When Maj. Gen. Wendell C. Neville, the Marine Corps commandant, died on July 8, 1930, Butler was the next most senior major general in the Corps and the logical successor.

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But it was payback time for Butler’s large contingent of political enemies, and the appointment went instead to Maj. Gen. Ben H. Fuller. That was just the start of Butler’s troubles. In a January 1931 speech, Butler criticized Italy’s fascist prime minister, Benito Mussolini, recounting secondhand an incident in which Mussolini allegedly ran down and killed a child without stopping his car. The Italian government protested, and Stimson issued a formal apology on behalf of the United States. President Hoover ordered Secretary of the Navy Charles Adams to court-martial Butler, who became the first general officer since the Civil War to be court-martialed. Public reaction, however, ran strongly in Butler’s favor, and he received only a formal reprimand. Butler retired from the Corps on Oct. 1, 1931.

No longer constrained by his active duty status, Butler became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and a staunch advocate of isolationism and strict neutrality. He turned stridently antiwar, though not anti-military. Butler never became a pacifist; he opposed disarmament in any form and advocated a strong national defense. He came to regard his foreign service in the Corps, particularly in the Central American “banana republics,” as having made the world safe only for American big business. “I spent most of my time as a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” he once said. “In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” His 1935 book, War Is a Racket, was presented as an exposé of the profit motive that drove modern warfare. In a famous speech in 1933 he said: “Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do is operate his racket in three districts [of Chicago]. I operated on three continents.”

Despite Butler’s open contempt for big business, a group of wealthy industrialists in 1934 actually tried to recruit him to lead an army of 500,000 disgruntled veterans in a bizarre but half-baked coup d’etat plot against newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal social programs were anathema to many of America’s elite. Butler instead exposed the scheme and testified against the plotters during a closed session of the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities—also known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee. The committee essentially believed Butler’s testimony but in the end took no action against the alleged plotters. The affair remains exceptionally controversial.

Butler remained a high-profile critic of big business and the U.S. government throughout the 1930s. On May 23, 1940, he entered the Philadelphia Naval Hospital for a checkup and died four weeks later, on June 21, most likely from intestinal cancer. He was only 58.

In his retirement Daly had led as low profile a life as possible, shunning all forms of publicity. He intensely disliked any fuss over his decorations, calling all medals “a lot of foolishness.” Dan Daly died on April 27, 1937, at the age of 63.

During World War II the U.S. Navy commissioned a destroyer honoring each of the Marine Corps’ two great heroes: USS Butler (DD-636) in 1942 and USS Daly (DD-519) the following year. Daly was also honored on a U.S. postage stamp issued in 2005.

Either man quite conceivably could have wound up with three Medals of Honor. If the rules had been different in 1900, both Butler and Lt. Carl Gamborg-Andresen would have received the Medal of Honor along with the four enlisted Marines in their rescue party. The now obsolete Marine Corps Brevet Medal they both later received was intended as something of a substitute for the Medal of Honor. The brevet medal ribbon bore the same design as that of the Medal of Honor, though in red instead of blue. Daly, of course, was actually nominated for his third Medal of Honor, but the recommendation was downgraded to a Distinguished Service Cross for the most arbitrary of reasons.

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