‘War is a racket. . . . It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.” Those may sound like the words of some college-campus peacenik, but in fact they emanated from an individual who at the time of his death was the most highly decorated Marine in U.S. history. Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (aka “the Fighting Quaker” or “Old Gimlet Eye”) had arguably the most complex, fascinating persona in the pantheon of Marine Corps icons, a war hero who came to detest war, a man who fought on three continents but came to ruefully opine that he had been “a high-class muscle-man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. . . . I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” Pretty astounding comments from someone who by the end of his time in uniform had garnered 17 military awards, including two Medals of Honor.
But before he became famous in the 1930s criss-crossing the country giving his barn-burning speeches to adoring crowds, before he became one of the nation’s most outspoken and impassioned railers against foreign intervention and war profiteering, Butler had a brief side career as a Prohibition enforcer. That’s right: In addition to being antiwar, Old Gimlet Eye was anti-booze as well. Taking a leave of absence from the Corps, the Pennsylvania-born Butler served as director of Public Safety for the City of Philadelphia from January 1924 to December 1925.
In that heyday of bootlegging and rumrunning, of speakeasies and bathtub gin, the mayor saw in General Butler the possibility of making Philly a “closed town.” It was Butler vs. the Roaring Twenties, and the Marine entered the fray with righteous zeal. (The photograph at right shows him enthusiastically taking an axe to a beer keg in 1924.) “The 48-hour drive,” a periodic all-out assault against vice, became the hallmark of Butler’s tenure, and one such sweep netted 1,077 arrests. Director Butler was making plenty of enemies, talk of removing him was constant, and he became known as “the storm center of the administration.” He claimed to have received 200 death threats after only one month as director.
When his term in office concluded, Unit No. 1, a special vice- and booze-busting task force, presented him with this gold-plated bronze badge, currently in the collection of Naval Institute Member Gerald J. Gallagher. To a Marine who amassed a record number of honors during his career, this surely must have been among the most unusual. Smedley Butler’s Philly billet had been a contentious one, but in the end, as the 1952 City Hall plaque honoring him put it: “He enforced the law impartially. He defended it courageously. He proved incorruptible.”
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