Old Gimlet Eye, first published in 1933, is the biography of U.S. Marine Corps legend Smedley Butler (1881-1940). Butler, who at the time of his death was the most decorated Marine in U.S. History, joined the Marines at age 16 and took part in military actions in the Philippines, China, Central America, Mexico, Cuba, and France in World War I. The book ends with Butler's retirement in 1931, but he would go on to become a leading critic against the unbridled power of monied interests in the United States, and their use of the military to achieve their own selfish ends. Author and journalist Lowell Thomas tells the story of Smedley in the first-person, and includes both the serious and lighthearted moments of Smedley's long service, making for an enjoyable reading experience.
Smedley D. Butler joined the Marine Corps at age 16 and took part in critical military actions in Cuba, the Philippines, China, Central America, Mexico, and France. He won renown as a battlefield hero and was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history at the time of his death in 1940. Old Gimlet Eye is an action-packed account of Butler's many heroic tours of duty.
War Is a Racket is a famous anti-war book written by retired Major General Smedley Buter. In the book, Butler discusses how businesses profit from conflict.
Smedley Butler's life and career epitomize the contradictory nature of American military policy through the first part of this century. Butler won renown as a Marine battlefield hero, campaigning in most of America's foreign military expeditions from 1898 to the late 1920s. He became the leading national advocate for paramilitary police reform. Upon his retirement, however, he renounced war and imperialism and devoted his energy and prestige to various dissident and leftist political causes.
The practice of big business promoting war to profit materially was firmly in place by the time Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote about it in his anti-corporate pamphlets. This historical biography explores the life of Butler, a little-known American Marine who exposed an alleged fascist coup to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt from office. This text is an exploration of the political issues of the first half of the twentieth century and an examination of a complicated, valiant man who shifted from Republican ideals to anti-corporate, left-wing populism.
The Emergence of American Amphibious Warfare, 1898–1945 examines how the United States became a military superpower through the use of amphibious operations. While other major world powers pursued and embraced different weapons and technologies to create different means of waging war, the United States was one of the few countries that spent decades training, developing, and employing amphibious warfare to pursue its national interests.Commonly seen as dangerous and costly, amphibious warfare was carefully modernized, refined, and promoted within American political and military circles for years by a small motley group of military mavericks, intellectuals, innovators, and crackpots. This generational cast of underdogs and unlikely heroes were able to do the impossible by predicting and convincing America’s leadership how the United States should fight World War II.David Nasca reveals that despite the new ways that states have to project military power today as seen with airpower, nuclear weapons, cyber warfare, and special operators, amphibious warfare has proven to be the most important element in transforming the theater of battle. In understanding how amphibious warfare allowed the United States to achieve geopolitical supremacy, competitor states are now looking at America’s amphibious past for clues in how to challenge the United States’ global leadership and expand its power and influence in the world.
The Small Wars of the United States, 1899–2009 is the complete bibliography of works on US military intervention and irregular warfare around the world, as well as efforts to quell insurgencies on behalf of American allies. The text covers conflicts from 1898 to present, with detailed annotations of selected sources. In this second edition, Benjamin R. Beede revises his seminal work, bringing it completely up to date, including entries on the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An invaluable research tool, The Small Wars of the United States, 1899–2009 is a critical resource for students and scholars studying US military history.
Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid–nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912–33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents. Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.
The Monroe Doctrine, "dollar diplomacy," the policy of the Good Neighbor—these well-known terms indicate the spectrum of the United States's relationships with its neighbors of the Western Hemisphere. Hemisphere thinking in the "Yankee" nation, founded on economic, political, and strategic needs, has come to encompass an appreciation of social and intellectual aspects as a vital part of a unified international unit. In The Western Hemisphere: Its Influence on United States Policies to the End of World War II, Wilfrid Hardy Callcott traces the rise of this awareness of the essential unity of the Western Hemisphere in international affairs. Although Callcott concentrates on the United States, he discusses all hemisphere countries, and his inclusion of Canada adds an additional dimension to previous studies on the subject. From the early days of the Republic to the end of World War I, the relations of the United Stales with its neighbors gradually developed from mere curiosity and from on-the-spot decision-making into policy. During the eighteenth century the persons entrusted with United States foreign policy pressed forward with their own country's westward expansion, while they expressed only an academic interest in the affairs of other Western Hemisphere nations from Canada to Brazil. By the end of the nineteenth century the United States had enthusiastically joined the imperialist nations. Although it soon replaced the use of force with economic controls, its military and economic manipulations naturally generated more fear and antagonism in the neighboring nations than cooperation and sympathy. After World War I, attention to the hemisphere was fostered by the need for strategic raw materials that were to be found from Canada to South America, and by Old World rivalries and needs that endangered New World interests. Canadian and Latin American views of Europe and the League of Nations became much like those of the United States. The new conditions that arose called forth the Good Neighbor policy to combine economic and strategic values in a complex program that included intellectual, social, and cultural elements. World War II accentuated the new consciousness and compelled recognition of the significance of hemisphere relationships in all of the New World nations.
