The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools
In an excerpt from Gangsters of Capitalism, Jonathan M. Katz
details how the authors of the Depression-era “Business Plot” aimed to
take power away from FDR and stop his “socialist” New Deal
Major General Smedley Butler addresses nearly 16,000 veteran bonus
marchers camped in Washington, D.C., July 20, 1932. Smedley urged them
to stay until the bonus has been paid.
AP Images
Award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire,
is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American
military imperialism in the early twentieth century. At its center is
one of the United States’s most fascinating yet little-known characters —
Gen. Smedley Butler, a Marine who fought in nearly every U.S. overseas
war in the early twentieth century. In this exclusive excerpt, Katz
documents how Butler played a pivotal role in an equally little-known
episode, in which a cadre of powerful businessmen tried to overthrow the
government of the United States, in an episode that anticipated the
events of Jan. 6, 2021. Read the exclusive excerpt below.
Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved
in many himself. He had overthrown governments and protected “friendly”
client ones around the world on behalf of some of the same U.S. bankers,
lawyers, and businessmen apparently now looking for his help.
For
33 years and four months Butler had been a United States Marine, a
veteran of nearly every overseas conflict back to the war against Spain
in 1898. Respected by his peers, beloved by his men, he was known as
“The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s
Friend,” and the famous “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. Bestselling
books had been written about him. Hollywood adored him. President
Roosevelt’s cousin, the late Theodore himself, was said to have called
Butler “the ideal American soldier.” Over the course of his career, he
had received the Army and Navy Distinguished Service medals, the French
Ordre de l’Étoile Noir, and, in the distinction that would ensure his
place in the Marine Corps pantheon, the Medal of Honor — twice.
Butler knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he
and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the
Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican
Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio
Somoza — men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created
militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He had
done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. P. Morgan, and
the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. Murphy.
And now a bond salesman, who worked for Murphy, was pitching Butler
on a domestic operation that set off the old veteran’s alarm bells. The
bond salesman was Gerald C. MacGuire, a 37-year-old Navy veteran with a
head Butler thought looked like a cannonball. MacGuire had been pursuing
Butler relentlessly throughout 1933 and 1934, starting with visits to
the Butler’s converted farmhouse on Philadelphia’s Main Line. In Newark,
where Butler was attending the reunion of a National Guard division,
MacGuire showed up at his hotel room and tossed a wad of cash on the bed
— $18,000, he said. In early 1934, Butler had received a series of
postcards from MacGuire, sent from the hotspots of fascist Europe,
including Hitler’s Berlin.
In August 1934, MacGuire called Butler from Philadelphia and asked to
meet. Butler suggested an abandoned café at the back of the lobby of
the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.
First MacGuire recounted all he had seen in Europe. He’d learned that
Mussolini and Hitler were able to stay in power because they kept
soldiers on their payrolls in various ways. “But that setup would not
suit us at all,” the businessman opined.
But in France, MacGuire had “found just exactly the organization
we’re going to have.” Called the Croix de Feu, or Fiery Cross, it was
like a more militant version of the American Legion: an association of
French World War veterans and paramilitaries. On Feb. 6, 1934 — six
weeks before MacGuire arrived — the Croix de Feu had taken part in a
riot of mainly far-right and fascist groups that had tried to storm the
French legislature. The insurrection was stopped by police; at least 15
people, mostly rioters, were killed. But in the aftermath, France’s
center-left prime minister had been forced to resign in favor of a
conservative.
MacGuire had attended a meeting of the Croix de Feu in Paris. It was
the sort of “super-organization” he believed Americans could get behind —
especially with a beloved war hero like Butler at the helm.
Then he made his proposal: The Marine would lead half a million
veterans in a march on Washington, blending the Croix de Feu’s assault
on the French legislature with the March on Rome that had put
Mussolini’s Fascisti in power in Italy a decade earlier. They would be
financed and armed by some of the most powerful corporations in America —
including DuPont, the nation’s biggest manufacturer of explosives and
synthetic materials.
The purpose of the action was to stop Roosevelt’s New Deal, the
president’s program to end the Great Depression, which one of the
millionaire du Pont brothers deemed “nothing more or less than the
Socialistic doctrine called by another name.” Butler’s veteran army,
MacGuire explained, would pressure the president to appoint a new
secretary of state, or “secretary of general affairs,” who would take on
the executive powers of government. If Roosevelt went along, he would
be allowed to remain as a figurehead, like the king of Italy. Otherwise,
he would be forced to resign, placing the new super-secretary in the
White House.
Butler recognized this immediately as a coup. He knew the people who
were allegedly behind it. He had made a life in the overlapping seams of
capital and empire, and he knew that the subversion of democracy by
force had turned out to be a required part of the job he had chosen. “I
spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business,
for Wall Street, and for the bankers,” Butler would write a year later.
“In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”
And Butler knew another thing that most Americans didn’t: how much
they would suffer if anyone did to their democracy what he had done to
so many others across the globe.
“Now, about this super-organization,” MacGuire asked the general. “Would you be interested in heading it?”
“I am interested in it, but I do not know about heading it,” Butler
told the bond salesman, as he resolved to report everything he had
learned to Congress. “I am very greatly interested in it, because, you
know, Jerry, my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy.
If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of
fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you,
and we will have a real war right at home.”
Eight decades after he publicly revealed his conversations
about what became known as the Business Plot, Smedley Butler is no
longer a household name. A few history buffs — and a not-inconsiderable
number of conspiracy-theory enthusiasts — remember him for his
whistleblowing of the alleged fascist coup. Another repository of his
memory is kept among modern-day Marines, who learn one detail of his
life in boot camp — the two Medals of Honor — and to sing his name along
with those of his legendary Marine contemporaries, Dan Daly and Lewis
“Chesty” Puller, in a running cadence about devotion to the Corps: “It
was good for Smedley Butler/And it’s good enough for me.”
I first encountered the other side of Butler’s legacy in Haiti, after
I moved there to be the correspondent for the Associated Press. To
Haitians, Butler is no hero. He is remembered by scholars there as the
most mechan — corrupt or evil — of the Marines. He helped lead
the U.S. invasion of that republic in 1915 and played a singular role in
setting up an occupation that lasted nearly two decades. Butler also
instigated a system of forced labor, the corvée, in which
Haitians were required to build hundreds of miles of roads for no pay,
and were killed or jailed if they did not comply. Haitians saw it for
what it was: a form of slavery, enraging a people whose ancestors had
freed themselves from enslavement and French colonialism over a century
before.
Such facts do not make a dent in the mainstream narrative of U.S.
history. Most Americans prefer to think of ourselves as plucky heroes:
the rebels who topple the empire, not the storm troopers running its
battle stations. U.S. textbooks — and more importantly the novels, video
games, monuments, tourist sites, and films where most people encounter
versions of American history — are more often about the Civil War or
World War II, the struggles most easily framed in moral certitudes of
right and wrong, and in which those fighting under the U.S. flag had the
strongest claims to being on the side of good.
“Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It
brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing
Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and
tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in
rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other
peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
And it is. It was no coincidence that thousands of young men like
Smedley Butler were convinced to sign up for America’s first overseas
war of empire on the promise of ending Spanish tyranny and imperialism
in Cuba. Brought up as a Quaker on Philadelphia’s Main Line, Butler held
on to principles of equality and fairness throughout his life, even as
he fought to install and defend despotic regimes all over the world.
That tension — between the ideal of the United States as a leading
champion of democracy on the one hand and a leading destroyer of
democracy on the other — remains the often unacknowledged fault line
running through American politics today.
For some past leaders, there was never a tension at all. When the
U.S. seized its first inhabited overseas colonies in 1898, some proudly
wore the label. “I am, as I expected I would be, a pretty good
imperialist,” Theodore Roosevelt mused to a British friend while on
safari in East Africa in 1910. But as the costs of full-on annexation
became clear, and control through influence and subterfuge became the
modus operandi of U.S. empire, American leaders reverted seamlessly back
to republican rhetoric.
The denial deepened during the Cold War. In 1955, the historian
William Appleman Williams wrote, “One of the central themes of American
historiography is that there is no American Empire.” It was essential
for the conflict against the Soviet Union — “the Evil Empire,” as Ronald
Reagan would call it — to heighten the supposed contrasts: They overthrew governments, we defended legitimate ones; they were expansionist, we went abroad only in defense of freedom.
As long as the United States seemed eternally ascendant, it was easy
to tell ourselves, as Americans, that the global dominance of U.S.
capital and the unparalleled reach of the U.S. military had been
coincidences, or fate; that America’s rise as a cultural and economic
superpower was just natural — a galaxy of individual choices, freely
made, by a planet hungry for an endless supply of Marvel superheroes and
the perfect salty crunch of McDonald’s fries.
But the illusion is fading. The myth of American invulnerability was
shattered by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The attempt to recover a sense
of dominance resulted in the catastrophic “forever wars” launched in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. The deaths of
well over half a million Americans in the coronavirus pandemic, and our
seeming inability to halt or contend with the threats of climate change,
are further reminders that we can neither accumulate nor consume our
way out of a fragile and interconnected world.
As I looked through history to find the origins of the patterns of
self-dealing and imperiousness that mark so much of American policy, I
kept running into the Quaker Marine with the funny name. Smedley
Butler’s military career started in the place where the United States’
overseas empire truly began, and the place that continues to symbolize
the most egregious abuses of American power: Guantánamo Bay. His last
overseas deployment, in China from 1927 to 1929, gave him a front-row
seat to both the start of the civil war between the Communists and the
Nationalists and the slowly materializing Japanese invasion that would
ultimately open World War II.
In the years between, Butler blazed a path for U.S. empire, helping
seize the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, and invading
and helping plunder Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
Mexico, and more. Butler was also a pioneer of the militarization of
police: first spearheading the creation of client police forces across
Latin America, then introducing those tactics to U.S. cities during a
two-year stint running the Philadelphia police during Prohibition.
Yet Butler would spend the last decade of his life trying to keep the
forces of tyranny and violence he had unleashed abroad from consuming
the country he loved. He watched the rise of fascism in Europe with
alarm. In 1935, Butler published a short book about the collusion
between business and the armed forces called War Is a Racket.
The warnings in that thin volume would be refined and amplified years
later by his fellow general, turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, whose
speechwriters would dub it the military-industrial complex.
Late in 1935, Butler would go further, declaring in a series of
articles for a radical magazine: “Only the United Kingdom has beaten our
record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our
exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the
Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis
Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria, and the African attack of Mussolini.”
Butler was not just throwing stones. In that article, he repeatedly
called himself a racketeer — a gangster — and enumerated his crimes:
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 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for
American fruit companies in 1903. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it
that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would
say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion.
Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The
best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines
operated on three continents.
Butler was telling a messier story than the ones Americans like to
hear about ourselves. But we ignore the past at our peril. Americans may
not recognize the events Butler referred to in his confession, but
America’s imperial history is well remembered in the places we invaded
and conquered — where leaders and elites use it and shape it to their
own ends. Nowhere is more poised to use its colonial past to its future
advantage than China, once a moribund kingdom in which U.S. forces,
twice led by Butler, intervened at will in the early 20th century. As
they embark on their own imperial project across Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, Chinese officials use their self-story of “national
humiliation” to position themselves as an antidote to American control,
finding willing audiences in countries grappling with their own
histories of subjugation by the United States.
The dangers are greater at home. Donald Trump
preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those
early-20th-century imperial chestnuts — militarism, white supremacy, and
the cult of manhood — with a newer fantasy: that Americans could
reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world
we made, by literally building walls along our border and making the
countries we conquered pay for them.
To those who did not know or have ignored America’s imperial history,
it could seem that Trump was an alien force (“This is not who we are,”
as the liberal saying goes), or that the implosion of his presidency has
made it safe to slip back into comfortable amnesias. But the movement
Trump built — a movement that stormed the Capitol, tried to overturn an
election, and, as I write these words, still dreams of reinstalling him
by force — is too firmly rooted in America’s past to be dislodged
without substantial effort. It is a product of the greed, bigotry, and
denialism that were woven into the structure of U.S. global supremacy
from the beginning — forces that now threaten to break apart not only
the empire but the society that birthed it.
On Nov. 20, 1934, readers of the New York Post were
startled by a headline: “Gen. Butler Accuses N.Y. Brokers of Plotting
Dictatorship in U.S.; $3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared; Says He Was
Asked to Lead 500,000 for Capital ‘Putsch’; U.S. Probing Charge.”
Smedley Butler revealed the Business Plot before a two-man panel of
the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities. The executive
session was held in the supper room of the New York City Bar Association
on West 44th Street. Present were the committee chairman, John W.
McCormack of Massachusetts, and vice chairman, Samuel Dickstein of New
York.
For 30 minutes, Butler told the story, starting with the first visit
of the bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire to his house in Newtown Square
in 1933.
Finally, Butler told the congressmen about his last meeting with
MacGuire at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. At that meeting, Butler
testified, MacGuire had told him to expect to see a powerful
organization forming to back the putsch from behind the scenes. “He
says: ‘You watch. In two or three weeks you will see it come out in the
paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of
it. These are to be the villagers in the opera.’” The bond salesman told
the Marine this group would advertise itself as a “society to maintain
the Constitution.”
“And in about two weeks,” Butler told the congressmen, “the American
Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to
be.”
The Liberty League was announced on Aug. 23, 1934, on the front page of TheNew York Times.
The article quoted its founders’ claim that it was a “nonpartisan
group” whose aim was to “combat radicalism, preserve property rights,
uphold and preserve the Constitution.” Its real goal, other observers
told the Times, was to oppose the New Deal and the taxes and controls it promised to impose on their fortunes.
Among the Liberty League’s principal founders was the
multimillionaire Irénée du Pont, former president of the explosives and
chemical manufacturing giant. Other backers included the head of General
Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, as well as executives of Phillips Petroleum,
Sun Oil, General Foods, and the McCann Erickson ad agency. The former
Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and John W. Davis — both of
them foes of FDR, the latter counsel to J.P. Morgan & Co. — were
among the League’s members as well. Its treasurer was MacGuire’s boss,
Grayson Murphy.
Sitting beside Butler in the hearing room was the journalist who wrote the Post article,
Paul Comly French. Knowing the committee might find his story hard to
swallow — or easy to suppress — Butler had called on the reporter, whom
he knew from his time running the Philadelphia police, to conduct his
own investigation. French told the congressmen what MacGuire had told
him: “We need a fascist government in this country, he insisted, to save
the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all
that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to
do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could
organize a million men overnight.”
MacGuire, the journalist added, had “continually discussed the need
of a man on a white horse, as he called it, a dictator who would come
galloping in on his white horse. He said that was the only way to save
the capitalistic system.”
Butler added one more enticing detail. MacGuire had told him that his
group in the plot — presumably a clique headed by Grayson Murphy — was
eager to have Butler lead the coup, but that “the Morgan interests” —
that is, bankers or businessmen connected to J. P. Morgan & Co. —
were against him. “The Morgan interests say you cannot be trusted, that
you are too radical and so forth, that you are too much on the side of
the little fellow,” he said the bond salesman had explained. They
preferred a more authoritarian general: Douglas MacArthur.
All of these were, in essence, merely leads. The committee would have
to investigate to make the case in full. What evidence was there to
show that anyone beside MacGuire, and likely Murphy, had known about the
plot? How far had the planning gone? Was Butler — or whoever would lead
the coup — to be the “man on a white horse,” or were they simply to
pave the way for the dictator who would “save the capitalistic system”?
But the committee’s investigation would be brief and conducted in an
atmosphere of overweening incredulity. As soon as Butler’s allegations
became public, the most powerful men in media did everything they could
to cast doubt on them and the Marine. TheNew York Times fronted
its story with the denials of the accused: Grayson M.P. Murphy called
it “a fantasy.” “Perfect moonshine! Too unutterably ridiculous to
comment upon!” exclaimed Thomas W. Lamont, the senior partner at J.P.
Morgan & Co. “He’d better be damn careful,” said the ex-Army general
and ex-FDR administration official Hugh S. Johnson, whom Butler said
was mooted as a potential “secretary of general affairs.” “Nobody said a
word to me about anything of the kind, and if they did, I’d throw them
out the window.”
Douglas MacArthur called it “the best laugh story of the year.”
Time magazine lampooned the allegations in a satire
headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” The writer imagined Butler on
horseback, spurs clinking, as he led a column of half a million men and
bankers up Pennsylvania Avenue. In an unsigned editorial, Adolph Ochs’ New York Times likened Butler to an early-20th-century Prussian con man.
There would only be one other witness of note before the committee.
MacGuire spent three days testifying before McCormack and Dickstein,
contradicting, then likely perjuring himself. He admitted having met the
Croix de Feu in Paris, though he claimed it was in passing at a mass at
Notre-Dame. The bond salesman also admitted having met many times with
Butler — but insisted, implausibly, that it was Butler who told him he was involved with “some vigilante committee somewhere,” and that the bond salesman had tried to talk him out of it.
There was no further inquiry. The committee was disbanded at the end
of 1934. McCormack argued, unpersuasively, that it was not necessary to
subpoena Grayson Murphy because the committee already had “cold evidence
linking him with this movement.”
“We did not want,” the future speaker of the House added, “to give him a chance to pose as an innocent victim.”
The committee’s final report was both complimentary to Butler and exceptionally vague:
In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it
received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to
establish a fascist organization in this country There is no question
but that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have
been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it
expedient.
The committee said it had “verified all the pertinent statements made
by General Butler.” But it named no one directly in connection with the
alleged coup.
Was there a Business Plot? In the absence of a full
investigation, it is difficult to say. It seems MacGuire was convinced
he was a front man for one. (He would not live long enough to reveal
more: Four months after the hearings, the bond salesman died at the age
of 37.)
It seems possible that at least some of the alleged principals’
denials were honest. MacGuire’s claim that all the members of the
Liberty League were planning to back a coup against Roosevelt does not
make it so. The incredulity with which men like Thomas Lamont and
Douglas MacArthur greeted the story could be explained by the
possibility that they had not heard of such a plan before Butler blew
the whistle.
But it is equally plausible that, had Butler not come forward, or had
MacGuire approached someone else, the coup or something like it might
have been attempted. Several alleged in connection with the plot were
avid fans of fascism. Lamont described himself as “something like a
missionary” for Mussolini, as he made J.P. Morgan one of fascist Italy’s
main overseas banking partners. The American Legion, an alleged source
of manpower for the putsch, featured yearly convention greetings from “a
wounded soldier in the Great War … his excellency, Benito Mussolini.”
The capo del governo himself was invited to speak at the 1930 convention, until the invitation was rescinded amid protests from organized labor.
Hugh S. Johnson, Time’s 1933 Man of the Year, had lavishly praised the “shining name” of Mussolini and the fascist stato corporativo as
models of anti-labor collectivism while running the New Deal’s
short-lived National Recovery Administration. Johnson’s firing by FDR
from the NRA in September 1934 was predicted by MacGuire, who told
Butler the former Army general had “talked too damn much.” (Johnson
would later help launch the Nazi-sympathizing America First Committee,
though he soon took pains to distance himself from the hardcore
antisemites in the group.)
Nothing lends more plausibility to the idea that a coup to sideline
Roosevelt was at least discussed — and that Butler’s name was floated to
lead it — than the likely involvement of MacGuire’s boss, the banker
Grayson M.P. Murphy. The financier’s biography reads like a shadow
version of Butler’s. Born in Philadelphia, he transferred to West Point
during the war against Spain. Murphy then joined the Military
Intelligence Division, running spy missions in the Philippines in 1902
and Panama in 1903. Then he entered the private sector, helping J.P.
Morgan conduct “dollar diplomacy” in the Dominican Republic and
Honduras. In 1920, Murphy toured war-ravaged Europe to make
“intelligence estimates and establish a private intelligence network”
with William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan — who would later lead the Office of
Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. This was the résumé of
someone who, at the very least, knew his way around the planning of a
coup.
Again, all of that is circumstantial evidence; none of it points
definitively to a plan to overthrow the U.S. government. But it was
enough to warrant further investigation. So why did no one look deeper
at the time? Why was the idea that a president could be overthrown by a
conspiracy of well-connected businessmen — and a few armed divisions led
by a rabble-rousing general — considered so ridiculous that the mere
suggestion was met with peals of laughter across America?
St Martins Press
It was because, for decades, Americans had been trained to react in
just that way: by excusing, covering up, or simply laughing away all
evidence that showed how many of those same people had been behind
similar schemes all over the world. Butler had led troops on the
bankers’ behalf to overthrow presidents in Nicaragua and Honduras, and
gone on a spy run to investigate regime change on behalf of the oil
companies in Mexico. He had risked his Marines’ lives for Standard Oil
in China and worked with Murphy’s customs agents in an invasion that
helped lead to a far-right dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In
Haiti, Butler had done what even the Croix de Feu and its French fascist
allies could not: shut down a national assembly at gunpoint.
In his own country, in his own time, Smedley Butler drew a line. “My
interest, my one hobby, is maintaining a democracy,” he told the bond
salesman. Butler clung to an idea of America as a place where the whole
of the people chose their leaders, the “little guy” got a fair shot
against the powerful, and everyone could live free from tyranny. It was
an idea that had never existed in practice for all, and seldom for most.
As long as Americans refused to grasp the reality of what their country
actually was — of what their soldiers and emissaries did with their
money and in their name all over the world — the idea would remain a
self-defeating fairy tale. Still, as long as that idea of America
survived, there was a chance its promise might be realized.
The real danger, Butler knew, lay in that idea’s negation. If a
faction gained power that exemplified the worst of America’s history and
instincts — with a leader willing to use his capital and influence to
destroy what semblance of democracy existed for his own ends — that
faction could overwhelm the nation’s fragile institutions and send one
of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen tumbling
irretrievably into darkness.
Twenty-one U.S. presidential elections later, on
Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood before an angry crowd on the White
House Ellipse. For weeks, Trump had urged supporters to join him in an
action against the joint session of Congress slated to recognize his
opponent, Joe Biden, as the next president that day. Among the thousands
who heeded his call were white supremacists, neo-Nazis, devotees of the
antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory, far-right militias, and elements
of his most loyal neo-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. “It is time
for war,” a speaker at a warm-up rally the night before had declared.
On the rally stage, the defeated president spoke with the everyman
style and bluntness of a Smedley Butler. He mirrored the Marine’s
rhetoric, too, saying his purpose was to “save our democracy.” But that
was not really his goal. Trump, and his faction, wanted to destroy the
election — to dismantle democracy rather than cede power to a
multiethnic, cross-class majority who had chosen someone else. Trump
lied to the thousands in winter coats and “Make America Great Again”
hats by claiming he still had a legitimate path to victory. His
solution: to intimidate his vice president and Congress into ignoring
the Constitution and refusing to certify the election, opening the door
for a critical mass of loyal state governments to reverse their
constituents’ votes and declare him the winner instead. In this, Trump
echoed the French fascists of 1934, who claimed their attack on
parliament would defend the popular will against “socialist influence”
and “give the nation the leaders it deserves.”
Trump then did what the Business Plotters — however many there were —
could not. He sent his mob, his version of Mussolini’s Black Shirts and
the Croix de Feu, to storm the Capitol. “We fight like hell,” the 45th
president instructed them. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not
going to have a country anymore.”
It was not just Trump’s personal embodiment of fascist logic and
authoritarian populism that should have prepared Americans for the Jan. 6
attack. Over a century of imperial violence had laid the groundwork for
the siege at the heart of U.S. democracy.
Many of the putschists, including a 35-year-old California woman shot
to death by police as she tried to break into the lobby leading to the
House floor, were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some
wore tactical armor and carried “flex cuffs” — nylon restraints the
military and police use for mass arrests of insurgents and dissidents.
The QAnon rioters were devotees of a supposed “military intelligence”
officer who prophesized, among other things, the imminent detention and
execution of liberals at Guantánamo. A Washington Post reporter heard some of the rioters chanting for “military tribunals.”
Even many of those opposed to the insurrection struggled to see what
was happening: that the boundaries between the center and the periphery
were collapsing. “I expected violent assault on democracy as a U.S.
Marine in Iraq. I never imagined it as a United States congressman in
America,” Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote as he
sheltered in the Capitol complex. George W. Bush, the president who
ordered Moulton into Baghdad, observed: “This is how election results
are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic.”
Watching from home, I wished Smedley Butler was around to remind the
former president how those “banana republics” came to be.
A few weeks after the siege, I talked to Butler’s 85-year-old
granddaughter, Philippa Wehle. I asked her over Skype what her
grandfather would have thought of the events of Jan. 6.
Her hazel eyes narrowed as she pondered: “I think he would have been in there. He would have been in the fray somehow.”
For an unsettling moment, I was unsure what she meant. Butler had
much in common with both sides of the siege: Like Trump’s mob, he had
often doubted the validity of democracy when practiced by nonwhites.
(The most prominent Trumpist conspiracy theories about purported fraud
in the 2020 election centered on cities with large immigrant and Black
populations.) Like many of the putschists, Butler saw himself as a
warrior for the “little guy” against a vast constellation of elite
interests — even though he, also like most of the Capitol attackers, was
relatively well-off. Moreover, the greatest proportion of veterans
arrested in connection with the attempted putsch were Marines. An
active-duty Marine major — a field artillery officer at Quantico — was
caught on video pushing open the doors to the East Rotunda and accused
by federal prosecutors of allowing other rioters to stream in.
But I knew too that Butler had taken his stand for democracy and
against the Business Plot. I would like to think he would have seen
through Trump as well. Butler had rejected the radio host Father Charles
Coughlin’s proto-Trumpian brand of red-baiting, antisemetic
conspiratorial populism, going so far as to inform FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover of an alleged 1936 effort involving the reactionary priest to
overthrow the left-leaning government of Mexico. When a reporter for the
Marxist magazine New Masses asked Butler “just where he stood
politically” in the wake of the Business Plot, he name-checked several
of the most left-leaning members of Congress, and said the only group he
would give his “blanket approval to” was the American Federation of
Labor. Butler added that he would not only “die to preserve democracy”
but also, crucially, “fight to broaden it.”
Perhaps it would have come down to timing: at what point in his life the attack on the government might have taken place.
“Do you think he would have been with the people storming the Capitol?” I asked Philippa, tentatively.
This time she answered immediately. “No! Heavens no. He would have
been trying to do something about it.” He might have been killed, she
added, given that the police were so unprepared. “Which is so
disturbing, because of course they should have known. They would have
known. They only had to read the papers.”
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