![]() RG: Well, I’m a big fan of this new book. Jonathan Katz: Hey, it’s great to be here. Our guest today, Jonathan Katz, is the author of the new book: “Gangsters of Capitalism, Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.” He previously lived in Haiti and can get us up to speed on the sprawling investigation into the potential role of the U.S. They played clips of this podcast at their press conference announcing it. You can read about that connection over at The Intercept, and check out our previous episode on the scheme and Bolivia, how they failed, and Arce won in a landslide - and that reporting, by the way, has led the new Bolivian government to charge the former defense minister and request his extradition from Brazil. Some of the same mercenaries involved in that assassination were also brought into Bolivia ahead of its last election, with orders to assassinate the prot?égé of Evo Morales, Luis Arce, who was running for president. And despite - or, perhaps, because of - evidence that the Haitian Prime Minister may have been involved, the U.S. In July, U.S.-trained Colombian mercenaries assassinated the Haitian President. Some of the strains have hit multiple countries. ![]() If you think of American imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th century as a virus, today, we’re living with its endless variants and mutations, which continue to infect governments around the world. He emerged from that journey the nation’s most celebrated pacifist, the man who first exposed the creation of the military industrial complex he would know, he said, because he built it - or at least he was the man at its center, who made sure that it did its work. He was involved one way or another in American interventions in Cuba, the Philippines, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, and Haiti. Basically, we are who we are, for better or for worse, thanks to what Smedley Butler did over the course of his fascinating and bloodsoaked career. But what he did before that was also of enormous consequence for the development of our politics, of our foreign policy, of our presidency - everything. That may have been the capstone to Butler’s life. The problem came when the General, Smedley Butler, exposed the plot and turned them all in. ![]() The simple version, though, is that leading reactionary politicians and business leaders plotted seriously to overthrow FDR by marching on Washington with 1000s of disgruntled veterans led by an unimpeachably principled Marine Corps General. The plan was never executed thanks to Butler, and the political and media class kind of collectively decided not to talk much about it, so it has almost entirely faded from memory. Ryan Grim: So chances are you’ve never heard the name Smedley Butler before, but if you have, it’s probably in the context of one of the wildest conspiracies ever hatched against an American president. In a new book on Butler’s career, “Gangsters of Capitalism,” Jonathan Katz details Butler’s life and explains how it dovetails with the broader story of American empire at the turn of the century. A cabinet officer told Hoover he could “see no profit in putting the Admirals up against a dashing Marine with a unique flair for publicity.“I was a racketeer a gangster for capitalism.” So declared famed Marine Corps officer Smedley Butler in 1935, at the end of a long career spent blazing a path for American interests in Cuba, Nicaragua, China, the Philippines, Panama, and Haiti. President Hoover ordered a court martial for Butler, however, public opinion was on Butler’s side. (Creative Commons)īutler’s relating of the story caused a political uproar in both Rome and Washington with the secretary of state apologizing to Mussolini, who denied the story, and Butler getting arrested. Mussolini kept driving and said, “What is one life in the affairs of a state?” Italian dictator Benito Musolini. The car was driving at high speed when it hit and killed a child. In 1931 Smedley Butler, who was then a major general, was giving a speech to the Philadelphia Contemporary Club and shared an anecdote told to him by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV who, when he was in Italy, rode with Mussolini in his car and interviewed him. Related: Operation Underworld: Did the mafia help the Navy during WWII or was there something sinister at play? The first general officer to be arrested since the Civil War He was later quoted as saying, “cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.” At the end of the second year, he resigned after being pressured by the city’s major.
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