Jon Lewis - The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

And I could see it. They had that sympathy racket, that they were going to have somebody take the patronage off of his shoulders and take all the worries and details off of his shoulders, and then he will be like the President of France. I said, “So that is where you got this idea?”

He said, “I have been traveling around—looking around. Now about this superorganization—would you be interested in heading it?”

I said, “I am interested in it, but I do not know about heading it. I am very greatly interested in it, because you know, Jerry, my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home. You know that.”

“Oh, no. We do not want that. We want to ease up on the President.”

He is going to ease up on him.

“Yes; and then you will put somebody in there you can run; is that the idea? The President will go around and christen babies and dedicate bridges, and kiss children. Mr. Roosevelt will never agree to that himself.”

“Oh, yes; he will. He will agree to that.”

I said, “I do not believe he will.” I said, “Don’t you know that this will cost money, what you are talking about?”

He says, “Yes; we have got $3,000,000 to start with, on the line, and we can get $300,000,000, if we need it.”

“Who is going to put all this money up?”

“Well,” he said, “you heard Clark tell you he was willing to put up $15,000,000 to save the other $15,000,000.”

“How are you going to care for all these men?”

He said, “Well, the Government will not give them pensions, or anything of that kind, but we will give it to them. We will give privates $10 a month and destitute captains $35. We will get them all right.”

“It will cost you a lot of money to do that.”

He said, “We will only have to do that for a year, and then everything will be all right again.”

Now, I cannot recall which one of these fellows told me about the rule of succession, about the Secretary of State becoming President when the Vice President is eliminated. There was something said in one of the conversations that I had either with MacGuire or with Flagg, whom I met in Indianapolis, that the President’s health was bad, and he might resign, and that Garner did not want it anyhow, and then this super secretary would take the place of the Secretary of State and in the order of succession would become President . He made some remark about the President being very thin-skinned and did not like criticism, and it would be very much easier to pin it on somebody else. He could say that he was a foot stuck in routine matters and let the other fellow take care of it and then get rid of him if necessary. That was the idea. He said that they had this money to spend on it, and he wanted to know again if I would head it, and I said, “No; I was interested in it, but I would not head it.”

He said “When I was in Paris, my headquarters were Morgan & Hodges. We had a meeting over there. I might as well tell you that our group is for you, for the head of this organization. Morgan & Hodges are against you. The Morgan interests say that you cannot be trusted, that you will be too radical, and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow; you cannot be trusted. They are for Douglas MacArthur as the head of it. Douglas MacArthur’s term expires in November, and if he is not reappointed it is to be presumed that he will be disappointed and sore and they are for getting him to head it.”

I said, “I do not think that you will get the soldiers to follow him, Jerry. He is in bad odor, because he put on a uniform with medals to march down the street in Washington. I know the soldiers.”

“Well, then, we will get Hanford MacNider. They want either MacArthur or MacNider. They do not want you. But our group tells them that you are the only fellow in America who can get the soldiers together. They say, ‘Yes, but he will get them together and go in the wrong way.’ That is what they say if you take charge of them.”

He said, “MacNider won’t do either. He will not get the soldiers to follow him, because he has been opposed to the bonus.”

“Yes, but we will have him in change (charge?)”

And it is interesting to note that three weeks later after this conversation MacNider changed and turned around for the bonus. It is interesting to note that.

He said, “There is going to be a big quarrel over the reappointment of MacArthur,” and he said, “You watch the President reappoint him. He is going to go right and if he does not reappoint him he is going to go left.”

I have been watching with a great deal of interest this quarrel over his reappointment to see how it comes out. He said, “You know as well as I do that MacArthur is Stotesbury’s son-in-law in Philadelphia—Morgan’s representative in Philadelphia. You just see how it goes and if I am not telling you the truth.”

I noticed that MacNider turned around for the bonus, and that there is a row over the reappointment of MacArthur.

So he left me, saying, “I am going down to Miami and I will get in touch with you after the convention is over, and we are going to make a fight down there for the gold standard, and we are going to organize.”

So since then, in talking to Paul French here—I had not said anything about this other thing, it did not make any difference about fiddling with the gold standard resolution, but this looked to me as though it might be getting near, that they were going to stir some of these soldiers up to hurt our Government. I did not know anything about this committee, so I told Paul to let his newspaper see what they could find out about the background of these fellows. I felt that it was just a racket, that these fellows were working one another and getting money out of the rich, selling them cold bricks. I have been in 752 different towns in the United States in 3 years and 1 month, and I made 1,022 speeches. I have seen absolutely no sign of anything showing a trend for a change of our form of Government. So it has never appealed to me at all. But as long as there was a lot of money stirring around—and I had noticed some of them with money to whom I have talked were dissatisfied and talking about having dictators—I thought that perhaps they might be tempted to put up money.

Now there is one point that I have forgotten which I think is the most important of all. I said, “What are you going to call this organization?”

He said, “Well, I do not know.”

I said, “Is there anything stirring about it yet.” “Yes,” he says; “you watch, in 2 or 3 weeks you will see it come out in the paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera. The papers will come out with it.” He did not give me the name of it, but he said that it would all be made public; a society to maintain the Constitution, and so forth… and in about two weeks the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be. We might have an assistant President, somebody to take the blame; and if things do not work out, he can drop him. He said, “That is what he was building up Hugh Johnson for. Hugh Johnson talked too damn much and got him into a hole, and he is going to fire him in the next three or four weeks.” I said, “How do you know all this?” “Oh,” he said, “we are in with him all the time. We know what is going to happen.” They had a lot of talk this time about maintaining the constitution. I said, “I do not see that the Constitution is in any danger,” and I asked him again, “Why are you in this thing?” He said, “I am a businessman. I have got a wife and children.”