Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?
A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like)
You...
By Danny Sjursen
February 22, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - There
once lived an odd little man -- five feet nine
inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet -- who
rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself.
For all but a few activist insiders and scholars,
U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington
Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a
century ago, this strange
contradiction of a man would become a national
war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and
then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most
prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and
educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an
influential congressman, he would end up serving in
nearly all of America’s “Banana
Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a
rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor,
he would retire as the youngest, most decorated
major general in the Marines.
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an
international intervention in the Chinese
Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a
constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the
police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved
absence from the military), and a proponent of
Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he
would serve in battle as well as in what might today
be labeled
peacekeeping,
counterinsurgency, and
advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the
Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti,
France, and China (again). While he showed early
signs of skepticism about some of those imperial
campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by
critics at the time, “Dollar
Diplomacy” operations -- that is, military
campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business
interests -- until he retired he remained the
prototypical loyal Marine.
But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his
tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign
policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d
only recently played such a prominent part.
Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in
what became a classic passage in his memoir, which
he
titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent
thirty-three years and four months in active
military service... And during that period, I spent
most of my time being a high class muscle-man for
Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero
transformed himself into an equally acclaimed
antiwar speaker and activist in a politically
turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly
anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and
politicians alike promoted what (for America, at
least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all,
the height of what later pro-war interventionists
would pejoratively label American “isolationism.” |