The amazing true story of the man who saved America

This story is about the man who saved America:

DAVID TALBOT: One day after Roosevelt is elected, two men come out, and they begin to lay out a plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt.

But, you may never have heard of Smedley Butler. His history in many ways parallels the birth of the American empire and modern American history.

This is not your dry stuff of texbooks. Local author David Talbot and his crew have created “pulp history” series, telling the exciting tales of forgotten history.

TALBOT: You can’t make this stuff up.

Pulp history author David Talbot brings us the story of Smedley Butler, the man he claims “saved America.” In his new book Devil Dog, Talbot brings to life the adventures and heroism of the most-decorated Marine in history as he runs down rebels in Nicaragua, throws gangsters out of Philadelphia and blows the lid off a plot against FDR. Let’s drop in on one of Butler’s many tales of heroism, when he was a young marine occupying Nicaragua.

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DAVID TALBOT (reading from Devil Dog): "Just then, the rebel leader came running towards Butler. The Marines on the train finger their triggers. The rebel commander wore a bandalier across his chest and had a pistol shoved in his belt. He was full of swagger. He stuck his face menacingly in Butler's, but the Marine didn't flinch.

'I'm going on to C----,' Butler informed him. 'Now what're you gonna do about it?'

In the blink of an eye, the rebel leader yanked the gun from his belt and stuck it in Butler's gut.

'If the train moves,' he told Butler, 'I shoot.'

The world stopped. Butler could not hear a sound. But he could see everything around him with the clarity of a hawk. 'One hundred red-blooded Americans were clustered around the locomotive to see what I would do,' he later wrote. If he backed down, he would humiliate his beloved Marine Corps. 'But if I signal to the Marines to shoot,' he wrote, 'there would be a frightful slaughter.'

In a flash, Butler made a grab for the rebel's gun, snatching it from the shocked man's grip. Then for a theatrical flourish, the Marine emptied the cartridges onto the ground. There was a stunned silence. And suddenly, hundreds of men, Nicaraguans and Americans, all burst into wild laughter. The death spell had been broken."

David Talbot is the author of the new pulp history series, Devil Dog: the Amazing True Story of the Man who Saved America – and that man is Smedley Butler, who we're discussing today.

TALBOT: Smedley, his first great military campaign was in China during the Boxer rebellion. And this was an amazing kind of military adventure, where basically all of the great armies of the western world from Europe to the United States to send on China, to really make it clear to the empress and the Chinese court, who's in control – the western empires. And so all these armies march across the northern plains, the dry and very dusty northern plains of China, descending on Peking as it was called in those days, the capital. And there, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, the drinking water is wretched, the soldiers are sick, but Smedley, who is just a kid, shows just how heroic. He takes a bullet at one point early in the campaign, but he keeps marching on with his wounded leg to Peking. And he was very gung-ho at that point. He thought that they were there to rescue the white women in the diplomatic compounds in Peking who were under siege by the Boxers, who were nativist, nationalist rebels, who were trying to push the western powers out of China. They were heroes.

Smedley Butler is the young American empire. He comes of age with the American empire. Every dirty little colonial war that America got involved in, there was Smedley Butler, right in the thick of things. So from China he ends up in Panama as the canal is being built. He's like the zelig of the American empire – he's everywhere. He's in Nicaragua fighting rebels there. He later goes to Mexico, fighting rebels in Mexico. And then he becomes in charge, he's put in charge as a Marine officer in charge of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, which of course to this day has ramifications in that part of the world. It was a very brutal occupation, and it went on for over 15 years from 1915 into the '30s. And so, again, Smedley Butler is playing key role wherever Americans assert their military power around the world.

That’s David Talbot, author of the new pulp history book Devil Dog: the Amazing True Story of the Man who Saved America. And, according to Talbot, that man is Smedley Butler. Butler’s tale is of the classic American hero, a man whose moral compass was so strong that it would eventually lead him to fight greed and corruption all the way to the top. Let’s return to his story now.

Butler came back from Central America and the battlefields of World War I, where he had become increasingly disenchanted with the war machine and the treatment of soldiers…

TALBOT: "They're thrown away," he says, "like animals – in VA hospitals, they're kept like dogs in kennels."

So, we’re in the post World War I era, and Prohibition is suddenly in force. Smedley Butler returns to his native Philadelphia…

TALBOT: You can’t make this stuff up – it’s wild history. Smedley comes back from World War I, he’s completely disenchanted with that war, with what happened with the veterans when they returned. He's appalled. So, I think he was open to something new in his life at that point, and many cities basically during the Prohibition Era are basically completely chaotic. There's literally gang war in the streets, bullets flying in downtowns as Prohibition kicks in and the bootleg gangs take over many cities.

There's a lot of crazy money at the same time, it was a go-go period of course for the American economy after the war in the 1920s. And so Smedley comes in the situation of Philadelphia's hometown where he's put in charge. The mayor's desperate; a new mayor's elected, he's trying to restore law and order in the city. And like many mayors at the time, he turns to the military and to a military hero: Smedley Butler, hometown boy. "Please come back! Rescue your city!"

And Smedley Butler starts to kick butt right away! He's a tough guy, and he leads raid on one speakeasy after the next starting with the guys on the lower rung – the corner bootleggers who are just selling beer to working stiffs on their way home. But then he starts to realize that no, the real problem there is not the corner speakeasies, it's the big boys. It's the Republican party machinery. It's the banks that are making money from the bootleg business – they're laundering money in their banks. And he realizes that when the mayor hired him, he didn't want him to go after the establishment; he just wanted to cover and go after the little guys.

But Smedley won't play that game. He starts to raid the Ritz-Carlton hotel during these very wild upperclass, blue-blood parties. He's dragging these VIPs and these millionaires off to jail. They can't believe it! They say, "That's not the way this is supposed to happen." And of course, he doesn't last long once he starts doing that.

But he saw it as a class war in a sense, and he believed that the little guys were getting the short end of it while the big guys got away with it.

So, Smedley leaves his job as head of public safety in Philadelphia, having come to believe there’s a class war going on…

TALBOT: Now he's in civilian life and he comes from a long line of Republicans. His father is a powerful Republican congressman, but he decides in 1932 that he has to switch parties and campaign for Franklin Roosevelt. He does this after Herbert Hoover tear-gasses and drives veterans out of Washington. Douglas MacArthur was the villain in that. He was the man in charge of that military operation that drove these veterans, many of whom had fought for him and been wounded fighting for him during World War I, but he was ruthless.

So they had set up camp outside of D.C. to protest with their families, there were women and children...

TALBOT: Right in the middle of the Capitol. Within gunfire, as they say, of Capitol Hill. They were driven out very violently. Smedley Butler, who addressed the troops, was the only officer to go down to the camps and address them as heroes. He said, "They call you 'tramps,' but that's not what they called you back in 1917 and ‘18, during World War I, when you were heroes in the battlefields of France." They loved him for that. He was appalled when Hoover and MacArthur drive these veterans out at bayonet point and set fire to the camps and he switches parties – he switches affiliation. He campaigns very vigorously for F.D.R. and he becomes a big supporter of Roosevelt.

Then his great moment of heroism comes when one day, after Roosevelt was elected, early in his term … In 1933, a car rolls up his driveway outside Philadelphia and two men come out who identify themselves as members of the American Legion and veterans of World War I, Smedley always had time for veterans and he sat with them. They began to lay out a plot, as it becomes clear to him over this meeting and several other meetings, a plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. These are emmissaries from Wall Street, these two men. They say that Franklin Roosevelt is putting the country at risk with his economic policies, that he's diluting not only their wealth but the government's wealth and the nation's wealth with his policies. They say for the good of the nation, he has to go. The way that they want to remove President Roosevelt, they say, is nonviolently. They want Smedley Butler to lead a march, like the Bonus Army March on Washington. Only this time, the men will be armed veterans – a half million men – and intimidate President Roosevelt into stepping down.

Butler leads them on, gets more and more information from them and instead of going along with the plot where he certainly would have been greatly enriched and would have enjoyed power as one of the plotters. He goes instead before Congress, just like a Frank Capra movie. And he exposes this plot in very dramatic testimony before a Congressional committee and he ends, he pulls the plug on the plot and then rescues the Roosevelt Administration.

SMEDLEY BUTLER (congressional testimony): I'm here before the Congressional Committee, the highest representation of the American people, under subpoena, to tell what I knew of activities, which I believe might lead to an attempt to set up a fascist dictatorship.

The plan that was outlined with me was to form and organization of veterans to use as a club to intimidate the government and break down our democratic institution. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was to pose to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to take over the functions of government. I talked with an investigator for this committee who came to me with a subpoena on Sunday, November 18. He told me they had unearthed evidence linking my name to several such veterans’ organizations. As it then seemed to me to be getting serious, I felt it was my duty to tell all I knew of such activities to this committee.

My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. I want to retain the right to vote and the right to speak freely and the right to write. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech and press.

That's Smedley Butler in 1935. Smedley Butler is the hero of David Talbot's new book Devil Dog: the Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America.

TALBOT: The reaction was very sharp against Butler at the time. It's interesting. He was a very beloved figure in the American Media up until this point, but when he began to accuse famous Americans, including Douglas MacArthur, who was a hero, and very powerful Americans like the J.P. Morgan financial interests on Wall Street like the DuPont family, all of which were fascist sympathizers and were very, vehemently anti-Roosevelt. When he began to accuse them of participating in this plot, then there was this severe media backlash led by some of the friends in the media like Henry Luce, of course, who was the media baron who controlled Time and Life magazines, a very powerful man – the Rupert Murdoch of his day. They began to ridicule Butler, say that he'd made up this plot, that it wasn't true and they were frankly having a big impact and tarnishing his reputation. They had a bigger loudspeaker than he did.

Then, again, just like the film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" where the newsboys go careening around the country trying to get the news out about the corruption in Washington and come to Senator Smith's defense, played by Jimmy Stewart – the same thing happens with Smedley Butler.

He's given an opportunity to go on a small radio station outside Philadelphia and give his side of the story and basically say, "Wake up, America. This investigation that Congress undertook was very important. It has to be made public." The committee had chosen not to release all the information for political reasons. He was chastising them and saying the information must be released in full. "It's your country, your democracy was threatened by this. You need to know about this." This is what he's telling the American people in this very raspy kind of Popeye-like voice. The ultimate significance is that you have to fight for democracy. Democracy is a fragile thing and that doesn't always mean getting in uniform and going off to a foreign country. In fact, it's just the opposite in many cases. You have to fight for it right here at home.

David Talbot is the author of Devil Dog, and the founder and former editor-in-chief of one of the first web magazines, Salon.com. Devil Dog is his latest pulp history book about the “man who saved America,” Smedley Butler. And, you can hear from and talk to David Talbot at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco Thursday, December 2, at 7 p.m.