5/12/2023 0 Comments Smedley butler katzButler was, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. That man, standing lonely astride the lens-shaped center of a peculiar Venn diagram, has the unlikely name of Smedley Darlington Butler. Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (J June 21, 1940), nicknamed 'Old Gimlet Eye', was a senior United States Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. Among those, there is probably only a single person who will be discovered almost exclusively by two generally nonoverlapping groups: avid readers of the corpus of Noam Chomsky, and members of the Marine Corps. They are most likely to be encountered, if they are encountered at all, in the institutions that often engage the attention of young people between the ages of 18 and 22. But there is also a group of people who have not passed into national legend, and perhaps whose lives are not considered fit to explain to children. There are some figures whose place in the story of the American past is so central that schoolchildren cannot help but know them: George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or Rosa Parks. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American military imperialism in the early twentieth century. I have a review in the January/February issue of The New Republic of Jonathan Katz’s biography/travelogue of Smedley Butler, a figure of long fascination to many and totally obscure to others.
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