The Plots Against the President (18 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

A Rainbow of Colored Shirts

Hitler's Brown Shirts and Mussolini's Black Shirts inspired America's right wing to form its own paramilitary organizations. J. Edgar Hoover had repeatedly and consistently warned President Roosevelt that the Bonus Army was a dangerous collection of Socialists and Communists intent on taking over the government. While both the American Fascist and Communist movements were burgeoning in response to the crisis of the early 1930s, whatever radical elements had existed within the Bonus Army had coalesced into a Fascist rather than Communist movement.

Calling themselves the Khaki Shirts, and openly emulating the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, this reactionary core of veterans posed an actual threat to the U.S. government and the Roosevelt administration—J. Edgar Hoover's myopic assessment notwithstanding. The self-styled “general” of the Khaki Shirts, alternately referred to as the U.S. Fascists, was enamored with the autocratic leaders of Germany and Italy. Arthur J. Smith founded the Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia, recruiting pro-Mussolini immigrants and vowing to build “the strongest army, navy and air corps in the world.” Espousing Fascism as the only escape from economic injustice and global depression, Smith in June 1933 claimed to have assembled one and a half million men who were prepared to take control of Washington, remove Roosevelt, and establish a dictatorship. When word spread that he planned to lead his army in a takeover of Pennsylvania's National Guard arsenal, Philadelphia police moved in. Smith met what a historian called his “slapstick Waterloo” when the police stormed the Khaki Shirts headquarters and “captured the entire putative army.” Smith fashioned a dramatic escape through a window. One of his followers was killed, which provided Smith with the pro-Fascist martyrdom he sought. He “staged a well-publicized funeral,” according to one account, and moved his “army” north.

On July 14, 1933, Smith led a rally in New York City in preparation for a Mussolini-style march on Washington. A group of anti-Fascists disrupted the protest and violence erupted. “Amid flying chairs and flashing knives,” the Khaki Shirts first “smashed the bleeding head” of a young anti-Fascist student and then fatally shot him. Smith eventually received a short prison sentence in connection with the killing. He ultimately disappeared with twenty-five thousand dollars from the Khaki Shirts' coffers and reinvented his organization as the Christian Front—a group with equally anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sympathies. Meanwhile, other extremist groups were erupting and sputtering throughout the country, organizing under various flags and shirt colors.

The Silver Shirts—a divinely inspired and apocalyptic Christian militia impelled into formation when Hitler became German chancellor—hoped to save America from Roosevelt in the same way that Italy and Germany had been saved by Fascist leaders. Described by the founder, the religious mystic William Dudley Pelley, as a “preventive and protective Militia working under cover” in forty-six states, the group was patterned on the notoriously corrupt, brutal, and xenophobic Texas Rangers. The Silver Shirts stockpiled weapons at its headquarters in Oklahoma—“the heart of the old Indian territory”—where former military and law enforcement officers taught recruits street fighting and other warrior tactics. Its elite unit, known as the Storm Troopers, drilled in California with Springfield rifles stolen from the Naval Air Station in San Diego. Referring to Roosevelt as “President Rosenfeld,” Pelley avidly spread the rumor that Roosevelt was descended from Dutch Jews and that his election “had been planned and prophesied by the Elders of Zion.”

Ku Klux Klansmen in Georgia formed an American Fascists group called the Black Shirts, named after Mussolini's paramilitary forces. Anti-Communist, anti-atheist, and anti-Negro, the white supremacists described themselves as “Friends of the New Germany.” The Gray Shirts, based in Glen Falls, New York, were commanded by a New York stockbroker and school superintendent and were focused on eliminating “idealistic or Communistic college professors” from the nation's educational institutions. The White Shirts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, were a “military organization armed with wooden staffs.” Crusaders for Economic Liberty, an extremist band of Christians, drilled in accordance with Army regulations, their white shirts bearing a Crusader cross and flag on the left breast. Their mission was to first take control of local government and then proceed to Washington to establish a new monetary system based on the “Golden Rule.”

What united this “rainbow” of colored shirts was a theatrical outpouring of pageantry and patriotism, flamboyant uniforms and lofty military ranks, a love of discipline and intimidation, and a melding of church and state. These flag-waving and cross-bearing white people paraded to the music of military marching bands, riling up enthusiasm in numerous towns and cities. The fervor revealed a disturbing obsession by some parts of America for “playing soldier and arraying [themselves] in panoplied garb calculated to inspire respect,” Charles W. Ferguson wrote in his 1930s assessment of America's lodges and clubs,
Fifty Million Brothers
. Whether or not the “various shirts and fancy breeches” signified anything larger in the American political process or psyche was not yet clear that summer of 1933. “The real threat of these bodies lies in the fact that, disunited though they may be at the moment, they have a common fund of pernicious doctrines,” Ferguson said. “They are all eloquently alarmed; they are dissatisfied with the present system. They incline to the totalitarian state with its corollary of a gagged press and stifled speech … Most of them seek to exclude Jews and other distasteful minorities from public life and economic competition. They agree on the necessity of direct, unparliamentary action.”

How deeply the reactionary impulse ran in America was not readily apparent, but the German and Italian Fascist upheavals clearly resonated with an element of the populace. Dangerous or not, America was awash with right-wing groups overtly bent on government takeover outside the bounds of the democratic electoral process. Government officials were sufficiently worried that they created congressional investigative committees and initiated undercover probes.

Democratic congressman Samuel Dickstein of New York City represented thousands of Lower East Side immigrants whose families, like his own, had escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms of Europe. His district bordered the East River from Chatham Square to East Houston Street. In 1930 he had participated in a congressional investigation into the dissemination of Communist propaganda in the United States. Later he inquired into religious persecution in Russia, and in 1933, after the assassination attempt on Roosevelt, instigated an inquiry into anarchist organizations. In the summer of 1933, Nazi-sympathizers held goose-stepping rallies in his own district. In the East Side ghetto he represented, where Jewish men had their beards pulled, “their wives insulted, their sons beaten,” Dickstein was naturally provoked into action. As chairman of the House Immigration Committee, he conducted an unofficial inquest into American Nazis, and when Hitler seized absolute power in Germany, Dickstein convinced his colleagues in the House of Representatives to create the Special Committee to Investigate Nazi Propaganda Activities in the United States. Even before the committee went into effect, Dickstein began amassing a body of information that he predicted would “shock the nation.”

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, ever on the lookout for new public enemies to incite fear and “to justify his increasingly large budget requests,” as his biographer Curt Gentry put it, found a captivating one in American Fascism. The issues at hand were so compelling and menacing that on July 30, 1933, Attorney General Cummings announced his appointment of Hoover as head of a new Division of Investigation that would absorb the former Bureau of Investigation. Hoover “did not have to look far for a new ‘menace,' ” wrote Gentry. “He found two, in fact. One, communism … an old menace, newly resurrected … [and] the other, fascism.” That the Roosevelt administration would place as controversial and offensive a figure as Hoover to head the new overarching investigative agency shocked many in the media. “Despite all this burlesque and bombast,” wrote Ray Tucker, the Washington bureau chief of
Collier's
magazine, “there is a serious and sinister side to this secret federal police system,” which he described as Hoover's “personal and political machine.” The first published account to insinuate that Hoover was a pantywaist, if not a homosexual—pointing out his fastidiousness in dress and other feminine qualities—the
Collier's
story said that Hoover was “short, fat, businesslike, and walks with mincing step.” The implication stung, and Hoover would adopt a strident manliness to impede any suggestion that he was not tough enough for the job. Hoover and his agency—destined to go down in American history as one of the most powerful and often-chilling government agencies—would turn its considerable command toward rooting out subversives.

Against the backdrop of an America that had come unglued, in a climate of restless uncertainty, frenzied protest, conspiracies and intrigues, surreptitious probes, mutinous masses, and charismatic dictators, a plot to overthrow Roosevelt seemed plausible. So when a U.S. general claimed that he had been asked by a group of powerful businessmen to lead an army of veterans in a coup d'état against President Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover and Samuel Dickstein took him seriously.

Chapter Thirty-two

Maverick Marine

“One of the really great generals in American history” is how General MacArthur described the wiry Smedley Darlington Butler. Inspired by the ideals of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, and the image of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, Butler began his soldiering career as a sixteen-year-old enlisted Marine in the 1898 Spanish-American War. “A splendid little war,” Butler called the conflict for Cuban independence, which was fought and won in ten weeks.

The first of three sons, he was born on July 30, 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Butler and Maud Darlington, both descended from a long line of notable Quakers. Butler was “vigorously brushed and combed and soaped to acquire the cleanliness next to godliness before going to the Friends' Meeting twice a week,” and he recalled a childhood peppered with the archaic
thee
s and
thou
s. Though pacifists, both grandfathers had served in the Union Army and the teenage Butler was enamored with all things military. Steeped in the law, politics, farming, and religion, his father was a judge in Chester County—where a Butler had sat on the bench for seventy-five years—and then served as a Republican congressman for three decades. Butler took the predictable route to the serene campus of Haverford College, the Quaker equivalent of Harvard, where an elocution teacher determined to make him a “first class orator” styled after William Cullen Bryant.

When the American warship the U.S.S.
Maine
was sunk in the Havana Harbor, setting off war between the United States and Spain, Butler, eager to defend his Pennsylvania home against the Spaniards in Cuba, thought school “seemed stupid and unnecessary.” He lied about his age and enlisted with the Marine Corps, newly expanded to assume tasks in “sunny tropic scenes,” according to a history of the Corps. His father strongly opposed his enlistment, but Butler convinced his mother to accompany him to the Washington headquarters to sign up. “If thee is determined to go, thee shall go,” the elder Butler said, finally giving his blessing. After six weeks of basic training, in which he learned how to use a 6-millimeter straight-pull rifle, a Gatling gun, and a Hotchkiss revolving cannon, Butler was sent to Guantánamo, Cuba, where a sniper's bullet barely missed his head one night. He was commissioned a first lieutenant and sent the following year with three hundred soldiers to the Philippines to defend the American occupation of the islands against native insurgents. By now fully enamored with the exploits and bravery of the Marines, he had a Japanese tattooist imbed the Marine Corps emblem across his minuscule chest, causing a life-threatening infection and high fever.

In 1900, he joined a Marine force being sent into China's Boxer Rebellion to rescue the U.S. legation stationed in Peking. He saw his job simply as protecting Americans on foreign soil, uninterested in the cause of the strife and oblivious to such provocative slights as the “Forbidden to Dogs and Chinese” signs that hung over the posh American private clubs. After one particularly harrowing battle in Tientsin, Butler and five other soldiers carried a wounded officer seventeen miles through a hail of enemy fire. Butler was shot in his leg and chest and contracted typhoid, and when he dropped below ninety pounds, his commander sent him to a hospital in San Francisco. Allied forces in China, numbering only 19,000, defeated 140,000 Boxers, and the relatively tiny 600-member Marine unit was extolled for special bravery.

After recovering, he returned to Philadelphia, where he was welcomed as a hero at the age of nineteen. Made a captain and now firmly identified with the Marine Corps, which considered itself the proud and “Always Faithful” elite of the U.S. military forces. Butler was now on an upward trajectory in his military career.

From 1902 until 1914, Butler served in several campaigns in Caribbean countries where he saw firsthand the role of American imperialism that would shape his increasingly contemptuous view of the Navy, politics, and the “opera bouffe” of Central American revolutions. He helped “liberate” the isthmus of Panama from Colombia, protected American businesses in Honduras, and engaged in what he thought were ludicrous rebellions in Nicaragua, in which American forces interchangeably sided with dictators and insurgents. “It wasn't exactly clear to me what all the fighting was about,” Butler later recalled. He developed a patronizing attitude toward these banana republics, which he thought behaved like unruly children, and a disdain for the U.S. military bent on putting them down while propping up governments that were even worse.

In 1914, Mexican rebels broke out against the repressive and murderous dictator Victoriano Huerta. The United States had a billion dollars invested in Mexico, managed by forty thousand Americans living there. President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a naval squadron to the Caribbean coast to protect Veracruz and Tampico, and the admiral of that operation sent Butler on a spy mission into the interior. Posing as a public-utilities expert, he traveled by rail from Veracruz to Mexico City, reviewing strategic installations along the way. Back in Veracruz, Butler was assigned command of a battalion of Marines who had arrived to help intercept a German ship loaded with weapons and bound for Mexico. The fighting was ferocious, and Butler—a fierce warrior, excellent shot, and precise bayonetter—earned his first Medal of Honor for bravery. “Military engagements during his pre–World War I era mainly pitted soldier against soldier,” according to an account in
Smithsonian
magazine. “The winner in such fluid skirmishes was the force that personally killed, wounded, captured or dispersed the most enemy soldiery.”

Next came what one historian called “Butler's most bizarre exploit,” when the Marines attempted to secure Haiti, which had been plagued by one revolution after another since its 1904 independence from France. There had been seven presidents in an eight-year period, and the U.S. Navy had “visited” the country nineteen times before World War I. One of the oldest independent nations in the western hemisphere, second only to the United States, Haiti had a tumultuous history of anarchy, and in the fall of 1915 was fighting off the indigenous Caco rebels who were fighting against the U.S.–sponsored Haitian government in what was one of the theaters in the “Banana Wars.” As in Mexico, Americans were heavily invested in Haiti, owning the only railroad and the nation's largest bank. President Wilson, worried that Germany might exploit the chaotic situation to install a submarine base on the northwest coast of the island, sent in the Marines, and as the ranking officer in the country, Butler assumed powers equivalent to those of the minister of the interior.

Roaming bands of guerrillas scuffled with the Marines. Butler led a dramatic attack against the rebels that earned him the undying devotion of his four companies of twenty-four men, as well as a second Medal of Honor—for which he was nominated by Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy whom Butler had squired around the island. Butler's men respected him “as much for his care as for his daring,” according to one account. “I'd cross hell on a slat if Butler gave the word,” said one man of their collective admiration. The feeling was mutual and impelled Butler to throw himself into veterans affairs with his trademark swaggering passion. Haiti was the turning point for Butler, in which he fully grasped that the Marines were being used to subjugate native populations around the world to protect American investments. Once recognizing that they were no more than colonial legionnaires, collecting foreign debts and providing glorified bodyguard services, he lost his zeal for leading young men into wars driven by profits rather than national security. In 1916 he registered his first official complaint with Washington about injustices at the hands of American occupiers, and when he received no reply, he slid further into disillusionment.

He went on to serve in World War I as a commander in France, where the U.S. Navy and Army, as well as the French Order of the Black Star, awarded him medals. Back in the United States, he became commanding general of the Marine barracks at Quantico, Virginia. He was posted to Shanghai, China, in 1927 as a brigadier general commanding a force of five thousand Marines. Sent to protect Americans and their enterprises in the midst of a bitter civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's forces in the south and vicious warlords in the north, Butler was once again baffled by the mission. He wrote his congressman father, who had been a ranking member of the U.S. House Naval Affairs Committee, asking him for an explanation of events transpiring in China. “I do not think that anyone knows our State policies, concerning the situation in China,” his father replied. “I do not believe there are any.” Policy or not, the American-sponsored Chiang Kai-shek was victorious, and Butler returned to yet another hero's welcome.

His distrust of the rationale for sending U.S. troops around the world coincided with a mounting postwar isolationist sentiment on the home front, and he was drawn to the pacifist disarmament movement supported by Quakers that was springing up as the Great Depression took hold. Antiwar novels were in vogue, and Butler found himself identifying with the protagonists more often than not. While he still believed wholeheartedly in the Marine duty to follow orders at all costs, he questioned the role of the U.S. military and his place in it. In his various deployments throughout the world, he was increasingly drawn to native cultures and customs and couldn't help developing empathy toward the downtrodden masses that the Marines were in the business of subduing. The man who had dedicated his life to the U.S. Marine Corps was riven with ambivalence. While his patriotism never wavered, he found it progressively difficult to stifle his doubts about the direction America had taken.