It was more than 25 years ago, while researching a story in a dark alcove of UC Berkeley's little-visited newspaper library, that I chanced upon some transcripts from the first hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). What I discovered was shocking beyond belief. The records revealed an organized conspiracy to overthrow the US government but it was not one hatched by a secretive Moscow-directed Communist cell. HUAC's initial alarm was focused on a plot bankrolled by the owners of major US corporations — including Goodyear, US Steel, JP Morgan, Heinz, and Maxwell House.
My heart was in my throat as I read about the plan for a corporate-backed military coup planned for 1933. How could we not have heard of this? Why was there no mention of this in our schoolroom history books? Why was it that, in the official transcripts of the McCormak-Dickstein HUAC hearings, the names of the corporate conspirators had been blacked out?
In the nearly eight decades since the plot was hatched (and a quarter-century since the publication of Nader's tome), only two books have dared to tackle this dark chapter in our country's long-festering secret war between its citizenry and the superrich. In 2007, Jules Archer published his exposé, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR (Skyhorse Publishing) and now, a plucky team of Bay Area writers and artists, is mainstreaming this long-suppressed story in a stunner of a book that combines the visual panache of graphic novel with the visceral punch of a nonfiction bombshell.
Devil Dog, the first book in David Talbot's "Pulp History" series from Simon & Schuster, celebrates the life of Smedley Darlington Butler, a unique American hero who single-handedly prevented the overthrow of representative government in the USA. A combination of historical narrative interspaced with copious sidebars and a "found history" grab bag of archival photos and mid-20th-Century memorabilia, Devil Dog also springs to life as an illustrated comic, courtesy of a slew of vivid pages rendered by local treasure Spain Rodriguez.
"Devil Dog" was one of many colorful nicknames bestowed on Smedley Butler. While best known as the author of the extended essay "War Is a Racket," Butler rightly deserves to be known as "The Man Who Saved America." He was a war hero many times over and, in his day, the most decorated Marine in US history. His feats of soldiery were so notable — and the loyalty that he inspired among the enlisted ranks was so heartfelt — that the would-be coup plotters believed Butler was the only man who could raise a popular army to topple FDR in a military coup.
These men did not know Smedley.
Butler was raised a Quaker in a wealthy Philadelphia family. His father, Congressman Thomas Butler, presided over the Naval Affairs Committee in Washington. Despite his blueblood heritage and political connections, Smedley enlisted to join the Marines to fight the Spaniards in Cuba — at the age of 16.
By August 1900, 18-year-old Marine Lieutenant Butler was leading a squad of 45 enlistees through Hubei Province to lay siege to the Chinese capital of Peking — as part of a coalition of 16,000 men from eight Western nations. Butler defined just how tough a Marine could be. He lead the march despite having been shot through the leg and, while storming the walls outside the Forbidden City, Butler was knocked to the ground from a bullet to the chest. To the amazement of his fellow soldiers, he struggled back to his feet, saved by a metal button on his shirt that had deflected the bullet. With an aching chest and coughing blood, Butler picked up his weapons and plunged back into the assault. In the course of his 33-year military career, Butler came under fire 121 times.
During the Taft Administration, Butler commanded the marines overseeing the construction of the Panama Canal. In a cheeky personal note, he recalled a visit from President Taft, at 300-pounds, the heaviest man ever to sit in the Oval Office. "The President held my two babies, Snooks and Smedley, on his lap — what there was of it," Butler wrote.
By August 1912, Butler was in Nicaragua "riding shotgun" on a locomotive filled with armed marines intent on breaking through a rebel blockade that threatened the US-backed regime. Braving bullets, bombs and broken rails, Butler plowed ahead.
In 1915, Butler was deployed to Haiti where a popular rebellion against the corrupt and murderous President Sam had erupted into "a carnival of gore." After an angry mob stormed the palace and literally tore the US puppet to pieces, the Marines were entrusted with the chore of destroying a force of armed insurgents headed by a charismatic rebel named Caco. Butler found these "hunt and kill" missions (the forerunners of modern counterinsurgency warfare) distasteful but he soon won his second Medal of Honor for a succession of "suicide missions" that involved storming two rebel-held forts with small bands of 27 and 300 Marines.
Politicians who refer to it as the "Great War," did not witless the conflict through the eyes of the participants. In Butler's case, the horror began even before the soldiers reached foreign shores. Butler was one of 4,000 soldiers aboard the USS Henderson when Spanish influenza swept the ship in mid-Atlantic. More than 1,200 (including Butler) were stricken and 100 died.
To his dismay, Butler was not sent into combat. Instead, he was put in charge of Camp Pontanezen, a hellhole of a military encampment that Talbot paints as "a vast sprawl of khaki-colored tents, which seemed to be sinking in a sea of ooze." The camp, built to accommodate 1,500, now held 65,000. More than 12,000 were feverish with influenza and hundreds were dying on a daily basis.
Butler went to work, transforming the camp from a "national scandal" into something closer to a "big hotel" — with dry paths, clean rooms, warmth, hearty food and even an ice-cream factory. But Butler was unprepared for a problem he could not have anticipated. The specter of shell-shocked soldiers returning from the front tore at Butler's soul. "They had been swept into the jaws of an industrial killing machine…. [and] mangled in breath-taking ways — shorn-off noses and chins, melted faces. But the ones whose wounds were inside seemed even more deeply broken." In a two-page illustration titled "Belleau Wood," Spain Rodriguez captures the utter horror of "modern," mechanized warfare.
After the war, Butler returned to the US and a new position as commander of the Marine base at Quantico. In 1924, however, Butler took a break from his military duties at the behest of W. Freeland Kendrick, the new Mayor of Philadelphia. Kendrick wanted an incorruptible ally to rid the city of the crime and corruption spawned by the Bootleg Era. He got his man. One of Butler's first acts as the city's new Director of Public Safety was to shut down 973 saloons. But when Butler attempted to apply the same law to wealthy scofflaws in their hotels and private clubs (and drew unwanted attention to the bankers who were profiting from laundering bootleg profits), Kendrick suddenly got cold feet. Butler refused the mayor's invitation to resign and Kendrick was forced to side with the gangsters and "bootleg kings." He fired the war hero.
By 1931, Butler was back in uniform and back at Quantico. At the age of 50, Butler was the country's most highly decorated soldier and the Pentagon's youngest major general. It was the year Butler would also make history of a darker kind — as the first officer since the Civil War to be arrested and stripped of his command "by the direct personal order of the president of the United States," Herbert Hoover.
It turns out there was a personal reason for the enmity between Butler and President Herbert Hover that stemmed from a shocking wartime encounter. The details of this story are another example of the many jaw-dropping examples of hidden history illuminated by Talbot's Pulp History torchlight. In the end, Mussolini's hit-and-run incident was confirmed and Butler was exonerated and reinstated, with full apologies.
It is around page 116 that Devil Dog begins to resonate with disturbing echoes of our own times. Millions of Americans had lost their jobs and homes because of the Depression. Around the country, families have been forced into squatter's camps dubbed "Hoovervilles." In July 1932, Washington became home to a protest encampment organized by the "Bonus Army," a community of veterans demanding payment for wages lost during their years of service in the so-called Great War.
Faced with the spectacle of "a ragged force, more than 15,000 strong — weather-beaten men and women in tattered clothes crowded between tents and shacks, and scrawny kids playing in the mud holes left over from the summer rain," Hoover rejected a proposed "Bonus Bill," arguing that Federal aid would not be a "stimulus" to the economy since the veterans would only "waste" any payments.
Butler agreed to address the Bonus Army. He rallied the vast crowd, insisting that they should stand firm until they won passage of a Bonus Bill. "You have as much right to lobby here as the US Steel Corporation!" he thundered. But it all ended in a nightmarish assault of clubs, bullets and tear-gas when government troops under the command of Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur charged across the Anacostia River and scattered the protest camp, toppling its tents and setting fire to the rubble. It was a scene reminiscent of the recent assaults in Bahrain and Egypt. MacArthur justified the attack by claiming the hapless veterans in Washington's "Tahrir Square" were Communist "revolutionaries" who planned to take over the government and hang the politicians.
One prominent member of the conspiracy to overthrow FDR was Senator Prescott Bush (father and grandfather of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush). As the London Guardian reported on September 25, 2004: "newly discovered files in the US National Archives [reveal] that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
The means of FDR's overthrow were far from subtle: The corporate conspirators planned a military coup that would remove Roosevelt from the Oval Office and install a business-friendly replacement. The idea was to enlist Butler to raise and command an army of US veterans to march on Washington with weapons supplied by Remington Arms, a company controlled by DuPont. After the take-over, "Secretary of General Affairs" Smedley Butler would run the government — with the close assistance of a shadow cabinet of Wall Street operators.
In his new book, War Is a Crime, David Swanson reports that the investigation stalled because Roosevelt offered the plotters a deal: In exchange for a promise to waive arrest and prosecution, the conspirators would agree to no longer stand in the way of FDR's New Deal reforms.
Butlerhad put his life and reputation on the line and felt betrayed — by the committee, by the press, by the Roosevelt Administration. Under fierce attack by the corporate-controlled press, Butler returned fire by mounting an unprecedented counter-attack. He became the fiery voice of America's first radio talk show. Butler inked a deal with a local station to host a series of 15-minute radio broadcasts. The commentaries were soon picked up by CBS and broadcast nationally to a growing audience of avid listeners.
After collapsing from exhaustion in the middle of strenuous speaking tour, Butler died on June 21, 1940 at the age of 58. His obituaries focused on his military exploits and largely avoided mention of the Big Business plot to destroy the country's representative government. As a final insult, Talbot reports, the Hearst newspaper chain turned Butler into a pro-American, war-loving cartoon character in a strip called "Heroes of Democracy." The strip never mentioned how Butler stood up to Wall Street's plot against democracy.
The legacy of Butler's amazing life has been effectively whitewashed from American history but Pulp History's Devil Dog has handed readers the tools they need to amend mainstream history's whitewashed wall with a vigorous graffiti makeover. Butler's struggle against the moneyed classes and corporate fascism is a struggle that we are facing today. The power of private corporations, of wealthy oil barons like the Koch brothers, of manufactured "gasroots" groups like the Tea Party, is growing stronger by the day. We may not have Smedley Darlington Butler with us any more but, thanks to David Talbot's crackling opus, we still have old Devil Dog's words and passion to stir us.