![]() On one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 percent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came.īutler published a short book, War Is a Racket, collecting the key themes of his orations in 1935. He soon began touring veterans’ halls and fairgrounds, speaking to crowds of thousands, and by the end of 1932, he was nationally recognized as one of the most charismatic and uncompromising tribunes of the ascendent veterans’ movement.Ĭrisscrossing the country, Butler denounced US warmaking abroad and ruling-class violence at home as two sides of the same bloody coin, telling audiences from Racine to Roanoke that America was divided into “two classes”: Having previously taken an extended leave from military service to supervise Philadelphia’s police department during prohibition, Butler finally left the Marines for good in 1931. ![]() The social atmosphere of the interwar period was so primed for a figure like Butler that his transformation from celebrity soldier to antiwar firebrand took only a few years. Turning his back on the defense establishment, Butler forcefully rejected not only the military command hierarchy but also the entire project of US warmaking. In the process, he became an avatar of the rumbling discontent that gripped the country in those years, as hundreds of thousands of aggrieved war veterans demanded relief from an intransigent government and, in doing so, ended up challenging the legitimacy of the American political system. ![]() As the fearsome roar of the early century faded into the unease of the Great Depression, Butler exchanged his military garb for a civilian suit and jacket, leaving the Marine Corps behind to pursue a new vocation as the most prominent antiwar orator in America. Butler was the youngest major general in Marine Corps history, and at the time of his death, he was the most decorated Marine who had ever lived.īut accolades were not enough to ease his troubled conscience. Along the way, he attained a kind of public glory few soldiers even dream of. The trajectory of his life as a soldier traced the arc of US imperial expansion in the early twentieth century, from Cuba to the Philippines to Nicaragua to Haiti to Shanghai, with many stops in between. And that’s what he did, at first.Īfter matriculating in elite schools, Butler enlisted in the Marines as a second lieutenant at the age of seventeen. Martin’s Press, 2022)īorn into a family of congressmen and millionaires in 1881, Smedley Butler was destined to succeed in the career of his choice while promoting the interests of his class. ![]() Review of Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. ![]()
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