“Devil Dog”: The war hero history forgot

– A new book series by Salon’s founder introduces unsung heroes, like the general who saved FDR from a coup –

From Salon:

He was one of the most decorated Marines in American history. But there are no Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler statues in Washington or buildings named after him at Camp Pendleton and Quantico. History has all but forgotten the scrappy, beak-nosed “fighting Quaker” from Philadelphia with the faintly ridiculous name. And yet, during the depths of the Depression — when some Wall Street bankers and military generals were openly flirting with fascist solutions to the crisis — Gen. Butler saved American democracy by exposing a plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Years later longtime Speaker of the House John McCormack, who as a young congressman presided over the investigation into the coup attempt, tried to give the unsung Butler his due. “If he had not been such a stubborn devotee of democracy,” said the legendary legislator, “Americans today could conceivably be living under an American Mussolini or Franco.” But, even today, the Butler story is too unnerving for textbook historians.

Butler always made the establishment uneasy. After a lifetime of military campaigns all over the globe — from China to Haiti to France — Butler became thoroughly disenchanted with America’s imperial adventures. In 1935, decades before President Eisenhower coined the term “military-industrial complex,” Butler wrote a scathing denunciation of U.S. militarism titled “War Is a Racket.”