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Among tens of millions of Veterans who have served our nation since the first Medals of Honor were awarded to Andrews’s Raiders in 1862, a split percentage of Vets — 3,528 to be exact — have earned the Medal of Honor.
Amazingly, there are 19 double recipients, and among them are two Marines, SgtMaj Daniel J. Daly (USMC), whom I recently profiled, and MajGen Smedley D. Butler. Notably, their military service paths crossed several times when earning those Medals.
Smedley Butler was born in 1881, the eldest of three sons in their West Chester, Pennsylvania family. His parents, Thomas and Maud, were descendants of prominent Quaker families, so Smedley would later earn the nickname “The Fighting Quaker.” He would also collect a few other monikers during his career: “Maverick Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” and “Fighting Hell-Devil.”
His father was an attorney who became a district judge and later a Republican member of Congress, serving in the House for 31 years. He was chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs for almost a decade, including his son’s Marine years.
Smedley attended the West Chester Friends Graded High School and the (then) Quaker-affiliated Haverford School in Philadelphia. He was captain of the baseball team and quarterback of the football team. Despite his father’s objections, Butler left Haverford a month before his 17th birthday and enlisted in the Marine Corps during the Spanish–American War. Despite his departure, Haverford awarded him a diploma in 1998.
Butler planned to lie about his age in order to join, but eventually, with his parents’ consent, he was able to receive a commission as a 2ndLt. He trained at Marine Barracks, Washington, DC, and shortly after the invasion of Cuba, he was then deployed to Guantánamo Bay, returning to the U.S. in 1899 when he was commissioned a 1stLt. He was then deployed to the Philippines, where his first combat action was leading 300 Marines to take the town of Noveleta. To commemorate that initiation, he had a large Marine Eagle, Globe, and Anchor emblem tattooed on his chest.
He next deployed to China during the Boxer Rebellion, where he first crossed paths with Dan Daly. It was during the Gaselee Expedition that he first distinguished himself in combat, disregarding his own wounds while assisting other injured Marines. His commanding officer, Major Littleton Waller, recommended Butler for a Medal of Honor “for the admirable control of his men in all the fights of the week, for saving a wounded man at the risk of his own life, and under a very severe fire.” However, at the time, military officers were not eligible for Medals of Honor. Two weeks before his 19th birthday, while recovering from his wounds, Butler received a brevet promotion to Captain. (He would later become one of only 20 Marines to receive the Marine Corps Brevet Medal.)
Smedley then served during various “Banana War” campaigns in Central America and the Caribbean, so-called because they were, in large part, to protect American commercial/agricultural harvesting interests in the region, notably those of the United Fruit Company. It was in Honduras in 1903 when he earned the nickname “Old Gimlet Eye” for his fierce stare in the face of battles with insurgents and rebels.
In 1905, he returned to Philadelphia and married Ethel Peters, and they would eventually have three children. He then returned to the Philippines, where, in 1908, he suffered a severe emotional disorder and received nine months of sick leave — spending most of that time managing a coal mine in West Virginia. But it was the onset of what would be a succession of undiagnosed emotional disorders, what we would now call Post Traumatic Stress.
In 1909, he returned to active duty in the Marine Corps and spent three years in Nicaragua, again defending, as he would later protest, American commercial interests in the region. From there, he went to Mexico. During that period, he earned a reputation for challenging the upper command of the Navy Department, whom he referred to as “swivel-chair admirals.”
Butler’s first Medal of Honor was awarded in 1914 for actions in Vera Cruz, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. In response to a diplomatic attack at Tampico, then-Major Butler led his men through urban warfare and sniper fire in order to retake the city and secure the diplomatic mission. His MoH citation notes: “Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion.”
A year later, after Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was murdered by a mob, Woodrow Wilson ordered Butler and his Marines to that country to help restore order. On October 24, 1915, some 400 Cacos rebels ambushed a Marine patrol, including SgtMaj Dan Daly, and the ensuing battle was the engagement for which Daly received his second Medal of Honor.
Three weeks later, Butler and three companies of Marines returned to the area to further secure it, and they again were surrounded by and fought off repeated attacks by about 100 Cacos rebels. On 17 November 1915, they encircled Fort Rivière in order to retake it from rebel forces. Butler and his Marines did so in hand-to-hand combat in just 20 minutes. Impressed with his exploits, then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt personally recommended Butler for his second Medal of Honor.
As noted in that MoH citation: “As commanding officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23d Companies and the marine and sailor detachment from the U.S.S. Connecticut, Maj. Butler led the attack on Fort Riviere. … Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Maj. Butler gave the signal to attack and marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the Cacos in hand-to-hand combat, took the bastion and crushed the Caco resistance. Throughout this perilous action, Maj. Butler was conspicuous for his bravery and forceful leadership.”
In 1918, at age 37, Butler, then a Brigadier General, was in command of Camp Pontanezen in France. This was a conduit for the American Expeditionary Force on its way to battlefields. For his service in 1918, Butler received the Army Distinguished Service Medal and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. He was also awarded the French Order of the Black Star.
He then returned to the U.S. to become commanding general of the Marine Corps Base Quantico barracks in Virginia.
In 1924, Philadelphia’s mayor contacted President Calvin Coolidge and requested a military general to assist with eradicating corruption from the municipal government. Coolidge sent Butler, who was granted leave to become Philadelphia’s director of public safety. He quickly turned the city’s corrupt racketeering operations on end. In his first two days, Butler organized and executed raids of 900 “speakeasies” that were in violation of Prohibition, many of which were engaged in payoff schemes to city officials. His targets included the Ritz Carlton and Union League, which catered to the city’s high society folks. His police officers had special uniforms, and his teams were equipped with armored car units to go after the mobsters.
Though his tactics were more in line with martial law, the city kept him in charge for a second year, after which he resigned. He observed that “cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.”
From 1927 to 1929, Butler returned to China to command the Marine Expeditionary Force in Tianjin and, upon returning to the U.S., was promoted to Major General.
In 1931, he became the first general officer to be arrested since the War Between the States, in his case, for violating diplomatic protocols by publicly repeating unverified information about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In a public speech, MajGen Butler stated as fact that Mussolini ran over and killed a child but kept driving, declaring, “What is one life in the affairs of a state?” The charges were dropped after the State Department agreed to a formal apology to Mussolini by Butler — an apology he never wrote.
Butler retired shortly thereafter and was, at the time, the most highly decorated Marine in history. He would hold that distinction until the retirement of LtGen Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller in 1955. Puller, who served for 37 years, was awarded five Navy Crosses and one Distinguished Service Cross.
In 1932, Butler launched a brief bid for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat as a Republican but was defeated in the primary.
To a degree, his protests in the years that followed were influenced by unbridled anger associated with his mental health issues — not to say that some of his criticisms were wrong.
In 1932, during the Great Depression, Butler delivered a fiery speech about the treatment of Veterans, which in some ways remains relevant to this day. It was in response to the Roosevelt administration’s opposition to a growing number of Veterans demanding the compensation they deserved for service to our nation.
Butler declared to a convention of those Vets: “I never saw such fine Americanism as is exhibited by you people. You have just as much right to have a lobby here as any steel corporation. Makes me so damn mad, a whole lot of people speak of you as tramps. By God, they didn’t speak of you as tramps in 1917 and ‘18.” He concluded: “Take it from me, this is the greatest demonstration of Americanism we have ever had. Pure Americanism. Don’t make any mistake about it, you’ve got the sympathy of the American people. Now, don’t you lose it!”
No longer constrained by his active duty status, he became an outspoken critic of the business interests that he believed were driving American foreign policy and military interventions.
In 1933, he declared: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. 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 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
That same year Butler became embroiled in a controversy known as the “Business Plot,” telling a congressional committee that a secret group of wealthy American industrialists were planning a coup d’état to overthrow Roosevelt and planned to use him as head of the coup. No such plot was ever verified though some aspects of his testimony were factual. Consequently, Butler was widely ridiculed for his allegations.
His 1935 book, War Is a Racket, was an exposé of the commercial interests that he claimed were the primary motivation for military actions in that era.
There are substantial historical merits to both his 1933 protests and his 1935 book on commercial interests and warfare. His thesis is, to this day, essential historical reading when discerning between our nation’s critical national security interests (which don’t exclude commerce) and warfare rooted primarily in commercial interests.
On May 23, 1940, Smedley Butler was admitted to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital for a routine medical evaluation. He died four weeks later from complication related to cancer. He was 58.
MajGen Smedley Butler: Your example of valor — a humble American Patriot defending Liberty for all above and beyond the call of duty and in disregard for the peril to your own life — is eternal.
“Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
Live your life worthy of his sacrifice.
(Read more Profiles of Valor here.)
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
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