Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America´s Empire

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. 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 1898 until the eve of World War II. He blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China, 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 the world and pored over the letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia´s Main Line. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism, to the rise of fascism in the 1930s, to the crisis 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.