The Plot To Seize The White House by Jules Archer

Author:Jules Archer [Archer, Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

21

Demands flooded in now for Butler's services as a lecturer. He had embarrassed governments, large and small, including his own, by his relentless candor, but his courage and honesty had ' won the admiration of millions of Americans. His speeches became more vitriolic than ever, scorching the hides of the powerful and the highly placed.

He met eager requests for articles by magazines and newspaper syndicates with the help of his friend E. Z. Dimitman, who was now night city editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dimitman would flesh out his views on war and peace, which Butler then edited and revised to his own satisfaction.

There never seemed to be enough money. Although he received some lecture fees up to $500, the average fee came to $25o and in many cases turned out to be far less. Most of what he managed to earn went into putting Tom Dick through Swarthmore and Smedley, Jr., through California Tech and M.I.T., and paying off the house he and Ethel had bought in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.

It was an old square farmhouse that had been gutted by fire except for its walls. Butler had rebuilt it with glass-enclosed porches and a huge, high hallway in which he erected his two treasured Chinese Blessings Umbrellas, opened like canopies at each end of the hall. He had thought to remodel the house for $35,000, but it had turned out to cost far more, and he was forced to sell most of the land to pay off the mortgage.

As a civilian Butler was close-fisted with money, gently but firmly resisting the endless letters he received begging for handouts, because he had no money to spare. His thrifty wife kept an old, ragged, shabby fur coat in the closet, over thirty years after he had brought it home for her from the Boxer Rebellion. She never wore it, but could not bring herself to throw it away. He himself upset many military organizations by canceling his membership and journal subscriptions without offering any explanation. He was too proud to admit the real reason; he simply had to prune expenses.

Out of uniform, he took pride in his appearance and dressed well but conservatively. Unable to break the traditions of thirty-three years of dress parade, he polished his shoes daily and buffed the buttons on his white, custom-made summer suits. His thought patterns, too, continued to dwell primarily on military concerns.

One of his objectives was to stir up a demand that the Marine Corps be removed from under the thumb of politically appointed desk admirals of the Navy and set up as a separate branch of the armed forces under their own leaders. He gave his reasons in an article called "To Hell with the Admirals! Why I Retired at Fifty," which appeared in Liberty Magazine on December 5, 1931:

The clique of desk-admirals who seem to hold sway in the Navy Department in Washington demand an Annapolis man as head of the Marine Corps. They desire to have the Corps an insignificant part of the naval service, a unit directly under their collective thumb.

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