ONE

PHILADELPHIA



As far as I know, the world’s only public monument to Smedley Butler is a modest plaque inside Philadelphia’s city hall. I paid it a visit one sunny afternoon. The behemoth municipal complex rises up from the middle of the boulevard, its limestone-and-granite tower soaring 548 feet into the sky. At the top stands a far more famous monument to one of Butler’s fellow Quakers: William Penn, the founder of the city and of the state that bears his family name.

Penn arrived in America in 1682, dreaming of freedom and profits. Many of his fellow first settlers of Pennsylvania were also Quakers, as members of the Religious Society of Friends are still known. They were fleeing religious persecution in England. Most threatening to the empire was the Quakers’ “Peace Testimony,” in which the faithful pledge to abstain from “all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever.” Thousands of Friends were imprisoned for refusing to serve in the military or swear an oath to the king. Hundreds died in the king’s jails.

Penn promised his American colonists the right to substantial religious freedom and self-government by an elected assembly. He also asked them to respect the rights of the native Lenape peoples, whose ancestors had lived on the land he was colonizing for thousands of years.

But Penn was also a craven businessman. He had sold off half a million acres of Lenape territory before he even opened talks with the tribal elders, and enslaved multiple Africans on his estate. “Though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my trouble,” Penn wrote. His settlers broke his promise to respect the Lenape almost immediately.1

This was the tension at the heart of the city Penn founded, the place he named Philadelphia—“place of fraternal love” in ancient Greek—and of the country whose independence was proclaimed in its statehouse in 1776. Conceived on ideals of peace, justice, and brotherhood, it would be built on conquest and exploitation.

The thirty-seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Penn was installed atop the city hall tower in 1894. His broad-brimmed Quaker hat was the highest point downtown for nearly a century.

The simpler bronze plaque to Smedley Butler is hidden inside the entrance, fifty stories below. It commemorates neither his years of conquest nor his subsequent pursuit of peace, but a stint fighting Philadelphia’s gangsters when he briefly led the city’s police department in the 1920s. The inscription reads:

He enforced the law impartially

He defended it courageously

He proved incorruptible

* * *

By the nineteenth century, Philadelphians had grown restless. Their city was perfectly positioned as a terminus for railroads to haul settlers and troops across the continent, and to bring resources and money back the other way. Through the former Lenape lands west of the Schuylkill River, the Pennsylvania state government built a transportation corridor dubbed the “Main Line of Public Works.”

Railroad barons built summer mansions along the Main Line tracks. As the inner city swelled with immigrants and formerly enslaved people in the years after the Civil War, the bosses set up commuter service so they, and the bankers and lawyers who worked for them, could live in their suburban homes full-time. In 1884, a few families set up a private high school on the grounds of a Quaker college to educate the new crop of wealthy white boys growing up on the Main Line. They called it the Haverford College Grammar School.

One of the school’s students in 1898 was Smedley Butler. He was the oldest son of a prominent Quaker family in the nearby town of West Chester. His father, Thomas S. Butler, was the district’s congressman. But the real money and power belonged to the family of his mother, the former Maud Mary Darlington. The Darlington name was all over West Chester’s streets, civic buildings, and banks. Thomas owed his congressional office to Maud’s father, Smedley Darlington—one of his predecessors in the seat, and the boy’s namesake.

Smedley Butler was scrawny but scrappy. At sixteen years old, he loved baseball, football, and his classmates’ attention. The only classes he liked were public speaking and Latin, where the teacher offered dramatic retellings of ancient naval battles. (“He could so imitate a storm raging on the sea around the Roman galleys,” Butler would later recall.)2 His father, Thomas, expected the boy to follow him into law. Acting might have been a better career choice, but Smedley was not conventionally handsome. Thomas had saddled him with the signature Butler nose, a protruding hawk’s beak that dominated his young face. The rest of his features were pure Maud: puffy steel-blue eyes, sandy reddish hair, and a wily resting smirk.

In early 1898, Thomas began bringing home stories from Washington about a brewing political crisis with Spain. One of the old Iberian empire’s last remaining colonies, Cuba, was in revolt. Cuban exiles and their scattered allies among the U.S. elite were trying to push Congress to intervene.

In late January, President William McKinley dispatched the USS Maine, one of the Navy’s first two steel battleships, to protect American business interests and lives.

Then, on February 17, the Philadelphia Inquirer dropped on the Butlers’ doorstep with startling news. The Maine had exploded in Havana Harbor. At least 258 American sailors and Marines were dead. Smedley pictured their lifeless faces, floating in the burning bay.

For an upper-class couple like Maud and Thomas, the Maine disaster was a blow to America’s nascent global ambitions. For a distracted teenager, it offered something even more consuming: a mystery. No one knew what had caused the explosion. For weeks, newspapers ramped up speculation, offering competing theories. Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World quoted an American doctor who claimed to have overheard Spaniards in Havana making threats against the Maine before it blew. Not to be outdone, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal claimed, without evidence, DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY. The media mogul offered an astounding $50,000 cash reward (over $1.5 million today) for “exclusive evidence that will convict the person, persons or government criminally responsible.”3

No evidence was found. On March 21, a U.S. naval court of inquiry announced that the destruction looked consistent with an outside explosion—possibly by a floating mine. But even the court had to admit that it could not fix responsibility for the destruction of the ship “upon any person or persons.”4

But by then, Smedley, like millions of other Americans, knew exactly whom to blame. In their attempts to push the United States into the fight for Cuban independence, the war caucus had spent years selling stories of Spanish cruelty. One Spanish colonial governor in particular, Don Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, had become a villain at American dinner tables for killing noncombatants, burning homes and farms, and his forces’ taste for rape and torture.

“Butcher” Weyler’s most notorious innovation was aimed at starving the insurgency of public support. He had ordered hundreds of thousands of Cuban civilians rounded up into squalid garrison towns, behind barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with machine guns. The Spanish called it reconcentración. U.S. newspapers translated it into a newly coined term: concentration camps.5

Photographs circulated of grown men reduced to living skeletons and visitors sitting atop mountains of reconcentrado bones. In a typical article, the New York Times reported that forty Cuban men, women, and children had tried to evade capture in a cave in Matanzas Province, only to have the Spanish soldiers set fire to the caverns and shoot those who ran outside gasping for air.6

Such stories hit close to home for Philadelphia Quakers raised on accounts of their ancestors’ torture and imprisonment without trial. A Quaker newspaper, the Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal, featured the eyewitness reports of Clara Barton—the founder of the American Red Cross, who was in Cuba to distribute food and medical aid to the camps—describing her volunteers’ battles with “filth and death.”7 As winter turned to spring in 1898, the Friends establishment continued condemning Spanish brutality in Cuba while characteristically protesting the American march to war.

But the boys at the Haverford School were not interested in such nuances. When Congress declared war, they gathered around the bonfires singing “We’ll Hang Governor Weyler to a Sour Apple Tree” and stripped the yellow from the maroon in their school’s colors so it would look less like the Spanish flag.8

Schoolyard rallies weren’t enough for Maud Butler’s oldest son. “I clenched my fists when I thought of those poor Cuban devils being starved and murdered by the beastly Spanish tyrants,” Butler later said. “I was determined to shoulder a rifle and help free little Cuba.”9

There were several obstacles to overcome before he could join the cause. The first was his age—two years below the minimum. An attempt to sneak off and convince the local Army unit to take him ended with the commander telling him to “run along home.”10

Then there was his father. Thomas Butler had joined nearly all of his Republican colleagues in voting for the war, but he wasn’t about to see his eldest child go off and die in a Caribbean ditch.

Thorniest of all were the Quakers. Neither of his parents were devout, but they had passed on many of their sect’s values to their son. His whole life, Smedley would address his loved ones in the Quaker plain style: using “thee” and “thou,” always signing letters to Maud “thy affectionate son.” Although both of Smedley’s grandfathers had fought for the Union in the Civil War, that had been considered a special case by some Friends, whose opposition to war was matched only by their hatred of slavery.

It was Maud who broke through the barriers. She understood, more than anyone, what going to war meant to her son. Had the world been different, she likely would have gone to fight Spain herself.

To Thomas, she suggested letting Smedley start at a junior officer’s rank: a benefit available to the rich and politically connected at the time, and one that might serve to keep him in training longer and out of the hottest fights.

To the West Chester Quaker meeting, she made her position plain: expel Smedley and the Darlington family fortune goes with him.

The solution to the age problem turned out to be the easiest of all. On a Monday morning in April before dawn, Smedley snuck out again. This time, his mother was with him. While Thomas slept, Maud and her teenage son walked the half mile to the West Chester train station. Nearly six hours and two trains later, they arrived at the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C. Maud waited outside as her son lied about his age to the colonel commandant.11 He surely did not care. The Marines needed all the bodies they could get.

Butler left the Haverford School before graduation to begin training. He was thrilled at the first sight of the sergeant major who led his instruction: a towering spit-and-polish Scotsman who had fought under Sir Horatio Kitchener in the recent British colonial conquest of the Sudan.12 But as the days unfolded, Smedley realized where he really was: a holding pen for daddy’s boys. One of Butler’s fellow recruits was George Reid, nephew of a high-ranking Marine Corps officer with the same name. Another was Robert Francis Wynne, the son of a prominent New York journalist—a pretty boy with short hair pomaded and parted down the middle. (For reasons lost to time, the boot campers decided to call him “Pete.”)

The sergeant major drilled the boy recruits on what were considered essential officers’ skills, like memorizing regulations and organizing dress parades.

In the meantime, Lt. Col. Robert W. Huntington’s new Marine battalion deployed to Cuba without them. At night, Smedley, Pete, and George would hunker down with the newspaper, devouring the updates from the correspondents on the beach where the Marines had landed: Guantánamo Bay.

The junior officers’ deployment orders finally arrived the day after the Fourth of July 1898. Maud made sure she and Thomas were at New York Harbor to see their son off. She wore her best blue-and-white silk dress with the big balloon sleeves. Smedley watched her standing on the dock until she’d vanished into the horizon.13


Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan M. Katz