A review by n_ck
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire by Jonathan M. Katz

informative

3.75

I enjoyed this as a sort of progressive spin on the dad military history/biography genre. Katz does a good job of avoiding hero worship of his subject. Butler's anti-militarism is frequently racist and paternalistic, far from any starry-eyed assessment of the general. The Fanon bit about facism being the strategies of colonialism turned inward to the metropole act as a governing thesis for the whole book. We follow Butler as he intervenes in Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America to forward the influence of American capitalist interests and subvert independent institutions and movements in those regions. His attacks on democracy anticipate the eventual fascist business plot against FDR, where Butler redeems himself by becoming an anti-war socialist and whistleblower.

The historical narrative is cut up with a contemporary travelogue following Butler's footsteps, which were probably the most expensive and least well done parts of the book. Katz is a good writer and researcher. There's plenty of good popular history in the storytelling here, but just the reality of dedicating a few pages each to a bunch of different countries means he ends up flattening a lot of history and nuance on contemporary figures like AMLO and Xi Jingping. I get that he's trying to show how the early 20th C american empire shaped our world today and paved the way for populism and authoritarianism but I could have done without the armchair analysis on a bunch of countries he doesn't have expertise in. Still, this is a good lefty dad history book — well worth your time if you're interested in Butler's biography in historical context.