Jonathan Katz, “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire”

Marines know a handful of biographical points about MajGen Smedley Butler: he fought in America's "small wars," won two Medals of Honor, had the Eagle Globe and Anchor tattooed across his chest...and near the end of his life, became an antiwar activist and published a pamphlet called War is a Racket which captured his decidedly negative personal reflections on his military career. Between those biographical bookends lies an untold story of moral injury in the pursuit of American foreign policy that is not well known, but which is now told in Jonathan Katz's book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire. We'll be joined by the author in this #BruteCast to dig more deeply into his book and its unflinching look at a part of Marine Corps history.

#TeamKrulak Non-Resident Fellow Maj Brian Kerg, USMC, recently reviewed the book in USNI's Proceedings.

Jonathan Myerson Katz is the author of Gangsters of Capitalism. He received the James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for reporting from Haiti. His first book, The Big Truck That Went By, was shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and won the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and the WOLA/Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. His work appears in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. Katz was a New America national fellow in the Future of War program and received a fellowship from the Logan Nonfiction Program. He lives with his wife and daughter in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Intro/outro music is "Evolution" from BenSound.com (https://www.bensound.com)

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