The Plot To Seize The White House (3 page)

The Plot to Seize the White House

to himself, he heard out his visitors in the hope of learning why they were so anxious to use him.

They explained that they had arranged for him to attend the convention as a delegate from Hawaii, which would give him the right to speak. When he still declined, they asked whether he wasn’t in sympathy with their desire to oust the “Royal Family.” He was, he said, because the leadership had simply been using the organization to feather their own nests, but he had absolutely no intention of attending the convention without an invitation.

His disappointed visitors took their leave but asked permission to return in a few weeks.

A month later Doyle and MacGuire returned. Without waiting to inquire whether Butler had changed his mind, MacGuire quickly informed him that there had been a change of plans. The general had been right to object to coming to the convention as just another delegate, MacGuire acknowledged. It would have been ineffective, and a waste of the general’s immense prestige.

MacGuire outlined a new plan in which Butler would gather two or three hundred Legionnaires and take them to Chicago on a special train.

They would be scattered throughout the audience at the convention, and when Butler made an appearance in the spectators’ gallery, they would leap to their feet applauding and cheering wildly. The proceedings would be stampeded with cries for a speech that would not die down until Butler was asked to the platform.

Incredulous at the audacity with which this scheme was being unfolded to him, Butler asked what kind of speech his visitors expected him to make. MacGuire produced some folded
The Plot

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typewritten pages from an inside jacket pocket. They would leave a speech with him to read. MacGuire urged Butler to round up several hundred Legionnaires, meanwhile, to take to Chicago with him.

Holding on to his fraying temper, Butler pointed out that none of the Legionnaires he knew could afford the trip or stay in Chicago. MacGuire quickly assured him that all their expenses would be paid. But Butler, who was constantly being approached with all kinds of wild schemes and proposals, was not prepared to take the plotters seriously until they could prove they had financial backing. When he challenged MacGuire on this point, the veteran slipped a bankbook out of his pocket. Without letting the name of the bank or the account be seen, he flipped over the pages and showed Butler two recent deposits-one for $42,000 and a second for $64,000-for “expenses.”

That settled it. No wounded soldiers Butler knew possessed $100,000 
bank accounts. His instincts sharpened by two years’ experience, on loan from the Marines, as crimebusting Director of Public Safety for Philadelphia, warned him that there was something decidedly unsavory about the proposition.

He decided to blend skepticism, wariness, and interest in his responses, to suggest that he might be induced to participate in the scheme if he could be assured that it was foolproof. He would profess himself interested, but unconvinced as long as he suspected that there was more to be learned about the scheme. So far they had told him practically nothing except what was barely necessary for the role they wanted him to play. He determined to get to the bottom of the plot, while trying not to scare them off in the process.

After they had left, he read over the speech MacGuire had left with him. It urged the American Legion convention to adopt a resolution calling for the United States to return to the gold standard, so that when veterans were paid the bonus promised to them, the money they received would not be worthless paper. Butler was baffled. What did a return to the gold standard have to do with the Legion? Why were MacGuire and Doyle being paid to force this speech on the convention-and who was paying them?

Butler detected an odor of intrigue. Some kind of outlandish scheme, he was convinced, was afoot. Knowing little about the gold standard, why Roosevelt had taken the country off it or who stood to gain by its restoration and why, he began thumbing through the financial pages of newspapers and magazines-sections of the press he had never had any occasion to read.

The first important fact he learned was that the government no longer had to back up every paper dollar with a dollar’s worth of gold. This meant that the Roosevelt Administration could increase the supply of paper money to keeps its pledge of making jobs for the unemployed, and give loans to farmers and homeowners whose property was threatened by foreclosure.

Banks would then be paid back in cheapened paper dollars for the gold-backed dollars they had lent.

Conservative financiers were horrified. They viewed a currency not solidly backed by gold as inflationary, undermining both private and business fortunes and leading to national bankruptcy. Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist out to destroy private enterprise by sapping the gold backing of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.

Butler began to understand that some wealthy Americans might be eager to use the American Legion as an instrument to pressure the Roosevelt Administration into restoring the gold standard. But who was behind MacGuire?

A short while after MacGuire’s second visit, he returned to see Butler again, this time alone. MacGuire asked how he was coming along in rounding up veterans to take with him to the convention. Butler replied evasively that he had been too busy to do anything about it. He then made it clear that he could no further interest in the plan unless MacGuire was willing to 
be candid and disclose the sources of the funds that were behind it.

After some hesitation MacGuire revealed that they had been provided by nine backers, the biggest contributor putting up nine thousand dollars.

Pressed to explain their motives, MacGuire insisted that they were simply concerned about helping veterans get their bonus and a square deal.

People who could afford such contributions, Butler reflected ironically, were hardly the type who favored a two-billion-dollar bonus for veterans.

When he prodded MacGuire further, the fat veteran revealed that one of his chief backers was a wealthy Legionnaire he worked for, Colonel Grayson M.-P. Murphy, who operated a brokerage firm at 52 Broadway in New York City. Butler pointed out the contradiction between MacGuire’s claim that his group was concerned with the problems of the poor rank-and-file veteran and the fact that his backers were all obviously wealthy men.

MacGuire simply shrugged and frankly admitted that as far as he personally was concerned, he was primarily involved in the transaction as a businessman and was being well taken care of for his efforts. It would be equally profitable for Butler, he hinted, if the general were disposed to cooperate.

Butler pumped him about Colonel Murphy’s connection with the plan.

Murphy, MacGuire revealed, was one of the founders of the Legion and had actually underwritten it with $125,000 in 1919 to pay for the organizational field work. He had been motivated by a desire to see the soldiers “cared for.”

When Butler questioned Murphy’s motive in wanting the gold-standard speech made at the convention, MacGuire explained that he and the other backers simply wanted to be sure that the veterans would be paid their bonus in sound gold-backed currency, not in “rubber money.”

He showed Butler several checks for large amounts signed by Murphy and two other men-Robert S. Clark and John 
Mills. Clark’s name rang a bell with Butler. He had known a Second Lieutenant Robert S. Clark in China during the Boxer Campaign who had been called “the millionaire lieutenant.”

The money, MacGuire said, would be used to open an expense account for Butler in Chicago. He hoped that the general would now get busy rounding up veterans to take to the convention.

Butler remained noncommittal. He intended to procrastinate as long as he could, continuing to pump MacGuire until had enough information to make a complete report to the government. The President, he felt, ought to know what schemes his rich opponents were up to overturn New Deal policies.

After the visit, Butler brooded over the implication of MacGuire’s revelation that his employer, key founder and sponsor of the American Legion, was involved. Tall, heavyset, Grayson Mallot-Prevost Murphy* not only operated one of Wall Street’s leading brokerage houses but was also a director of Guaranty Trust, a Morgan bank, and had extensive industrial and financial interests as a director of Anaconda Copper, Goodyear Tire, and Bethlehem Steel. A West Point graduate, Murphy was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I with the rank of colonel. Butler’s bushy eyebrows rose when he also learned that the financier had been decorated by Benito Mussolini, who had made him a Command of the Crown of Italy.

Butler found out that he had been one of twenty American officers who had met in Paris in February, 1919, reportedly on orders from the commanders of the A.E.F., to counter revolutionary unrest in Europe following the end of World War I, by forming a veterans’ organization with the alleged purpose of looking after veterans’ welfare and uniting them to defend America at home as they had abroad.

Murphy had put up $125,000 to get the American Legion going, and it had been organized in the spring with a caucus of about a thousand officers and men. The Legion had then solicited funds and support from industrialists. Swift and Company executives had written other firms, “We are all 
(The Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy referred to here and throughout the book died on October 19, 1937.) 
Legion, the results it will obtain, and the ultimate effect in helping to offset radicalism.”

The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920’s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency. When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were Communists trying to create national chaos so that the Reds could take over. Legionnaires were given baseball bats to break up strikes and civil rights demonstrations. The American Civil Liberties Union later reported, “Of the forces most active in attacking civil rights, the American Legion led the field.”

The rank and file, however, had grown increasingly restless and impatient with the “Royal Family” that ran the Legion, especially after the Depression had left so many jobless. Veterans forced to sell apples on street corners were angered by a Legion leadership that opposed the bonus and government spending as inflationary. That was why so many thousands had bypassed the Legion to join the Bonus March on Washington.

Adding up the facts, Butler was struck by a startling contradiction.

MacGuire had claimed to speak for rank-and-file discontent with the Legion’s bosses and professed to want to oust them, yet he was an agent for a top founder of the Legion who was obviously one of the powers behind the throne. MacGuire had revealed that the Legion still owed Murphy part of the $125,000 foundation money he had provided and had tacitly acknowledged that Murphy “makes the kings.”

MacGuire obviously had to be lying in his claim that he-or Murphy-wanted to topple the present leadership. Why? Perhaps it was a ruse to channel and control popular discontent in the Legion, hopefully with Butler’s help, for the purposes of the nine wealthy men behind MacGuire.

Butler awaited MacGuire’s next move with deep interest.

In September Butler was asked to address a convention of the Legion’s 29th Division at Newark, New Jersey. On the Sunday morning he was in the city, the phone rang in his hotel room. It was MacGuire, who was in the lobby and asked to see him.

Invited to Butler’s room, MacGuire reminded the general that the time for the American Legion Convention was rapidly approaching. Was Butler finally ready to take a contingent of veterans to Chicago and make the gold-standard speech?

Butler displayed increasing skepticism about the whole plan. In a gruff voice he challenged MacGuire’s proposal as a bluff without any real money behind it. His visitor whipped a fat wallet out of his hip pocket, extracted a mass of thousand-dollar bills, and scattered them all over the bed. The eighteen thousand dollars, he said smugly, would amply cover the expenses of Butler and the veterans he led to Chicago.

The gesture caught Butler by surprise; losing his temper, he accused MacGuire of trying to give him thousand-dollar bills whose number had been recorded, so that once he cashed them, the plotters would have proof of his complicity. MacGuire hastily assured him that he could have smaller denominations.

In his vexation Butler snapped at the bond salesman to take back the money immediately, as he had no intention of getting involved in MacGuire’s scheme. But then, as he regained control of his anger, he sought to make it appear that he was merely indignant that he was forced to deal with an emissary. He would negotiate, he told MacGuire firmly, only with principals.

After some hesitation MacGuire agreed to have him contacted by Robert S. Clark, a banker who had inherited a large fortune from a founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

One week later Clark phoned Butler at his home. They arranged a meeting at the railroad station. Butler instantly recognized the tall, gangling man, hair now steel-gray, who stepped off the train as the lieutenant he had known thirty-four years earlier.

Butler drove him home for lunch, during which they exchanged memories of the Boxer Campaign. Afterward they adjourned to the spacious, glassed-in porch, and Clark got down to the business of his visit.

He was going to the American Legion convention in a private car attached to the Pennsylvania Limited, he told Butler. He planned to have the train stop at Paoli to pick the general up, and they would continue on to Chicago together. A suite of rooms had already been reserved for Butler at the Palmer House.

Clark would see to it, he told the general, that Butler was calling for a resolution demanding restoration of the gold standard. In discussing the speech, the millionaire was induced to reveal that the author was none other than John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic candidate for President, and now chief attorney for J. P. Morgan and Company.