8/5/2023 0 Comments Smedley butler wars democracyMacGuire had been pursuing Butler relentlessly throughout 19, starting with visits to the Butler’s converted farmhouse on Philadelphia’s Main Line. MacGuire, a 37-year-old Navy veteran with a head Butler thought looked like a cannonball. Murphy.Īnd now a bond salesman, who worked for Murphy, was pitching Butler on a domestic operation that set off the old veteran’s alarm bells. Morgan, and the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. He had done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. President Roosevelt’s cousin, the late Theodore himself, was said to have called Butler “the ideal American soldier.” Over the course of his career, he had received the Army and Navy Distinguished Service medals, the French Ordre de l’Étoile Noir, and, in the distinction that would ensure his place in the Marine Corps pantheon, the Medal of Honor - twice.īutler knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio Somoza - men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. Bestselling books had been written about him. Respected by his peers, beloved by his men, he was known as “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s Friend,” and the famous “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. bankers, lawyers, and businessmen apparently now looking for his help.įor 33 years and four months Butler had been a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict back to the war against Spain in 1898. He had overthrown governments and protected “friendly” client ones around the world on behalf of some of the same U.S. Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. In this exclusive excerpt, Katz documents how Butler played a pivotal role in an equally little-known episode, in which a cadre of powerful businessmen tried to overthrow the government of the United States, in an episode that anticipated the events of Jan. overseas war in the early twentieth century. Smedley Butler, a Marine who fought in nearly every U.S. At its center is one of the United States’s most fascinating yet little-known characters - Gen. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American military imperialism in the early twentieth century.
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