In August 1934, MacGuire called Butler from Philadelphia and asked to meet. MacGuire said he was having “a wonderful time” in Berlin. Hitler was now chancellor, on his way to becoming führer. The Reichstag fire had happened a year earlier. About two months later, Butler received another postcard, this time from Germany. It was sent from the French Riviera, where the bond salesman had just arrived after visiting Fascist Italy. But then, a few months later, in early 1934, Butler received a postcard from MacGuire. The dates of the American Legion convention came and went. Clark himself paid a visit to the Newtown Square house soon after, hinting broadly that he would cover the Butlers’ mortgage if the Marine played ball. Morgan & Co., and Wall Street’s most influential law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. Murphy, who had close ties with the nation’s most powerful bank, J. Another was MacGuire’s boss, the well-connected financier Grayson M.-P. One of them was Robert Sterling Clark-an heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, whom Butler had known as a lieutenant in China during the Boxer Rebellion decades earlier. MacGuire told the general he was working for several wealthy backers. Then he asked where all the money was coming from. “You put that money away before someone walks in here,” Butler barked. 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. Over the following weeks, MacGuire continued the courtship. That explained the ties to the American Legion, if little else. Asking around in the days that followed, he learned MacGuire had been a Navy man in the World War, and had suffered a skull fracture at sea in 1918-off the exact spot on the coast of France where Butler had been stationed. Nor did they pull up in his dirt driveway in a chauffeured Packard limousine. 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.īut most who asked for an audience at the general’s converted farmhouse in Newtown Square, a suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line, did not carry thick bankbooks, as the bond salesman did. Bestselling books had been written about him. Respected by his peers, beloved by his men, he was known throughout the country as “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s Friend,” and the famous “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. For thirty-three years and four months he had been in active service as a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict dating back to the war against Spain in 1898. Then he opened a bank book showing $42,000 in deposits-worth over $850,000 nearly a century later.īutler was accustomed to people asking him for favors. “Oh, we have friends,” MacGuire responded. “How do you get the money to do that?” the general asked. MacGuire replied it would all be taken care of: train tickets, hotels, everything. What rank-and-file veteran could afford a five-day trip to Chicago in the middle of the Great Depression, Butler wondered. Once they were at the convention, they would spread out around the assembly and start a chant to demand that Butler be given the floor. Butler, the salesman said, would travel in secret with a few hundred legionnaire friends. He was trying to persuade Butler to come to the next Legion convention, in Chicago, to give a speech denouncing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt-specifically his recent decision to take the dollar off the gold standard.

MacGuire, represented himself as a member of the American Legion, a veterans’ organization founded at the end of the Great War. Two mammoth red satin umbrellas, given to Butler by villagers on his last overseas mission, to China, swayed gently overhead atop their fifteen-foot poles. The visitor was sitting in the vaulted main hallway the Butlers used as a living room, his cannonball-shaped head framed by the retired general’s old command flags, medals, swords, and assorted tropical bric-a-brac. Smedley Butler sized up the one doing all the talking-the bond salesman in the tailored suit. This image is in the public domain via WikiCommons. A picture of a double medal of honor recipient Smedley Butler.

Marine corps general smedley butler