It is just one in a litany of violent power plays Butler orchestrated even while recognizing their moral bankruptcy in letters home.Īmong deeds weighing heavily on Butler in his later years was how he helped create domestic praetorian “guardias nacionales” in countries including Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic later used by ruthless strongmen as shock troops. The veteran foreign correspondent was employed by The Associated Press in Haiti when he learned how Butler and Marines had stormed its parliament in 1917, dissolving it at gunpoint for resisting a U.S.-penned constitution that granted foreigners property ownership rights in the Black Caribbean nation founded by former slaves.

Katz’s engaging style brings history alive. They include Greg Grandin’s Pulitzer-winning “The End of the Myth” and Vincent Bevins’ “The Jakarta Method.” expansionism and cast doubt on the oft-repeated claim of American exceptionalism. “Gangsters of Capitalism” is in the vein of a number of recent histories - a category we used to call “revisionism” - that expose the brutality and racism in U.S. Capitol a year ago and nearly thwart what had long been considered a stable democracy. Perhaps it’s no surprise a defeated president was able to rally a violent mob to storm the U.S. Katz visited nine countries to report it, including China, where Butler was wounded trying to put down the Boxer Rebellion, to help understand how the United States got to where it is now. The book combines history, scholarship and travelogue. Why haven’t we heard of Butler before? Perhaps because there’s little to glorify here. The 344-page biography follows the blood-soaked transformation of Butler, a Philadelphia mainline Quaker and congressman’s son, from capitalist tool to repentant antiwar activist. Katz’s lively, deeply researched “Gangsters of Capitalism” tracks Butler’s three decades of foreign conquest. His answer: “Yes.” Smedley Butler was the tip of the spear in democracy-thwarting invasions and occupations beginning in 1898 whose beneficiaries included the banker J.P. empire-building expedition - in Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, Mexico, Nicaragua and Haiti - asked himself the same question. Some wonder: Were they instruments of less-than-noble imperialist adventures?Ī century ago, a gimlet-eyed Marine who featured in pretty much every early U.S. veterans of the country’s 21-century “forever wars” - men and women who lost buddies and limbs to roadside bombs and suffer psychic scars - struggle to understand the why behind them. “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire” by Jonathan M.

Smedley butler katz