The book is replete with Butler’s casual, paternalistic racism-as opposed to so many of his military colleagues from the south who informed their global imperialism with a virulent racism tied to their beliefs in slavery-but also offers his sense that trying to get to know the “natives” was a better way to help control them. military.” Fortunately for the biography, Butler was a prolific letter writer, and since he achieved fame early in his military exploits, people kept all his correspondence. Butler began as a recruit so eager he lied about his age to get into the Spanish-American War only to become, as Katz put it, “an imperfect trying to speak truth to power from within, or just after, leaving the U.S. Katz, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere, vividly captures this arc. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. And during that period I spent most of time being ahigh-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force-the Marine Corps. (Of course, despite might be widely inappropriate word choice here.) In the last years of his life he took to the lecture circuit, publishing a pamphlet titled War Is a Racket, and in the socialist magazine Common Sense, alongside pieces by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos, wrote (as Katz quotes): Despite being nicknamed “the Fighting Quaker”-he came from a Main Line, Pennsylvania family-and despite harrowing tales of slaughter of civilians in Vera Cruz, Mexico and of Cacos revolutionaries in Haiti, Butler eventually had a huge change of heart. It helps that Butler is an engrossing center for any book. The book is a vivid history lesson, a corrective to national amnesia, and a somber warning that we can never feel secure our democracy is, let alone will remain, truly democratic.
As just one example, remember in 1980 Ronald Reagan partially ran for president against Carter for “giving away” the Panama Canal Zone that he claimed was a “sovereign United States territory just the same as Alaska.” Reagan and all those who voted for him could have profited from reading Jonathan Katz’s eye-opening Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. Perhaps we don’t really know of Butler despite his exploits in our name because we like to sweep our national ugliness under the rug of history.
(That leaves out his time as commanding general at Marine Corps Base, Quantico, and a brief run as Philadelphia Director of Public Safety, helping kickstart our still problematic militarization of police.) From that point he ended up Zelig-like at the heart of every flashpoint of America’s global attentions-the Philippines, China for the Boxer Rebellion, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France for World War I, and China again. Those medals were awarded thanks to his work helping create a century of empire-his first action was in Cuba, and of all places at Guantánamo, during the Spanish-American War. By that I refer to the now mostly forgotten-despite his distinctive name-Smedley Butler, who upon his death in 1940 was the most decorated Marine in our country’s history. foreign involvement should be called the Butler Effect. Forget about the butterfly effect, it seems the last 130 years of U.S.
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