![]() ![]() Butler’s Blemishesīut he ignores Butler’s blemishes. ![]() Katz is at his best when he shows what he calls “the paper divide” between “outright fascism” and “the American elite.” He details how American corporations remained in Germany after Adolf Hitler took power and engaged in profitable relations with the dictator even when it was apparent Hitler was re-arming for war. Katz even concedes that “in the absence of a full investigation” it is “difficult to say” whether there was a planned coup. He notes that Congress concluded “no evidence was presented … to show a connection” from the alleged plotters to “any fascist activity of any European country” and even allows that some of the accused were honest in their denials. Roosevelt because of the president’s “socialist tendencies.” On this matter, in which Butler claimed to have been approached by industrialists to lead the coup (in a Mussolini-style march of veterans on the White House), Katz is remarkably level-headed. Nevertheless, Butler continued to be, in the words of Katz, at the “forefront of dollar diplomacy,” and even pioneered the counterinsurgency techniques that would later be employed in Vietnam. It is difficult to pinpoint when Butler took a hard left, but by 1936 he was no longer even a Republican, voting for Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, and was a member of the communist-controlled American League Against War and Fascism.īutler is best remembered for his testimony to Congress in 1934 about his insider knowledge of a plot by outraged industrialists to overthrow Franklin D. To his parents during his military efforts to overthrow the home-grown Nicaraguan government, he wrote: “What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is financed by Americans who have wildcat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a government which will declare a monopoly in their favor.” At the Forefront of Dollar Diplomacyīutler was also beginning to register an uncomfortable awareness that he was not aiding his country but Wall Street. Butler dissolved the Haitian parliament and reinstated slavery for the building of roads. It was during his work as a military occupier and head of the police of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 that Butler’s imperialistic tendencies went into high gear. ![]() ![]() Twelve years later, Butler was a spy in Mexico, aiding the U.S. Katz begins the narrative with the teenage Butler, caught up in the war fever of the 1898 Spanish-American War, enlisting in the fight.īy the early 20th century, Butler was part of the occupying force in the Philippines, which Katz pithily dubs America’s “first Asian quagmire.” By 1902, he was part of the military protection of the Panama Canal. Katz skillfully shows that in American imperialist ventures, Butler, always the marine, was front and center. global supremacy from the beginning.” Butler’s Beginnings Smedley Butler, experienced the same late-age crisis of conscience, regretting, from the closeness of death, what he had nourished.īutler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner (one of only five men to receive it twice), is used by Katz to fill in the “blank space” that is Americans’ understanding of their country’s imperialism “in the Caribbean or Latin America or Asia.” From this he attempts to connect the dots to the Donald Trump presidency and the movement that the former president supposedly spawned - a movement Katz declares is “firmly rooted in America’s past” and a “product of the greed, bigotry, and denialism that was woven into the structure of U.S. Katz’s immensely readable “Gangsters of Capitalism,” Marine Maj. ![]()
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