from the Haitian region. The remainder took refuge at Fort Rivière, an old French-built stronghold deep within the country. Fort Rivière sat atop Montagne Noire, the front reachable by a steep, rocky slope. The other three sides fell away so steeply that an approach from those directions was impossible. Some Marine officers argued that it should be assaulted by a regiment supported by artillery, but Butler convinced his colonel to allow him to attack with just four companies of 24 men each, plus two machine gun detachments. Butler and his men took the rebel stronghold on November 17 1915, in which he received his second Medal of Honor, for which he also received the Haitian Medal of Honor. Butler was an aggressive troop commander and a stern disciplinarian, but as he always led from the front, his men were said to love him.

Later, as the initial organizer and commanding officer of the Haitian Gendarmerie, the native police force, Butler established a record as a capable administrator; under his supervision, order was largely restored, and many vital public works projects were successfully completed.

World War I

During World War I, Butler, much to his disappointment, was not assigned to a combat command on the Western Front. While his superiors considered him brave and brilliant, they also described him as "unreliable." He was, however, promoted to the rank of brigadier general at the age of thirty-seven and placed in command of Camp Pontanezen at Brest, France. In October 1918, a debarkation depot near Brest funneled troops of the American Expeditionary Force to the battlefields. U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker sent novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart to report on the camp. She later described how Butler solved the mud problem: "[T]he ground under the tents was nothing but mud, [so] he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duckboards 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." General John J. Pershing authorized a duckboard shoulder patch for the units. This won Butler another nickname, "Old Duckboard." For his services Butler earned not only the Distinguished Service Medal of both the Army and the Navy but also the French Order of the Black Star.

Following the war, Butler transformed that wartime training camp at Quantico, Virginia into a permanent Marine post.

Director of Public Safety

On official leave of absence from the Marine Corps from January 1924 to December 1925, Butler briefly became the Director of Public Safety in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Due to the influence of Butler's father, the congressman, the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, W. Freeland Kendrick, asked Butler to leave the Marines to become Director of Public Safety, the official in charge of running the police and fire departments. Philadelphia's municipal government was notoriously corrupt. Butler refused at first, but when Kendrick asked President Calvin Coolidge to intervene, and Coolidge contacted Butler to say that he could take the necessary leave from the Corps, Butler agreed.

Within days Butler ordered raids on more than 900 speakeasies. Butler also went after bootleggers, hookers, gamblers and corrupt police officers. He had roofs removed from police cars so that cops couldn't sleep during their shifts.

What got Butler in trouble was that in addition to going after gangsters and the working-class joints, Butler raided the social elites' favorite speakeasies, the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League. A week later, Kendrick fired Butler. Butler later said "cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in."

China and stateside service

From 1927 to 1929, Butler was commander of the Marine Expeditionary Force in China. He cleverly parlayed among various nationalist generals and warlords in order to protect American lives and property, and ultimately won the public acclaim of contending Chinese leaders.

When Butler returned to the United States, in 1929, he was promoted. At 48, he became the Marine Corps' youngest major general. Butler helped to preserve the Marine Corps' existence against critics in the Army and the Congress who, during budget fights, argued that the Army could do the work of the Marines. He directed the Quantico camp's growth until it became the "showplace" of the Corps. He also set about vigorously to keep the Marines in the public limelight. In four years, his Quantico Marines football team amassed a record of 38-2-2 against powerful service teams as well as civilian schools, and bulldog mascot "Sergeant Major Jiggs" became a national symbol of Marine tenacity and aggressiveness. Butler also won national attention by taking thousands of his men on long field marches, many of which he led from the front, to Gettysburg and other Civil War battle sites, where they conducted large-scale re-enactments before crowds of often distinguished spectators.

In 1931, Butler publicly recounted gossip about Benito Mussolini in which the dictator allegedly struck a child with his automobile in a hit-and-run accident. The Italian government protested, and President Hoover, who strongly disliked Butler, forced Secretary of the Navy Adams to court martial Butler. Butler became the first general officer to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. Butler apologized (to Adams) and the court martial was cancelled with only a reprimand.

Military retirement and speaking career

When Major General Wendell C. Neville died in July 1930, many expected Butler to succeed him as Commandant of the Marine Corps. Butler, however, had criticized too many things too often, and the recent death of his father, the congressman, had removed some of his protection from the hostility of his civilian superiors. Butler failed to receive the appointment, although he was then the senior major general on the active list. The position went instead to Major General Ben H. Fuller. At his own request, Butler retired from active duty on October 1, 1931.

Butler took up a lucrative career on the lecture circuit. In 1932, he ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania, allied with Gifford Pinchot. He was defeated by a large margin.

Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Though the investigating congressional committee corroborated most of the specifics of his testimony, the evidence he provided was deemed insufficient by the FDR administration and no further action was taken. (See Business Plot)

Butler was known for his outspoken lectures against war profiteering and what he viewed as nascent fascism in the United States. His book War is a Racket(1935) presents a highly critical view of the profit motive behind warfare. Between 1935 and 1937, Butler served as a spokesman for the American League Against War and Fascism, which was considered by many to be communist dominated, and gave numerous speeches to the Communist Party USA in the 1930s, as well as to pacifist groups. [4] The following, from the non-Marxist socialist newspaper Common Sense in 1935, is one of his most widely quoted statements:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as 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 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. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Smedley Butler died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940. He was buried at West Chester. His doctor had described his illness as an incurable condition of the upper abdominal tract, presumably cancer.

Trivia

Camp Smedley Butler Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan is named in honor of Butler.

The Boston, Massachusetts, chapter of Veterans for Peace is called the Smedley D. Butler Brigade in his honor.

The USS Butler (DD-636), a Gleaves-class destroyer, was named in his honor in 1942.

Butler was featured in the documentary film The Corporation.

Billy Bragg quoted Butler's famous paragraph (above) to describe his song The Marching Song of the Covert Batallions in the liner notes of the album The Internationale.