One of my greatest war heroes is Smedley D. Butler, more for his courage and candid insight than anything he did to die in 1940 as the most decorated marine in US history.Butler was just 16 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps during the Spanish-American War. A subsequent naval engagement brought him to Nicaragua.“What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wildcat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a government which will declare a monopoly in their favour,” Smedley wrote in a letter to his parents.“The whole business is rotten to the core.”Butler retired in 1931 following 33 years in the navy. Four years later, he offered wry reflections on his service to the magazine Common Sense.“I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism." "I helped make Mexico and 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 benefit of Wall Street." "I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.”The retired major general laid out a fuller treatise in 1935 in his book War is a Racket.“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives,” he wrote.“A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”WWII was still four years away when Butler noted the “mad dogs of Europe are on the loose.” He also saw the war propaganda at home.“Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese,” he wrote.“To save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and to go to war — a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.”Butler’s prophecy proved true, as the war cost the US more than $4 trillion in 2023 dollars. Almost 12.2 million American personnel were deployed, resulting in 418,500 soldier and civilian deaths.Of $52 billion spent by the US government on the war, $39 billion was expended in the war period, leaving $16 billion in profits. Tax returns showed 21,000 Americans became millionaires in the war years.Butler cited many examples of profiteering companies alongside these numbers. Du Pont and Bethlehem Steel earned $6 million annually before wartime, but they respectively earned $58 million and $49 million annually in the war years. A Senate report found coal companies made anywhere from 100% to 7,856% on capital stock during the war.Butler bemoaned the messages that made men accept conscription and feel shame if they didn’t enlist.“So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side,” wrote Butler.“Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the ‘war to end wars.’ This was the ‘war to make the world safe for democracy.’ No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason.”Butler offered a few solutions, unlikely to ever be enacted. He said a month before the general public was conscripted, everyone in the industries that fed war should also be conscripted for the same price as what the conscripted soldier was paid, which at the time was $30 a month.“They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!"“Give capital and industry and labour thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket— that and nothing else.”Another idea was “a limited plebiscite” where “those who would be called upon to do the fighting and the dying” would vote on whether to go to war.A third part of the solution was to ensure military forces were for defensive purposes only. He said navy ships should be limited to within 200 miles of the US coastline, a rule that would have prevented some conflicts prior to WWI he identified.In a worthy conclusion to his book, Butler said if bright minds were put to work “building a greater prosperity for all peoples…we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war — even the munition makers."“So ... I say, ‘TO HELL WITH WAR!’”
