“A gangster for capitalism” — Smedley Butler and American interventionism

Imagine, for a moment, a recently retired, highly decorated Marine general getting up in front of crowds and saying something like this:

War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes…

At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the [first] World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. (source )

This speech, later made into a book entitled War is a Racket, was given by Smedley Darlington Butler, who served from 1898–1931. He is one of the most important and decorated members in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. Not only did he rise to the top of the Marine Corps despite having one of the most unlikely war-hero names of all time, but, in his long career, he saw the United States transition from being a relatively isolationist power to being a world power — and the quote above is how he summed up what he the country’s armed forces accomplished in that time. In order to see how he became so jaded, let’s take a look at the career of Smedley Butler, who took part in many of the United States’ least-known and least-defensible military actions.

Cuba and the Philippines — Making the Spanish Empire American

In 1898, Butler was the son of a member of the House of Representatives and was being educated at the Haverford School, a fancy private school outside of Philadelphia, when he dropped out of high school at age 16 to join the Marines, lying about his age in order to see some action while the Spanish-American War was still going on. He served in the occupation force after the invasion, patrolling Guantanamo, Cuba, which of course remains an American possession to this day, housing the prison made infamous during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Most Americans don’t know much about the…