A groundbreaking journey tracing America's violent and forgotten path to world power, told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine who was there at every step of the way.
Smedley D. Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Everywhere the flag went, "The Fighting Quaker" went - serving in every major overseas conflict from the Spanish-American War until the eve of World War II. Butler boasted two Medals of Honor, helped seize the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, led troops in China (twice), and helped invade and occupy Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and more.
Yet in retirement, Butler could only sum up his career with dismay: "I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."
Why did a proud Marine look so darkly at the empire he did as much as anyone to build? And why do Americans know so little about this explosive and formative era of their country's history?
To write this deeply researched narrative, Jonathan M. Katz traveled across the world - from China to Central America, the Mexico border to Guantánamo Bay - and pored over personal letters of Smedley Butler, his fellow Marines, and Butler's Quaker family on the Philadelphia Main Line. Along the way, Katz discovers the ways the legacies of the Marines' actions are still alive elsewhere: talking history with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a Chinese devotee of the Boxer Rebellion, and finding himself playing a P.O.W. in a Filipino movie about that country's "American War." Tracing a path from the first great wave of U.S. overseas expansionism in 1898, to the rise of fascism in America in the 1930s, to the upheaval in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that much of the world can never forget.
