George S. Patton

George Smith Patton Jr. (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1967) was an American general who took part in the Second American Civil War and the Great Revolutionary War. Born into an upper-class family in California with a long-history of military involvement, Patton himself enrolled in military school as a young man, and became a comissioned officer in 1909. In 1914, he would go on to serve in the Great War in Europe.

In spite of having held conservative, nationalistic views before 1914, he like many other soldiers regardless of their rank, were changed by their experiences and the brutality they were forced to endure. By 1917, he had grown sympathetic to socialism, having met with a socialist group in France, and becoming critical of the motives of those leading America into the war. Following the conclusion of the war, while remaining a career soldier, he would go on to join the Socialist Labor Party, a group he had once chastized, while building secret connections with left-wing groups and figures. During the 1920s, he would begin working as a double agent for the underground sections of the Party, which went undiscovered by the military. Following the MacArthur Putsch in 1933, he was tasked by Douglas MacArthur with recruiting decamped Bonus Army marchers in Pennsylvania for the White army. Instead, arriving at the camp on 1 March, he would dispatch known rightists among the veterans as scouts, while proclaiming a mutiny against the military government in their absense, inviting the discontented veterans to join him, which they overwhelmingly opted to do. The Bonus Army would then march north and capture a military arsenal, marking one of the first major Red victories in the civil war.