Imperialist repents in Butler bio
Plenty of U.S. veterans of the country’s 21-century “forever wars” — men and women who lost buddies and limbs to roadside bombs and suffer psychic scars — struggle to understand the why behind them. Some wonder: Were they instruments of lessthan-noble imperialist adventures?
A century ago, a gimleteyed Marine who featured in pretty much every early U.S. empire-building expedition — in Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, Mexico, Nicaragua and Haiti — asked himself the same question. His answer: “Yes.” Smedley Butler was the tip of the spear in democracy-thwarting invasions and occupations beginning in 1898 whose beneficiaries included the banker J.P. Morgan and Standard Oil.
Jonathan M. Katz’s lively, deeply researched “Gangsters of Capitalism” tracks Butler’s three decades of foreign conquest. The biography follows the blood-soaked transformation of Butler, a Quaker from Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs and congressman’s son, from capitalist tool to repentant antiwar activist.
The book combines history, scholarship and travelogue. Katz visited nine countries to report it, including China, where Butler was wounded trying to put down the Boxer Rebellion, to help understand how the U.S. got to where it is now. Perhaps it’s no surprise a defeated president was able to rally a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol a year ago and nearly thwart what had long been considered a stable democracy.
“Gangsters of Capitalism” is in the vein of a number of recent histories — a category we used to call “revisionism” — that expose the brutality and racism in U.S. expansionism
and cast doubt on the oft-repeated claim of American exceptionalism.
“Gangsters of Capitalism” tries to reckon how a highly decorated U.S. soldier could act so flagrantly anti-democratic while abroad, overseeing extrajudicial killings, forced labor and electionrigging, then work to try to prevent America from dispatching its youth to die in foreign wars.
There is no evidence Butler gained materially from being “a racketeer for capitalism” — his words — who “helped rape a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.” His only reward, it seems, was the esteem of his fellow combatants and the veterans whose pension rights he fought for during the Depression. And maybe to teach us a lesson. — Frank Bajak, Associated Press
‘Lost & Found’ is a straightforward,
elegantly written tribute to Kathryn Schulz’s father, Isaac Schulz, a Cleveland lawyer who died in 2016 at age 74, leaving behind his wife of 49 years and two daughters, including Kathryn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The second half
of the book is a passionate paean to her New Yorker colleague Casey Cep, whom she met and fell madly in love with 18 months before her beloved father died.
The two parts, “Lost” and “Found,” are followed by a shorter section, “And,” which owes its name to a short, scintillating quotation at the beginning of the book from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “Nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence.”
Here, she drills down into the meaning of this humble conjunction, quoting James at greater length and endorsing his observation that “consciousness … is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations.” In other words, it was perfectly possible for her to almost simultaneously experience the grief of losing her father and the joy of finding the love of her life.
James is one of many writers, thinkers and poets, — including Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Walt Whitman — whose words amplify Schulz’s own often dazzling reflections on loss, discovery and the continuity of life.