
Gangsters of Capitalism
Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire
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Narrated by:
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Adam Barr
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By:
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Jonathan M. Katz
About this listen
A groundbreaking journey tracing America’s forgotten path to global power - and how its legacies shape our world today - told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine.
Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Best-selling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker” went - serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: “I was a racketeer for capitalism."
Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world - from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal - and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a POW extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of US overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.
©2022 Jonathan M. Katz (P)2022 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Lively, deeply researched ... Katz’s engaging style brings history alive."—Associated Press
"Like Butler himself, Katz’s book is singular and hard to pin down ... an exhilarating hybrid of studious history and adventuresome travelogue."—Jacobin
"Katz’s realism may shock many readers, but they would be well served to join him in pulling back the curtain, tipping over the jugs of institutional Kool-Aid, and taking a long, cold hard look in the proverbial mirror. Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, this is a raw historical perspective that will both fascinate and unsettle."—Task and Purpose
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Story
An anarchist assassin, demagogues, and a plotted coup d’état—the forgotten history of the forces that lashed out against FDR as he took the helm of a country on the brink. In March 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally became the nation's thirty-second president. The man swept in by a landslide four months earlier now took charge of a country in the grip of panic brought on by economic catastrophe. Though no one yet knew it-not even Roosevelt-it was a radical moment in America. And with all of its unmistakable resonance with events of today, it is a cautionary tale. The Plots Against...
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Very interesting facts but virtual voice doesn’t do it justice
- By BakerMaker on 02-14-25
By: Sally Denton
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The Money Men
- Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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A best-selling historian's gripping account of the powerful men who controlled America's financial destiny. From the first days of the United States, a battle raged over money. On one side were the democrats, who wanted cheap money and feared the concentration of financial interests in the hands of a few. On the other were the capitalists who sought the soundness of a national bank and the profits that came with it.
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Not clear what this book is really about
- By Chris on 07-03-08
By: H. W. Brands
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Strike
- Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire
- By: Sarah E. Bond
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices—and their labor—acknowledged. Sarah E. Bond explores Ancient Rome from a new angle to show that the history of labor conflicts and collective action goes back thousands of years, uncovering a world far more similar to our own than we realize.
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Disappointing
- By Theresa Porter on 03-07-25
By: Sarah E. Bond
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American Midnight
- The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threated by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor
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Disturbing yet Reassuring
- By Sams95 on 11-18-22
By: Adam Hochschild
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Prevail
- The Inspiring Story of Ethiopia's Victory over Mussolini's Invasion, 1935-1941
- By: Jeff Pearce, Richard Pankhurst - foreword
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 24 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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It was the war that changed everything, and yet it's been mostly forgotten: in 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. It dominated newspaper headlines and newsreels. It inspired mass marches in Harlem, a play on Broadway, and independence movements in Africa. As the British Navy sailed into the Mediterranean for a white-knuckle showdown with Italian ships, riots broke out in major cities all over the United States.
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This is not a history, it's a package of anecdotes
- By M2 on 02-03-15
By: Jeff Pearce, and others
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How to Hide an Empire
- A History of the Greater United States
- By: Daniel Immerwahr
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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We are familiar with maps that outline all 50 states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire", exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories - the islands, atolls, and archipelagos - this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, author Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light.
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How to beat a straw man to death
- By Susan on 01-25-20
By: Daniel Immerwahr
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Birchers
- How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
- By: Matthew Dallek
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life.
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Do not recommend
- By Michael F. on 05-21-23
By: Matthew Dallek
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The Jakarta Method
- Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
- By: Vincent Bevins
- Narrated by: Tim Paige
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.
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Great book, but the narration has serious flaws
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 08-03-20
By: Vincent Bevins
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The Pentagon Papers
- The Secret History of the Vietnam War
- By: Neil Sheehan, E. W. Kenworthy, Fox Butterfield, and others
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 37 hrs
- Unabridged
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The basis for the film The Post, The Pentagon Papers are a series of articles, documents, and studies examining the Johnson Administration's lies to the public about the extent of US involvement in the Vietnam War, bringing to light shocking conclusions about America's true role in the conflict. With a brand-new foreword by James L. Greenfield, this edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story is sure to provoke discussion about free press and government deception.
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Awful as an audiobook
- By Sean on 02-08-18
By: Neil Sheehan, and others
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Bad Mexicans
- Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands
- By: Kelly Lytle Hernández
- Narrated by: Joana Garcia
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magon, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and American dissidents—to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico's dictator, Porfirio Diaz, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of US authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime.
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Great book, but why is the narrator so bad?
- By bean on 10-14-22
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Heirs of the Founders
- The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery.
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Excellent
- By Jean on 12-04-18
By: H. W. Brands
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Founding Partisans
- Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.
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Very educational
- By Mark Mears on 02-21-24
By: H. W. Brands
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Blackshirts and Reds
- Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
- By: Michael Parenti
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Blackshirts and Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege.
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couldn't believe this was on audible
- By Amazon Customer on 02-24-22
By: Michael Parenti
What listeners say about Gangsters of Capitalism
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- John Cashman
- 04-26-22
Excellent book
This is an excellent and timely book on a long neglected subject. Very highly recommended.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-18-22
Brilliant
Great book, wonderfully alternating between Butler's career and vignettes telling us about the places his actions affected.
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- BYbarra
- 04-11-23
Remarkable and Revealing
General Smedley Butler, have you heard of him? His story is one of a loyal marine who moved up through the ranks and fought where he was sent in the years before and after WWI. Decorated with two Medal of Honors.
But as he serves the more he sustained how the US military was not used to defend the United States but for political-business reasons. For invading, coercing and manipulating other weaker nations.
He loved his country and democracy and believed his mission was to protect both, but instead he was used for the interest of American big business.
The author traveled to all the places the general fought and relates the situations to later times of US history to even the present.
It is a worthy and valuable biography to read. If you dare leave your political and world history closet.
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- A. S. Read
- 06-30-23
So much to absorb
Loved it. Should be required reading for hx buffs. Reader was great too. Lots to absorb.
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- J. Ford
- 06-10-23
Skewed left some
A great story and great research including going to the locations. The author tried to tell multiple sides of a story but still missed a few and made it seem a little more conspiracy than reality.
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- Lizzie Ketzenberger
- 04-18-24
How we got here
Great book about the history we aren’t told in school. An enlightening look at how we got here. Well told narrative history and nicely tied into our current times.
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- Benjamin
- 01-28-22
historical tour of the crimes of American Empire
thoughtful investigation of the life of Smedley Butler in both historical context and through the lense of the author traveling to major sites of Butler's life. ties the strands of the present back to some of the historic turning points for the early American Empire. documents many of the atrocities that Butler took part in or orchestrated for the benefit of gangster capitalism.
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7 people found this helpful
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- no
- 04-25-22
a man's journey to self-realization and awareness.
Smedley Butler, a racist and bigoted man, who spent his life in forcing the will of capitalist imperialist upon the Lesser nations of the world. He was changed by his brutal experiences to question the ruthless imperialism of his government and Military fellows.
an eye-opening revelation of America's past imperialism and its effect on today's fragile democracy.
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- J Robinson
- 03-27-22
Exceptional read
Great examination of America’s Imperial past and its impact on the present. Fascinating look at America’s occupation of Haiti and its effects.
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- Brandon Hellbusch
- 05-15-22
A good round perspective of Smedley Butler
Being a person who is generally anti-war and very skeptical of the state department. I learned a great deal more about what the United States did during the early 1900's. The overall narrative in most US history classes jumps from the Civil War, a slight bit on the Spanish War, then straight through to WW1. Butler was in pivotal areas and conflicts I was unaware of before listening to this audio book.This was educational and raw veiw of Butler and his legacy, the bad and the good.
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