Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz

Especially in the Caribbean―and above all in Haiti―he crushed local resistance and installed US-business friendly regimes and pioneered counterinsurgency and the so-called “banana republics” before bringing those hardnosed imperialist violent suppression tactics home to American shores as the chief of the Philadelphia police. From there, the career of the “Fighting Quaker” put Butler on the frontlines of nearly every important venue for the expansion of American formal and informal empire. The protagonist, Smedley Butler, is one of the most decorated war heroes in American history, a man with a singular legacy as a soldier that began when an idealistic 16-year-old boy from a privileged Quaker background joined the Marines to avenge the “sinking” of the USS Maine

Martin’s Press, 2022) tells the story of the birth and maturation of modern American imperialism, and its culmination in an alleged domestic coup attempt in 1934 led by a shadowy capitalist cabal and modeled on foreign interventions. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises 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.Jonathan Katz’s Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I was a racketeer for capitalism.'Īward-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world-from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal-and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went-serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. Bestselling books were written about him. Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. 'Far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler.' 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.

Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz