Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History (review)

Reviews Hans Schmidt, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987. 292 pp. $28.00. During the Vietnam War, retired marine General David Shoup drew public attention with his sharp attacks on U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Shoup's dissent, while surprising to many, was not without precedent. Consciously or not, he was following the example of another highly decorated marine general who a generation earlier had demurred even more strongly to American imperialism. Major General Smedley Darlington Butler achieved mythic status as a "marine's marine" during his years of service to the American Imperium from 1898 to 1931. Winner of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he began his career with the SpanishAmerican War and participated in every campaign of consequence until his retirement . Those years encompassed the "Banana Wars," a squalid parade of interventions in Latin America and China in which Butler served (in his own words) as "a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers." Butler's apostasy led him into a postretirement career as a publicist for left wing causes, but it was not the only characteristic that set him apart from his colleagues. He sprang from a background strikingly different from most professional soldiers. Scion of a venerable and distinguished Quaker family, he enjoyed the advantages of a genteel Victorian upbringing. His father represented the family's Pennsylvania district in Congress for several decades. He was, in fact, instrumental in obtaining Smedley's commission (despite family misgivings) as a sixteen-year-old second lieutenant in the war with Spain. Not only did Butler deviate from the expectations of his faith and class in choosing a military career, but he embraced the roughneck faction of the Corps, those who rejected the emerging staff hierarchy and professionalization in favor of anti-intellectualism and rough expedients in the field. Clearly, not the sort one would expect to support Vito Marcantonio, share lecture platforms with Communist Party speakers, vote for Norman Thomas, and denounce the use of troops as strikebreakers. What, then, to make of Butler and his career? reviews 155 In preparing Maverick Marine, Hans Schmidt enjoyed the cooperation of Butler's family, access to his papers, interviews with associates, and worked diligently in a variety of archives. The result is a thoughtful and well-written narrative of Butler's career as a marine and a dissenter. It is marked by balance (the biographee offers ample opportunity for partisan diversion) and attention to a social and political context which ranged from the high Victorian age to the onset of World War II. Perhaps the most striking lesson of this biography is the continuity of U.S. policy in the third world. As the author delves into the particulars of Butler's Banana War campaigns, we succumb to a sense of déjà vu. America's trouble spots seem to erupt in a recurring pattern, with current debate echoing many of the points Smedley Butler made a half century ago. Even the locales are the same: the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras, Panama. Haiti provides the best example. Butler held sway as a satrap in that unfortunate land in the years 1915-18. His principal accomplishments were the suppression of Caco rebels in the northern part of the country and the establishment of an Americanofficered native gendarmerie. The colonial model received full obeisance: the force's junior officers were marine enlisted men and its senior commanders were marine officers . Like other American military ventures, Haiti was marked by interservice rivalry (the marine commander charged his navy counterpart with insanity and backstabbing ). Racism, too, was a prominent factor. Butler characterized the Caco leaders as "shaved apes . . . just plain low nigger," but changed his tune when many of the defeated rebels joined his command as gendarmes. Then they became "my little chocolate soldiers." Highhanded authoritarianism and solicitous attention to U.S. economic interests were the twin lodestars of American rule in Haiti. Major H. L. Roosevelt, cousin of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, surveyed local investment possibilities for his highly placed kinsman. And when the Haitian Senate failed to...