The Pacifist Who Toppled a Democracy: A History of Smedley Butler

Smedley Butler came from solid Quaker stock, on both sides of his family tree—but he dropped out of high school when the Spanish-American War broke out and lied about his age so he could enlist in the Marine Corps as an officer. “And from there,” Jonathan M. Katz reflects, “he served in every occupation, invasion, [and] war the United States participated in from 1898 to the eve of World War II.”

In this episode, Katz—the author of Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire—goes deep into Butler’s outsized presence in the history of imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. That includes his role of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, where he forced the democratically elected government to disband at gunpoint—then instituted a nationwide forced labor program that was, in essence, the reintroduction of slavery.

After retiring from the Marines, though, Butler began to publicly acknowledge the consequences of his 33-year career as “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” He became an outspoken critic of the profit motive behind military-backed colonialism and warned his fellow Americans about the imminent threat of fascism. “I think if he was around today, he would have absolutely no trouble recognizing ICE,” Katz says; the brutal activities of federal agents in the streets of American cities reminds him sharply of Butler’s gendarmerie, recruited from among the native Haitian population.