A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to
global power—and how its legacies shape our world today—told
through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine.
"The book is
far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler... a
compelling and insightful meditation on the trauma people still feel
as a result of Butler’s career and the American ambitions it
represented."
—The Washington
Post
Smedley
Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling
books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag
went, “The Fighting Quaker” went—serving in nearly every major
overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World
War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly
seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex
the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in
China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico,
Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a
warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I
was a racketeer for capitalism."
Award-winning
author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world—from China
to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal—and
pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and
his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz
shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very
much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in
Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer
Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino
movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of
U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the
crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters
of Capitalism tells an
urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned
about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.