A veterans warning smedley butler12/6/2023 When he read of the explosion of the USS Maine in the Havana harbor in 1898-which the “yellow journalism” of the era painted as a Spanish attack-he decided to enlist in the Marines. “I clenched my fists when I thought of those poor Cuban devils being starved and murdered by the beastly Spanish tyrants,” he wrote later. In spite of the Quaker tradition of pacifism, Butler believed in the mission. The United States promised it was entering the fight to free the remaining Spanish overseas colonies from tyranny. He was 16 years old when the Spanish-American War broke out. Both were prominent families, but the young Butler would not pursue a career in politics. ![]() The name reflects Butler’s Pennsylvania Quaker heritage-his father, Thomas Butler, was a congressman in the seat once held by his wife’s father, Smedley Darlington. That man, standing lonely astride the lens-shaped center of a peculiar Venn diagram, has the unlikely name of Smedley Darlington Butler. Among those, there is probably only a single person who will be discovered almost exclusively by two generally nonoverlapping groups: avid readers of the corpus of Noam Chomsky, and members of the Marine Corps. They are most likely to be encountered, if they are encountered at all, in the institutions that often engage the attention of young people between the ages of 18 and 22. But there is also a group of people who have not passed into national legend, and perhaps whose lives are not considered fit to explain to children. There are some figures whose place in the story of the American past is so central that schoolchildren cannot help but know them: George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or Rosa Parks. Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan M.
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