In the anti-Spanish war fever of 1898, Butler lied about his age to receive a direct commission as a Marine Second Lieutenant. Nevertheless, Haverford awarded him his high school diploma on 6 June 1898, before the end of his final year his transcript stated he completed the Scientific Course "with Credit." Marine Corps during the Spanish-American War. Against the wishes of his father, he left school 38 days before his seventeenth birthday to enlist in the U.S. A Haverford athlete, he became captain of its baseball team and quarterback of its football team. His maternal grandfather was Smedley Darlington, a Republican Congressman from 1887-1891.īutler attended the West Chester Friends Graded High School, followed by The Haverford School, a secondary school popular with sons of upper-class Philadelphia families. His father was a lawyer, a judge and, for 31 years, a Congressman and chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee during the Harding and Coolidge administrations. His parents Thomas Stalker and Maud Darlington Butler, were descended from local Quaker families. Smedley Butler was born on 30 July 1881, in West Chester, PA, the eldest of three sons. He was buried at Oaklands Cemetery in West Chester, PA his home has been maintained as a memorial and contains memorabilia collected during his various careers. In his 1935 book, War is a Racket, he described the workings of the military-industrial complex and, after retiring from service, became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s.īutler continued his speaking engagements in an extended tour but in June 1940 checked himself into a naval hospital, dying a few weeks later from what was believed to be cancer. In addition to his military achievements, he served as the Director of Public Safety in Philadelphia for two years and was an outspoken critic of U.S. He is one of 19 people to twice receive the Medal of Honor, one of three to be awarded both the Marine Corps Brevet Medal and the Medal of Honor, and the only person to be awarded the Brevet Medal and two Medals of Honor, all for separate actions. By the end of his career he had received 16 medals, five of which were for heroism. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars, and France in World War I. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. But in each case, the story ends in blood, tears, decline, and even bankruptcy.Smedley Darlington Butler, nicknamed "The Fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Maybe it is the unchanging destiny for every great nation to burst its borders and become an Empire. One interesting feature of the book is how the author goes to today’s version of each of the exact places Butler saw action, and sees what the result of that is now (or at least in the months just preceding Covid). In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."īutler finally got sick of seeing his Marines die for "banksters" and politically connected corporations. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. He is most famous now for ‘coming to my senses’ after he retired: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. He was the most decorated of all Marines, and worked himself up from the lowest commissioned ranks to Major General. But it does a great job in looking at the career of one of the most interesting of all Americans, Marine Corps General Smedley Butler. I don’t agree with all of Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan M. You can understand how they feel about the US. Americans may have forgotten, but those nations have not. The stories of US interventions in China, Philippines, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti (and others I can’t keep track of) make the current histories of these nations make more sense.
#MARINE CORPS GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER SERIES#
When the US became an empire in 1898, a series of tragic events were set into motion events we are still living with. What normally happens is that these aspects get forgotten, undeservedly so. There are aspects of every country’s history that few are proud of.
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