The Most Decorated Marine in America Sat Down and Confessed: 'I Was a Gangster for Capitalism'

A short, leathery man with a hawk nose stands on a stage in 1935 and tells a room full of Americans that everything he won his medals for was a lie. He is not a peace activist. He is not a coward. He is the most decorated Marine alive — two Medals of Honor pinned to a chest that fought on three continents. And he is looking the crowd dead in the eye, saying he was nothing but hired muscle.

His name is Smedley Butler. For 33 years he was America's fist.

Then he opened his hand and showed everyone what he'd been holding.

The man who couldn't lose

For thirty years, America kept sending its Marines ashore.

Cuba. Haiti. Nicaragua. The Dominican Republic. Mexico. Again and again, US troops landed in the Caribbean and Central America — small wars history later nicknamed the "Banana Wars," because so many of them ended up protecting American companies that grew bananas, sugar, and fruit, the United Fruit Company chief among them (Wikipedia).

And the man at the tip of that spear, over and over, was Smedley Butler.

He was a born fighter. He lied about his age to enlist at sixteen. He charged a fort in Haiti and won. By the time he was done, he had collected sixteen medals — and two Medals of Honor, the highest award the country gives, for two separate actions. Only one other Marine in history ever pulled that off (Wikipedia).

One medal was for Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. One was for Fort Rivière, Haiti, in 1915 — a battle he won in under twenty minutes (Wikipedia).

He was the most decorated Marine in the country. He was a legend in uniform.

And somewhere along the way, he started to feel sick about all of it.

The confession

In 1935, in the worst pit of the Great Depression — banks failing, men in breadlines — Butler sat down and wrote out the truth as he saw it.

He called it War Is a Racket. The first line is a punch:

> "WAR is a racket. It always has been." (War Is a Racket, 1935)

Then he turned the gun on himself. In a speech a couple of years earlier, he'd already said it out loud:

> "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. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." (Smedley Butler, 1933 speech)

He didn't stop at confessing. He named names.

> "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." (Smedley Butler, 1933 speech)

Real companies. Real banks. Standard Oil. National City Bank. Brown Brothers. The men who landed the Marines, Butler was saying, weren't fighting for freedom. They were collecting on debts.

Three continents

Butler had a comparison ready, and it was savage.

Al Capone — the most famous gangster in America at the time, the bootlegger whose name meant crime — ran his rackets in a few neighborhoods of Chicago. Butler said he himself had done the same thing. Just bigger.

> "The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents." (Wikiquote)

The most decorated Marine in America had just compared himself to a mob enforcer — and said the mob was small-time.

And the strange thing is, he wasn't shouting into the wind. The whole country was starting to ask the same question.

He wasn't the only one asking

While Butler was writing, the United States Senate was running an investigation that asked an explosive question out loud: had arms makers and banks dragged America into World War I to get rich?

It was called the Nye Committee, after Senator Gerald Nye. From 1934 to 1936 it held 93 hearings and grilled more than 200 witnesses — bankers, arms makers, the four du Pont brothers who ran one of the biggest gunpowder fortunes on Earth. The newspapers had a name for the people it was hunting: the "merchants of death" (Wikipedia).

The committee never quite proved that bankers caused the war. But it laid bare how staggeringly some had cashed in on it. The du Pont brothers shrugged that their company's 400 percent wartime profit was just "the good fruit of sound business" (Wikipedia).

For a few years, a huge chunk of America believed the same thing Butler did: that someone makes money every time a soldier dies.

The plot to use him

Here's where Butler's story turns almost too strange to believe.

A year before he published his confession, Butler walked into a closed-door Congressional committee and testified, under oath, that a group of wealthy men had tried to recruit him for a coup (Business Plot, Wikipedia).

The plan, as he told it: a Wall Street bond salesman named Gerald MacGuire approached him with the promise of an army of 500,000 veterans, financial backing from rich businessmen, and a march on Washington. The goal was to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt — to make him a figurehead — and Butler was supposed to be the man on the white horse leading the soldiers (Business Plot, Wikipedia).

They picked the wrong Marine. Butler took it to Congress instead.

The plotters denied it. No one was ever charged. Some newspapers laughed it off as a hoax. But the Congressional committee that heard him did not dismiss it. Its final report said:

> "There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient." (Business Plot, Wikipedia)

Historians still argue over how serious the plot really was — whether it was a true conspiracy or loose big talk that never had a chance. That part is genuinely disputed. But the testimony is real, it's on the record, and the most decorated Marine in America is the one who gave it.

What he wanted you to take away

Butler had a simple idea for how to kill the racket. He wrote it out plainly: take the profit out of war. The month before you draft a single teenager, draft the bankers and the factory owners and the war-bond sellers too — and pay them all the same $30 a month the kid in the trenches gets. He bet the appetite for war would vanish overnight (War Is a Racket, 1935).

It never happened. It probably never will.

But chew on what this man was. He wasn't a college professor. He wasn't a pacifist who never heard a shot. He was the guy who led the charge — twice decorated, beloved by his men, the most famous fighting Marine of his age. And when he finally got honest, his message wasn't "war is hell."

It was: war is a business, and the people who order it up are almost never the people who bleed for it.

That's the part worth keeping. Not as an attack on any one country or company or president — but as a question to hold onto every time the drums start beating and someone tells you it's about freedom. Who collects when this is over? The most decorated Marine in America spent thirty-three years learning the answer. Then he spent the rest of his life trying to warn you.

He died in 1940, still warning. He was 58 (Wikipedia).

Sources & Further Reading

• Smedley Butler — Wikipedia (medals, the two-time Medal of Honor, Banana Wars and the United Fruit Company, biography, death in 1940)
• War Is a Racket (1935), full text (the book's opening line and Butler's anti-profit "conscript capital" proposal)
• Smedley Butler, 1933 speech "On Interventionism" via Federation of American Scientists (the "gangster for capitalism" confession and the company list)
• Smedley Butler — Wikiquote (verbatim quotations, including the Al Capone comparison from Common Sense, Nov. 1935)
• Nye Committee — Wikipedia (the Senate "merchants of death" munitions inquiry, 1934–1936, and the du Pont brothers' testimony)
• Business Plot — Wikipedia (Butler's sworn testimony and the McCormack–Dickstein Committee's findings)