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.