{"id":55382,"date":"2022-01-21T01:22:25","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T01:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2022\/01\/21\/the-marine-who-marched-on-the-philippines-and-then-on-washington\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T09:30:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T09:30:33","slug":"the-marine-who-marched-on-the-philippines-and-then-on-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/opinion\/commentary\/2022\/01\/21\/the-marine-who-marched-on-the-philippines-and-then-on-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"The Marine who marched on the Philippines \u2014 and then on Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Smedley D. Butler<\/i><\/a> was the most celebrated warfighter of his time \u2014 the recipient of two Medals of Honor, who served in nearly every major overseas conflict from 1898 until the eve of World War II. But as award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz details in his new book, <\/i>\u201c<\/b>Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America\u2019s Empire\u201d<\/b><\/a> (St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2022)<\/i>, after his retirement from the Marine Corps in 1931, Butler became a warrior against war. He decried his storied record, warned about the rise of fascism in America, and said he had been a \u201cracketeer for capitalism.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this exclusive excerpt from the book, Katz writes about one of the events that helped foster Butler\u2019s more radical turn: <\/i>the Bonus March of 1932<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Smedley D. Butler addressing the Bonus Marchers in Anacostia Flats, Washington, D.C., July 19, 1932. (Still from Fox Movietone News outtake, Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Over the spring of 1932, veterans from every corner of the country began making their way to Washington, D.C. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, they set up encampments across Washington. By July, there were some forty-five thousand veteran protesters, wives, and children living in shacks in the shadow of the Capitol dome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cause that drew them was known as the \u201cbonus.\u201d Veterans\u2019 benefits had been minimal in the last World War. Many had come home from Europe to find their savings drained and jobs gone. In 1924, Congress had finally passed a bonus bill over President Coolidge\u2019s veto, mandating that most who served during the mobilization would get $1 of back pay for each day of home service and $1.25 for each day abroad. But there was a catch: if the sum was more than $50, it would only be paid to the veteran\u2019s survivors after they died or in 1945, whichever came first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the Great Depression hit, many veterans realized their green-bordered bonus certificates was their only asset that still held any value. In 1931, an Army veteran named Joseph T. Angelo walked four days from his home in New Jersey to Washington to demand the bonus be paid immediately. In response, Congress passed a bill allowing veterans to cash in part of their IOUs as loans. But President Hoover vetoed it, warning it would set a dangerous precedent by breaking \u201cthe barriers of self-reliance and self-support in our people.\u201d The protesters\u2019 goal in 1932 was to change his mind and force Congress\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Washingtonians were sympathetic to the BEF. A D.C. police captain named Sidney Marks, sent to evict the largest encampment \u2014 on the mudflats across the Anacostia River \u2014 instead told the protesters they had his support. The marchers renamed the site Camp Marks in his honor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the federal and military establishments were not as pleased. They denounced the occupiers as Communists and radicals. Most alarming to some, veterans of all skin colors were living in the bonus camps side by side at a time when the District of Columbia and military were strictly segregated by race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 16, the Senate adjourned without taking the latest bonus bill up, effectively killing the measure. Senators left just before midnight, fleeing through the underground tunnels beneath the Capitol to avoid confronting marchers. Hoover headed to his Shenandoah summer retreat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As dejected marchers began to take federal agents\u2019 offers for train tickets home, the organizer of the BEF, Walter W. Waters, sent an urgent invitation to the one senior military man who had taken a public position in support of the veterans \u2014 the one officer whom he knew the veterans would listen to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smedley Butler arrived at Camp Marks on July 19, accompanied by his son Smedley Junior, on summer break from MIT. They strolled around the shanty town, greeting men Butler had last seen shuffling through his mudhole camp in France. Word spread, and soon thousands converged around a wooden stage to hear what Old Gimlet Eye had to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smedley took off his sport coat, rolled up his sleeves, and tucked his polka dot tie between two shirt buttons so it wouldn\u2019t flop around. A line of sun-worn U.S. flags waved behind him. Waters introduced Butler as \u201ca real soldier, a real man, a real gentleman, and a real comrade\u201d \u2014 noting, in case anyone had forgotten, the two Medals of Honor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Butler looked over the crowd, now totaling about sixteen thousand stalwarts. He told the marchers what an honor it was to be among fellow soldiers; how it made him \u201cso damn mad\u201d to hear people calling them tramps. \u201cBy God, they didn\u2019t speak of you as tramps in 1917 and \u201818!\u201d he said to applause. \u201cI mean just what I say. I don\u2019t want anything,\u201d he assured, his tie now loose and arms flying wildly through the air. \u201cNobody can kick me anymore. I\u2019ll say what I please.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His thinning hair was now thoroughly mussed, his throat hoarse, but his lungs were filled with anger \u2014 at how the veterans were being treated, at the state of the country, at the ruins of his own career. \u201cThis is the greatest demonstration of Americanism we have ever had! Pure Americanism. Willing to take this beating as you\u2019ve taken it, stand right steady. You keep every law! And why in the hell shouldn\u2019t you? Who in the hell has done all the bleeding for this country, and for this law, and this Constitution anyhow, but you fellas?\u201d The veterans roared back in reply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut don\u2019t \u2014 don\u2019t! \u2014 take a step backward,\u201d he warned. \u201cRemember that as soon as you haul down your camp flag here and clear out \u2014 every one of you clears out \u2014 this evaporates in thin air. And all this struggle will have been no good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unable to bear the thought of leaving, Smedley and Smedley Junior stayed the night at Camp Marks, trading war stories with the protesters late into the night. The next morning, they shared a breakfast of potatoes, black coffee, and hard bread with them before departing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by Butler, thousands of marchers stayed. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. Army chief of staff, instructed his adjutants to draw up plans to evict the veterans by force. MacArthur also secretly began moving combat vehicles, machine guns, and tanks to Fort Myer, just outside Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 28, nine days after Butler\u2019s speech, policemen fatally shot two marchers in an attempt to evict the BEF from an abandoned building next to the Capitol. MacArthur ordered his aide \u2014 forty-one-year-old Maj. Dwight Eisenhower \u2014 to put on his uniform and join him in the streets to oversee the final maneuver in person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around 4:30 p.m., a reporter spotted four hundred Army infantrymen fixing bayonets and putting on gas masks. Army grenades exploded on the National Mall, releasing gas laced with Adamsite \u2014 a chemical weapon that can cause vomiting, asphyxiation, and, under certain circumstances, death. Cavalry, led in the saddle by George Patton, charged into a crowd of spectators. Tear gas and smoke from hundreds of burning shacks blotted out the view of the Capitol dome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 9:00 p.m., MacArthur announced that Camp Marks was to be destroyed. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley rushed a message from Hoover ordering the chief of staff not to cross the Anacostia River. MacArthur ignored the president. He positioned tanks on the bridge to cut off the camp from the city, then ordered the camp burned to the ground. Scores were injured. A twelve-week-old baby whose impoverished parents had brought him to Camp Marks choked on Adamsite and died soon after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a press conference, MacArthur asserted that he had prevented a Communist revolution. \u201cI think as a military maneuver, if you can call a thing of this kind a military maneuver, that it was unique. I have been in many riots, but I think this is the first riot I ever was in or ever saw in which there was no real bloodshed.\u201d MacArthur was likely thinking of his experiences in the Philippines and Mexico, though he could have been talking about the military\u2019s experience suppressing uprisings and dissent around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those who watched it could not believe that scenes they associated with the imperial periphery had taken place in the nation\u2019s capital. A reporter who witnessed the violence commented: \u201cGod, that I should see such things in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Gen. Douglas MacArthur\u2019s handiwork: the Bonus Marchers\u2019 encampment in flames in front of the U.S. Capitol, July 28, 1932. (National Archives and Records Administration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cBattle of Washington,\u201d as MacArthur\u2019s assault on the Bonus March became known, was a clarifying moment. For Butler, it hardened a growing conviction that the key fault line in America was class: Wall Street and those who carried out its wishes against the \u201clittle guy.\u201d That fall, he tried out a version of the idea he\u2019d been mulling since Nicaragua: that America\u2019s wars were started by capitalists at the expense of the soldiers sent to fight them. \u201cWhen the war is over,\u201d Butler told a crowd in New York, \u201cthe soldier comes back, is given a march up Fifth Avenue, and as soon as he is disbanded at the end of the march the capitalists say, \u2018To hell with him\u2019 and start all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Franklin Delano Roosevelt read about the burning of Camp Marks in his bedroom at the governor\u2019s mansion in Albany. He could not believe Hoover had turned the army loose on U.S. citizens, nor how far MacArthur had gone. It was a wonder, Roosevelt told his friend and adviser Rexford Tugwell, that there hadn\u2019t been \u201cmore resentment, more radicalism, when people were treated that way.\u201d FDR was in a unique position to do something about it. Four weeks before MacArthur\u2019s assault, he had accepted the Democratic nomination for president, promising \u201ca new deal for the American people.\u201d Butler crossed party lines to campaign for him, calling himself a \u201cHoover-for-Ex-President Republican.\u201d Roosevelt won in a landslide that November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Roosevelt who moved into the White House in March 1933 was still the ex-Navy official who had helped plan the invasion of Veracruz, supervise the brutal occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and oversee the colonial district around his \u201cUncle Ted\u2019s vast public work\u201d in Panama. Yet Roosevelt was horrified by the approval with which his empire-building peers greeted MacArthur\u2019s assault on American citizens \u2014 veterans who had just been asking for their government\u2019s help in a crisis. The president told Tugwell that he sensed in the United States \u201can impulse among a good many \u2018strong\u2019 men, men used to having their way, mostly industrialists who directed affairs without being questioned, a feeling that democracy had run its course and that the totalitarians had grasped the necessities of the time. People wanted strong leadership; they were sick of uncertainty, anxious for security, and willing to trade liberty for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millions of Americans were turning to demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest who used his nationally syndicated radio show to defend Hitler and spread conspiracy theories of a worldwide \u201cJudeo-Bolshevik\u201d plot. The \u201cNazi-minded among American leaders,\u201d as Roosevelt called them, were more fond of the dictatorial MacArthur. His greater \u201ccharm, tradition, and majestic appearance\u201d put a high-class and distinctively American shine on the naked repression he unleashed against the Bonus Marchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the divide between outright fascism and the American elite was paper thin at the depths of the Depression. U.S. corporations not only remained in Germany after Hitler became chancellor in early 1933, but courted Nazi approval. There was money in it: Coca-Cola, General Motors, and IBM all saw their German profits surge in the wake of the Nazi ascent. The most influential of all U.S. businessmen, Henry Ford, had long since entered into a mutual admiration society with the soon-to-be f\u00fchrer. Hitler heaped praise on Ford\u2019s antisemitic writings, and had told a U.S. reporter a decade earlier: \u201cWe look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti movement in America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Germany and the United States were in many ways sister empires, who had risen at roughly the same time to challenge the older powers of Europe. Now Germany, defeated and humiliated, was turning its imperialism inward in the form of fascism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question for all Americans was if they would do the same. MacArthur\u2019s answer in the burning of the bonus camps seemed to be a resounding yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roosevelt chose otherwise. He resolved to show \u201cthat democracy in the United States \u2014 limited and flawed though it remained \u2014 was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it,\u201d as the historian Eric Rauchway has written. He would do so by remaking the relationship between government, business, and the people through New Deal programs, including massive spending on public works, social insurance, and support for labor unions. FDR did so knowing that, if he failed, he could be ushered from office \u2014 and, more dangerously, that a fascist turn could happen in the United States. All that was missing, as the president told Tugwell, was a leader: \u201cthe familiar symbolic figure \u2014 the man on horseback \u2014 to give it realism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From \u201c<\/i>Gangsters of Capitalism<\/i><\/a>\u201d by Jonathan M. Katz. Copyright \u00a9 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin\u2019s Publishing Group.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jonathan Myerson Katz<\/i><\/a>, author of \u201cGangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America\u2019s Empire,\u201d received the James Foley\/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for reporting from Haiti. His first book, \u201cThe Big Truck That Went By,\u201d was shortlisted for the PEN\/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and won the Overseas Press Club\u2019s Cornelius Ryan Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and the WOLA\/Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. His work appears in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. Katz has received fellowships from New America and the Logan Nonfiction Program. He lives with his wife and daughter in Charlottesville, VA. His newsletter can be found at <\/i>theracket.news<\/i><\/a>. Follow him on Twitter at <\/i>@KatzOnEarth<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have an opinion?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This article is an Op-Ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the authors. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please <\/i>email Military Times Managing Editor Howard Altman<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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