![]() ![]() It had been largely on their behalf that Butler and his Marines trained and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America: dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader, Anastasio Somoza, who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He recognized the type of Wall Street conspirators seeking to install a fascist regime in the US. cities during a two-year stint running the Philadelphia police during Prohibition.Īt the time of the big business plot in 1933-34, Butler had become deeply suspicious of the corporate interests who had benefited from the various interventions by the Marines. Butler was also a pioneer of the militarization of police: first spearheading the creation of client police forces across Latin America (known in most Spanish-speaking countries as the Guardia Nacional and in Haiti as the Gendarmerie), then introducing those tactics to U.S. empire across the world, helping seize the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, and invading and helping plunder Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and more. ![]() Haitians saw it for what it was: a form of slavery, enraging a people whose ancestors had freed themselves from enslavement and French colonialism over a century before.īlazed a path for U.S. Most notoriously, Butler instigated a system of forced labor, the corvée, in which Haitians were required to build hundreds of miles of roads for no pay, and were killed or jailed if they did not comply. “To Haitians,” Katz writes, “Butler is no hero.” Once the Woodrow Wilson administration sent the US Marines into Haiti in July 1915, using the pretext of a political crisis, Butler led a Marine battalion across the northern part of the country to “dismantle” popular resistance by brutal means.Īs Katz writes, Butler helped lead the invasion of HaitiĪnd played a singular role in setting up an occupation that lasted nearly two decades. ![]() Katz became aware of Butler’s story in its fuller dimensions after he moved to Haiti to be a correspondent for the Associated Press. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.” Butler joined the Marines at the time of the Spanish-American War at 16, and proceeded to participate in US military interventions in Cuba, the Philippines, China (at the time of the Boxer Rebellion and later in the 1920s), the Dominican Republic, several countries in Central America, Mexico and Haiti.Īs Butler later acknowledged, when his eyes had been opened, in the 1930s, “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In researching the so-called Wall Street Putsch, valuable insight was provided by Katz’s Gangsters of Capitalism, which gives a vivid account of the incident.īeyond that, however, through recounting Smedley Butler’s life and military career, Katz offers a brief but indelible history of the emergence of American imperialism in the first decades of the 20th century. The 1933-34 events have a special significance in light of the attempt by former-President Donald Trump and his fascist forces on Januto overturn the results of the 2020 election and maintain himself in power. As Butler later told a congressional committee, the agent for these interests eventually proposed that he lead half a million veterans in a march on Washington and force Roosevelt to accept a “secretary of general affairs,” that is, an unelected dictator, appointed by leading financial and business figures, or step aside. Smedley Butler was approached by a representative of powerful business concerns.
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