Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “ isolationism.” Unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.” He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. corporate investors.īut after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate business interests-until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine. While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “ Dollar Diplomacy” operations-that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.Ī teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “ Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. There once lived an odd little man-five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet-who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. Why no retired generals oppose America’s modern forever wars.
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