This explainer video description covers the book "Gangsters of Capitalism" by Jonathan M. Katz and delves into the extraordinary life and shocking confessions of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. A true legend in the Marine Corps pantheon, Butler was famously known as “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” and the celebrated “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. He received the Medal of Honor—twice—ensuring his place in history.
The video exposes Butler’s transformation from imperial hero to fierce antiwar critic, detailing how he was a “high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers”. Butler himself confessed, “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism”.
Key imperialist exploits detailed include:
Helping secure Haiti and Cuba for the “National City Bank boys”.
Purifying Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers (1909–12).
Bringing “light” to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests (1916).
Making Honduras “right” for American fruit companies (1903).
Ensuring Mexico (Tampico, 1914) was safe for American oil interests and protecting Standard Oil in China (1927).
Butler aided in overthrowing foreign governments and protecting client regimes, training future dictators such as the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza.
The video culminates with Butler’s brave whistleblowing on the alleged Business Plot (1934), a plan to install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. Butler revealed that bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire approached him multiple times with proposals for a coup designed to stop President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The plot involved organizing half a million veterans, modeled after France’s populist authoritarian group Croix de Feu. Financial backing was traced to wealthy figures like Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune) and financier Grayson M.-P. Murphy (who had close ties with J. P. Morgan & Co. and the powerful law firm Sullivan & Cromwell). Corporations like DuPont were allegedly prepared to finance and arm the coup.
Learn why Butler resolved to stop the plot, declaring, “my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy“. This profound experience led him to publish the anti-imperialist book, War Is a Racket.
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