Smedley Butler’s War Is a Racket

Smedley Butler in 1929. (Image source: US Marine Corps)

1,922 words

When I look back on all of America’s wars, sometimes I wonder how many of them were justified. By entering a certain war, did America’s leaders truly have the welfare of the people in mind? Or were they more concerned about their own power and enrichment? I certainly don’t have the historical chops to exhaustively break down every war the United States has ever fought, but if there is one thing the dissident Right has taught me these past few years, it’s that when the government tells you it’s time for war, hold on to your wallet — because you’re likely to get fleeced.

This is essentially the point behind Smedley Butler’s famous 1935 pamphlet War Is a Racket. Dripping with sarcasm, this mordant manifesto relentlessly demonstrates through inductive reasoning how the United States — at least in the twentieth century — perpetrated war in order to fill the pockets of the business class. Any talk about freedom, patriotism, and democracy was pure swill, according to Butler. The lives of millions were a small price to pay for the millions in revenue that wars — especially foreign wars — could generate.

Butler’s career as an officer in the United States Marines spanned 34 years. He fought in the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, the First World War, and in the Banana Wars, which were a series of military interventions designed to protect US private interests in Latin America. By the time of his death, he was the most decorated US Marine in history.

Here is how Butler looked back on his career of killing for Uncle Sam:

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 in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. 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.

After his retirement, Butler became famous for relentless fulminating against American wars — and especially American war profiteering. He wasn’t a pacifist per se. He had no trouble with truly defensive wars. He simply delighted in pulling back the government’s curtain of lies to reveal fat cats raking in the dough while actual doughboys were getting their legs blown off on battlefields. And he didn’t care if the people soaking up his message were socialists, capitalists, pacifists, or fascists.

General Smedley Butler Speaks to the Veterans Bonus Army, 1932

Predictably, Butler supported the Bonus Army veterans who marched on Washington in 1932. Two years later he garnered national attention by revealing a supposed fascist conspiracy, called the Business Plot, which sought to overthrow Washington. It’s still an open question as to how real this plot actually was.

Early in War Is a Racket, Butler writes:

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulder to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket — and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friend the du Ponts, the powder people — didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 was $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit, we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that so patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump — or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

War Is a Racket goes on for pages like this. Yet one of its virtues is brevity. Smedley Butler is no professional writer, and his prose doesn’t exactly sing. Thus, he makes it impossible not to immediately get his point so as not to consume more of the reader’s time than necessary. Another virtue is Butler’s concern not only for the lives of the men who fought in the US military, but for their minds as well. And this comes from a time when “shell shock” — as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was known back then — was not well understood and was still linked to cowardice and weakness of mind:

In the government hospital at Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

Butler offers little evidence which could prove in a court of law that America went to war because a handful of ambitious tycoons wanted to build swanky hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk. He simply reveals who got rich during America’s wars, and then asks the reader to draw his own conclusions. The closest he gets is when he implicates Woodrow Wilson for serving American deep pockets when he declared war against Germany in 1916. Remember all that talk about making the world safe for democracy? Yeah. All lies.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had “kept us out of war” and on the implied promise that he would “keep us out of war.” Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and to die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won’t.

So . . .

While not footnoted or particularly well-researched, War Is a Racket does effectively reveal how obscene capitalism can become during wartime. I understand there are sound arguments supporting capitalism, many of which I explored in my review of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. But if Butler’s figures are anywhere close to correct, then clearly something is wrong with capitalism. War Is a Racket invokes what Czeslaw Milosz refers to as a “revolt of the stomach” against war, even if one cannot articulate a reason or offer a suitable alternative.

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Is Smedley Butler wrong?

I suspect not. Didn’t President Dwight Eisenhower famously warn the American people about the “military-industrial complex” during his farewell address in 1961? Didn’t CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles convince Eisenhower to violently overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in the mid-1950s largely to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, which happened to be one-time clients of the Dulles brothers? Weren’t anti-war protestors constantly pointing to Vice President Dick Cheney’s involvement with defense contractor Halliburton, which was awarded $39.5 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq during the war there?

Just recently, the Why Files YouTube channel explored the fact that in 1948, the CIA allegedly teamed up with the Italian mafia and the Vatican to sell heroin in American inner cities in order to fund Operation Gladio, a purported secret army based in Europe which used rehabilitated Nazis and others on the Right to stage terrorist attacks and pin them on Communists. This initiative was supposedly responsible for killing hundreds of innocents by the early 1970s. Later in the episode, host A. J. Gentile describes the CIA’s Cold War efforts to defend against Soviet aggression as a sales pitch meant to increase the power of the organization and enrich American military contractors. Yes, the Communists were genocidal bastards who needed to be stopped. But did the people lining up to stop them have to be so sleazy?

Operation Gladio | How The Mob Financed The CIA's Secret Army

The primary thing which Smedley Butler requires of his reader is a conspiratorial mindset. People who wield power will maintain that power, and they will do so by acquiring as much money as possible. If sending millions off to war with a bouquet of lies will do the trick, then so be it. And if you stand in their way, watch out. Is this how it is in all cases? Probably not quite.

Then again, inconvenient people often have a way of turning up dead, don’t they? Just ask Gary Webb. He’s the journalist mentioned in the Why Files episode who in 1996 wrote an exposé detailing how the CIA had supposedly funded the Nicaraguan Contras by trafficking crack cocaine in US inner cities during the 1980s. He committed suicide in 2004 by shooting himself in the head. Twice. The Jeremy Renner movie Kill the Messenger covers Webb’s travails, and is well worth watching.

As for Butler, all the sources I could find state that he most likely died from cancer after being sick for a few weeks in the summer of 1940. He was 58 years old. Further, he hadn’t exactly been slowing down his anti-war messaging — just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his cronies were secretly preparing for war. How convenient. It does not require a great leap of faith to believe that if world leaders and business magnates decide they can enrich themselves through instigating a war, then they’re probably not above finding clever ways to dispense with pesky whistleblowers who attempt to spoil their nefarious plans.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

But what I do know is that Smedley Butler’s unsubtle message in War Is a Racket should be taken to heart and remembered whenever a leader calls upon his people to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of some noble cause. It’s not enough for a cause to be noble. The leaders themselves must also be noble. And that, I’m afraid, is a very rare thing.