Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M Katz

Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M Katz

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.

"The book is far more extraordinary than even the life of Smedley Butler... a compelling and insightful meditation on the trauma people still feel as a result of Butler's career and the American ambitions it represented."
--The Washington Post

Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, "The Fighting Quaker" went--serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: "I was a racketeer for capitalism."


Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world--from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal--and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.

Jonathan M. Katz was the 2010 recipient of the Medill Medal of Courage in Journalism and the 2012 winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for The Big Truck That Went By. He wrote and edited for the Associated Press for eight years in about a dozen countries and territories, three and a half years of which he spent living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was the only full-time American reporter on the ground when the earthquake struck. Katz is often featured as an expert on Haiti on television and radio.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781250135599
ISBN 10	1250135591
Title	Gangsters of Capitalism
Author	Jonathan M Katz
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	St. Martin's Griffin
Year published	2023-08-01
Number of pages	432
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.