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13 Nat'l Mun. Rev. 367 (1924)
General Butler Cleans up

handle is hein.journals/natmnr13 and id is 427 raw text is: GENERAL BUTLER CLEANS UP BY AUSTIN F. MACDONALD University of Pensylvania A report on the first six months' service of the new director of public safety of Philadelphia. :: WHN W. Freeland Kendrick was elected mayor of Philadelphia last fall, he promised to devote his time and energy to cleaning up the city. The wiseacres smiled and shook their heads knowingly. These same pledges, they declared, were made at the beginning of every new administration. They had been made in 1919 by a newly- elected independent, whose sincerity of purpose could not be doubted. Yet at the end of his four-year regime Phila- delphia was notorious for its violations of the liquor laws and for the daring operations of its bandits. So it may not be surprioing that when in 1923 the pledges of law enforcement were made by a member of the dominant political machine, a man who owed his election to the support of the organization, they were regarded by many as mean- ingless. CAMPAIGN PROMISES CARRIED OUT But no sooner was Mr. Kendrick elected than he took steps to carry out his campaign promises of law en- forcement. It was necessary, he felt, to put Philadelphia's police force on a semi-military basis, and so, instead of appointing some Philadelphia politician to -the post of director of public safety, he cast about for some- one with military experience and a dis- tinguished record of service. The man he finally hit upon was Brigadier- General Smedley D. Butler, otherwise known as Gimlet Eye Butler and the Fighting Quaker. There was some doubt as to whether Butler could be persuaded to give up active service in the Marine Corps, of which organiza- tion he would before many years be- come the head; there was no doubt as to his fitness for the task of combating crime in Philadelphia. His record spoke for itself. After running away from home to fight in the Spanish-American War, he was made a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps at the age of sixteen. Twice wounded while marching to the relief of the foreign legations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he was offered the Victoria Cross by the British Government for rescuing an enlisted man under a rain of fire. His own government refused to permit him to accept this distinction, but twice on later occasions conferred upon him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Medals meant so little to Butler, how- ever, that it took an edict from the secretary of war to make him wear them. What he wanted was more fighting, and he got it in Nicaragua, Mexico and Haiti. He was in charge of the American forces in Haiti when the United States entered the World War, but was relieved at his own re- quest, so that he might go overseas at the head of the Thirteenth Regi- ment of Marines. This was the man to whom Mayor- elect Kendrick offered the directorship of public safety,- a brigadier-general

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