Description

In the summer of 1934, a group of prominent Wall Street financiers offered $18,000 in cash to a retired Marine Corps general if he would lead a paramilitary force of a half million men to march on Washington, D.C. Their objective? To overthrow the United States government and replace Franklin Roosevelt with a dictator. General Smedley Butler refused the money, along with an offer from the heir to the Singer sewing machine dynasty to pay off his mortgage if he joined their cause. Money was not his concern. The U.S. Constitution was. Butler had sworn allegiance to that Constitution thirty-six years before as a young lieutenant about to ship off to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War. Since then he had compiled one of the most spectacular records in the history of American arms. One of only nineteen men to ever earn two Medals of Honor, Butler became a general at age 37, a year before his contemporary Douglas MacArthur did. AMERICAN RENEGADE paints a vivid portrait of this little remembered warrior, set against the backdrop of the extraordinary times he lived through. Appointed by President Coolidge to serve as Philadelphia police chief in 1923, Butler immediately ran afoul of big city Prohibition politics. Accusing Benito Mussolini of vehicular manslaughter in 1931, Old Gimlet Eye caused an international incident and nearly got himself court martialed. But his most infamous role was assumed in retirement, when he became a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy. Looking back on his service, Butler referred to himself as a "racketeer for capitalism," saying, "I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.” No history of Smedley Butler is complete without a parallel narrative about the organization he served for 33 years. A former Marine himself, Nate Braden describes the transformation of the Corps from little more than a constabulary force of 2,000 men in 1898 to an amphibious juggernaut of 600,000 in World War II. Led by a handful of brilliant visionaries who knew their service would not survive unless it continually reinvented itself, the Marines fashioned themselves into America's quick reaction force, a role they perform to this day. Smedley Butler's mark is still deeply felt in the Corps, and the expertise he earned fighting counterinsurgencies is as timely now as it ever was. When the flames of a new insurgency began to rage out of control in Iraq, the Marine Corps quietly began to reprint its legendary guide to irregular warfare, the Small Wars Manual. It was first published the same year Smedley died, a case of extremely bad timing as it turned out, since the war that followed was anything but small. Yet today, in a nuclear age that marginalizes conventional warfare, Old Gimlet Eye would most likely be nodding in appreciation as this manual, containing so many pages he himself had written in blood and sweat, is once again dusted off in another effort to learn what we can from the past. "Upon giving the commencement address recently at the Haverford School, I was astonished to learn that no one at the school, including most of the administration and faculty, had ever heard of their most distinguished alumni, Marine General Smedley Butler. Such alas is the state of education in American history these days. Nate Braden will soon fix that problem as it pertains to Smedley Butler with his wonderful new book. Winner of two Medals of Honor, a great combat Marine and leader, and in his latter days a strident peace activist, Butler is truly one of the more interesting figures of the first half of the 20th century. Braden does this immensely complex figure justice in this well-written adventure biography" --John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy and 9/11 Commission Board Member

EAN: 9781980213932

ISBN: 1980213933

Manufacturer: Independently published

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