I really enjoyed this book at first but after awhile I got bored of the subject matter. The corruption in this book very much reminded me of "Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World", so if you enjoyed that book this is certain to be a win for you.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.

The scope of this book was truly ambitious and impressive. Sadly it collapses under its own weight for the most part and cannot come close to hitting its various targets. There is good information though and a valuable resource in some ways.

Genre: history, politics
Pub date: 1/18/22 (out now)
In one sentence (from the publisher): A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to global power—and how its legacies shape our world today—told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine.

I hadn't heard of Smedley Butler prior to reading the book, and I'm betting this is the case for most Americans of my generation. Butler started his Marine career at age 16, helping drive US colonial ambitions in the Philippines, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, and more. The stories of his cruelty towards native populations are horrifying - as author Jonathan Katz follows Butler's path, Butler is referred to as the devil by multiple interviewees. Even more shocking is the fact that Butler came to regret his work - doing a 180 to call himself a gangster and insist that "war is a racket".

This is a strong piece of nonfiction covering US history that has been glossed over due to its brutality. I enjoyed the structure focused on Butler but also covering events more broadly - following one central character gave the book a nice narrative. Katz also discusses the imperialist attitudes of politicians of the times, including Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and FDR. In support of Butler's claim that war is a racket, Katz shows how veterans were abandoned during the Depression and how various titans of industry profited from war and colonization.

I also enjoyed how Katz tied the events of Butler's lifetime to later conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East, showing how the US continues to repeat its earlier mistakes. I recommend this book to anyone seeking to learn more about the US imperialist past - it covers some of the same themes as How to Hide an Empire and Lies My Teacher Told Me. Both text and audio are enjoyable - narrator Adam Barr has a nice rhythm to his narration that keeps the book from being too dry - it felt like listening to a good podcast!

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and Macmillan Audio for providing text and audio advanced copies in exchange for an honest review.

Though this was supposed to be a book about the subjugating of the Caribbean Island and Central America, it is really a biography of Marine General Smedley Butler and the Marines. Beginning his career with the pacification of the Phillipines and then with the international troops who lifted the siege of the Embassy Compound in Beijing, he spent most of his time overthrowing elected governments that were a danger to American business.

He was involved or lead the Marines who took over the Central American countries of Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala and left each one (after ten or more years) in the hands of a friendly General who usually terrorized the native population. During this time he became on of the few in the military to have won two medals of honor.

Later in life he began to realize the while all those businesses that he helped to protect were doing well financially, he didn't receive any remuneration above his military salary. He resented that Congress never compensated those who fought in the trenches and built railroads so that companies could export their products through ports the marines manned and protected. He marched with the "Men" of the Bonus Army and was there when troops under MacArthur, Eisenhower and Paton fired on the ex-troopers who were demanding that their WW1 bonuses be paid early.

I was very surprised by this book. I thought that I was quite well read in the history of American foreign policy, but thanks to this book, I now realize that I was subjected to quite a biased education of it. You know, the "you-rah-rah" America that we were all taught in school. How the U.S. was a force of good, bringing freedom to those places that needed it.
Katz opened my eyes to a different perspective. That of the U.S. as an imperialistic force, out to further the advances of big businesses and the rich.
He does this through the eyes of a famous U.S. Marine, Smedley Butler. Raised as a Quaker, he somehow finds himself enlisted in the Marine Corps. And on to his adventures! Beginning as a tough, literally take no prisoners hellhound, he is sent to the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, China, and Panama. As he "grows", he discovers that the reasons are not just to promote the freedom-loving ways of the U.S., but to benefit the rich. He grows more and more disillusioned to the fighting and killing. Finally retiring, he finds himself being recruited into a plot to overthrow the Federal Government. To which, to his great credit, he exposes.
On a personal level, I really enjoyed the sections on China. My grandfather was in the Navy there at the same time, and now I think I have a feeling about what we went through, and why he would never talk about it. Also, regarding the ending, with the plot to overthrow the government; I could not help but draw parallels with the machinations of the Trump administration after the 2020 election (and continuing to today).
This is a long, and sometimes tiring book. But it is never boring. I really think that if you read it, you will come away with a much greater sense of our place in history. And why we have some of the problems we have today. And why some nations do not trust us.
Very educational!

I leave my perusal of Jonathan M. Katz's "Gangsters of Capitalism" (kindly provided to me by St. Martin's Press in the form of an ARC) with very mixed feelings but resolved not, myself, to fall into some of the traps that the author falls into. The problem, such as it is, revolves around the strong idealogical bias with which the author infuses this work and his own analyses of events in the life of his protagonist, General Smedley Butler, one of the most famous Marines in the history of the United States Marine Corps. My quandary, as a reviewer, is that the author's ideological stance is directly contrary to my own position, and this makes it more difficult for me to be as fair as I want to be. At the risk of oversimplifying, I suspect Mr. Katz would identify his own political (and polemical position) as what has come to be called Progressivism (in the modern far left sense) while my approach is essentially Libertarian. With that out of the way, I should point out that, as a primer on the growth of imperial diplomacy as practiced by the United States, the book is quite useful. General Butler and his policies and beliefs loom large in any study of the growth of the American Empire following the Spanish-American War. He was involved in the Philippine Islands, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, China, and Panama (as well as sundry other places, including a stint as Philadelphia Chief of Police at the beginning of Prohibition)! The narrative focuses on Butler and his exploits, usually recounted in an entertaining anecdotal fashion and only strays most obviously from this when the author jumps forward in time to his own experiences in some of the places that were shaped by Butler and his men. Throughout, the author maintains a consistent position towards the events he is describing. The text, despite my disappointment with the overarching perspective, is both informative and revealing, and I would recommend it to anyone trying to discover the roots of our modern difficulties in a number of places, but most especially in Mexico and Central America. There is much to be learned here despite my reservations.